Damn what’s that hammering on the door, I can’t co... oh, our players! Hi there.

Yeah, we’ve been pretty quiet recently, partly because we were busy improving the game, and partly because DEV Calvin locked us up in a cage to encourage that.

You might have noticed that we’re a little bit behind of our planned schedule, so let’s cut to the case. We’re closing up August with a big bang - unless otherwise noted, all of the following will be part of the patch today (08-25).

New assignments

We’re adding 16 brand new level 1 assignments for all three main Alpha terminals: 6 combat, 7 industrial and 3 logistics ones. At the same time we say farewell to the old level 1 assignments, so this is basically an upgrade of all those assignments.

Well, actually a bit more than that - they are not only using the same elements that we introduced in the new storyline assignments recently, we’re also introducing a few new assignment types and revamping some old ones.

Mining assignments will ask you to exploit new experimental minerals that are acquired exactly the same way as the new rare mineral isotopes and variants that we have introduced in the last patch, and which you all seem to love. While you can recycle these new minerals too (like isotopes) if you happen to get them outside of assignments, they are much less valuable and pretty much only needed by those crazy professors at Syndicate Research Labs. But, the good news is that you can still keep the good old run-of-the-mill minerals that you dig up while you’re waiting for that rare bit to pop up in your cargohold.

Furthermore, these new mining assignments do not have a completion radius anymore, so you only have to find the right type of mineral field and you’re good. No more complaining that you can’t finish your assignments because that lovely Riveler blob has sucked it dry.

The long-awaited harvesting assignments will finally appear as well, and they will work much like the new mining ones outlined above. Harvesting plants will occasionally yield some new experimental minerals and you will have to deliver those. Since we can’t be sure where plants can be found, these assignments won’t have a completion radius either.

Manufacturers will probably welcome the new production assignments. They have objectives for creating calibration templates in reverse engineering, and they will also ask you to mass produce some nerdy machinery from components you have to collect on the field.

Combat assignments get some love too, instead of the bland “get here, kill 10 bad guys”-routine, they are spiced up with some switch activation and item delivery objectives.

Transport assignments will not send you from terminal to terminal anymore, but to item collectors or item suppliers out on the field. This marks the end of the legendary - and very profitable - “Triangle”.

Generally all these new assignments are (hopefully) much more interesting, their descriptions are more story-driven and closer to the lore too.

While today’s patch will only replace level 1 assignments, the rest of the levels will continuously get the same facelift during the next patches.

Relation system changes

As announced in the big revamp blogpost, from now on terminal facility relation bonuses will be only calculated from industry-related contractor corporations, so industrial players won’t have to do combat assignments to increase their relation.

We also felt that the current number of contractor corporations was a bit too much, players got lost in a maze of various NPC corporations and it was not easy to keep track of all their individual relations. So we decided to reduce (or merge, sort of) the current 27 (9 per faction) corporations to 3 per faction. Instead of half-breed combat/industrial or industrial/logistics corporations, there will be only pure combat, industrial and logistics oriented ones, and these will be the clear providers of matching assignments.

What will this mean for your current relation achievements? For every character, we’ll check their relations for all 3 sets of NPC corporations (for example one set being combat/combat, combat/industrial, combat/logistics) and take the current highest relation they have towards them within a set. Those 3 highest relation values will be applied for the new “pure” NPC corporations. In case you would end up having negative relations to any of them, you’ll be given a clean sheet and start from zero. (This process will take up actually the majority of our downtime.)

Random NPC spawns

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.”

With that in mind, we’re introducing new random NPC spawns, where you can’t really be sure what you’ll be up against next. Of course we didn’t want it to be a complete Russian roulette, so the NPC ranks in one spawn will only vary by 1 or 2 levels.

The real fun with them though, is that there is a small chance that they will spawn new elite NPCs. These have +50% health, but in turn have significantly better drop rates, 100% kernel drop chance, and they can even have up to 3 kernels instead of only one.

In this patch we’re only switching 3 normal spawns per island to these new random ones, but their numbers will grow in the coming patches.

