Update Notes 8/5

[Ghost Runner]

Downtime start: 4am PDT

The Devs want to thank the PS2 players who helped out on Test over the past week. To show our appreciation, we’re granting Analyst helmets to the Live accounts to anyone who spent an hour total on the Test environment between 12:01 am Thursday July 24th and 11:59 pm Sunday August 3rd.

Also, special thanks to the following who went above and beyond and really helped our QA team out: Sir_Kane, DarkTexas, Shaql, Kalakhina, Shadoiex, MUCHO, Itzhaki, LCTR, GustavoM, and KleenexTissues.

Directives
We’ve added a brand new prestige/achievement-style system.

Showcase Your Honors: Build up your Directive Score and show off your prowess with others!
Ramp Up Stats: Earn points and certs with each Directive Tier completion (4 per Directive Tree)
Build Your Arsenal: Obtain exclusive Auraxium prestige weapons and appearance items upon each Directive Tree completion
Choose Your Direction: Directives reinforce all roles available in game; from aircraft to tanks to grunts to generals, there are options for every soldier!

For a very detailed write up on the system see this post.

New Ribbons

Kill Streak: Earning a kill streak bonus awards credit towards this ribbon.
Logistics: Awarded by Sunderers equipped with resupply or repair modules when they give repairs and resupplies to other vehicles. Amount required is comparable to the Resupply Ribbon. Players must be in the Sunderer for this ribbon to be credited.
Resupply Ribbon (updated): Resupplies by Sunderer will no longer count towards the Resupply ribbon; it is now exclusively from Engineer ammunition resupplies.

Faction Pistols

VS Spiker: Reverse-engineered from ancient Vanu tech, the Spiker's hovering powercore allows the standard 2x burst to be held and charged into an accurate 6-round salvo.
NC NC08 Mag-Scatter: The NC08 Mag-Scatter's powerful tungsten buckshot and compact frame make it an excellent close-range sidearm that can quickly dispatch nearby targets.
TR T4 AMP: The Terran Republic's Automatic Machine Pistol functions similarly to an SMG thanks to its lightning-fast, fully automatic fire.

Resource Consolidation
The three resource types have been consolidated down to one; Nanites. The old resource system was a common source of frustration for many players. To alleviate numerous pains of that system and pave the way for future strategic improvements, we have consolidated all of the resources into a single new resource, rebalanced costs, and normalized resource income.

Infantry resources, Mechanized resources, and Aerospace resources have all been combed into a single new resource called Nanites.
Nanite income has replaced all other resource incomes and occurs at a steady 50 resources per minute, with a max pool of 750.
Resource boosts such as those from Membership now apply to Nanites.
Nanite income is tied to the warpgates, so it does not change with territory ownership or vary by continent. Players will always receive 50 nanites per minute.
New players will start with 600 nanites.
You can now see your current value of Nanites on the lower sections of the Mini Map.
All vehicles and MAX now cost Nanites to be created. Vehicle and MAX costs have been rebalanced to account for the consolidation.
Infantry consumables are now purchased with Nanites. Costs of consumables have been rebalanced.
Acquisition timers have been removed from vehicles and MAX. The ability to pull additional vehicles and MAX is now purely based on available resources to the player.
Acquisition timer cert lines have been deprecated,and all certs spent on them refunded.
Auto resupply is now defaulted to on for all items. This is now the way to restock consumables. An auto-resupply toggle checkbox has replaced the “+” resupply button on the main loadout page.
Consumable stack sizes have been reduced to the max possible carrying capacity. Players who have more than the new stack size will still have all the consumables they purchased previously, but will be unable to see that amount and will eventually use enough to get down to the new limit.
Nanite Costs of Vehicles and Consumables:
450 - Galaxy, Liberator, MBTs
350 - ESFs, Lightning, MAX
200 - Sunderer
150 - Harasser
75 - Revive Grenade, C4, Prox/Betty/Claymore mines
50 - Flash, Tank Mine, Concussion Grenade, AV Grenade, Sticky Grenade, Frag Grenade, Medkit
25 - Restoration Kit, Flash Grenade, Smoke Grenade, EMP grenade, Heal Grenade, Decoy Grenade

Spawning Changes

Quick Deploy:The death recap screen now has a quick deploy option.
When you spawn at a location it will become your quick spawn location, respawning at that location will be 5 seconds quicker than a normal respawn.
When your quick spawn location becomes invalidated (destroyed/capped/too far away) a new one will be chosen based on your death location.
Quick spawn can be bypassed using Escape or Mouse Click. Those will open the Deploy Screen as normal to pick a new class or deploy location.
Respawning at Facilities or Sunderers that are within 300m of your death location should no longer require a loading screen.
The canopies on top of most spawn rooms has been removed. This will allow you to shoot up out of the spawn rooms a little easier, hopefully shooing away those pesky Liberator campers.
The painfields around most spawn rooms have been increased in size. This should force campers to back up a bit.
New defensive certification for Sunderer: Deployment Shield.
Generates a shield for the Sunderer when deployed that will absorb up to a certain amount of damage, but will regenerate over time. Damage done to the Sunderer or the shield will delay the shields regeneration for several seconds.

