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VO 1.8.568 - SSS / Drop changes.
Cross-posting this from news, with a few Notes. Obviously, this development is in reference to the reported exploit earlier this week. I don't love hard-limits on systems like this, they feel a bit artificial. But, they have evolved to be a necessity, and do have analogues in the real-world (like the "circuit breakers" on the stock market). Moving on..
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VO 1.8.568 includes:
- Remote Capship commands may again be issued by owners, from inside of Turrets.
- Certain Hive drops, like those commonly used in Capital Ship manufacturing, now have absolute per-unit-time drop limits, per-sector. This means that once a sector stops producing specific drops, no more will appear until a time limit expires. Both the drop-limit and the time-limit are randomized within ranges, varying across sectors. If a sector has been exhausted, it will be best to avoid that sector for a few hours. In this way, intensive "farming" activity of Hive drops will need to move from sector-to-sector, over time, to achieve successful yields. The absolute quantity of possible yield is defined server-side, regardless of the number of players or the technique involved.
- Sectors now send analytics when their drop limits have been hit, for a particular item, giving developer insight on the locations that are commonly reaching existing limits (limits may be adjusted, across the galaxy, while the server is online).
- "Emergency" restrictions on Capships, from earlier this week, which impacted drops from enemy ships, have been removed.
- Capship Turrets no longer increment the "kill" counters.
- Additional analytics added to the client, measuring startup problems, tutorial progress, and initial performance.
- Following player feedback, ES3 Android devices have been reverted to disable Dynamic Lights and Dynamic Shadows by default. Players wishing to directly configure the options can find them in Options, Advanced, Video.
Another week unfortunately marred by reports of player-exploits, and a lot of associated usage of development time.
On late Weds night we received the reports, and locked down the ability of Capital Ships to be used to generate rare bot-drops from bot kills. This ability has since been restored, as of tonight.
We've also taken a new "drop" system, which has been in Production testing with the extremely-uncommon "Rarified Heliocene Alloy" since last-year, and expanded it to include a number of other, better-known drops used in the Manufacturing process of various goods and items.
This system allows direct control over the quantity of drops that can be generated per-unit-time, as explained above. The exact limits won't be disclosed, and they are randomized both in quantity and in the length of time that a sector may be "depleted". The definition of these values will continue to be tweaked as time goes on.
It is the intention for this system to only function as an "emergency brake" against future exploits and "farming" concerns. There's always a risk of an "economy of scale" problem in an MMORPG, due to inherent player organization and communication.
Goal is to further enhance the native reactions of the Hives to large-scale aggression, and other more evident tweaks to gameplay, to create a robust enough "sliding scale" of difficulty to keep people from easily bumping against the absolute limits. These changes to the Hives are not in place yet, and will take some time to roll out over the coming weeks.
The hard-limits themselves can be adjusted on-the-fly, or even automatically adjusted by the game when measuring other parameters, to deal with situations like In-Game Events or unusually high player concurrency.
We've also shipped a new Android APK tonight, with more functionality in testing, prior to a wider Mobile update.
That's all for now, have a great weekend, everyone.
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VO 1.8.568 includes:
- Remote Capship commands may again be issued by owners, from inside of Turrets.
- Certain Hive drops, like those commonly used in Capital Ship manufacturing, now have absolute per-unit-time drop limits, per-sector. This means that once a sector stops producing specific drops, no more will appear until a time limit expires. Both the drop-limit and the time-limit are randomized within ranges, varying across sectors. If a sector has been exhausted, it will be best to avoid that sector for a few hours. In this way, intensive "farming" activity of Hive drops will need to move from sector-to-sector, over time, to achieve successful yields. The absolute quantity of possible yield is defined server-side, regardless of the number of players or the technique involved.
- Sectors now send analytics when their drop limits have been hit, for a particular item, giving developer insight on the locations that are commonly reaching existing limits (limits may be adjusted, across the galaxy, while the server is online).
- "Emergency" restrictions on Capships, from earlier this week, which impacted drops from enemy ships, have been removed.
- Capship Turrets no longer increment the "kill" counters.
- Additional analytics added to the client, measuring startup problems, tutorial progress, and initial performance.
