VO 1.8.647 included (this week):

- Four new custom-made missions available in various trees.
- The /+ActivateTurrets command will now auto-fire charge-based weapons (for example, Repair Turret) when the weapon becomes fully charged.
- Added a lua GetRegisteredCommands() function to return a list of all the commands (from community, Suggestions Forum).
- Added a /showcommands command to open a menu showing all of the available commands (from community, Suggestions Forum).
- Missions that can only be taken once every 24 hours have been changed to once every 22 hours (from community, Suggestions Forum).
- All players can now dock with the capships that are a part of their hive or border skirmish mission, even if their faction standing is too low (from community, Suggestions Forum).
- Players are kicked out of the skirmish capship if they abort their skirmish mission.
- Players who become Hated with the faction of the skirmish mission are now ejected from the mission.
- Fixed potential issue when attempting to command their capship to follow immediately after entering their mission's skirmish sector.
- Improvements to internal monitoring of the server, to improve notification of rare and unusual provider outages.

VO 1.8.646 included (last week):

- Four new custom-made missions, available in various trees.
- Fixed issue with expired self-defense warnings being reapplied to players docking to their capship.
- Advanced Combat Training group mission now reduces the number of NPC adversaries when a player leaves the group.
- Fixed extremely limited fog radar range in Deneb G-6.
- Fixed issue with player-owned capships being destroyed with no notification in simulated skirmish sectors.
- Internal improvements to game economy analytics.

Some significant projects around advanced server development and other areas are progressing in the background. More information on that later.

Hi Inc,

Thanks for changing the 24 hr wait to 22 hrs. I do have a question about docking during crit skirmishes. I rarely bother taking the crit missions and have always been able to dock with the tridents in Grey. For the first time in forever, I went after some queens in nation space and was unable to dock without taking the mission. Was this intentional? My toon is POS with the nation, and I've never had this issue in Grey crits. I also haven't done grey crits in a week or two to know if it is now the same there.

So, after some digging, this was an unintended consequence to how the change was implemented. It wasn't specified in the design for the change, and I didn't know about it until now, but as it stands you do need to be on the mission in order to dock with the capships that are part of that mission.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, one way or the other. I'm open to a Suggestions discussion if people think that aspect should be reverted in some way to be based more around faction-standing, so people can more easily "drop into" skirmishes.

But, if there's a desire to revert that, I do want a Suggestions Forum thread so that the issue is evaluated intentionally, based on stated specific goals for gameplay, whereas previously it was just kind of "defaulting" to other existing docking behaviours and limitations.

There was a suggestion recently about being able to join the mission from within the hive sector if the faction military are present? Perhaps that could offer a solution?

I came here to suggest what the above person mentioned.

Thank you for the answer. I was mainly curious about the change. I'm with mybeatsarebollox and Inevitable on this. I believe this is the suggestion they were referring to, which you said you would consider. While it was convenient to dock to the tridents before the change without a mission, it won't be a hardship in my case, and I feel like newer players should default to taking the mission anyway.

https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/38470