Pathfinding

The zombiepilot plan got ugraded to a homing robot chicken plan - we’ve decided to implement some basic pathfinding first. It’s still not very bright in finding the optimal route around obstacles, but it does the job.

Unstack by volume

Small feature but extremely useful, so it deserves its own paragraph. From now on the unstack window will have a dropdown menu where you’ll be able to choose whether you want to split the stack by item amount or volume. Optimally filling up your cargo just got simple.

Lastly, there have been many questions about the proposed account reset changes, and we’re long overdue with that too. The reason for the delay is that we’re not really satisfied with some important aspects of character development, so there might be some groundbreaking changes in order to make account resets not needed at all. More on this in a devblog later™.

The week of 25th of July is almost over and you still can’t close your outposts. Hey you devs, what’s up with that?

Well, a change of plans. After the previous devblog about being able to block other corporations from entering your own outposts, there have been discussions about it both on our forums and ingame. The initial reactions were welcoming, but quite a few concerns emerged soon.

We have conducted our own internal discussions about this matter as well, and came to the decision that we’d bring forward an Intrusion revamp planned for later, rather than build upon a broken mechanic and create more issues. So outpost closing will still happen, but in a hopefully much more sensible Intrusion system.

While the other promised feature, the “elite” NPC spawns is pretty much finished, it still needs some testing & tweaking, so this will be delayed to next week. Though there will be a patch tomorrow (07.29.), it will contain fixes for the new storyline assignments and some other minor changes.

So, let’s continue with the important part of this devblog, the Intrusion system.

What’s wrong with the current system?

The random nature of the times neither benefits defender, nor attacker - one’s ability to hold an outpost is largely luck, combined with the number of players one can bring to bear in a specific time zone. This encourages superalliances, and overconcentration of players (a.k.a. blobs) in order to ensure the safety of these locations. While we have no problem with people banding together as they see fit, we don’t want that banding together to be the “one correct option” - and the current system encourages this.

Furthermore, the intrusion system is in no way a reflection of who actually controls a location. It is instead a reflection of who can bring the most power to bear at a random time, once a week. This is problematic because a) it discourages exploration and utilization of betas in general, b) it does not reflect the “truth” of who is in a particular area, and c) by encouraging superalliances, we’re essentially excluding small parties from taking and using remote locations successfully - cutting off part of the playerbase.

So after much consideration, we bring you the new Outpost Capture system, coming “soon.”

Ownership-Through-Occupation

The simplest way to understand the new mechanic, when you boil it down to an essence, is this:

“If you reside in an area and control that area, you will eventually come to control the outpost. If you raid-and-retreat from an area, it will become very hard to hold the outpost.”

Here’s the mechanics of the system:

Every outpost, as you know, has 3 SAPs. This will not change. What changes is that instead of an Outpost having all 3 SAPs becoming accessible once a week, two SAPs will become accessible every 24 hours. Exactly when and which SAP becomes available is completely random and unknown - just that you can count on two sometime during every 24 hour period. Every Outpost operates independently - the SAPs at Brightstone are on a completely different timer than the SAPs at South Isietsu, and so on. The effect of capturing a SAP would be changed as well.

When a SAP is captured, this lowers or raises the Outpost’s stability level, depending on whether the SAP was captured by the Outpost’s current owner or some other party.

Stability, in effect, is a measure of the Outpost owner’s ability to maintain control over the areas around the Outpost. Captures by the owner indicate the area is in hand and therefore stable - captures by outside parties indicate the area is troubled, and therefore unstable. If the owner of the Outpost captures the SAP, they have demonstrated control and dominance over the area - the stability value of the outpost grows. If another party captures the SAP, they have demonstrated that the owners of the outpost are NOT in full control of the area: the stability value of the Outpost decreases. After the SAP capture is complete or 2 hours pass, the SAP disappears and reverts to its neutral, passive state. The stability level of an outpost changes by roughly 6.66% per SAP capture.

Capturing an Outpost - When Destabilization Occurs

In order to fully destabilize an Outpost - take it from 100% to 0% - you need to capture 15 SAPs in a row. (Essentially, one full week plus one more SAP.) This shows absolute domination and control of a location.