- Following player feedback, ES3 Android devices have been reverted to disable Dynamic Lights and Dynamic Shadows by default. Players wishing to directly configure the options can find them in Options, Advanced, Video.
Another week unfortunately marred by reports of player-exploits, and a lot of associated usage of development time.
On late Weds night we received the reports, and locked down the ability of Capital Ships to be used to generate rare bot-drops from bot kills. This ability has since been restored, as of tonight.
We've also taken a new "drop" system, which has been in Production testing with the extremely-uncommon "Rarified Heliocene Alloy" since last-year, and expanded it to include a number of other, better-known drops used in the Manufacturing process of various goods and items.
This system allows direct control over the quantity of drops that can be generated per-unit-time, as explained above. The exact limits won't be disclosed, and they are randomized both in quantity and in the length of time that a sector may be "depleted". The definition of these values will continue to be tweaked as time goes on.
It is the intention for this system to only function as an "emergency brake" against future exploits and "farming" concerns. There's always a risk of an "economy of scale" problem in an MMORPG, due to inherent player organization and communication.
Goal is to further enhance the native reactions of the Hives to large-scale aggression, and other more evident tweaks to gameplay, to create a robust enough "sliding scale" of difficulty to keep people from easily bumping against the absolute limits. These changes to the Hives are not in place yet, and will take some time to roll out over the coming weeks.
The hard-limits themselves can be adjusted on-the-fly, or even automatically adjusted by the game when measuring other parameters, to deal with situations like In-Game Events or unusually high player concurrency.
We've also shipped a new Android APK tonight, with more functionality in testing, prior to a wider Mobile update.
That's all for now, have a great weekend, everyone.
I keep seeing people saying that they don't understand what's changed, so I'll try another explanation. We'll use Synthetic SilkSteel (SSS) as an example..
1) Historically, drop-rates of SSS were purely based on the defined chance that it "might" appear when you killed a particular type of bot. So, kill more of those bots, and you'll collect more of the item. This system has not been changed, it still exists exactly as it always has.
2) A new hard-limit system has been added in addition to #1. It's a rate-limit on the absolute number of a given item that will be dropped within a single sector, over a given period of time. So, let's say we had set the value for SSS to simply 200 drops in 2 hours. That would mean, that if someone comes through and farms 200 SSS in 30 minutes, the sector will cease to drop any more for the next 1:30. After the two-hour limit expires, the sector will begin dropping SSS again. The normal "chance" system in #1 is still used, it just checks the hard-limit in #2 before making an actual drop.
3) The hard-limit system is actually a bit more complex than this, because it factors in other things, like if a drop expires without being picked up, it will be subtracted from the current hard-limit count for the sector. So, if someone comes through and "farms" 200 SSS, but then fails to pick up half of it, when those crates expire, they will be removed from the limit, allowing the sector to continue dropping SSS.
4) Lastly, the system does not use the fixed, simple limit of my example above (200 drops in 2 hours), instead every sector randomly generates a new drop-limit and a new time-limit, every time the previous time-limit expires. This makes it more challenging for a "farmer" to predict exactly when they can go back to a specific location and continue farming there again. It also makes the system a bit more chaotic and generally naturalistic, and makes farming more advantageous to do manually, rather than (potentially) just scripting a particular number of drops, because you don't know what the "yield" of any given sector will be.
5) The result here is that we can exert control over the total success of farming, and that farming now needs to "move around" to be more successful, as sectors will become exhausted and it'll be beneficial to move somewhere else. There's also some potential contention over locations, if farmers are competing, so to speak.
6) There may be an increased resentment of farmers by non-farmer types, who dislike the fact that sectors are being depleted of their drop-capacity. This is going to be addressed through more advanced Hive behaviours, as I said in the Newspost. Basically, the Hive is probably going to dislike you more, if you kill really large numbers of them, over shorter periods of time. And other factors. These are long-standing plans, but people have recently been posting similar ideas on Suggestions, which have had positive responses thus far.
7) Some farmers may also attempt to just stay in one location and farm very-slowly, to stay under the rate limits. If so.. more power to them, although there'll probably be negative reactions from the Hive to people who are around for really long periods of time, as well. And it should be remembered that the Hives are persistent entities, they remember things and their knowledge crosses sector and system boundaries. So, this is not just "bots spawning in a sector", so to speak.
