So i’m being told i need to make a blog post to answer those questions, here we are.

My questions this week are from starwyrm:
1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what recently released content have you worked with?
and just for you:
3. so you’re Canadian, Eh? east or west? either way, shoutout from New Brunswick!

The number of hours I spend playing SS vary greatly from week to week. Depending mostly on how many major problems I have to fix. But on average i would say I spend about 20hours playing ss (Not counting afk time)
I do spend quite a good share of this time on secret unteamed alts that i just enjoy leveling and meeting random people.

I very rarely work directly on content or content code, my role is more of a code management thing. Bug and crash fixing, performance improvements, security implementation, backup systems, server configuration and such.
I am especially the one stuck with being awake for days when the server experience major problems… extreme lags, hardware failure / replacement, external attacks, patch going wrong, memory corruption errors and the likes. Mostly because well… if i dont do it, who will ?
It takes a special kind of mental illness to have the instinct needed to figure those weird issues that make very little sense up to the point where you do track it down, and apparently, I am affected !

As for the last question, I am east Canadian, more specifically from Quebec. I live in Saguenay but thats about as precise as you’ll get .

This week’s update is going to cover a few different things including; new Tech 22 missiles and factories, some changes to Tech 22 Alien Ships and an update on the new zone launching next universe, the Temple Grounds. Keep reading to find out more.

As promised, with the class rebalance we are going to be making a new set of tech 22 missiles available. We would have done this earlier, but it didn’t make sense to make a set of new missiles only to rework them a few months later. These new missiles will come from factories available from Mitchell Sparks in LACS S2637 once you have done the introduction mission available in the Blue Photon Subspace Facility.

There are three new missiles that will be available.

• The Ksaravis’ayu is a physical damage missile similar to the rotten eggs launched by Raurava in Equipment 22 or Janayitri Sahistha in Piloting 22. While flying they will damage nearby enemies and on impact they will impart a caustic parasite. These launch in salvos of three.
• The Matra Markata Prahetiayu is a standard missile, the twist being that is is a radiation damage missile. These launch in salvos of 5.
• The Visphotakapad Ksaravis’ayu is a small, fast missile that does a low-damage but sizable area-of-effect on detonation. All ships caught in the blast zone are infected with a caustic parasite. These launch in salvos of 10.

In addition to adding the new missiles, you will not be able to use the Basic DNA Extraction Beam on on a variety of missiles launched by the Aveksaka in Subspace. Extracting from a missile is going to be challenging, and as such, you will get a high return from each DNA extracted. Currently, each factory will produce 5 crates of the new missiles per DNA used.

Tech 22 ships will be seeing a few changes as well. Firstly, all tech 22 player ships are getting nameplates. Currently they don’t have them and it can get a little confusing when you can’t tell the aliens and the players apart! Secondly, there are goign to be a few changes coming to both the Vacohar’ayu and the Rajanicar’ayu.

It’s important that these ships are viable alternatives to the high end Olympus ships and at the moment they are a little lacking.  As such, both are getting new in-built superitems. The Vacohar’ayu will be getting “Alien Evasive Maneuvers.” This device will give a short duration 75% evasion buff on a fairly lengthy cooldown. This will add some much needed survival utility on the ship. The Rajanicar’ayu will be getting the “Alien Translocator”. This is a super item that uses a translocator, effectively allowing the ship to have two. Finally, both ships are also having their resistances reevaluated. Energy and physical resistances are lacking and will see some buffs.

Finally, I’ve been doing some serious work on making sure the new tech 22 boss, The High Prophet, is ready for launch with next universe. The boss fight has seen quite a few changes from it’s previous iteration and will be available for testing in the next week. This boss fight is unlike anything currently in game and I’m very excited to see how players handle him.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums. I’ll be back again next week with another update!

For years we’ve gotten so many requests to accept various currencies from across the world and haven’t been able to accommodate all players that wanted to play. We’ve been following the bitcoin trend closely for the past year and we’re proud to announce that we’re accepting bitcoins for payments for subscriptions and services like augmenter resets, and item forms! You can find out more information about bitcoin here.

And while we’re on the subject of news I’m officially beginning the class rebalance testing phase WITH PRIZES! The top five contributors to testing will get CUSTOM SHIP SKINS for the ship of their choice (much like the beta contest). All the juicy details are available over at the newly created testing forum.

