This blog is meant to inform you what this means for the game, for you, the players, and how the future of Perpetuum looks like. Because there is a future, at least we hope so.

How we got here

We knew from the start that Perpetuum will be a niche game and we were cool with it. But even considering that, it never really got off. We had two major spikes, the one during the EVE exodus, and after the Steam launch, but even those pale in comparison to what the we would have needed to justify the “massively” in MMORPG.

Over the years we’ve been in talks with numerous serious publishers and investors, but unfortunately none of those promises came to fruition. So the only thing we could do was to push it on our own and hope that steady work will eventually pay off and bring in a critical mass of players that would keep the game alive for a long time, and provide us a living.

The most prominent feedback that we have received over the years is that Perpetuum has great mechanics and atmosphere but lacks content, and that it is a great foundation for a game. Sadly we never got to the point where we could develop it to its full potential.

It was basically catch-22. After the initial spikes our playerbase always receded to unhealthy levels, which meant that we had to lay off some of our less essential content-related people and also that we didn’t have the funds to do any impactful marketing. Which in turn meant that we could bring in even less new players and develop less new content and do even less marketing. These cycles transformed into a downward spiral where the remaining developers had to be on minimum wage for years and the only thing we could do for the game was fixing bugs and recycling old content. If we would have found a publisher we would have been shut down probably years ago.

I joined Avatar Creations in 2006. After 10 years of “bringing up your own child” and making it part of your everyday life, it’s hard to call it. I can only speak about my own personal experience, but after such a long time of trying hard and failing, there comes a moment when you ask yourself “is it really worth it?” and “what am I doing with my life?”. So the remaining few of us made a mutual agreement that this is it, it’s time to let go.

We didn’t just want to simply let it die though, for two reasons. The first is a selfish one: if years from now someone asks what we have worked on for 10 years, we would like to be able to show them and say “it’s here, you can still play with it if you want”. In case of an MMO this is not self-evident.

The second reason is of course our players. However small it is, we still have a faithful community, and we love you all for that.

Your own Perpetuum server

So while the official server is still going to stay online for an undetermined time, in the last few months we’ve been working on a standalone server solution, in order to ensure the game’s future.

Although Perpetuum’s server application is far from being simple, our primary goal while developing the standalone server was simplicity and ease of use, while keeping the possibility of optional in-depth customization open.

The minimum requirements for running the server are lower than you might think: it can be run on the same Windows-based PC that you play Perpetuum on, even both at the same time. Resource usage of course goes up with the concurrent players on the server, so beyond a certain number a dedicated server machine is needed.

You’ll also need to have an SQL server installed for the database, but we got that covered. The Perpetuum server installer is a single exe about 1GB in size and includes the freely available Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Express that’s automatically installed and configured along with the Perpetuum server itself.

The installer also comes with an Admin Tool application, which is used to start/stop and configure the server, as well as provide a management interface for the player accounts on that server.

Server availability can be customized in the following of ways:

• Public server: the server will be publicly available and listed in the server browser, which will be visible both in the game client and on our website.
• Private server: the server will not be visible in the server browser; players will have to enter the server’s address manually in the game client.
• Open registration: anyone who connects to the server can create a new account and play.
• Limited registration: players need to request an account from server admins and only they can create player accounts.

As I mentioned above, initially our primary goal is to provide a working standalone server that anyone who has ever installed any application can set up, manage, and run with minimum hassle. Once we see that this works we can move on to the next phase where we provide documentation and know-how on how you can customize your server and the database, like doing your own balancing. Word of warning though: even our own management tools feel a lot of times quite hacky, the ways you’ll have to tinker with stuff will certainly require patience and at least some minimal knowledge on how databases work.

We still have to work out some kinks, but the standalone server installer will soon be made publicly available to download, for free of course.

Game client changes

The introduction of the standalone server will of course require support in the game client as well, while still retaining simple access to the official server.

It’s not a big change though: a new server selection screen will precede the current login screen. This includes a new server browser window where all the publicly available player-run servers are listed along with the official server, and you can select any number of them to be included in the server dropdown menu on the main screen. From there it’s as easy as clicking the connect button and after that it’s business as usual, just enter your credentials and play.

Becoming Steam-only

A bigger change that some of you probably won’t like is that soon Steam will be the only place where Perpetuum will be distributed, including the standalone server. The reason for this is to ensure the availability of the game on a stable platform, as opposed to our own website that we cannot guarantee to be around forever. Another reason is that it’s uneconomical for us to keep our own payment platform, as purchases made via Steam outweigh our own store by far.

It’s important to note that existing non-Steam (e-mail based) accounts will continue to work with the Steam-based Perpetuum client, but you won’t be able to create a non-Steam account after the change.

Perpetuum Credits and DLCs discontinued

On a standalone server Perpetuum Credits and DLC will make no sense, since we cannot sell and transfer them to a privately held server, and the administrators of the servers would be able to easily hack in as many credits or EP as they like.

So as of now, Perpetuum Credits, ICE, and Upgrade Kits (DLCs) are not available to purchase anymore, but existing assets are not removed of course and can still be used.

FAQ

In the rest of this blog I’ll try to collect any remaining info and questions you might have, and I will also update this section if any unanswered issue comes up in the comments or the forum.

What happens to the official server?

While the development of Perpetuum is discontinued, the game is not shutting down, and the official server will still stay online for an undetermined time.

How can I play Perpetuum in the future?

You will have the choice to either continue playing on the official server, or play on any of the player-run servers.

When will I be able to run my own Perpetuum server?

As soon as possible. Most of the development is done, but we're still working on some details and bugs.

Can I play with my existing account/character on a private server?

This is something that we’re still looking into. What we know for sure is that we cannot give out any personal information included in Perpetuum accounts unless the account holder requests it, so simply copying the database is absolutely a no go. Another problem is that there are a lot of dependencies related to characters, so if we transfer a single account, there are going to be numerous problems if the character’s corporation, or the base/storage where its items are doesn’t exist on the new server... and those are just a few examples.

Can I sell Perpetuum Credits on my own server?

No, Perpetuum Credits are discontinued as server administrators could easily hack in as many credits as they like.

What happens to game features depending on Perpetuum Credits?

They will be either removed or changed to use other ingame currencies (like NIC) at a later time.

What prevents private server administrators to cheat on their own servers and give advantages to certain characters?

Technically nothing. Server administrators have full access to their server’s database and can do with it as they please, we can’t do anything to prevent this. This is something where the power of the community comes in, and we hope servers run by trusted players will develop a good reputation where you can be sure that everyone plays fair.

Will you still provide support for the game?

We are committed to fix any critical game-breaking bugs in the future that would prevent running the game at all. Anything beyond this, including new content, balancing, and individual player support (running the support ticket system) is not possible for us anymore.

Will I be able to do tweak balancing or add new ingame items on my own server?

To a certain extent, yes. It won’t be simple, and your possibilities will be quite limited, but we intend to come up with some documentation on what you can do and how you can do it.

Steam Trading Cards for Perpetuum are now available!

If you are a Steam-dweller you probably know what these are, but here is a quick recap:

Playing Perpetuum on Steam will give you trading cards from time to time (every 30 minutes of gameplay to be exact). A set consists of 5 cards, and you can get half of this (rounded up, so 3) by simply playing.

The other half (and more) can be acquired by in-game purchases (Perpetuum Credits) or via the Steam community market. (I'll quote the Steam Trading Card FAQ here: "For every $9 USD spent (approximate) (...), you will earn one card drop. This card will drop at some point as you play.")

Completing a card set will earn you a badge, a random emoticon and profile background, and other stuff.

Summary:

• 5 trading cards
• 5 badge levels (plus 1 foil badge)
• 5 profile backgrounds (3 common, 1 uncommon, and 1 rare)
• 10 emoticons (6 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare)

Happy card hunting!

Good news! The annual make-your-wallet-cry winter festivities are underway!

Perpetuum is available at 75% off, credit packs and ICE at 50%, and you can even save 10% on the new premium packs and upgrade kits. This is true for both the Steam store and our own store, where the upgrade kits are also available since yesterday.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, the base game will receive a permanent price drop to 9.99 EUR/USD, and now I can also tell you that this will happen when the sale ends on January 4.

