*Upcoming Events*

There will be a special developer-run Capture The Flag event on

Saturday, May 15th, at 5PM CST, 23:00 UTC. Unique prizes may be

expected. More details will be posted to the forums, as well as the

in-game event system, as the date approaches. Notices will also go out

via Twitter, RSS, and Facebook.

*Recent Changes*

We've made some cool progress lately, including:

- More Conquerable Stations! -

Two additional conquerable stations have been added to the universe, and

all conquerable stations are now visible on radar only to those who have

a currently active key. The "S" icon is hidden from all others, which is

now a matter of some importance, as at least one of the stations is

obscured in a dense, persistent fog. Additionally, static fog now limits

the characters shown on the sector list ("u" menu) to only those within

radar range, allowing total concealment through use of radar occlusion

and fog. More features are upcoming for conquerable stations, where they

may be used to manufacture special equipment over a period of time, and

where multiple stations may be needed to work concurrently to build

larger and more complex equipment.

- War Convoys -

These special blockade fleets are launched by either the Itani or the

Serco every day, depending on who controls the most sectors in Deneb.

Each convoy then blockades the grayspace borders of the opposition,

impinging on trade and other activity. If the conquest of Deneb should

be reversed the following day, then the convoy of the new winner will

need to break through the remaining blockade from yesterday. In this

way, actions from the war front in Deneb have repercussions that

resonate throughout the rest of the galaxy.

- Friend Keys -

Help your friends check out Vendetta Online! Any account subscribed for

a month or longer may now begin collecting "Friend Keys", special

extended-trial key codes that may be sent to anyone you think might

enjoy the game. Accounts may accumulate up to five "Friend Keys" at any

given time, although each may only be applied to a single

never-subscribed trial account. As time goes on, more Friend Key related

features may be expected.

- Replacement of the Players Online website list -

This was a long-requested but still somewhat controversial change. The

"Players Online" list on the VO website has long displayed the names of

all characters currently in-game. Unfortunately, this was extensively

abused, both by people "data mining" the list to determine which

characters were "alts" of other known characters (by never being logged

on at the same time), as well as people seeking out and continually

hunting down specific individuals over and over again. To improve this

situation, we've removed the Players Online list and replaced it with a

graph of relative "player density", colored by Nation alignment. In

addition, a "Buddies Online" list is also present, which checks against

the buddies of all characters present in the account used to log onto

the website.

- Increased Financial Rewards for Deneb War participants -

We have drastically increased the payouts for Dynamic Warfare

participants in Deneb. Income per kill has increased from 1500 credits

to 5000. Overall skirmish success bonuses have been increased by four

fold. In addition, we plan for more "role-specific" bonuses, for people

flying Bombers and the like; dropping the shields of a capship will

accrue a special bonus, along with credits-per-percentage-damage for any

destroyed capital vessel. Combined with the existing free ship

replacement for any person homed in the station issuing the Skirmish

mission, combat on the Deneb border is on its way to becoming a

reasonable income-generating activity in VO.

- Friendly Fire, New Trade Routes, Ship Tweaks, Etc -

Friendly Fire restrictions have been dropped from all space, with the

exception of the Itani, Serco and UIT Capitol Systems (six in all).

Odia is experiencing large demand for many manufactured products, with

Corvus and other local corporations paying top dollar to support a great

deal of unexplained activity. Consumer Robotics, Civilian Textiles and

Personal Defense Systems number among the items seeing demand spikes in

the region.

The Warthog TD has had a serious makeover, with improved armor, thrust,

braking, turbo, and more. Cargo capacity and turbo energy usage were

slightly reduced in compensation.

*Upcoming Changes*

- Launch of the Vendetta Online development Trac -

The VO "Trac" is a development wiki and collection of ongoing tickets

detailing the work we're doing, and what we have planned for the future.

