"Yes, now I'm frustrated and annoyed. Or no. I was that before. Now I'm just sad."

I'm not sure if I'm in stage 4 with you, or if I've moved on to stage 5 yet. All I can say is that its a damn shame, and that I'd love to have seen how it worked out if anything from my stage 3 had been implemented. At least I had fun, and I'll always have that.

This seems to confirm my suspicions that the Devs see the Serco as an opponent race, designed to fall to Itani guns with enough effort. That's the only reason I can fathom that after so long, after so many nerfings and re-nerfings of our ships and our complete lack of backstory except as enemies to be killed.

There can be no absolute 'good' and 'evil' in the playable races of an MMORPG. There simply must not. So long as the Devs see the Serco as enemies, we will never be given equal footing. Please, please please guys. Reevaluate the way you're building the Serco. We need to be different, not inferior.

"This seems to confirm my suspicions that the Devs see the Serco as an opponent race, designed to fall to Itani guns with enough effort."

There is a much simplier explanation.

If there is indeed a simpler explanation, I would be interested to hear it. Right now I see symptomatic reasons and thus symptomatic proposed resolutions. I believe that there is an overarching systematic issue that prevents the Serco from ever becoming equal to the Itani. If the systematic ill is cured, the symptomatic ills will follow.

WHOA! Everyone just chill out!

Incarnate began this thread by saying that large ships / batteries were still in need of tweaking. The Prom IS such a large ship, and it just happens to be the Serco special. There is no anti-Serco bias, and the Prom will be tweaked to something more suitable.

As Incarnate said at the beginning of this thread, it's not all set in stone. There should be none of this doom and gloom stuff. Play the game for a few days, make some unemotional, well informed suggestions, and watch Vendetta evolve into something we can all be proud of.

Being Serco is a challenge at the moment, but that just means we train harder, pilot better, learn more, Act together to overcome the odds..

All things being equal, Itani know they will die, and the devs know it too :)

Temp.

I consider it an interesting challenge (SerMehth is my Serco char) to learn to fly the brick ships as fighters. Just gotta level up a bit... :P

If it wasn't for the grossly huge oversight of not writing the new map code for ALL PLATFORMS and the now-frequent crashes I'd say this patch was overall a good step forward for the game...

That being said, please take into consideration the "other platforms" - if I see another feature pop up for Windows users that won't appear (at least right now) for Linux or Mac users, I won't be renewing my subscription. Devs, please consider testing your new features on all platforms before releasing them to the live servers...

- David -

KMehthas:

The devs ALWAYS consider all platforms when making updates. They strive to make the features identical across all platforms. I think it 2+ years this is the second such issue to come up. This was an error that they missed in testing. A bug. They know it, they admitted it immediately, and they're fixing it tonight. I think that's refreshingly proactive and honest of them. I don't think we need to get heavy-handed with them about it now.

From the News:

"Some interface changes have been made to the Character Info screen. The Navigation screen now supports the setting of multiple waypoints using Shift+click [UPDATE: Waypoints are not working on the Mac or Linux, this will be fixed in a patch on Tuesday night]. Many other changes and bugfixes"

what Incarnate said in-game was "oh i forgot to write it for mac and linux" (not exact quote, but darn close) - I know you're trying to douse the fires of this patch, but please don't insult my intelligence.

just crashed again - hud disappeared, lost all input (keyboard,mouse,joystick, lost all graphics except the background which froze.

I very much like that this game does strive to support all three platforms, but there are some things lacking in Linux (the joystick calibration page, for example).

- David -

I wasn't trying to insult your intelligence at all. I simply was not present for that statement.

People should douse their fires, however.

KMehthas:

I would like to take just a moment out of my incredibly boring day at work (1.5 hours to go might make it) to let you know that the devs are EXTREMELY good about supporting all 3 platforms. Given the amount of coding they do for each release, and the frequency of the updates, its probable that they really did just forget to write the code for the waypoints, its never happened in the past, but theres a first time for everything.

Theres only 4 of them after all (only 2 are programmers per say), and if a1k0n thought raybondo was doing it, and raybondo though a1kon was doing it, wellll. mistakes do happen

As far as the joystick calibration on linux, I believe they have said that is due to the way the various builds handle joysticks, eg they dont all use the same command structure or something. (i cant remember for sure, i use windoze myself)

"If there is indeed a simpler explanation, I would be interested to hear it."

"When in doubt, turn to the sources for which Vendetta owes its inspiration. Consult the works of the most didactic of the Grandmasters, and in the Logic of Empire you'll find the trusty (though misattributed) razor", he answered cryptically.

Sorry, i see a great change here...

And sure, it does need adjusting....

And please? will everyone chill out while its not such a stressfull time? IE X-Mas?