On behalf of the DEV team we wish you Happy Holidays!

The upgrade kits contain varying amounts of Extension Points, Perpetuum Credits, Alien Improbability Devices, and also exclusive new sparks, and the Perpetuum original soundtrack.

These kits are organized into the above mentioned premium packages, which include the base game plus one or both of the kits - the picture below should give you a nice breakdown.

You might also notice that the base game will come with 200 credits and 1 AID from now on, in order to provide a less bumpy road for new players.

Of course the individual upgrades are also available outside of the premium packages. So if you are an older player, you can also purchase these in any combination* and enjoy the same goodies like someone getting a whole premium package for the first time as a new player. (Hence the name "Upgrade Kit".)

* Each upgrade kit can be purchased only once for each Perpetuum account.

Pricing

Soon after the introduction of the premium packages, the base game (aka. "Standard Edition") will undergo a permanent price reduction and will be available for only 9.99 USD/EUR.

Both Upgrade Kits go for the same 9.99 price tag if purchased separately, and if you decide for one of the premium packages, you'll enjoy a few bucks off on the package price compared to the individual prices. The Premium Edition goes for 18.99 (save about 5%) and the Superior Edition for 27.99 (save about 7%).

Note that these packages are currently available on Steam only, but we'll offer them in our own store soon as well.

Head over to our Steam store page to check them out now!

ICE & Winter Sale

We’ve been thinking quite a lot about whether we should bring back ICE, and if so, in what form. Based on the forums, most of you would like to have it back too, so we finally decided that the most straightforward thing to do of course is to make it give credits.

For those of you not familiar with ICE (now called Instant Credit Extender instead of Integration Cycle Extender, hooray for multipurpose acronyms!): it’s an item that you can purchase for real money (costs the same as a 2400 credit pack), which gives you an ingame ICE item that can be traded on the market. If you activate it ingame, it gives 2400 credits to your account. The trick is of course that those who don’t want or can’t spend real money on credits but have the NIC to spend can this way obtain credits too.

Some of you have also suggested that there should be smaller credit packs too, because sometimes a pack of 2400 credits can be too much if you just want to downgrade a few extensions. So starting today, we’ll also offer tiny packs of 200 Perpetuum Credits. If this is received well and ICE also works out, we’ll consider doing a smaller version of ICE too, providing 200 credits. And not just because then we can have vanilla ICE and ICE (ice) baby.

To celebrate the return of ICE and of course the Holidays, we’ll have a Winter sale along with the Steam Holiday sale, where the base game and all credit products (including ICE) will be 33% off.

The New PvE - Random Assignments

So, let’s start this. I’ll tell you in advance that this will be a big change that not only affects assignments but general gameplay too, so one blog won’t be enough. But we have to begin somewhere.

Just to get you up to speed, the second stage of our assignment system revamp is about making the assignments themselves random, meaning that you still choose the type of the assignment, but the exact objectives and locations are generated randomly when you request it.

Currently there is a big problem with the number of available assignments at a specific location. Although we have over 500 hand-crafted assignments, this number gets so diluted due to all the terminals, levels, and assignment types, that we are sometimes left with only 4-5 assignments in the final random pool. And that means a lot of repetition.

The main advantage of having a random assignment system is two-fold:

• For you, it provides for a varied gameplay experience, providing just an ample amount of uncertainty, without stumbling into the exact same assignments over and over.
• For us, it frees up a lot of content development power. A properly done template system allows us to simply add a new objective to the pool, and the system will automatically include it in all future assignment assembly requests, exponentially increasing the number of possible assignments.

The assignment template system

So in the new system, instead of creating specific assignments with specific objectives, we only create assignment template schemes. This means that we only set the type of objectives, like “destroy N number of X type NPC”, not specific NPCs, numbers, or locations. Of course we still have to create a number of different templates for all types of assignments (combat, industrial, transport, etc.), but this can’t be compared to the man hours we need to create fixed assignments.

Due to the generative nature of this template system, we can also easily create relations between the number and difficulty of the tasks that get included in the assignment, and the rewards that you’ll get for them. Naturally, this makes balancing changes a lot easier too: a simple reward multiplier that is based on the request location zone can easily add an additional risk reward for beta assignments, while still using the same templates as alpha islands.

Sidenote: There is a certain room for randomness in templates too, but the objectives usually build upon each other and their order must be logical, so that would need a lot of rules which ultimately might not even pay off compared to fixed templates. Even with fixed templates there are a lot of pitfalls that we have to address, like linking together loot and dropoff objectives so they provide and request the same random item.

Another complaint that keeps popping up about assignments is that the walking time to get to and from an assignment is a lot of times longer that the actual time it takes to complete it. The new system employs a combination of various new mechanics to fight this.

For one, when you request a new assignment, the objectives from the random pool will be picked by considering a distance limit from the request location. To be more precise, the first objective will consider the distance from the request location, the second objective from the first objective, and so on. Assignments basically become a daisy chain of objective locations that randomly send you around the world, but with reasonable walking times between them.

Assignment terminals

Another new feature that we’re planning are called assignment terminals. These are small buildings scattered around islands that (as their main role) function as assignment request and delivery points. (We are calling them kiosks internally, this is what you see on the diagrams.)

The advantage of these small terminals is that it doesn’t matter if you have wandered too far off from a main terminal, you’ll always have a small assignment terminal nearby where you can request a new assignment, without having to break the action too much.

And finally, there is the idea of providing a teleport home option at these assignment terminals. This would be only offered for a fixed time after you completed an assignment, to give you the possibility of loading off your loot at the main terminal or generally finishing an assignment-running session.

Even more uses

The above are generally meant to make doing assignments more dynamic, but we also plan to give these terminals more, important roles, and these will affect gameplay in general.

• They will function as persistent, private storage facilities on the terrain. You can drop anything from your cargo into them and they will keep them indefinitely and securely. Assignments will also use them to provide any starting or reward items.
• They will also make you able to re-equip your robot while on the terrain, using either modules from their storage or from your cargo. This function will probably have the largest impact on the way you play Perpetuum.

So as you can see we have a large part of it worked out, but there are still a few things hanging in the air, mostly related to specific objective types and how they can work together with the template system.

NPC spawns in general are also slated for a revamp that would make us able to create real mixed spawns that work together as a single group, and to solve the orange spawn/red spawn/kiting/AI issues, but that’s already for another time.

Closing Notes

We’re also trying to work out why some of you experience serious lag and disconnects and others not. Unfortunately we’re still tapping in the dark since we can’t reproduce it either, and it’s hard to fix something if you don’t know the cause (assuming that it is a problem with our server). Some internal measurement tools are in the works, which could possibly find their way into the live client as well.

On behalf of the Dev team, we wish you Happy Holidays!

This brings me to the main announcement of this blog. As outlined in the previous status report, once we’re looking at a stable gamma system, we’re ending our Early Access phase on Steam.

Originally the EA phase was meant to be quite short, basically to make sure that our new servers work as they should and our integration with Steam is flawless. But because of the removal/revamp of gamma islands the game has lost a large chunk of its content, we decided to extend EA until it’s finished. Of course we could still wait until we’re done with the mission system revamp, and with new PvE content, and the new engine, and and and… but that would be a vicious cycle and we’d be stuck in there forever. With the new changes of the Steam UI it has also become even less desirable to stay in Early Access for longer than absolutely necessary, simply from a visibility standpoint.

So with that said, we’re officially launching on Steam this Friday, the 17th of October. And as it is the case with all newly launching games, Perpetuum will be -10% off for a week.

Of course this won’t really change much from a development perspective, we’re continuing on the road we have laid out and keep improving the game.

New mineral system

We’re also planning a small patch for this Thursday (version 3.5.2), with a few bug fixes, and something that we wanted to do for a while now. This is a reworked mineral spawning system, which won’t mean too much difference in gameplay at first, but it makes our lives easier and it’s also more optimal for the server and the database.

To get a bit more technical, mineral fields so far have been generated and stored in raw bitmaps, and “fields” as a concept did not actually exist. Minerals in ground tiles had no connection to each other, and we couldn’t tell whether two tiles belonged to the same mineral field or not. This made it practically impossible to create rules and mechanics that would affect a whole mineral field.