And here’s a preview of the trophy ship! It is much win. wow.

Thanks to Jey he has found and isolated the cause of the crash. It was something related to Micron, and until a fix gets in it will be locked. We are expecting the fix to go in today (Monday, January 27th). The Event weekend will be extended through the end of next weekend (Monday, February 2^nd), subs will be extended by three days, and the class rebalance contest that was going to launch Friday will now launch Tuesday. Thank you guys for your patience and understanding!

This week’s update will focus primarily on the newly announced advanced class skills. It will give a few more details about the skills and detail how we are handling training them. Keep reading to find out more!

First, I’d like to give a few more updates about the new advanced subskill system, as it’s been my primary project for the last few weeks. In all, we are adding 42 new skills to the game. There are six general skills, four focus locked skills (one per focus) and 32 class locked skills (four per class). All of these skills will reset with a Skill Reset.

If you remember last week’s post; in it I detailed transference resistance and evasion augmenter stats. From what I have seen in the forums, there has been a fair bit of speculation on how they are going to be used. Since we have finally announced the new advanced subskills, I think it’s safe to give a few more details on these new stats. Both of those will see use in the new subskills. Specially, the following three;

• Lucky Devil (Speed Demon) – +10% evasion, +5% critical hit chance
• Advanced Flight Controller (Fleet Commander) – +75% evasion for fighters, +2 fighter slots.
• Civil Engineer (Engineer) - +20% transference resistance, -15% tractor beam energy cost.

The design for advanced subskills calls for leveling up your focus to unlock the ability to train a new skill. For example, training focus 21 unlocks the ability to train one new skill, training focus 22 unlocks the ability to train another, etc. Using the current skill training and mission systems we have in place there was no easy way to accomplish this. We considered a token system, where your focus training mission would grant you a token to train the skill, but unfortunately there is no way to remove tokens on a skill reset (which would allow players to get extra tokens). So, we hit on the idea of ‘Advanced Skill Points’.

Advanced Skill Points can be received as mission rewards, and are used as mission goals and mission requirements. Each time you complete a focus training mission for a tech 21+ focus skill you will get one of these points to spend on an advanced subskill. You can then go to your focus base to find a set of new missions unlocked that offer advanced subskills. These skill training missions only appear if you have a token to spend.

For players who already have their focus skill trained to level 21, they will be able to find a set of missions to grandfather them into the new system so they don’t have to skill reset to get their first advanced skill point. Players will also be able to train tech 22 focus and class skills. Much like with tech 21, each focus will require the player to have already obtained two different tech 22 skills.

So that’s it for this week’s update. We’ll be starting a series of blog posts detailing the new skills this week, so be prepared for that. And as always, if you have an questions, comments or suggestions on the material covered here, feel free to post in the forums!

For this month’s event we’ve got +30% Mod chance on dropped items, +30% Aug drop chance, and +50% experience gained!

The event will start roughly around 12:30pm EST on Friday, January 24th and end Monday, January 27th at 12:30pm EST!

Client
Additions
* Added buff icons for Dampening and Critical Hit Immunity Tweaks
* Added /lkc distortion for those who dont like the distortion effect on laser / trans applied at veryhigh, /lkc 1.1 would disable them completly. (already live)
* New news viewer in the client.
* New context menu for the Possession tab of the Character dialog.
* New options for slaves in the Possesions tab context menu; “Follow Me”, “Leave Stasis”, “Open Inventory”, and “Repair Ship”

Tweaks
* Particles system change, higher fluidity and shorter trails all around (smoother animation as well), on very high especially (lower graphic also gain smoothness but not as much) (already live)
* Particles system massive performance increase. This patch improved the performance of the particles rendering system by nearly 300% (which allowed us to make most existing case much smoother without impacting performances) (already live)
* Greatly improved memory bandwidth and rendering efficiency (speed if it was your bottleneck) on all dynamically generated meshes, (like the suns and the spheres used in some projectiles), also fixed a memory leak on that side which was one of the last remaining known client crash (already live)
* More debug data to help me pinpoint the last known crash still existing (the one where you alt tab during an autopilot jump and it sometime crash). I am sure there are other crashes left, but the 2 mentioned here are the last 2 i was able to prove existed. (already live)
* Moved “Release Slave” button in the Possession tab to the new context menu.