8) I'm not actually trying to "stop farming", that's never been the goal, of this or other changes. I mean, if I wanted to do that, I could do that. What I am trying to do is put an automated "brake" system into place, that lets me monitor what's going on, and mitigates the effects of new tactics being discovered through game changes (like the recent "ActivateTurrets" drama), or really-dedicated new players who bring a serious economy-of-scale. This new system is per-sector, but it can always be expanded to be per-system, or across the entire galaxy if I have to.
People are still going to farm, but now they'll probably be moving around more when doing it, and eventually it'll be a bit more combat-intensive, or there'll be more "stealth" mechanics needed to hide from the Hive, or other things to make it more interesting (and like a.. game, and not Progress Quest). I'm not specifically against farming, as long as reasonable sanity checks are in place.
I hope this helps.
1) Historically, drop-rates of SSS were purely based on the defined chance that it "might" appear when you killed a particular type of bot. So, kill more of those bots, and you'll collect more of the item. This system has not been changed, it still exists exactly as it always has.
2) A new hard-limit system has been added in addition to #1. It's a rate-limit on the absolute number of a given item that will be dropped within a single sector, over a given period of time. So, let's say we had set the value for SSS to simply 200 drops in 2 hours. That would mean, that if someone comes through and farms 200 SSS in 30 minutes, the sector will cease to drop any more for the next 1:30. After the two-hour limit expires, the sector will begin dropping SSS again. The normal "chance" system in #1 is still used, it just checks the hard-limit in #2 before making an actual drop.
3) The hard-limit system is actually a bit more complex than this, because it factors in other things, like if a drop expires without being picked up, it will be subtracted from the current hard-limit count for the sector. So, if someone comes through and "farms" 200 SSS, but then fails to pick up half of it, when those crates expire, they will be removed from the limit, allowing the sector to continue dropping SSS.
4) Lastly, the system does not use the fixed, simple limit of my example above (200 drops in 2 hours), instead every sector randomly generates a new drop-limit and a new time-limit, every time the previous time-limit expires. This makes it more challenging for a "farmer" to predict exactly when they can go back to a specific location and continue farming there again. It also makes the system a bit more chaotic and generally naturalistic, and makes farming more advantageous to do manually, rather than (potentially) just scripting a particular number of drops, because you don't know what the "yield" of any given sector will be.
5) The result here is that we can exert control over the total success of farming, and that farming now needs to "move around" to be more successful, as sectors will become exhausted and it'll be beneficial to move somewhere else. There's also some potential contention over locations, if farmers are competing, so to speak.
6) There may be an increased resentment of farmers by non-farmer types, who dislike the fact that sectors are being depleted of their drop-capacity. This is going to be addressed through more advanced Hive behaviours, as I said in the Newspost. Basically, the Hive is probably going to dislike you more, if you kill really large numbers of them, over shorter periods of time. And other factors. These are long-standing plans, but people have recently been posting similar ideas on Suggestions, which have had positive responses thus far.
7) Some farmers may also attempt to just stay in one location and farm very-slowly, to stay under the rate limits. If so.. more power to them, although there'll probably be negative reactions from the Hive to people who are around for really long periods of time, as well. And it should be remembered that the Hives are persistent entities, they remember things and their knowledge crosses sector and system boundaries. So, this is not just "bots spawning in a sector", so to speak.
8) I'm not actually trying to "stop farming", that's never been the goal, of this or other changes. I mean, if I wanted to do that, I could do that. What I am trying to do is put an automated "brake" system into place, that lets me monitor what's going on, and mitigates the effects of new tactics being discovered through game changes (like the recent "ActivateTurrets" drama), or really-dedicated new players who bring a serious economy-of-scale. This new system is per-sector, but it can always be expanded to be per-system, or across the entire galaxy if I have to.
People are still going to farm, but now they'll probably be moving around more when doing it, and eventually it'll be a bit more combat-intensive, or there'll be more "stealth" mechanics needed to hide from the Hive, or other things to make it more interesting (and like a.. game, and not Progress Quest). I'm not specifically against farming, as long as reasonable sanity checks are in place.
I hope this helps.