The public release of this was a primary feature promised in the last

newsletter, intended to happen during the month of April. Unfortunately,

this has not come to pass, for which I apologize. GDC (the Game

Developers Conference in San Francisco, back in March) had some

unexpected (but positive) results and opportunities, and we have been

focusing a great deal of attention on a significant new VO feature that

has not yet been announced. There will likely be a press release about

this feature towards the end of May, in the run-up to E3.

Nonetheless, I am hopeful that we will see the Trac debut in May, with

the complete milestones for VO 1.9 and 2.0, as well as many of our

long-range plans. This may be something kind of new: a retail-shipped

MMORPG allowing public access to our forward-looking design

documentation and internal development discussions. This is a whole

other level beyond the cooked-down "developer blogs" that ourselves and

many other games have maintained for the last decade. For better or

worse, you will be able to see us struggling with new APIs, major bugs,

or implementation strategies for new features. Hopefully this degree of

transparency will help inspire further interest in our long-range plans,

and allow our userbase to see their own suggestions be scheduled for

implementation, as well as join in watching us check off the various

tickets and milestones that mark the road to our Ideal Game.

- Faction Redux, Mutual Exclusion -

A lot of work over this coming month will focus on "polish"; areas of

gameplay that while fundamentally implemented, and functional, could

really use some improved balance or tweaking to make it shine.

One area that impinges on many parts of the game is our Faction Standing

system, which has tended to be excessively lax over the past few years.

We will be adding mutual exclusions to the system, such that one may be

aligned with the Itani OR the Serco, but not be highly regarded by both

at the same time. This has been planned for years, but following the

drop of Friendly Fire restrictions from most of the galaxy, this needs

to take place in the near future. We expect this change to suddenly

alter the relevance of many gameplay factors, such as the

above-mentioned "War Convoys", as their aggression will impact new

groups of people. The exact specifications for how this will play out

will be posted to the forums in advance of release, and we will be

allowing people to choose the "side" (Itani vs Serco) with whom they

would prefer to retain higher standings.

The Itani and Serco will also not be the only mutual exclusion in place,

as some Corporations also have enmity for one another. The degree of the

mutual exclusion will not always be the same, but there will be cases

where gaining standing with one group is a tradeoff, as you lose

standing with another. In the long run, this should be much better for

the game, and make for a more interesting environment.

- Complex Sectors, Fog, and Bot Radar -

Truly complex sectors require some technical work that has not yet been

completed, but you can expect to see more of them in the near future.

We're still using the central Deneb ring as our testbed for this, and we

intend to make many performance improvements to loading time, and other

aspects, before rolling it out galaxy-wide.

Foggy "reefs" that create choke points in the galaxy, and largely

replace Ion Storms will also be rolled out. However, any effect on

visibility and radar range is problematic for as long as we have bots

with magical unlimited detection abilities. Of course, this is another

non-trivial issue, since their "unlimited" sensor range is of use in

certain mission-based activities, where the NPC is spawned far from the

user, so we will likely have to find solutions to several tangential

problems in the process of changing this.

- Economy, Game In General -

The economy also requires more attention, a re-working of the way trade

works in the galaxy, the distribution of items, and what it all

"means".. from the lowest newbie in an EC-89, to a vast armada of

Constellations. The economy, for lack of a better term, is a fundamental

root of my long-planned "Endgame"; a seed from which many things will

sprout, and much gameplay will be affected.

In General, for the near term, it is our plan to focus a lot of energy

over the coming months on "cleaning up" and polishing a lot of our

existing content. Bringing back and revising "Capture The Cargo" and

tying it into the Deneb conflict, fixing silly exploits in Convoy

missions, locating most of the dumb gameplay oversights and problems

that people have had to become "used to" over the years, and actually

doing something about them.

It is never as exciting to tell someone that you're going to be spending

a lot of time "polishing", as opposed to creating the Next Awesome

Thing. But I expect that this time will have a greater and more welcome

impact on our player's enjoyment of the overall game than the majority

of our "Big Gameplay Additions" of the last few years.