Because we recognize it is possible for someone to capture an Outpost through blind luck - they had one person wander by at 3am when the two parties battling for the Outpost were asleep, and the critical SAP just appeared - we have also incorporated a “Snowball Effect.”

The first and second time in a row that you capture a SAP, you get credit for one capture. The third time, you get credit for two captures. The fourth, three captures, and so on. Essentially allowing for a 1+1+2+3+4+5 situation - three days with absolutely no response from the defender and 100% domination by the attacker leads to a capture on the start of the fourth day. You would be able to dock again much sooner than that, obviously. Note that a “no capture” SAP (nobody captures it and it expires in 2 hours) resets the Snowball Effect. Among other reasons, this was instituted so that if someone is utterly unable to hold a location - they got very lucky with the initial capture, for example - the dominant party in the area can flex a little muscle and take the outpost down again right away.

When An Outpost is Captured the stability of the Outpost instantly reverts to 50% in the hands of the new owner: they have the ability to lock the Outpost, but only barely. The new owners of the Outpost, though, can demonstrate financial might along with their military acumen by bidding NIC in order to prove their commitment to the area. Doing so will immediately raise the starting value of the Outpost Stability. This can only be done immediately after the Outpost is captured. No one is impressed with you throwing cash around after you’re supposed to be in control!

The probable values for “demonstrating financial might” are as follows:

• Pay 100m NIC: Outpost starts at 60% stability.
• 250m NIC: 70% stability.
• 450m NIC: 80% stability
• 700m NIC: 90% stability.
• 1 billion NIC: You start with absolute 100% stability on the outpost. (You go with your bad NIC-holding self.)

The outpost stability level is also a measure of the benefits you receive. Outpost ownership is no longer going to be an absolute: the greater the stability of the outpost, the more benefit the owner receives. The values below are subject to tweaking, but here’s a general idea of what we’re thinking:

• 0% stability - The Outpost has been destabilized and is open for capture. The next SAP capture could change ownership of the Outpost.

• 25% stability - No benefits other than getting paid when other groups use the outpost; you’re barely holding on to control.

• 50% stability - Minimum threshold for outpost locking controls (to block other corporations from entering), moderate relation bonuses for industrial facilities. Minor price reductions.

• 75% stability - Reduced prices for service in the outpost, high relation bonuses for industrial facilities, Outpost locking controls.

• 90% Stability - Owners receive high discounts for services and enjoy maximum relation benefits, may also lock the Outpost.

• 100% Stability - Owners not charged for any service and enjoy maximum relation benefits; may also lock the Outpost docking mechanism.

A few questions that people might have

Q. Won’t my corp just lose SAPs when they come up in the middle of the night and none of us are on?

• A: Absolutely. If you don’t have a presence on the island 24/7, there exists the possibility that your stability level will - over the long term - tend to hover right around the percentage of the time you’re on the island. If you’ve got a presence the 80% of the time, you’ll probably hold right around 80% stability if someone starts challenging you for it. If no one challenges you, the SAPs you miss will despawn in 2 hours, and eventually you’ll raise the stability to 100%. If you lose one overnight, no big deal: your presence on the island will allow you to push it back to 100% soon enough.

Q. What if more than one party is pounding on my outpost at a time? How does that work?

• A: You’ll have a hard road. It doesn’t matter which corp takes your SAPs - the Outpost Stability goes down all the same. To use a historical metaphor, it didn’t matter to a Roman citizen which nation was pillaging and sacking them before Rome fell - just that they were being pillaged and sacked.

Q. So when a Outpost reaches 0% stability and becomes open for capture, more than one party could show up and fight for it? What happens if the original owner captures it again?

• A: Yes, we expect that the areas around an Outpost at 0% stability will become wild melees as multiple parties all move to be the one to capture an outpost. These could turn into pretty impressive endurance matches, since you can never be sure when the critical SAP will appear. (Imagine the King-of-the-Hill match if the next SAP to open was the Passive one!) If the original owner manages to capture the SAP, they also get the 50% value and the chance to pay to increase it, but if they’ve been ground down to 0% once, they’ll be ground down again. (Or not, if they can prove they deserve to keep it now.)