Fixes
* Multiple client crashes fix (already live)
* Fixed a bug that caused engine particles to not update after an engine change until you undocked a second time. (already live)
* Fixed a client crash in the map flags (already live)
* Fixed a client crash in the warp effect. (already live and there is still one crash remaining on warp while alt-tabbing)

Server
Additions
* New item type: Field Amplifier – Amplifies aura projectors
* Added support for parasites on missile warheads.
* New Chain Bullet weapon effect.
* New Repair Slave Option in the X Menu
* New Boss Condition to count unequipped items in the boss inventory.

Tweaks
* Made it so AI’s/Slaves thinking about using offensive super items will check the range of the first weapon in the super item, wherever it is in the order of actions, whereas before, they would only check the range if the first action in the super item was a weapon.
* (dev stuff) Asteroid spawners can now spawn named asteroids.
* Added new subtype for class items like Deathblossom, Sniper Analyzer, etc.
* Sniper Analyzer now uses the Overloader icon.
* AI bases without skills won’t display a skills tab.
* Seperated Missile and Fighter bays.
* Seperated Missile and Fighter slots.
* You can have a missile and a fighter bay equipped at the same time.
* Shield Tweaks now affect shield regeneration provided by shield chargers.
* Changes to repair messages.
* Improved layer filtering for loading wild AI and applied it to holiday AI (no more holiday AI in The Nexus for example)

Fixes
* Fixed a bug where combat slaves were not using offensive super items
* Fix for auto-start mission errors.
* Fix for Janitor’s Outpost not showing a skills tab.
* Irradiated AI will no longer use Superitems.
* Transwarp now properly reduces the shields of the user.
* Splashing laser effect now acts as ethereal even if the starting laser is corporeal.
* Fixes to the Chain Laser weapon effect.
* Ships under the effect of an invincibility aura (+100% resistance all aura) are no logner affected by resistance reducing auras.
* Fixed a bug where it was sometimes not possible to crit a husk
* Fixed a typo in the ship repair confirmation dialog.
* Fixed issue where the server wouldn’t tell the client when a fighter docked with it’s owner’s ship.
* server change to remove support from uncrypted connection (will check for update but wont let you fully connect using an uncrypted version).
* fix for the rts order feedbacks not working.
* server crash fix.

Content
Additions
* New client map layers for Holiday content and Color Empire zone.
* Zeus’ Throne has a new inbuilt Missile Bay.
* Shrimp has a new inbuilt missile bay.
* Battle Sphere has a new inbuilt missile bay.
* Assault Behemoth has a new inbuilt missile bay.

Tweaks
* Reduced the prices on the Seer Mine factories to only consome field obtainable (or producable) commodities
* Unteamed the End of the Universe Beacon.
* You can now only tow to Janitor’s Outpost if you are towing from the Nexus.
* Changed price on Blue Photon Stock Missile crates.
* Damage fields in Bila no longer affect drones.
* Akara Adhara now drops a protection field emitter at 5% shields so players don’t die after they kill it.
* Paxian Bombs no longer spawn after 10% on the tractor boss. The final 10% must be done by the player.
* Incendiary Missiles now do half their damage in Napalm Fire.
* Gave Olympus a minimum level requirement of 750 to enter
* Changed all the Olympus wormholes to require Warp Navigation 3 (some of these won’t be in effect until new uni, but all of the instanced holes and the entrance one are done)
* The Zarkara at the dead end in the Akhara instance is no longer invincible.
* Goldenboy ships in Rumble Arena now have self-destructors.
* The Pest Drone Device acquired in the Nexus now properly drops Small Pest Drones instead of Blue Scout Drones.
* Changed Red Photon Prototype Remote Weapon Augmentation to give -20% Recoil
* Alien Outposts in Pajca and Sas arms now count the number of miniboss fighters in inventory before creating more.
* Changes to Saluna Psu to make it more usable.
* Buffed most T22 alien shields.
* Fixed an error with Dhatri Zaktirasa and Dhatri Devazaktirasa weapons which were incorrectly marked as pulse guns in the balance sheet and had way too much DPS for their type of weapon.
* Drone Scoop is now tech 0