With the new system, fields are node-based and are stored hierarchically in the database, which makes it very easy to let a whole field despawn without any residue after a certain time for example.

The system is very different compared to the current one, which will result in all the mineral fields being reset, so please be aware of this.

From a balancing standpoint we’ll also take this opportunity and make the faction-specific mineral difference even more significant, going from a 1:1.5 ratio of non-faction:faction minerals on an island to a 1:2 ratio.

Intrusion and gamma changes

Two relatively small but very significant changes will happen here, based on forum feedback and our observations, which will be deployed in the patch after the next one (3.5.3).

The change related to gamma islands is that we’ll be lifting the limit of 3 terminals per island. We have anticipated this change and mentioned before gammas were opened that we’re playing it safe but this might happen, but now we’re sure it has to go. The remaining terminal-to-terminal range limit and the red no-build areas should be enough to provide a soft limit for the number of terminals on an island.

The change to intrusions will bring an end to the automatic stability increase of beta outposts, and will require the owner corporation to complete their own SAP events as well. This will be the only way to increase the stability of outposts; if an event happens without any interaction then the stability will remain unchanged. Attacking corporations completing SAP events will of course still reduce stability, like they do now. As a result of this change, intrusion events should be more fast-paced and straightforward as defenders won’t have to stand around for two hours waiting for someone to come, but it will also require more effort to keep an outpost stable.

Robot balancing

We’re preparing a larger balancing patch that affects pretty much every robot in the game. The general aim is to boost light and assault class robots, and to stimulate or rather make room for a larger variance in weapon and module choices for all robots.

Listing all the changes specifically would be too much for this blog, but here are the main points:

• Light and assault bots get additional head and/or leg slots.
• They also get a slight CPU and reactor boost...
• ...and a 25% mass increase, so equipped modules don’t affect their speed that much.
• The current faction-specific weapon damage bonus of all combat robots will be changed to a combination of a larger general weapon damage bonus plus a smaller faction-specific weapon damage bonus. This means that your robot will be less “crippled” when using weapons other than its faction-specific ones.
• Weapon-specific bonuses of assaults and mechs will be size-independent, so assaults will receive bonuses for medium weapons, and mechs for light weapons too.
• All robots will receive an extra bonus that is either connected to their intended role or their faction.
• We’d like to emphasize the scout role of light combats, so they receive a detection bonus.
• Combat assaults receive an optimal range bonus in order to take on longer-ranged mechs more easily.
• Light EWs get a small bonus to their faction-specific weapon cycle times to increase their combat capabilities a bit.
• Combat mechs should be as agile as possible on the battlefield, so they receive a bonus to demobilizer resistance.
• EW mechs’ main role is to disrupt from the distance, this means an EW module optimal range bonus for them.
• Combat heavy mechs, being the slow fortresses they are, receive a small survivability boost with the help of armor resistance bonuses.
• Industrial light robots get an accumulator capacity bonus giving them more working stability or even survivability, depending on their loadout.
• Industrial mechs will be pushed more towards a combat support role with remote support module and sensor strength bonuses, while still retaining their primary mining and harvesting bonuses.
• We’re also making indy heavy mechs a bit more sturdy with a bonus to their armor amount.
• It’s not all that bright of course, so don’t be surprised if there will be also nerfs to some robots’ specific bonuses.

Mk2 robots have special bonuses and those will stay as they are, but basically Mk2s (and other special variants like prototypes) will get the same treatment as their normal counterparts.

These can still change as we will still go through all of these modifications again in the coming week. It will also hit the public test server first since we’re of course curious about your feedback too, so we don’t have an exact schedule for this other than “soon”.

Closing

Although this report is mainly about the impending and shortly upcoming changes, don’t forget that the larger updates outlined in the September and May status reports are still in effect. So the next blog post should tell you more about the incoming second stage of our mission system revamp. Or maybe another one inbetween about the teleport and highway network revamp?

The good news is that the wait is finally over soon: the reworked gamma islands patch will hit the live server next Wednesday, the 17th of September.

Now, since this will be a big patch that includes a lot of changes and fixes outside of gamma mechanics too, we’ll take a bit of precaution. When we deploy the patch on the 17th, gamma islands will be there, but the teleports leading to them will be initially disabled. We’ll use the next two days to gather any issues that might come up during general gameplay, and if all goes well, we’ll deploy the fixes and open up gammas on Friday the 19th. (Update: we'd still like to take a few days to make sure everything is right and check out a few remaining bugs, so gammas will open next week.)

There are still a few kinks to iron out until then, but these are mainly just small bugs and balancing issues. Testing on the PTS will still go on too (you're welcome to join!), and here we would like to thank everyone who helped us with feedback, ideas, or bug reports!

What you need to know about the new gammas

The new gamma mechanics include a few big changes and a lot of small ones. For simplicity’s sake I’ll only talk about the important ones here, and those who are interested in the details can do so in the “Gamma revamp testing” forum topic, which is fairly comprehensive.

New islands, new layout

Initially we’ll start off with 6 gamma islands - 3 old, and 3 brand new ones. For the new islands we tried to make things interesting instead of following the “big chunk of land”-style, so we have some split landmasses and archipelago-style zones too. Additional islands will be introduced when we see that the demand arises, and we’ll also try to keep them varied and interesting. And although the teleport network for these 6 islands seems fairly symmetrical for now, this won’t be the case as we expand with additional ones, so don’t build strategies around this.

Reworked terraforming

Sky-high “terrain walls” were one of the big problems of old gammas. Although it was nice to see people getting creative, apart from the aesthetic issues it also allowed for near-impenetrable fortresses, which caused a lot of headaches for us and for you as well. No-bounds terraforming was a big issue, so we’re changing this now.

Terraforming has now a limit of how steep you can make the terrain. This limit is set between the slope capability of assault and mech class robots, which means that you can’t ever terraform anything where a light or assault bot wouldn’t be able to pass. Unfortunately we have to say goodbye to beacon-terraforming, however much you guys liked it, because we simply couldn’t make it work together with the slope limit (for now at least). So instead we made module terraforming more user friendly, by making terrain tile locking instant, and merging all the different types of terraforming charges into one charge, where you select the type of terraforming method from the new terraforming panel.

Network bandwidth limit

The second big issue that came up was that we didn’t impose any limits on the number of structures you can build. This not only caused balancing problems (numbers always win), but server and client performance issues too. To remedy this, all buildings connected to the network have a certain bandwidth usage and main terminals received a bandwidth cap.

Energy management changes

Like some of you, we have also made the observation that gamma colonies are too self-sufficient. Since reactors generated energy out of thin air, you could practically leave your base alone and it worked for an indefinite time, unless someone destroyed it.

A big change here is that reactors won’t be generating energy on their own anymore. We’re introducing a new underground resource, which is not so much a mineral, but actually an energy field (that’s what we’re on Nia for, after all). These fields cannot be exploited by regular means; you need to place energy wells on them (a new building type), which will send the raw energy over your network into the reactors, which in turn will convert it to energy usable by all the buildings.

Like normal minerals, energy fields also deplete and respawn at random places all the time, so colony managers will need to check on them every few days and look for new energy sources to keep the colony powered.

Gamma highways

This has been requested for quite a long time now, and now they are here: buildable highway nodes, which will create a strip of speed boosting effect between them.

Walls and gates

Also a fairly big change is that now you’ll be able to lock and directly shoot deployable walls and all kinds of plants too.

We have also created a simple forcefield gate that you can place between wall tiles, and can be opened and closed with a simple click (if you have access, of course). Since this is not part of the gamma colony system, but a simple deployable field device, you'll also be able to use these on Beta islands.

The end of Steam Early Access

Our Early Access phase on Steam has been created with the aim to warn new players about possible server and connectivity issues while we were in the process of moving our servers. Meanwhile, the development of gamma took longer than expected, and since such a large system in the game can bring unexpected performance issues, we have chosen to wait with the closure of EA. But with that done, it will have served its intended purpose by a large margin, so it must come to an end.

So after gamma is released and seems stable, we will come out of Early Access and officially launch on Steam.