Even if i have to adjust my setup (for now i hope, and have took the opp. to train someone in Pvp even though im kinda one handed at the mo, and not its not rude..lol) im still having fun and doing what i do best, shoot at things....

I agree with Fm - its kinda like the devs have said *we know we aint got it 100%*...

,,../me will comment no further on this subject.

I think it's horrible that there is no DirectX support in the mac version of vendetta.
It makes me cry.

Good lord. Lighten up people. I have not gotten a chance to do much of anything to the heavy ships, and I threw in the prom tweaks at the last second, and did not test them. I was actually a little worried the SkyCommand prom might be *too* strong, but despite not having time to get to the heavy ships, I stuck it in there in the hopes of actually making Serco people a little happier (that went well!). The "thrust" numbers have bearing on one another, but are not a justified way of comparing ships on their own. Mass distribution is a major factor, which is why the Valk can be amazing with a thrust of only 210, while the IBG Centurion (a less massive ship, even!) needs 230 to be in the same agility ballpark.

I am irritated by the notion of my being biased towards one nation or another. For most of the alpha and beta, my primary incognito character was Serco, and I spent more time playing that character than any other. Not that any of you would know that. But I mean, seriously, I created the nations and their backgrounds, why would I be biased one way or another? That would be pointless and stupid. The only reason my "Incarnate" character is Itani is because it was one of the first characters ever made, and back then new characters defaulted (arbitrarily) to the "blue team". Heh. That sure was a long time ago.

I've been hearing about Prometheus issues forever, and I do very much want to address them. The prometheus was never supposed to be a pure fighter. But I do want to make it the coolest, most hard-core heavily armored assault ship out there, which *is* what it's supposed to be. I mean.. has anyone tried the Serco Guardian Vulture? That's a fighter, and it's nearly as scary as the vulturius but with substantially less energy drain.

As for the problem with the nav points not working on the Mac and Linux platforms.. that's very embarassing, and we're very sorry about that. In all the years we've been doing this, we've never made that sort of error. (Some platforms have had exclusive features for a time, but only because of technical / development reasons, like OpenGL shader restrictions and the like). We are multiplatform developers. Andy primarily codes and plays the game on Linux, for one, and he was definitely the first to notice the problem.. unfortunately it was about 15 seconds after we released.

The point of this first balance patch was to try and bring the vulture and centurion in line to be competitive with the valkyrie, with a top speed difference across the board that would allow them to catch up to and engage heavier ships. I'm not sure yet, but we may have achieved that, although the top end centurions are probably a bit too nuts now (I thought they might be). I'm trying, for the most part, to achieve one thing at a time, because if I completely rework the entire ship/weapon/energy balance at once, I have no reference point to work from. It's the experimental concept of keeping a Control for reference while changing variables elsewhere. I've said, in newsposts, in progress and on here, that I expect this to be the first of several patches that hopefully address the problems of the game. For some reason, however, it seems like certain people believe that any patch that implements something they don't like is going to be the LAST ONE EVER. This is not the case. We're just *starting*.

Think about it, we haven't done an actual game/ship balance redux since umm.. around Vendetta Test 3.2.x, so well over a year and a half ago? Two years? Sure, we added features that affected game balance (like weapon mass, increased turbo duration) but we didn't actually spend any time rebalancing anything. And the game has suffered because of it. But now I'm trying to go about doing that. If you don't like what I'm doing, or wish I would do something else, then say so, and say what, and say why. If you've written dissertations on this 17 times and sent me 5 emails over the last 3 years, then say so AGAIN. Please! Because up until right now, I have not been focused on this at all. I do read the suggestions, but everyone has priorities, and this one has now (finally) come to the top.

For those of you who have been with us for awhile, and long for the better-tuned combat of the 3.x era, that combat was not An Accident. I loved that gameplay and I'm not trying to abandon it.

(specifically what I said in-game was that Ray had forgotten to write it for Mac or Linux, we had just discovered the problem about 2 minutes before, and were just then discussing it). Ray came on and apologized.

Hi Incarnate :

You and the devs have a good holidays! Don't worry too much about it :). (I've just renewed my subscription too.)

Dont Devs Get an Edit button? its a big change, chill inc. not swarms next time though, i wish i could shoot seekers at you...lol

[Edit]

Me will be 5 days late... not my fault, and not yours... but my subscription will be as long a v is here....

Heh, devs strike back!

Incarnate, you might want to take a look at the vultures... yes, they're scary fast, but for so short a time as to not really be effective. As a first tweak I would suggest lowering their drains a bit - not enough that they can infini-boost, but enough so that they don't take five minutes to cross a sector with three turbo recharges.

Of course, it's only been a day, and peak time for today hasn't even come and gone yet...

Am I the only one that sees the majority of those changes as positive or very positive?

I mean, until now you'd only see Vultures and Valks, maybe the game will have opportunity for other types of ships!