Fixes
* Fixed Ares’ War Cry and Hephaestus’ Flame Tractors.
* Lots of various spelling fixes in missions
* Fixed a typo in the Compact Colony Blueprint description
* Fixed Undead Helro’s Vultures counting for Strontium 90 missions
* Infernal Darkness Access mission no longer autocompletes.
* Fixed Alien Siege Mode superitem.
* Fix for MIRV missiles.
* Fix for Vihara Sapta.
* Fix for Small Disintegrator Missile Production Blueprint.
* Fix for Zeus’ Energizing Beam not affecting player ships.
* Beefed the Bear tractors

New uni stuff
+ New Blue Photon Testing Range galaxy.
+ Fixed a bug that caused L Suns to not effect solar panels correctly
+ Added two new testing drones to Blue Photon Test Range.
+ Added two new missile types, Incendiary and Surgical Strike.
+ Added factories for the new missile types.
+ Added new missile blueprints to Hyperion.

= CLASS REBALANCE – Not live yet
= Added -1% Electric Tempering bonus to Speed Demon Class Skill.
= Reduced Speedy Firing subskill from +4% Rate of Fire to +3% Rate of Fire.
= Increased Speedy Firing subskill from +1% Damage to +2% Damage.
= Added +2% Damage to Psychic Sight subskill.
= Added +1% Critical Hit Chance to Shadow Ambush subskill.
= Reduced Shadow Ambush subskill Backstab passive from +3% Critical Hit Chance to +2% Critical Hit Chance.
= Reduced Shadow Ambush subskill Backstab passive from +3% Damage to +2% Damage.
= Removed Electric Tempering from Ordnance Supremacy subskill.
= Added +3% Damage to Berserker Class skill.
= Added -1% Space on Equipped Weapons to Berserker Class skill.
= Removed -1% Space on Equipped Weapons from Arsenel Expertise subskill.
= Added +2% Damage to Arsenel Expertise subskill.
= Reduced Sniper Class skill from +3% Physical Damage to +0.5% Physical Damage.
= Changed Sniper Class passive, Sniper Analysis to +10% Critical Hit Strength, +3.75% Damage (+200% Critical Hit Strength, +75% Damage after 5 minutes)
= Added +2% Damage to Stalking subskill.
= Added +2% Damage to Gunner Class skill.
= Increased Big Guns subskill from +3% Mining Damage to +3% Damage, +1% Mining Damage.
= Destruction subskill now only triggers on missile attacks.
= Destruction subskill now grants vunerability to all damage types.
= Increased Destruction subskill from +0.5% (1 Weapon) / +1% (2 Weapons) to +2% (Missile Strike).
= Destruction can now be applied by splash damage from missiles.
= Fix for not taking item durability damage if you had drones on board.
= New Critical Hit Immunity Tweak
= Berserker Engagement Devices
= Moved some of the splash damage on Lancer Missile to a Napalm Fire DoT
= Sniper Flak Device
= Sniper Ricochet Device
= Stacked Missile Bays no longer grant a firing cooldown bonus.
= Fleet Commander fighter recall devices.
= Using a missile launcher will clear the queue.
= Changed Missile Mastery to +2.5% Damage per level.
= Updated missiles with Salvo Counts for testing.
= Added Prototype and Ultimate Deathblossoms.
= Fix so AI drones still explode on death.
= Missile Bays now have a max queue.
= Deathblossom now uses the proper amount of energy while multifiring.
= Deathblossom damage bonus removed.
= Deathblossom energy use reduced from 200% to 60%.
= Fix for undestroyed drones getting placed in the destroyed stack.
= Berserker Shield Redistribution device.
= Missile Changes for class rebalance.
= Deathblossom now properly targets AI teamed with your target.
= New Seer Ambush Overloaders.
= Splash Damage Warhead support for parasites.

This week’s update is going to detail some general changes coming with the class rebalance. They include two new augmenter stats and a new client animation to go along with one of them. Keep reading to find out more.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re adding two new augmenter stats; the first of these is Transference Resistance. Transference resistance added by the new augmenter stat is handled in the same way transference resistance added by the Resistance augmenter stat is — that is to say it only affects positive transference damage (from an AI that uses transference damage weapons or an outgoing heal). Right now there is only a specific usage of this stat in mind, but it may make its way onto augs or gear sometime down the line.

The second new augmenter stat is one that I think is a lot more exciting; Evasion. The evasion augmenter stat gives the user a chance to dodge damage; that is the damage source will pass right through their ship without hitting them and potentially hit something behind them.

In order to keep this stat from becoming too powerful a ships evasion will scale based on the damage source.