Of course this doesn’t really change anything - we will still continue development and regularly bring in new features and much needed changes.

What comes next

As laid out in a previous blog, first we’ll be doing a rework of the current highway and teleport networks, to speed up travelling in the game. The gamma patch actually includes a related change already, giving a flat speed increase to all robots.

Meanwhile we’re preparing a larger balance package for robots, with the aim of boosting smaller classes a bit, and changing some bonuses all around to make certain roles more distinct and logical.

Then we’ll move on to the long overdue second stage of the assignment revamp, bringing real variance to the PvE experience in the form of random assignments. NPC spawns have also become a bit of a mess due to all the balancing and mechanics changes over the years, so we are planning a big overhaul for them as well.

Later on we’ll still continue with improving the neglected PvE part of Perpetuum. The introduction of energy fields slowly starts to give sense for the actual backstory, and we have a few solid ideas already to make the collection of raw energy not just a gamma-only feature, but an interesting incentive that all players can participate in, from new to old.

That’s all for now, and I’ll try to make these reports a monthly thing, promised.

LAUNCH CONFIRMED!

Cue "it's been a long road" and other emotional phrases, and you have probably heard about this by now, but:

Perpetuum will be officially released on Steam on the 23rd of April. (Yes, this year :)

Feel free to check out our store page - though there is not much to look at yet, but some discussions have already started there.

Steam beta access

Those who already own the game are now able to link their Perpetuum and Steam accounts on our website and receive a free copy of the game on Steam. We have set up a new Account connections section under account management where you can do this.

Note that this is only a small gift for our loyal players and future purchases of Perpetuum on our website will not mean that you will also get a Steam key. Since Steam is not a requirement to access the game and will not give players any in-game benefits, we will still be offering Perpetuum through our own store as well.

For now Steam access is still in beta stage (earlier than Early Access), so there might still be some small bugs or things missing.

Gamma reset and testing

The most important information you need to know that the gamma reset will happen a day before the Steam launch, on April 22.

Since the last patch, the client includes the personal and corporation-level reimbursement selectors, where you can tell us the target terminal where you would like to have your gamma items transferred on the day of the reset. (More info in the patch notes.)

Meanwhile we’ve been working on the changes that justify the whole gamma reset in the first place, namely the terraform limitation and the colony building network restrictions. Both of these will be out on the public test server very soon, and we kindly urge you to break it in any way you can. We’re also putting down a mobile teleport next to the TM Alpha terminal on the test server which leads to the gamma test zone, so you won’t have to walk all the way unnecessarily. More info on the testing forum soon.

Depending on how testing and development of this goes, the best case scenario is that we don’t shut down gammas at all, but do the reset on the 22nd and you can immediately take it back with the improved mechanics in place. In case we encounter some serious issues during testing, we will still have the reset on the 22nd, but will close down gammas on the same day until we can deploy the changes.

Twitch intergration

Gameplay features always have priority, but Gargaj has been working on integrating Twitch's one-click video streaming into the client whenever he had some spare time, so this is also coming very soon. Complete with Twitch chat integration, Twitch account linking, and eye-twitching Perpetuum video stream overdose!

Also, some of you have asked our stand regarding video sharing and monetization, so we've put up a policy page on our website - see here.

Payment model change

During and since our Steam Greenlight campaign we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from players not familiar with the game. This feedback was overwhelmingly positive, however there was a single recurring complaint that we couldn’t ignore. We’ve thought and talked about this for a long time before coming to a decision, and in the end we decided that the best chance for Perpetuum to grow with this new audience is to do something about the subscription system.

On April the 2nd, as a last step in preparation for our upcoming Steam launch, Perpetuum is going to change its payment model.

The subscription model will be dropped in favor of a single purchase when players join the world of Perpetuum, and augmented with optional in-game purchases of previously unavailable services and cosmetic upgrades. The price of the single and final purchase of the game will be comparable to 3 months of subscription time in the past: 28.99 USD/EUR (VAT included).

In anticipation of the influx of new players, we will suspend our 15-day trial and free reactivation options on the same day. The payment model change combined with our Steam launch is a disproportionately large step for us compared to our recent years, and we want to make sure that we can provide the highest possible quality of service for the players who purchase the game.

A gift for our active players

As a thank you for supporting us over the years and helping us to get to this point, all players who had at least 3 months of game time ever(!) on their account by April 2 will receive Perpetuum for free. The 3 months can be anywhere in the past, reach into the future, be continuous or intermittent, doesn’t matter. We check for redeemed game time codes or monthly subscriptions. We also take ICE into consideration, but it’s important that we count consumed ICE items, and NOT redeemed ICE codes.

So if your account currently has had only 1 or 2 months of game time so far, this is your opportunity to extend it to 3 months and get the game for good.

The accounts that have less than 3 months of accumulated game time on April 2 will be deactivated, and can only be used again if you purchase the game for the full price.

We have set up an eligibility check on our website, so you can verify whether your account has enough months to receive a free copy or not.

EP system changes

The system most affected by the change is the EP system. It’s not being removed, and the core of the game will be kept as it has always been, however several adjustments need to be made in order to make it work.

First off, for the purpose of easier management, instead of receiving one EP every minute, players will be receiving the EP in daily packages. All accounts which own the game will accumulate Extension Points daily, however this raises the issue of older accounts having more EP without doing anything. In order to avoid the issue of inactive players gathering EP indefinitely, we’re introducing a new rule: EP will only gather on an account for three days after being last online. We’re confident that this isn’t such a big requirement for active players, but it will make sure that inactive players can be caught up to in terms of EP.

The second major change concerns the level playing field in Perpetuum. The EP system has always been one of the core systems guaranteeing that equal progress can be achieved for all players in the game. This won’t change, however we’re raising the bar a bit: for players willing to support us each month we’re introducing the EP Boost. This service will be available as an in-game purchase and will grant players a 50% boost to all EP earned for 30 days. The pricing of this service will be comparable to the monthly fee we’re replacing.

Perpetuum Credits

We’ll introduce a new type of currency that you’ll be able to purchase for real money - we’re simply calling it Perpetuum Credits (PC).

The following items will be available to purchase for Perpetuum Credits:

• EP booster
  Activating an EP booster on your account will increase your EP acquisition rate by 50% over the normal rate for a month. It will also make sure that you receive your EP supplement for every day as long as it is active, even if you miss to log in for more than 3 days.
• EP reset
  Reset the extensions of a character to starting levels, and free up all the EP spent on them. The EP can then be spent again for any character on the account. The EP reset item will also free up all EP penalties caused by character deletions. UPDATE: Based on your feedback and after some internal discussion, we have decided to not offer EP resets for now. The extension downgrade feature might even make a separate EP reset unnecessary, we'll see how people will use it.
• Extension downgrade
  Currently extension downgrading is only available for 30 days after an account is created. We will remove this limit, and make level-by-level downgrading for Perpetuum Credits available to everyone. Also, there will be no level limit for downgrading, you’ll be able to downgrade even from level 10, down to the starting level of the extension.
• Character rename
  Makes you able to rename your character. To avoid abuse, character information windows will publicly list all past names.
• Corporation rename
  Change the name and short ID of your corporation. This will be only available to CEOs and deputy CEOs.

This is only the initial list of items, and we plan to introduce some more in the future, like the long awaited robot paint option. We’d like to stress that these will be only convenience or cosmetic items - no player will get the upper hand in the game by throwing wads of cash at us.

Any subscription that spans beyond the day of the payment model switch will be converted to the appropriate amount of PC and added to the account. UPDATE: see a detailed explanation here.

We'll roll out these changes to the public test server on March 20, so you'll be able to see how this all works before it goes live.

Gamma reset

We’d like to quickly address this as well in this blog because the plans for gammas have changed around too many times.

So if you haven’t heard about this yet, we’re going to reset gamma islands, with the necessary reimbursements. The reason for this is that we’re changing the rules for terraforming and building limits for a better gamma gameplay and balance, and unfortunately there is no way around a reset.