Q. What if my corp gets a string of bad luck with their SAPs, or has to go AFK for a day or two because of (insert reason here?)

• A. Remember that the system is gradual: you’ll be able to tell if you’re in trouble, and if your entire corp disappears for a day or two, you’re still in control. It’s by the end of the third or fourth day (depending on how quickly and how hard you were under attack) you’ll have a problem. You can interrupt a Snowball Effect with one capture, and if you honestly can’t field enough force at your Outpost to prevent even one enemy capture, you probably shouldn’t hold it right now. When everyone’s back and ready to fight, you can always take it back the same way you took it to begin with.

Q. What happens when this system goes active?

• A. All current owners will be given 50% stability at all of their Outposts, with no possibility of paying to increase the value. We’ll give you basic docking control - whether you can hang on to it after that is entirely up to you.

Q. Will we be able to tell the Outpost’s stability level?

• A. Yes. We’re still working on where the information will be known, but it will be publicly available.

Q. Can a corp that has strong relations with mine capture a SAP for me?

• A. We have no plans to allow this at the present time. If you’re leaning on another corp for safety, they’ll need to either defend the SAP until it disappears... or maybe they should be the ones owning the Outpost?

Q. Could a corporation just watch two other groups battle it out, and then swoop in for the last capture when it really matters?

• A. Someone might be able to pull that off once, but they’ll just lose control right away themselves if they’re not exerting enough force to hold the place - and if they are, then they’re the rightful owners to begin with. It’s unlikely that a group could repeatedly “snipe” the last SAP for the capture when its time of arrival is unknown. If you’re trying to take an Outpost and you’re being repeatedly “sniped” by different parties, you may not have the force to hold on to it yourself!

In Summary (TL;DR)

• Outpost Ownership will now naturally reflect who lives on an island.
• Outpost Ownership is going to become organic, and not absolute, in a tug-of-war fashion.
• This allows us to implement Outpost locking without creating the nightmare situation of “You wake up and can’t get to your stuff.” It will be very clear in advance when you’re in danger of losing control.
• We feel this system encourages small groups to “take their shot” since few groups will have the ability to maintain multiple locations at the same time.
• We feel this system will encourage PvP on the beta islands: it’s a very safe bet that somewhere on some island at some outpost at least one SAP is vulnerable at all times, and people will need to be on their islands in order to keep their outposts safe. More beta traffic offers more opportunities for raiding and for defending. More PvP for everyone!
• We want the system to reward people who live on the betas, not just those that raid them.

Is This All?

No! We’re anticipating a great deal of improvement to your Beta experience. Possibilities on the horizon include Aura-type bonuses for Outpost ownership which also scale with your ability to demonstrate stability.

We’re very excited to implement this new system and see the dramatic and positive effects this will have on PvP. We’re committed to making living on the outer islands more interesting for everyone, and more rewarding as well. Demonstrate that you can hold an Outpost this way, and when other changes to improve Beta life come in the future, you’ll be glad you did!

We look forward to your feedback and opinions on this proposal. We’re excited to see how this changes your Perpetuum experience, and see how you feel about it!

Scuttle safe!

Well, this has been an exciting three weeks. We had to allocate most of our resources to stabilizing our service, but rest assured we did this with great pleasure. While our efforts had clear results, the development plan for the first two weeks was ruined, and the last week was spent finishing the storyline missions that are to be released with the next patch. This would have been deployed today, but we found an unexpected mission-critical bug and will release it sometime in the beginning of next week. Till then, a few teasers:

While these new missions are only available to Agents with high relations (they are level 3 assignments) and form a small proportion of all missions in game, they serve as a great platform to test our new assignment features that will find their way into the entire assignment system.

