Patchnotes, april 17th (by request)

[Zatrais]

Upcoming Megapatch

1) Increased turret rotation (tracking speed) for the following vehicular turrets:
- (slight increase) Magrider, Prowler (main gun), Vanguard, Sunderer
- (medium increase) Prowler (12mm), Enforcer, Marauder, Thresher, Deliverer, Galaxy
- (fast increase) Harasser

2) ALL MAPS HAVE BEEN REVISED. Some maps have had facilities actually added to them, many have new bunkers and towers, and trees have been moved to create more chokepoints. You should find many more "battle-worthy" areas on the various maps now.

3) Fixed Pulsar. (Bad data was causing it to be gimped. No longer.)

4) A few AMS cloak bubble exploits were sealed up.

5) You now (properly) get the "Hit K to cloak" message when you first don an Infiltration Suit.

6) Fixed a bug where differing Empires could get into the same vehicle if it had been jacked.

7) The exploit of starting a hack, manipulating your inventory, and then being able to move away from the control console with the hack still in progress has been fixed.

8) Strikers will no longer home in on a cloaked AMS.

9) You can no longer kill other players in the VR Driving Area with splash damage.

10) Character statistics are no longer shared between your account's characters. They are now (properly) individual between your characters.

11) Capture vs. Capture Assist statistics: If you are the hacker of a facility, or in the squad which has that hacker in it, and you capture the facility successfully, you get a "Capture" stat. If you get xp for the capture any other way, then you get a "Capture Assist" stat.

12) You now get a stat for hacking a Tower. (We're not saying it's a useful stat...but you get one.

13) We now properly track ANT kill stats.

14) You should no longer lose your mouse cursor after using chat on the map screen.

15) If you get to zero stamina, you now have to rest up until you get 20 points of stamina before you can run again. (Previously, you only had to get one point of stamina back.) We also now have "panting" fatigue sounds to help you understand when you have hit zero stamina during a battle.

16) Different classes of armor now reduce more damage. For instance, tanks now have an armor value that reduces incoming AP damage directly, which makes small-arms fire against tanks very ineffective (or even completely ineffective with some weapons).

The net result is that tanks should be much more fearsome now and anti-tank weaponry (and other tanks) will be critical to have to stop the advance of other tanks. More details below:

Best absorption (deflection)
============================
AMS
Magrider
Prowler
Vanguard
Sunderer

Medium absorption (deflection)
==============================
Deliverer
Galaxy
Lightning

Lightest absorption (deflection)
================================
ANT
Enforcer
Marauder
MAX
Reaver
Thresher

No absorption (deflection)
==========================
Basilisk
Harasser
Mosquito
Wraith

Note: It's important to note in the above that this is for soldier assault weaponry (machine guns, shotguns, laser rifles).

Dedicated anti-vehicular weaponry still inflict full damage, as do vehicular machine guns (and MAX weapon systems).

17) Enforcer, Marauder, and Thresher received 25% armor increases. Harasser received a 20% armor increase.

18) 75mm shell received slight increase in damage versus soldiers.

19) Reduced AP damage from pistols by roughly 50%. Pistols can still use AP ammo, but they inflict much less damage than their rifle counterparts. NOTE: This is BEFORE the absorption system (above) kicks in...so pistols are pretty ineffective against tanks now.

20) ATI8500 cards should now see textures correctly.

21) The map issue with ATI9000-series cards is now resolved.

22) Vehicles now (properly) fall to the ground when a driver leaves it. (No more "propped up in the air" AMSs and such.)

23) Magriders and Threshers now do collision damage to other players.

24) Light vehicles will now suffer damage when ramming other dynamic objects (players and vehicles) while heavy vehicles will suffer very little such damage.

25) The AMS can no longer be deployed on a vehicle pad.

26) You shouldn't be able to make the Vanguard (or other vehicles) flip erratically end over end.

27) You no longer take damage when braking while driving a vehicle.

28) Thresher and Magrider now properly drive out of a Tech Plant tunnel.

29) AMSs can no longer be deployed while underwater.

30) Female avatars are now visible when bailing out of an air vehicle.

31) You can now (properly) kick other players out of a Galaxy via the passenger listing on your vehicle properties.

32) You can no longer bail out of a vehicle and then immediately mount back into it.

33) Moved inertia down on tanks so they don't behave like boats when they hit bumps.

34) Fixed chat shortcuts. They are now:
- /l = Local Chat (open chat heard by players in the area)
- /b = Broadcast Chat (only heard in friendly SOIs)
- /s = Squad chat (must belong to a Squad)
- /o = Outfit chat (must belong to an Outfit)
- /c = Command chat (CR3 and above only)

35) Zone population limits are now in place. They are currently set very high, so you won't see them in action very much. They are set high so that we can keep breaking the zones in beta to determine where we can improve our code. But in Release, these caps will be hard limits to the number of players that can be in a zone. There's a hard upper limit on total population, but there are also Empire-specific limits in place to prevent "squatter locking" of continents where you just pile in lots of people and win because no one else can get there. Those Empire-specific limits are shown on the map interface and are easy to understand.

36) Spitfires and Mines will no longer cause grief to the Combat Engineer who laid them. These are automated systems and not under the control of the CE, so they don't cause grief.

37) The TRMAX Burster no longer explodes when hitting non-aircraft targets. It does kinetic damage instead (less damage) when hitting non-aircraft targets.

38) You can no longer "quick-switch" firing modes in the Reaver to get 250 rockets.

39) Decimator can no longer be fired in guided mode by switching firing modes quickly.

40) Relaxed the tolerances for slope when deploying ACE items.

41) GeForce cards got a large number of graphics fixes. (NOTE: You *can* use the 43.45 drivers. These are the latest on nVidia's site and they fix many issues even without these code changes. However, those drivers are technically Beta drivers since the Windows Hardware Quality Lab has not yet authorized them...so only use them if you're comfortable with nVidia's quality check.)

42) Massive front-end appearance improvements. All the front-end (server select, character select, etc.) screens are visually improved.

43) Shadows now work on Matrox Parahelia cards (which have great performance with PlanetSide, by the way, now that they upgraded the card drivers...make sure to get latest from their site).

44) You now get grief points for running over friendly Spitfires.

45) The grief system has been overhauled. It should be much more difficult to grief accidentally. You'll still be warned that you hit a friendly, but if you don't "grief" very often, your grief points will remain small. We've also increased the grief dissipation rate and we've capped the maximum amount of grief you can get from any one instance. Therefore, if you're a Griefer and dedicated to causing harm, you will eventually go into weapons lock or get your account banned. But if you are just playing normally, and you watch to avoid friendly harm, you should be just fine. Daily dissipation will take care of most of the points you accrue each day if you are an "accidental griefer".

46) Lancer: Increased ammo clip to six shots. Increased ammo box to six shots.

47) VS MAX Comet: Increased damage versus armor. Slight increase in damage versus soldiers. Slight increase to damge potential at edge of the blast.

48) VS MAX Starfire: Increased to six shots. (Still to come: Improvements in the overall tracking mechanism for this config.)

49) Battleplans: If you have Command Rank 3 or above, and you are the squad leader, you can draw battleplans on your overhead map view that will be automatically transmitted to all players in your squad. If you're CR3 or above, you can access the draw, text, and eraser tools in the "Battleplans" menu on the overhead map (which doesn't appear unless you're the appropriate rank).