The initial plan was to do the reset before the Steam launch, close down gamma, and reopen it whenever we feel it’s ready. However, we have made considerable progress and we might be able to avoid a closedown. So the current plan is to do the reset and the reimbursement on the day we launch on Steam, and start right away with a revamped gamma experience. If we encounter any showstopper issues connected to this, the reset will still happen on the day of the launch, and we’ll revert to the original plan.

As for the reimbursements, the details are still being worked out, but here’s what we already know for sure:

• Reimbursing buildings and items in them is straightforward because they all have a specific owner. Items will be reimbursed as they are, either to characters (if in private storage), or to corporations (if in corporation storage). Buildings will be reimbursed by returning the foundation item and the appropriate amount of construction blocks.
• Reimbursing terraforming is the tricky part. There is simply no way to know how much or where an individual character or a corporation has terraformed. Pretty much the only thing we are able to do is a fair approximation based on gamma activity. So the plan is to check which corporations ever had a gamma terminal in the past (counted up until today, to avoid abuse), and we’ll give out a package of terraforming charges for each terminal they have ever placed.
• Both individual characters and corporations will be able to set a target terminal for the reimbursement within the game. The selection interface for this will be included in the payment model patch. If you miss to set a target terminal, we will use the TM Alpha terminal by default, so nothing will be lost.

Q&A

So when will you actually launch on Steam?
- The exact date of our Steam launch will be announced on the day of the payment model patch on April the 2nd.

Will I be able to transfer Perpetuum Credits between accounts?
- No.

Will I be able to trade Perpetuum Credits in the game for NIC?
- No, but we’re keeping this option open for the future.

My account’s validity is beyond the day of the payment model switch! What will happen to my subscription after that?
- Your extra subscription time will be converted to the appropriate amount of Perpetuum Credits and added to your account. See a detailed explanation here.

How will I get my free copy of Perpetuum?
- If your account had at least 3 months of game time through the years, your Perpetuum account will automatically be converted to a lifetime account on April the 2nd. If you have less than 3 months of game time so far, you can make your account eligible for the free copy at a reduced price by purchasing the missing months in our store until April the 2nd. Check your account status page to verify its eligibility.

What will happen to unused ICE items?
- ICE will be discontinued and market orders for ICE will be cancelled during the payment model patch. Then, all ICE items in private storages and cargos will be converted to the appropriate amount of Perpetuum Credits and added to the owner's account. ICE in corporation storages will be converted and added to the account of the CEO, so make sure you move out any ICE items to personal storages if this doesn't fit for you.

What will happen to recurring subscriptions?
- All recurring subscriptions will be stopped on April the 2nd.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments and we’ll include it here! Details about the Steam launch and everything you need to know about it will be announced after April the 2nd.

As it happens, Perpetuum is officially 2 years old today. No, we didn’t forget about it, so you can now stop spamming the forum with it :)

I’m not really the sentimental type, so I hope you forgive me if I won’t start a tearful trip down memory lane. Fact is that we’re still here, and if it only depends on us, we don’t intend to go anywhere. Fact is that in these 2 years Perpetuum saw more than 60 patches, from small fixes to large content and feature updates, including two major expansions. And fact is that we couldn’t have done this without you, our faithful players. So thank you for sticking with us thus far, and here’s to many more years ahead!

Of course it wouldn’t be a proper anniversary without some fun events, so let’s see what we have in store for you.

Allow me to start with the bad news: there won’t be an official tournament this time. Last year it was really great and it provided us with a lot of experience, and we’d really love to do it again in the future. But the truth is that it takes away so much development resources and manpower that at this time we’d rather spend that on actual development. Hope that’s okay with you. *puppyeyes*

But without further ado, here’s what will happen on our 2nd anniversary weekend, starting on the 30th of November, and closing on the 4th of December:

Anniversary sparks

Again, you will have the opportunity to unlock the "golden" Niani sparks through the connected special assignments. For our new players this will be the first time to get their hands on one of these special sparks, and for our veterans this will mean that they can unlock the other one too, the one which they couldn’t last year (although I bet some of you managed to unlock both by various means).

Treasure hunt

Of course, the annual treasure hunt returns as well, but this time with a twist. Last year you had it simple, just had to search for artifacts and you got instant candy. To make it a bit challenging, the artifacts you have to look for will contain (beside random loot) a special distress beacon too. (Artifacts will be available on every island.)

Activating one of these distress beacons will call forth a Guardian Commander of one of the three factions, who will not be very happy that you phoned him out of his lovely plasma bubble bath. However if you can beat him, he will drop an Alien Improbability Device for sure, and maybe, just maybe, a universal faction token.

This token can be used in the Syndicate Supplies to exchange it for an Integration Cycle Extender, or as you know it better, ICE. Stocks will be limited though, so don’t miss out.

P.A.Q.S.

It’s time for the Perpetuum Anniversary Quiz Show again, with yours truly. We had one a year ago and it was great fun, so I thought it’s high time that we did it again. What’s it about you ask?

Well, I go out in a robot and everyone gathers around me as if I would about to start a lovely tale. Instead of a tale though, I drop out a field container with something inside it, and ask a question. The answer to that question is always a four-digit number, which happens to be the code that opens said container. The fastest one to find the answer and loot the container will get to keep anything that’s inside it. Pretty straightforward stuff. This time there will be even a few cool items in them. (See what I did there?)

We’ll have a dedicated chat channel for the quiz, the name will be announced at a later time, but we’ll of course have server-wide messages right before the event too.

The event will happen on Sunday, December 2nd at 21:00 CET (server time), right outside of Truhold-Markson Alpha terminal. So make sure you get there in time, or place a spark teleport target beforehand! (Here is a link to figure your local time for the event.)

Last but not least, a little something aimed at those who can’t take part in these events for any reason: every account that has an active subscription at the time of the patch on Friday the 30th will receive a redeemable Alien Improbability Device. (And I’d like to state here that contrary to hearsay, it does not contain only T4 items.)

Well, that’s pretty much it. We hope you’ll have great time, wish you steady loot, and hope to see you in the game!

The introduction of Integration Cycle Extenders seems to be a success so far, the ingame market is constantly filled with buy and sell orders for it.

For a while, the price of ICE seemed to settle around 60-70 million NIC - much lower than we have expected, but certainly good news for buyers. Lately it seemed to slowly start upwards and it is quite possible that today's patch will increase demand and thus its price even more.

I want to br-... play free!

A lot of you with expired accounts have come to us asking to let you in for a few minutes so you can buy an ICE and get back into the game. But that wouldn't have been fair towards the others, not to mention the user management nightmare.

So today we present you our new temporary account reactivation feature, which will revive an expired Perpetuum account for 24 hours, completely free of charge. Obviously we still have to pay our rent, so you can only do this once every 30 days.

An account reactivated this way is no different than any other active account, you will even get EP for those 24 hours too.

Use that time to buy ICE, manage roles of dead corporations, check out new game features, or whatever else you can think of.

How?

The temporary reactivation feature can be reached from your account status page, or here is a direct link to it.

So spread the word to your old buddies and see you in game!

"The Green Light Bundle puts great indie games in the spotlight. Games that need your help to get onto Steam. Choose your price, play the games and don't forget to rate them on Steam Greenlight(tm)."

Along with all the other nice indie games, the bundle includes a 30-day Perpetuum game time code. The code is available for old and new accounts alike, but only one green light bundle code is allowed per account.

To the Green Light Bundle website!

(Note that this is separate from Steam Greenlight, we're awaiting an announcement for that on Monday.)

Anyway.

I don't think I have to introduce Steam Greenlight to anyone, but I'm happy to say that we took the chance as soon as we literally could and put the game up, so now you can express your desire to get the game up on Steam! Click here!

Exploits and reimbursements

There have been some occurrences of faulty functioning on server-side which were widely discussed on the forums. As a general statement, I'd like to remind everyone that as it says in the EULA, the abuse of such faulty mechanics is forbidden, and you may be risking your account status by doing so.

The most prominent such issue, as most might have heard of, was an anomaly which resulted in bots respawning in your hangar after they've been shot, essentially allowing you to fight with the same robot multiple times, turning Perpetuum into something of a George Romero movie. This was prominently used during a major fight on Monday; to address this, we will reimburse those players who suffered losses to these zombie bots, and will also temporarily suspend the accounts of those players who have repeatedly utilized this flaw.

