02/19/2008    |    Devlog    |    isildur    |    Discuss

A tactic arose recently in regards to port contention. Players (and their alts) would take unrest missions and hold onto them. Once they all had unrest missions, they would turn them all in at the same time, and push a port all the way from peaceful to having a port battle scheduled.

The reason we have these missions in the first place is to allow rich players to spend their money in ways that directly impact the game world. As secondary goals, missions create markets for items that dont necessarily fit into ship production, and create a demand for those items. Also, the missions drain money out of the economy in a purely voluntary way. These things are all basically Good.

The problem is that we clearly never intended for players to be able to take a port from 0 to 5k or even 10k unrest instantly. While were biased towards attackers (we like PvP!) this goes well beyond bias and into the realm of insanity. Defenders should be able to draw a line in the sand, declare a port off-limits, and enforce that with doubloons. Thats not currently possible. Worst of all, this tactic can be used on new player ports just as easily as on ports in the Antilles. New player ports are intended to be harder to attack, and this process circumvents all the tuning we did to make that the case.

The big issue in the current system is that the requirements for the mission are only checked when you take the mission, not when you turn it in. Weve changed that so that we test for mission validity both when you take the mission and when youre completing the mission. This means that while the unrest missions can take a port into Open PvP, you cannot reach the point at which we schedule a port battle solely via the unrest missions. Once you hit Open PvP, the unrest missions will be considered invalid and you will not be able to turn them in. This change is going into Testbed on Thursday, and is expected to go live this Monday. We would roll this out sooner, except that the changes required are fairly widespread, and we need to make sure its adequately tested.

While it will be good to get the short-term fix out, were already making plans for a longer-term series of changes to clean this issue up for good, and make economic unrest more like what we originally envisioned: a way for traders to contribute meaningfully to their nations cause, and an incentive for traders to risk travel through PvP areas. This series of changes begins with a complete overhaul of our creaky old delivery mission system into something more shop-like, making it both more powerful and more streamlined. Those initial steps are coming up in 1.2, and everyone at FLS who has the misfortune of working with the current delivery system is eagerly anticipating them.

02/19/2008    |    Devlog    |    isildur    |    Discuss