• For projectiles evasion will scale based on the speed of the evading ship relative to the speed of the projectile. So the faster the projectile and the slower the evading ship, the lower the chance to evade.
• For laser beams evasion will scale based on the evading ships distance from the shooter. The closer the evading ship, the less likely to evade.
• For warheads evasion is ignored. That means to escape missile damage you need to kill the missile or fly away from it.

Evasion also has one other condition and that is the evading ship needs to have an equipped engine to evade. That means no evasion on your Thatches, sorry! Evasion is applicable on all lasers and projectiles fired normally. It also is applied to projectiles and lasers created by splash, chain, ricochet, spray and chain bullet weapon effects. Evasion is not applied to AoE or Warhead weapon effects.

With the mechanics out of the way, I am sure people are going to ask something along the lines of “How do I know a shot has been evaded and it’s not just lag?”. This is handled in two ways. First, the evader and the evadee will get a damage pop up reading “Miss”. The pop up will only display if you have damage pop-ups enabled. Secondly, the ship evading will do a barrel roll.

Barrel rolling will only be enabled for players who play using the perspective camera mode.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post your comments, suggestions and questions in the discussion topic! Until next week.

Yclepticon here with a surprise post about a new facet of the class rebalance.  Some of the older players may remember when we first put in class skills past level 20.  This was largely well received as it allowed endgame players to get a bit more hull, speed, and DPS out of their setups.  However, it was noted at the time that some classes made out a lot better than others with that addition.  For example, Sniper got about 7% more DPS while Berserker and Gunner got little to none (since 5% more Multifiring doesn’t do anything).  Here is how we are going to fix that problem.

First: class subskills will now only train up to level 20, and players who still have them higher than that will no longer receive the extra bonuses.  But don’t stop reading!

Second: each class now receives four new advanced subskills.  You can train one advanced subskill each time you level up your main class skill past 20.  So players with Berserker 21 can choose one advanced subskill, and then another one once they get Berserker 22.  And yes, the main class and focus skills will now go up to 22.  In addition to the four advanced subskills of your class, you will also have access to around ten subskills that are available to everyone.

Now some of you are probably thinking, “why should I trade in all three of my level 21 subskills for a single skill?”  The answer is self-evident when you see what the new skills are like.  So without further ado, let’s see some numbers!

Say you’re a Speed Demon with level 21 in all the subskills.  When we scale back Speedy Movement to level 20, you’ll lose a small amount of speed (about 1.4%).  That’s like unequipping a tech 4 sleek item–not that big a deal–but suppose you really want that extra edge in PvP.  You may be interested in the following advanced subskill:

Master Scout: +10% Speed, +25% Radar, -50% Scanner Energy Cost

That’s right, you’ll get a full 10% Speed increase, multiplicative with all your other skills and gear.  On top of that, you’ll pick up some extra Radar to find those pesky Snipers and Seers, and using an ENIAC Omega will suddenly be a lot easier as well (if you can fit it!)

Now suppose you have a Berserker with level 21 in all the subskills, which currently gives you some small bonuses to Resistance (2.4%), Damage (1%), and Hull Space (based on equipped weapons).  First of all, the Hull Space bonus is now moved completely over to the main Berserker class, so your hull won’t change even after subskills are scaled back to level 20.  But suppose you really want that extra Damage.  You may be interested in picking up:

Berserker Classic: +200% Multifiring, -30% Rate of Fire

If you don’t fancy carrying so many weapons around, there’s another new Berserker skill that also boosts DPS… but I’ll leave that for another day.

Finally, let’s say you have an Engineer with level 21 subskills.  One thing you can’t currently get from any skill is the ability to charge your equipped drones faster.  That’s changing now with:

Electrical Engineer: Equipped drones charge 10% faster

There are a few other new ways to improve your drone-juggling skills but I’ll leave those for a later day as well.

* Changed the client random number generation to use a greatly optimised version for performance increase on some os (windows 8 used especially should see a performance increase by about 10%, wine user by nearly 25% (depending on the kernel) and windows 7 used by about 5%. (depending on the scenario)

* client side code to handle connecting using an encrypted user/pass beta client 266.* will still send both encrypted and uncrypted connection message in parallel, to remain compatible with old and new server. Once version 267 roll in, support for uncrypted login will be dropped from the client.

* fixed 2 crash fixes from dmp files sent.

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.