Another, less problematic issue arose from the change of the production fees on Gamma islands: now that the mechanic has changed, and fees are returned to the owner corporation instead of the Syndicate, we will retroactively reimburse the corporations with these fees for their previous productions as well, since they should've been receiving these funds in the first place.

The Big One

And now for the most uncomfortable part: Our announcement about the adjustment of the gamma teleport ranges kicked up a massive stink, and it'd be feeble not to address that. To this end, we'd like to offer a chance to the major corporations / alliances involved in this game to express their opinions on the upcoming change, and invite them to a public roundtable on July the 5th (this forum and the opening post will continue to update with more information), where we'd like to provide an opportunity for the delegates of these groups to debate the change, provide us developers with enough insight so that we can handle this right, or even to make further adjustments. This also means that said change will be postponed until we have reached an agreement with the playerbase.

This all, of course, is far from being a final denouement of the situation, and we're well aware of that, but admittedly we painted ourselves in a corner a bit, so at this point what we feel is best, is to give you players a chance to right our wrongs.

Finally the day has come, when we unleash what we essentially consider as almost a rewrite of the game (considering there's barely anything left untouched in it), and open the Gamma Frontier. This has been a frankly unreasonable amount of work, but having seen some of the things already built on the test servers, I feel it was already well worth it.

A big big BIG thank you and massive respect goes to anyone who gave the test server a shot and systematically uncovered our occasional mishaps through numbers and lines of code; we hope the final product lives up to your expectations. (And if you didn't join the test server, now you know who to blame.)

The massive list of changes and upgrades are available here, the help pages are available here, and a fairly accurate representation of the dev-team can be found here.

And now, it's your turn: Last one on Gamma is a rotten Arkhe!

The server will open on Friday, 12:00 CEST, and you can already start preloading the test-client here. An important technical note I'd like to make: There's been a number of considerable changes in architecture, so it's important that you make this a separate installation! It is not recommended to install this over an existing Perpetuum installation or to try and skip ahead in preloading by using an existing datafile - this test client will only work with the test server! Other than that, it's the same old download-run-watch-progress-bar-login routine we all know so dreadfully well.

Now, this isn't the only thing to keep in mind. The test server, being somewhat different from the usual environment, needs a few things to be explained or taken note of:

• If you have a valid, paid account when the test server opens up, your account will be valid for the test-server as well. On the other hand, we will not perform continuous syncing; if you're late for the party, you won't get in. (That doesn't mean we won't do syncing later, but you have to have your best puppy-eyes in store.)
• The test server is subject to the same EULA/COC as the live one - be civil, even if something's broken (and oh yes, there will be blood).
• PVP on the test server should be strictly consensual; we won't limit your options via technical restrictions, but assuming that you're on the server to test, breaking someone else's gameplay won't help any of us, and we might revoke your access if you keep continually disturbing other players.
• For obvious reasons, some things will run in "cheat mode": The market will seed everything for low prices, you will get large amounts of EP and NIC, time-dependent processes will be sped up to minutes instead of hours, and robots will get automatically reimbursed after they've been shot. Of course this makes economic balancing difficult, but at the same time we don't want to wait two months for the first base to be built either.
• The test server will cease operation as soon as we consider testing complete and deploy the patch to the final live server. No data will be migrated back.

There will be a separate forum for the testing server topics here, so please open topics or post opinions there instead of other forums so we don't have to fish all the ideas and death threats together from other forums.

That's all I suppose, happy preloading, testing, and Lord Have Mercy.

It has been an extraordinary weekend for us, seeing both the Agents in the audience and in the arena completely tuned to the same frequency and enjoying it as much as we enjoyed donning the visibility vests while rounding up the teams, conducting the matches as the officials, and pushing out the Zamboni afterwards to clear the arena of leftover robot parts. The great atmosphere certainly underlined our trust in the community Perpetuum has built around itself, it has been a great inspiration for us, and we're certainly gonna do this once again.

The execution of the tournament by was no means flawless, and I'd like to observe some things that we need to think about later: First off, the upper rim of the arena was way too popular, because it consisted of one single ring without any interruptions. We duly noted this and while we don't want to discourage long-range fighting, the amount of constant merry-go-rounding eventually just became silly after a while, and we'll certainly take steps against this next time. Another thing that gave us a bit of a headache was the obviously hasty decision of allowing matches to be decided with a coin-flip. This turned out to be a bad idea and we'll make sure to granulate the rules more specifically next time, perhaps including things like damage dealt or shots fired. (Again, these are just conclusions, not plans. We'll see.)

That all said, let's start the ceremony with a few people who we need to thank.

The "Jackie Stewart"-award for the commentary booth

The tournament certainly wouldn't have been as enjoyable as it was for people outside the arena if it wasn't for the amazing (and I mean that to the fullest extent) insights to the people who did the commentary with Mancs and Calvin on the stream: a big thank you go out to Lemon, Gremrod and GLiMPSE who attended our little livestream as guests, performed interviews and generally made the video stream entertaining even for people who weren't as savvy about the game as most of us. Their reward for their time and unwavering enthusiasm shall be a custom label on the forums reminding everyone that these people mean business.

The "Baby's First PVP" award for the best newcomer group

We'd like to take time to provide some kudos to the only corporation in the tournament who, despite being a fairly new PVE formation, decided to not only give the whole thing a shot but also managed to advance to the second round of the tournament, so a big hand goes to Rue Tang Clan for proving that even low EP players with enough dedication, creativity, a good understanding of game mechanics can match up any other group. They will receive what they probably need the most after the tourney: a round of reimbursements for their robots lost during those two matches.

The combined "Dale Earnhardt Jr."-award for most left turn laps around the arena and the "Garden Rake"-award for least rules observed

To commemorate the special moment of seeing four completely masked Troiars running full speed around the top rim of the arena for 30 minutes in hopes to avoid any sort of firefight and getting through the round via the coin flip, but ultimately realizing that they forgot to fill out the point cap and will be eliminated regardless, we'd like to present Infinity with a special Perpetuum 500 lightweight frame to aid them in their future efforts of legging it from firefights. This is also in honor of what we perceived to be the biggest surprise in tournament, eliminating M2S in the first round.

The "COME AT ME BRO"-award for most spectacular tanking

This one goes to a moment in a match we all found incredibly entertaining: We'd like to hand out our only individual award to Tux from 62nd, who successfully held his ground as a single robot for about 20 minutes after his team was destroyed early by Remedy, eating ridiculous amount of damage and EW like a boss. His reward will be, appropriately, a unique The Wall-brand shield hardener, to help him become comfortably numb.

...and now without further ado, let's hear it for the winners:

• On runner-up place: Remedy Inc.
• On third place: Crimson Imperium Reborn
• On second place: Immortal Legacy

And finally, the winner of the first anniversary Perpetuum Tournament is:

With a nail-biting finale, CHAOS has shown us amazing proficiency, tactics and discipline as they marched through the rounds with their impenetrable Tyrannos squad, and they're well deserving to the champion title, and by proxy the free entry to the next tournament as reigning champion. The top three teams are already in the process of receiving their rewards (see details here), and all other participating teams will also receive a complimentary goodie package, so hopefully we can wrap all this up within a few days.

Once again, a big big honest Thank You to all the groups who have stepped up to participate, the players spectating in the audience, all the players who in the meantime roamed the fields in search for treasure, and all those who watched the weekend unfold on the video stream. (If you missed it, check the video archive here.)

We had a great time - hope to see even more of you in the next event!

Well then, it seems it's high time for some proper festivities, complete with a number of surprises, treasure hunts, and robot massacres!

Perpetuum Corporation Tournament

It is with a mixture of great pleasure and honor that we announce the first Perpetuum Corporation Tournament. We will be hosting this prestigious event on the first weekend of December (3rd and 4th). Allow me to cut through the red tape, here are the rules:

Registration

• Application for the tournament is done by the CEO or Deputy CEO of a corporation.
• The registration fee is 10 million NIC. Only the exact amount done in one transfer will count as a proper registration.
• The registration fee is to be transferred to “DEV Tournament” (use Agent search); this will be the proof of application.
• One application per corporation. To make it fair for everyone, we'll check for alt corporations and let them only apply if we don't have the 16 teams.
• The first 16 applications are accepted, above this the money will be simply sent back.
• The deadline for the applications is the 27th of November, 20:00 server time (CET).
• The exact time for the tournament matches will be announced after all applications have been processed. The first day will see the first elimination round, the second day will host the finals.