Outfits & Recruitment
We polished up the interface, fixed bugs, and added a couple things to Outfits and Recruitment.

Outfit Leaders now have the ability to give permissions to set the Outfit Decal, Update Recruitment Details, and Manage Recruitment Applications.
If an outfit rejects a player's petition to join them while that player is offline, a notification will be played the next time that player logs on.
Outfit leaders will now receive a notification when someone applies to your outfit.
As an applicant you will now receive a notification that your application was sent successfully.
If you drop your outfit for a different one your decal will now update correctly.
You can now type way more information when listing your outfit for recruitment.
Added a filter to the outfit recruitment browser for outfit size.
Outfit base capture now calculates play contribution before xp buffs are applied.
All faction banners have been redesigned for better visibility and for outfit decals.
Pending requests that were in a bugged state should now be removed.

Continent Locking
We did some polish and bug fixing. We also added new adversarial alerts.

Adversarial Alerts
All existing alerts have been retired and replaced with Adversarial Alerts
An Adversarial Alert triggers whenever an empire controls at least 75% of a continent
The "attacking" empire who triggered the alert wins by either conquering the continent (by having 85% territory control) or by maintaining their 75% control by the end of the time limit.
The "defending" empire wins the alert by gaining 35% territory control
The continent locks in the case of an attacker win
It is considered a draw if neither the attacker nor defenders meet their win condition
All adversarial alerts have a 1 hour time limit
The 2 minute countdown to the start of an alert was removed
Alerts now have a participation bonus of +30% XP (up from +20%)
Adversarial Alert Rewards
There are 4 possible end conditions and the reward scheme is as follows:
Attacker Dominating Victory (attacker territory is equal to or greater than 85%)
Attacker reward = 5000 XP
Defender reward = 500 XP
Defender Victory (defender territory is equal to or greater than 35%)
Winning Defender reward = 5000 XP
Losing Defender reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Attacker reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Attacker Victory (attacker territory is greater than or equal to 75% but less than 85%)
Attacker reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Defender reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Draw (attacker territory is less than 75% and defender territory is less than 35%)
Attacker reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Defender reward = Portion of 5000 XP (based on their territory control)
Concurrent alerts are now supported
Multiple alerts can now be active at the same time
You must be on the continent of the alert to see alert status information on the Tab screen
The continent selector on the map screen now displays active alerts and their timers
The warpgate terminal also shows active alerts and their timers
Outfit capture data will clear if continent locking or unlocking changes base to faction other than what captured it.
If the last continent you were on is now locked, it will try to find another continent for you before resorting to VR.
Capture Progress is now reset when a continent becomes locked.
Added lock icon on continent selection drop down to show if a continent is locked.

Lethality Changes (Rocket Launchers, Tank Primaries, Bulldog)

We have a long term goal to remove some of the excessive lethality in the game. The Liberator belly gun changes made last June were a step in meeting this goal. This goal is not just about reducing vehicle lethality against infantry, but lethality across the board (infantry against vehicles, infantry against infantry, aircraft vs infantry, etc). For this update, we are adjusting the lethality of heavy assault rocket launchers, tank primary weapons and the M60 Bulldog.

For most Heavy Assault rocket launchers we are reducing infantry vs infantry lethality by lowering the the blast damage and inner blast radius. The blast damage reduction will render the rocket launchers incapable of a 1 hit kill against full health infantry with blast damage alone. In addition, this will prevent a 1 hit kill on a direct hit against targets using max rank flak armor:

Inner blast damage reduced from 1000 to 750
Inner blast radius reduced from 0.5 meters to 0.35 meters
Affected launchers
S1
Nemesis
Hades
Hawk
Shrike
Crow
Grounder
Skep Launcher
ML-7
Annihilator
Decimator
Inner Blast damage reduced from 1000 to 650
The decimator required a larger blast damage reduction to make it possible for a soldier with max rank flak armor to survive the direct hit
Inner Blast radius reduced from 0.5 meters to 0.35 meters

For tank primary weapons, we want to reduce the blast effectiveness of HEAT and HE. HEAT will no longer be able to 1 shot infantry with splash damage alone. For HE, the blast radius will be reduced in size (matching HEAT) but will still retain the ability to 1 shot infantry. The time to reload will also be reduced on the HE to match HEAT/AP. These changes combined should make the difference between HE and HEAT more clean:

HEAT does more damage to tanks on a single hit, can’t 1 hit kill infantry with blast.
HE does less damage to tanks on a single hit but can 1 hit kill infantry with the blast.
All other stats except muzzle velocity should be identical between them.