The influx of players brought light to a lot of glitches, imbalances and dysfunctional mechanisms in the game, so instead of rushing forward and pushing out new features in the next weeks, we are taking a step back and making everything that is available in the game better. All of these features are subject to change, but their purpose and outlines are quite clear. Behold, in the specific order of release:

Week of 25th of July

All our base are belong to us

Beta outposts are greatly underused at the moment. This is due to their poor risk versus reward ratio. Industrial traffic attracts a lot of hostile attention and the attackers have great advantages at the moment:

• safe equipment storage
• instant respawn
• seeing the defenders’ available backup numbers
• seeing what the defenders deploy to the island through an Arkhe scout
• docking when overwhelmed
• generally nothing to lose

To make these outposts and their facilities more appealing, the owners will be able to manage docking access via the relation system. The ownership will be decided in the period of two Intrusions. Losing the first Intrusion, the defenders will lose docking access management rights and the second will decide the new owner of the outpost. Later on the Intrusion timer system will also be revisited.

Welcome your new robot overlords

The Nians are becoming more clever and flexible - if you partially destroy a spawn group, it will keep coming at you. If you totally destroy a spawn group, the Nians will deploy a different kind of spawn the next time to keep you guessing. There’s also the chance that the spawn group may be an "elite" spawn - special forces carrying higher quality gear, or items that will lead to higher ranked Elite Spawns.

Week of 15th of August

Fledgeling industrialist love

There is a distinct lack of beginner production in the game. Industrialists either have to commit very serious effort, resources and EP to production, or risk failing to be competitive in any market. To mend this we are going to introduce a simple system that allows us to determine an item’s manufacturing ‘difficulty’, making it more or less sensitive to extensions and facility levels.

The idea is quite simple. CTs will not start at a default 50% material and time efficiency level, but will be predefined by their end product's complexity. Complex items will have low efficiency, leaving great room for improvement, whereas simple items - such as ammo and standard equipment - will start at high values, making them less sensitive to improving factors.

Furthermore we also plan to replace all epriton based components in T1 modules. This and the above changes will allow for a much easier and competitive entry to the industrialist career.

Industrialist brothers in arms

Currently all involved in high level production have to grind their relations up towards the relevant factions to achieve competitive results on the market. This is quite unfair, as these characters typically have little extension points invested in combat, so their combat extension spending comes at an expensive rate and they are forced into activities they may not prefer.

Henceforth, the combat mission relations will not be effecting production. Industrial mission relations will still be calculated, as the facilities currently used by the Agents are owned and loaned by the Syndicate.

From the cartographer’s wishlist

• Agents will be able to set waypoints by a point & click method on the map, rename them, and organize them info folders.
• Outpost ownership will be displayed on the map.
• The legend area will be resizeable, making the use of the map much more comfortable.

Zombiepilot

Probably one of the most anticipated features since launch is the autopilot. Good news everyone, the time has come. You will be able to add waypoints in a certain order to create routes. When the autopilot is engaged, it will follow the route. Although plants that may grow in the path will block the robots, it’s worth noting that there are already many paths connecting the main landmarks that are cleared of these annoying vegetables. Have fun finding them and plot away!

Why is it called Zombiepilot?* Because it is really dumb and will literally do nothing more than try to lurch its way towards the next waypoint. Braaaiiinns!

* It's not, actually.

Perpetual life

Perpetuum’s persistent universe is in strong contrast with the Agents being able to reinvent themselves and appear with different names and faces. Character resetting will be removed at this point. Obviously doing it right the first time is nearly impossible. Fear not - we have a solution.

For the first 30 days you can both add and subtract extension levels in your Agent Profile. The limitation to this is that you won't be able to jump back and forth between full-fledged combat and industry specialization every minute, and that taking any extension to level 6 will freeze it perpetually. There will be an option for a one time attribute reset in this first period as well, most probably via running a trimmed version of the character creator again.

Week of 22nd of August

Farewell ‘Triangle’

All assignments will be overhauled:

• The newly introduced features will make all assignments more challenging and exciting.
• Transport missions will be fixed, their targets will not be another terminal, where another mission can be picked up, but rather a special building on the field. This will correct their reward per time ratio.
• Mining missions will have a special target material, which is required by the Syndicate for the process of collecting energy and transferring it back to Earth, and is not used in the production chain.
• Geoscanning assignments will be removed, and added as extra objectives to mining missions. These changes will ensure that these assignments do not interfere with the economy on the surface.