Rules

• The tournament is a 16 team straight elimination ladder.
• Robots destroyed in the tournament will NOT be reimbursed.
• Looting on the battlefield is allowed.
• Team members will be placed into the combat zone, where they must remain still and may not engage any modules until the Tournament Master gives the signal for the fight to commence.
• The team that eliminates all its opponent’s robots first wins the match.
• There are no module restrictions, robots may be fit freely.
• The maximum time frame for a round is 30 minutes. Once this expires the team with most points on the field wins (calculated from still standing robots - for the point system see below). If this number is the same, the team with the most points destroyed wins. If the number is still the same, we draw a winner.

Team compositions

Every team can have up to 10 members. Teams can only include members of the registered corporation.

Teams can be assembled using a point system for robot classes. Every team will have a maximum of 25 points available to spend in any given match. The point cost of robots is as follows:

• Light: 2 points (Mk2: +1, Indy: -1)
• Light EW: 3 points (Mk2: +1)
• Assault: 3 points (Mk2: +1, Indy: -1)
• Mech: 6 points (Mk2: +1, Indy: -1)
• EW Mech: 8 points (Mk2: +1)
• Heavy Mech: 8 points (Mk2: +1, Indy: -1)

As you can see, Mk2 and industrial robots modify the base value up and down, for example a mech-class Kain Mk2 will cost 6+1=7 points, while a light industrial robot like the Argano will cost 2-1=1 points. The modifiers for industrial Mk2 robots eliminate each other, so these cost exactly the base points.

Rewards

1st place:

• 10 robots of the winners choice of Vanguard Mesmer, Mercenary Seth or Praetorian Gropho in any combination. These babies have somewhat better stats than their Mk2 counterparts, and won't be available anywhere else in the game. Also, they are black.
• 5 T4 Prototype items of choice and 5 level 10 decoders.

2nd place:

• 10 Mk2 robots of choice.
• 4 T4 Prototype items of choice and 4 level 10 decoders.

3rd place:

• 10 standard robots of choice.
• 3 T4 Prototype items of choice and 3 level 10 decoders.

For those who just like to watch

The tournament will be held in a designated area only accessible for the combatants, but we will video stream the matches to the public.

Anniversary Treasure Hunt

Of course we will also have something for those who are not interested in such violent practices like killing each other, and would rather engage in a fun community event with a promise for shiny loot.

The Syndicate got word that the enemy is digging out never before seen ancient data consoles, which contain very valuable pieces of information that could help in our cause battling them.

Time will be short; you’ll have to be quick and grab as many as you can before they do. These ancient data consoles can be found in new types of artifacts, as well as looting them from elite and officer-class Nians who carry them on their way home.

We’ll set up some new delivery assignments where you will be able to exchange the consoles you find for rare Alien Improbability Devices. What are they good for? Well, that’s a surprise!

The surprises don’t end here: we’ll also introduce two very special sparks (one combat and one industrial type), which will be only available to unlock during this anniversary weekend.

Mark the date

The big Perpetuum Anniversary Weekend will start on the 2nd of December at 12:00, and will end on the 5th at 12:00 (all CET/server times). As mentioned above, the event will also include the Corporation Tournament taking place on the 3rd and 4th. Make sure you don’t miss this, we’ll surely be there!

ps. Details on Intrusion 2.0 coming up next week, which will also be a part of our anniversary package!

• We wanted to target as many people as we can.
• We wanted to keep the required PC specs as low as we can.
• We didn't have much experience with DirectX and wanted to start working in a smaller sandbox first.
• With some work we managed to put everything we wanted visually into shader model 2.0 in the end.

We've reached the limits of shader model 2.0 a while ago, and the game really looks better than we would have ever thought. However at this point there's no real option for real visual upgrades without either switching to a higher shader model or going through significant hacks that reduce client performance and mess up the codebase.

This post is advance warning that we'll be changing the minimum requirement for Perpetuum from shader model 2.0 to shader model 3*. As the vast majority of you have hardware that supports SM3, the change will only affect a handful of players.

Do note that changing shader models isn't a silver bullet that will make the game look better magically overnight. This change is necessary in order for us to move the 3D engine forward to more current visual techniques and will take effect when we roll out the first such change, about a month from now to give proper warning. Initially the changes will focus on client performance as opposed to visual upgrades, and we'll gradually move to making things look better when we feel the client is performing well enough.

* For those who are not that tech-savvy, shader model 3 is supported by GPUs manufactured since around 2005, specifically the AMD/ATI X1000 series and above, and the nVidia GeForce 6 series and above. While the Intel GMA series GPUs do have SM3.0 to some extent, they are not officially supported.

The magnitude of these exploits have helped these players to affect the whole poiltical landscape of Perpetuum. With the uneven playing field, legitimate corporations had an extremely hard time competing for their goals. Their persistence is admirable and we are committed to achieving and maintaining a game where skill and effort prevail.

We have thoroughly examined the extent of the exploits and removed all robots, equipment and commodities associated with them to the last. All accounts that were involved in the fabrication of aforementioned resources have been permanently banned from the game. The same is true for those accounts that had characters gaining unfair knowledge base improvements.

We are certain that from now on, Nia will be a much more interesting, exciting and rewarding place to be, and are looking forward to a new age in both the political and economical events of the game. The extent of our investigation and handling of the situation ensures that everyone has the same chance for fame and fortune in our distant world.

The exploitable mechanism has been fixed. We warn all players, that we will deal with similar offenders with utmost severity. If anyone has further information regarding the issue, now is the time to come forward and share it with us privately at support@perpetuum-online.com. We will keep pursuing this case with full effort. For those that feel they have been cheated out of their hard earned wealth, please contact us and we will examine your cases individually. Our goal is to enrich the immersion and experience within the game, not to harm them.

Of course calling it an expansion will not make it something you have to pay for, in this context it's free to download like every other patch we have done and will continue to do.

We have the date as well, so to make it all official:

Perpetuum: Terra Incognita will be released on 2011.05.04.

Now that this is done, let's see what's in it for you:

Doubling the game world

The Syndicate Army's heroic offensive resulted in the conquest of 6 new islands. This is a major success, since the area where Perpetuum Agents may operate is practically doubled. As our forces push towards the Nian Empires' hearts, the islands have significantly more infrastructure and the Nians have done some drastic terraforming on them. Three of the new islands will be under tight Syndicate supervision (Alpha zones), but the other three fall beyond its ability to provide policing (Beta zones).

Although they are not explicitly called alpha and beta in the game since they have their unique names, we’ll make it simple for you and tell you that this is their official designation. Keeping this naming convention is beneficial for two reasons: we plan to have many more islands, and the greek alphabet is not infinite. Also we felt like the association of alpha=carebears and beta=here be dragons burned into everyone’s minds, so we didn’t want to mess with that, and this way we can easily assign for example “gamma” to different map types in the future, like terraformable ones.

The new islands will of course include all the features as the current ones, like harvestable plants, mineral fields, artifacts, and so on. NPCs will be higher in ranks, you will be able to fight heavy mechs on the new Alpha islands, and the weakest NPCs you'll find on Beta ones will be rank 4.

Contrary to our previous statement, a few missions will be also available from the start, but more will come shortly after.

We'll also have a little event when the new zones open up:

When the teleports are operational, Agents will be allowed to enter the new zones. Beware though, they might be crawling with special enemy guards, especially around the main terminals and outposts. Take extreme caution and move in large forces to be ready to take out these hostile groups. Once they are destroyed, our jammers will go online and you will be able to safely reside around those terminals from then on.

Highways

One of the greatest scientific discoveries of the new territories is a kind of energized highway network, called ElectroMagnetic ACcelerator Strips (EMACS). These help robots traverse at faster speeds - an additional 36 km/h to be precise - while using these paths. These highways link some of the most visited structures, and the Syndicate will use this newly found technology to build these strips on the old islands as well.

