Weekly Dev Activities (December 7, 2004)

[Lartnev]

Sporkfire has posted this week's Weekly Dev Activities which sports some major changes to BattleField Robotics:

Hello all,

Once again, we have the Weekly Dev activities, a day late but filled with good info. Thanks for your patience. Hopefully, you'll find it worth the wait ;)

BFR Adjustments

• Standard BFR�s will no longer be available for purchase. The Gunner variants will be available to players after Imprinting in the caverns without requiring the Advanced BFR merit. The Gunner variants will be renamed Colossus, Aphelion and Peregrine.
• Adjusted the armor on the Gunner variants to all be the same, equaling the current Colossus.
• Adjusted the movement characteristics (top speed, turning radius, etc) of all Gunner variants to be the same, roughly equaling the current Colossus. Run speed has been lowered for all.
• Moderately increased the effectiveness of BFR Gunner weaponry.
• Lowered the damage absorption and regeneration rate (while moving and crouching) for the Flight BFR�s.
• Reduced the armor on all Flight BFR�s.
• Reduced damage done by BFR pilot weaponry.
• Adjusted movement characteristics of the Flight BFR�s to be roughly equal or better than the current Eclipse.
• The Advanced BFR kill streak has been adjusted to required 15 kills. The Advanced merit is required to gain access to the Flight BFR's.
• Caverns Facilities will count toward BFR acquisition if they merit 450 or more Experience.

The design goals for these changes include making the team-oriented two-person Gunner variants the standard BFR�s. Pilots will have some capacity for damage output, but the real destructive power will come from the Gunner.

Flight variants are more mobile, but must use those new properties to avoid damage, as they are also significantly less protected now. Its weaker pilot weapons will make the Flight BFR a choice for situations where mobility and moderate firepower are important, but will keep this loadout from being an all-purpose mobile death machine.

In addition, we have been working on an event for the December holiday season. Events have so far proven popular among players, filling the servers to participate. In the course of putting this one together, the team has been developing a set of tools that can be used to run events on a regular basis, changing up the play conditions and goals for them. The December event will be a significant departure from the prior two Monolith races, so get ready!

We�ve collected several solid months of data on kill statistics, which we will be using to assign values to the Merit Commendations. This is one of the last steps to releasing the full range of them onto the live servers for our December update.

The stats pane will reflect driver assisted kills, meaning that if a gunner scores a kill, the driver will also have a kill registered to their stats. Driver assisted kills will be tracked in their own section of the stats pane.

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