Hey guys, terribly sorry for ignoring some of your posts.
As you might imagine, it's hard to reply to everything when there's that much.
I'll try to do quick bullet point again.
1. RE: War. Can't really pick sides here, I hope you understand. I
am monitoring the situation somewhat, and am nudging devs to make fixes here and there, but our main concern is fair play, not this or that squad winning.
2. Orbital Cannon. Will probably continue nerfing it, but will likely not remove it from the game. It's just too useful of a tool to remove completely. Plus, it's one of our earliest items, before there was that much equipment as we have now, it was just Mining Lasers + Energy Beams + Orbital Cannon.
3. @rehbell & @shivasimha - regarding SG2 being buggy, I suggest you try cache refresh (Ctrl+F5). If it doesn't help, we'll investigate further.
4. @rehbell, thanks for the reports, adding to the list.
5. @black_wulf, sorry for your gear, but that really was a bug. It stood for like 1.5 months, which is a bit too much, and it's our fault, but now that it's finally fixed things should get back on track.
- [ENC] Orbital Cannon now disrupts the ship instead.
How long is it supposed to disrupt the ship for? Here is the log entry from the latest in diggers rampage:
2017-03-07 11:31:13 Atik PD bombs Atik VI with Orbital Cannon demolishing 1 Warehouse
2017-03-07 11:31:12 Atik PD lands on DIGGY STARDUST
2017-03-07 11:31:05 Atik PD lifts off DIGGY STARDUST
Definitely for longer. A couple of minutes, not several seconds. I'm not sure what's up, probably a critical bug.
I would like to say something about mining. The further you are from an asteroid away, the fewer ore you get. An example. I dismantled an asteroid with a MLKIII laser which was far away - http://prntscr.com/eh5h2g. I have received 1 iron ore. That's hard. Basically, I now have to operate day and night for working equipment mining to buy me new used equipment. I do not think that should be the purpose of the game. Let's see how much goes well.
That is not correct, distance to asteroids makes absolutely no difference to your mining. Never did and still doesn't. Maybe your mining laser is broken?
wtf. the game just became worse. Waste of my time playing this. Now even more waiting you cant even dock, land.
I cant understand why did you ( the devs ) screwed up the game like this.
If you think about it, it makes lots of sense. I can think of 4 situations:
1. Traveling between sectors -- no change. 5mins to approach a gate + 5mins to jump = 10mins as before.
2. Mining -- no change, just stay near a station.
3. Hunting -- no change, just stay near a station/planet.
4. Managing multiple planets in the same sector -- that indeed is now harder. Like I said, we'll introduce counterweights for this to make it easier again. But people were asking to limit planet owners' ability to have many planets (like introducing taxes and other different penalties and even hard limits to number of planets), personally, I think this is much better than any of those solutions.
As always, things are going to be evaluated and re-evaluated further.
We simply can't predict each and every outcome when we rebalance something. Maybe because the team is stupid, maybe because the game just has too many factors and variables, I'm not sure. But collecting real stats from the real server is always more productive than just doing math and doing our little tests on our test server.
Also, I've said this before: we hate the station hiding "gameplay". This was never supposed to be a "undock-fire-dock" game, it just makes no sense. We want people to stay in space and have prolonged battles. Not having any real "distance" (ZERO dimensions) is the root of this problem. The "your weapons ports are open" and "your hull is burning" were always very crude workarounds. We'd love to remove both those aspects completely, but we'll see.
Again, terribly sorry if I missed some posts, last few days have been very busy.
Edit: OK, yeah, the Orbital Cannon disruption is not working correctly. Don't worry, all the damage it's dealing after this point is going to be accounted for.