Event notification system

NIC gets transferred, Agents come and go, production gets finished, someone buys your ammo on the market - a lot of stuff can happen in the background, which you were not necessarily aware so far. The new event notification system will help with this, by showing you informative but non-intrusive popups for many types of events. As you can see on the screenshot, you will be able to select which events you wish to get notified of, and even set how long they should be visible.

The system brings some new features along with it, for example you will now know immediately when another corporation changes their relation towards your corporation.

Explosion damage

Destroyed robots will deal area-of-effect damage to their environment within a certain radius. This includes other players, NPCs, and even plantlife. The explosion will have a relatively small "full effect" radius, and a falloff radius as well, and both damage and falloff depend on the size of the robot. Damage will also be modified by the exploding robot’s accumulator status: the peak recharge rate is at 50%, thus the higher the reactor’s performance, the higher the damage will be. Similarly to missiles, robot explosions will have an explosion radius parameter which ties into hit surface size, so smaller robots can practically "dodge" the explosions of larger robots (or at least reduce the received damage). To avoid griefing, this feature will only work on beta (PvP) islands.

New modules

We'll be intruducing two completely new modules in this patch. The first one is the Energy Recovery Plating (ERP), and as the name suggests, this is an armor plating which will absorb a portion of the received damage and transform it into energy, directly injecting it into the robot's accumulator.

The second one is the Weapon stabilizer, which will reduce the hit dispersion and explosion size of your equipped weapons, raising their effective firepower.

Both modules go into leg slots, and will be available via kernel research.

Internal corporation markets

A player requested feature, this will allow you to put up items and adverts on the market that only the members of your corporation will be able to see and use (this will not work in NPC corporations of course). Corporations that didn't take the communist way of life can use it to supply cheap ammo for their soldiers, put up buy orders for raw materials to automatically pay their miners, or any other purposes we can't think of but surely you can.

Mineral and mining changes

I'll start with the good news, so maybe we can sell this off as a good thing™: we'll increase the mining yield of one cycle for every raw material by 50%. And we'll reduce mineral regeneration rates accordingly. Sounds bad at first, but this only hurts those grinding at the same mineral field every day, while the rest of the island is like an untouched mining paradise.

We'll also remove titan ore from beta islands. There's been many discussions about how all the beta corporations are too self-sufficient, which hurts the economy, and alpha corporations don't really have anything they could offer for them. Hopefully this change will start some goods exchange between alpha and beta islands. It's important to note that we will only stop the regeneration of titan ore, so current minerals will stay in the ground until they are all fully mined out.

New player love

I’m sure we agree that joining a player-run corporation takes gameplay to a whole new level. With Corporation recruitment panels we’d like to make it much easier for our players to find a suitable corporation they can join. Corporation leaders will be able to set up a profile based on simple selections including primary activity, location, time zone, what kind of players they are looking for, are they combat or industry oriented, and so on. Based on this, other players can do an advanced search and find the perfect corporation for their playstyle.

We’ll also extend our ingame help with a career tips section, sort of “what the hell am I supposed to do in this game”-guide. You select an occupation from a list, and we’ll show you a collection of useful snippets for that particular topic, filled with links to our current extensive help pages.

The character creation process will also get some much needed guides about what effects and consequences your choices will have there.

Account reset revamp

Resetting accounts has been a bit complicated so far, since if you wanted to do a reset but didn't have enough EP to delete your characters, you had to wait up to 6 days for practically nothing. Players suggested that we should allow negative EP, so we did just that. This way you don't have to wait for EP to accumulate and can immediately do a reset if you wish.

Furthermore we are dropping the 45-day limit for the reset, and you can do a reset as many times as you want. This alone would of course pretty much destroy the persistence of the game, so it comes with a price: the first reset on every account is for free, without a time limit, but every consequent reset will put 20% of your actual total accumulated EP into a cumulative penalty pool. This effectively means that the older your account, the higher the actual penalty will be. Since this is a new system with different rules, we decided to give everyone one last chance to fully utilize it, so those who already had a reset will start with no penalties as well.

We'll be adding an information popup for the character selection screen where you will be able to check how many resets you have done so far, and how much EP you'll get back if you decide to do one.

Of course these won't be the only changes in the patch, you can expect the usual small fixes and improvements as well.

But but... where are my geoscanner folders and assignment system changes? - you might ask. They are coming of course, but we had to draw a line somewhere, otherwise you'd be looking at no patch till summer. So we'll bring those in some 1.1 patch shortly after this one is out (and we have fixed all the new bugs that we're no doubt putting in).

What more to say, we hope you're as excited about all this as we are, and hope to see you taking the new land for yourselves next Wednesday!

We in the Perpetuum team realize that the strength of our current player-base comes from groups of friends forming communities inside the game. Perpetuum was built around the concept of people playing together, not simply next to each other in the same world. Because of this we wish all new players to experience team play as early on in the game as possible.

To this end we're very glad to announce the recruit program: players with active accounts who have subscribed for at least 30 days will be receiving recruit codes, which can be used to kickstart a new account. These codes can only be used on accounts on which no codes have been redeemed yet and give 15 days of play time.

Most importantly if the player decides to subscribe to the game for at least 30 days, the validity of the original account which received the recruit code will also be extended by 15 days. We're sending out recruit codes daily, and after a while we'll be giving you a code like this for each purchase. If you haven't received one yet, don't worry - it'll come in time.

Again, keep in mind that these codes can only be used on a new account. Invite your friends to try Perpetuum!

We’re very happy to announce that the client will be available in two new languages, French and Slovenian after the patch. We’re delighted to see the French community grow so rapidly and hope to see more of you guys online after this update.

Now for the stuff more interesting to most players, the gameplay changes:

One for the money

Be prepared to activate your prototype facilities, as with the patch we’re introducing a new heavy mech class robot, called the Lithus. This robot can be thought of as the big brother of the Sequer, and will satisfy all your hauling needs.

Two for the show

Due to popular demand we’re also introducing a trophies and losses section in the character screen that will show your kills and deaths, and the parties involved in the fights.

Three to get ready

Since the launch of the game the number of people involved in Intrusion events and PvP fights has been constantly growing. We really like this trend, however as the number of players reaches a critical mass in a single fight, tactics seem to go out the window and the fight turns into a simple numbers game.

Our aim has always been to create a PvP environment where tactics, smart maneuvering and coordinated teamwork get you superior results, so we’ve discussed the issue in length over the holidays. We traced the core of the problem back to a simple fact, and that is that for a variety of reasons Perpetuum employs a limited simulation of the real world. The main factors at play are that we don’t have robot collisions or friendly fire, and these two factors allow for large numbers of players to move as a single, small unit and one-shot-kill anyone they see. Fixing this issue is quite a tough challenge, as robot collisions and friendly fire are missing from the game for good reasons. Introducing robot collisions would severely limit the movement of players and give rise to a whole lot of possible exploits with people standing in each others way just for the laughs. We’ve explored the possibility of friendly fire, but all the solutions we looked at would have had a huge performance impact on the server, so this side of the issue can’t be fixed either.

We decided to look at the problem from an other angle and discourage the kind of behaviour we’ve seen. There will be several changes coming in the future, all of which combined will make big fights a lot more tactical than they are today. We’ll be introducing area of effect weapons, and robot explosion area of effect damage/debuffs, but tomorrow's patch only brings the very first of the systems designed to combat the problem: Interference.

The Interference system simulates the effects safely fighting in a close group would have on the combat effectiveness of the group in the real world. Basically members of the group would have to be more careful not to shoot any of their comrades, and thus be slower to fire and would have to devote a lot of their attention to working together with their unit. The Interference system simulates this with locking time and sensor strength debuffs on large groups of robots moving in close proximity. Each robot in the game has an interference range and strength, and emits an interference level which affects each other robot within this range. The interference accumulates and as it reaches critical levels (different for different robot types) it manifests in the mentioned debuffs. This mechanic, coupled with later area of effect mechanics will discourage the one-shot-kill setup that has mostly taken away from the gameplay experience above a certain number of people involved in a fight.

Comments on the patch and the above mentioned issues are welcome!

Now go, cat, go.