Change Details:

Lightning HEAT
Blast damage reduced from 1000 to 750
Lightning HE
Time to reload reduced from 3750 to 3000
Outer blast radius reduced from 8 meters to 5 meters
Inner blast radius reduced from 1.5 meters to 1 meter
Lightning Viper
Blast damage reduced to 450
Magrider HEAT
Blast damage reduced from 1000 to 750
Inner blast radius reduced from 1.5 meters to 1 meter
Magrider HE
Time to reload reduced from 4750ms to 3750ms
Outer blast radius reduced from 8 meters to 5 meters
Inner blast radius reduced from 2 meters to 1 meter
Vanguard HEAT
Blast damage reduced from 1000 to 750
Inner blast radius reduced from 1.5 meters to 1 meter
Vanguard HE
Time to reload reduced from 4750ms to 4000ms
Outer blast radius reduced from 8 meters to 5 meters
Inner blast radius reduced from 2 meters to 1 meter
Prowler AP
Blast damage reduced from 500 to 375
Prowler Heat
Blast damage reduced from 650 to 450
Prowler HE
Time to reload reduced from 3500ms to 2500ms
Outer blast radius reduced from 8 meters to 5 meters
Inner blast radius reduced from 1.5 meters to 1 meter

Bulldog:Blast damage is being adjusted so that the weapon requires more accurate shots. For the air version, we are making a reduction in its projectile velocity to reduce its effectiveness against air. The velocity will be reduced to the same level of the Zepher.

Blast damage reduced from 600 to 500
Inner blast radius reduced from 2 meters to 1 meter
Outer blast radius reduced from 6 meters to 5 meters
Air version only: Projectile speed reduced from 250 to 200 mps

Canister, PPA, Marauder
Tank anti-personnel secondary weapons are all receiving some adjustments to bring them closer together. These changes are intended to be a first step; we may have additional changes for these weapons based on how well these changes work.

C85 Canister
The area the canister is lacking in the most is range. To increase the effective range we are making two changes. We are increasing the minimum damage and tightening the pellet spread a little. We are also changing it to use a shotgun crosshair.

Pellet spread decreased from 1 degree to 0.9 degrees (1.33 degrees to 1.1 degrees on Harasser)
Minimum damage increased from 80 to 100
Crosshair changed from standard crosshair to a shotgun crosshair.

The minimum damage change should noticeably reduce the amount of hits required against targets outside the max range (42 meters for Van, 31 meters for Harasser). For example, if you were far enough away and only landing an average of two pellets a shot, the min damage change will change that from a 7 shot kill to a 5 shot kill.

Proton II PPA
We want to address how much the weapon can be spammed and how effective it is at suppressing an area, so we will be reducing its magazine size and ammo capacity. In addition, we are reducing the visual size of the projectile. The projectile was as big as the resulting explosion visual, and that felt weird.

Magazine size reduced from 50 to 20
Certifications reduced from 5/10/15/20 per rank to 3/6/11/15 per rank
Stock Ammo capacity reduced from 350 to 200
Certifications reduced from 50 per rank to 20 per rank
Projectile visual scaled down 50%
This has no bearing on its collision detection

P525 Marauder
For the marauder we are starting with its ability to hit. We are increasing the projectile speed.

Projectile speed increased from 150 to 175 (125 to 150 for Harasser)

G30 Walker, A30 Walker and M20 Drake
These weapons are intended to be effective against fast moving aircraft but they are simply missing too many shots. So we’re increasing their projectile velocity and normalizing their cone of fires to be similar.

M20 Drake

Projectile speed increased from 550 to 750 meters per second
CoF increased from 0.5 degrees to 0.65 degrees

A30 / G30 Walker

Projectile speed increased from 750 to 1000 meters per second
CoF decreased from 0.75 degrees to 0.65 degrees

Repair Tool
Repair tool targeting has been adjusted to be based off the vehicles bounding box instead of the origin. This should make the range of the repair tool more consistent regardless of where you are in relation to the vehicle and fix locations where you seem like you should be able to repair the vehicle but can’t.


Cruise Control
The vehicle version of auto-run, cruise control, should now continue to function when controller focus is no longer on the vehicle; for example when opening the map or alt tabbing.

[CONTINUED]

Up x 34

d_carey, Monday at 4:58 PM
#1 Last edited by d_carey, Monday at 7:21 PM
d_carey Developer

Misc

New Player Studio items have been added! Rejoice in your new potential for beauty.
New loading screen! Out with the old and busted, in with the new hotness.
Changed standard C4 description text and added colored text with instructions how to use.
Updated the default dumbfire VS rocket launcher S1's description.
Updated the NS Decimator description.
Updated the NS Annihilator description.
Changed all NS-7 PDW ribbon/medal strings to no longer contain the word "commissioner" in any of them.
Reworded many consumable descriptions: Nanite Healing Grenade, Nanite Revive Grenade, Medical Kit, Restoration Kit, Concussion Grenade, Anti-Vehicle Grenade, Flash Grenade.
Facility Turrets now use the same vehicle shader as common pool vehicles. They have been optimized and should be easier to discern from a distance.
Base Turrets have had their textures optimized.
Polish to small placeable objects:
Ammo pack - increased deploy size
Ammo pack, C4, Tank Mine, Proxy Mine, Bouncing Mine - improved physics
Removed the option to toggle motion blur from settings because the feature itself has been temporarily disabled (see Known Issues section below)