As you can see, we have a lot of changes on the horizon that we’re excited about, and we think you will be too. We look forward to reading your feedback on these suggestions, and working with you to create the best possible play experience. Until next time:

“Scuttle safe!”

The reason why I split this post in two parts was because the remaining features I promised to write about were either unfinished concepts, or not that solid on our list, so they could be pushed around in case something more important turns up. (Well that, and the fact that it would have been terribly long.) A lot stuff happened since Part 1 that can influence our priorities in the development of Perpetuum, most importantly: player feedback.

Apart from the forum, which probably plays the most important role in this, there was Episode #7 of the Incoming Transmission podcast (thanks again Gremrod & Kalsius for doing it!). Gremrod asked me beforehand what topic I would suggest for them to discuss, and since there have been some talks about when Alliances/Conglomerates will be implemented, I told him this would be something we’d like to hear about before we do it. So, among other topics, they talked about a proposed alliance feature and while everyone throws around their ideas and suggestions (noted!), the majority seemed to agree that currently an alliance feature would be premature with the current playerbase, and we should rather focus on improving current corporation features. We also discussed it and agree, so that’s what we’ll do.

Unfortunately this will delay artillery and second-generation weaponry, but I think we can agree that it’s better to improve current features first, rather than drop another variable into the complex formula that is PvP combat, creating even more balancing issues to deal with.

Corporation management improvements

In the last patch we’ve made remote production processes visible on monitoring panels. This was only the first step, and we intend to merge all your production jobs in one common monitoring panel. This in turn will pave the way for the much requested corporation-created production processes, complete with production rights, logs, and source/target storage options.

Another relatively complex idea we have in store is a system where corporation leaders have a place to plan jobs, operations and events for their members. We call this corporate projects.

It will sortof work like an agenda: you think of a goal for your corporation, and optionally set a deadline. Members can then opt in to help the cause, and their efforts will be of course logged and displayed for everyone in the corporation to see. Goals can be anything from mining a hundred million titan ore, to delivering a few kernels for your research department, reaching a simple income goal, or even a number of PvP kills. Naturally you will also be able to set rewards for these goals.

I’m sure with the right tools you guys can be much more creative than what we can think of right now. If it turns out as it should, the system will be loose enough to simply use it for organizing any kind of corporation events, or keeping track of salaries as well.

Account reset changes

Again? Yeah, admittedly we overshot a little bit with the last account reset revamp. Sure, it was a bliss for those with a “misplanned” character, but in the wrong hands it’s a dangerous tool which hurts the persistence of the game.

So we’ll try to bring you a solution, where beginner players who realized their mistakes they made at character creation don’t have to delete that character in order to refine their attributes or extensions.

Spark teleport

As mentioned earlier, the spark teleport system will allow you to teleport yourself without any robots or equipment from one terminal to another.

The system will work with the help of spark teleport nodes: at any given time you can have a maximum of 3 of these nodes placed at the terminal or outpost of your liking. This creates unique teleport channels which you (and only you) can use to move your spark from any other terminal to those locations. Of course both using a spark teleport and changing the configuration will have a cooldown limit in order to make it not too overpowered and you can also expect it to be a small NIC sink.

Waypoints and routes

Hot on the trail of the geoscan result folders, we’ll introduce the same system for waypoints as well, with a little twist. You will not only be able to organize them, but with the proper sorting they will make up waypoint routes.

In its first iteration, these routes will probably be used by a not-that-bright autopilot system which will simply walk a straight line between waypoints, so its uses will be pretty much limited to highways and main roads without any blockings. (Later we might bring in some pathfinding AI as well.) Using the pre-made and stored routes will be as simple as selecting one while on the terrain and activating the autopilot, which will then start to walk towards the first or nearest waypoint of the route.

Of course this won’t make you travel faster, but it will help those doing the same transport routes over and over and allow them to do something else meanwhile, like checking the market, or trolling on general chat.

We heard you like pink robots

Some of you may think that this seems to contradict the “more important features” statement I made above, but since the core mechanics which make robot paintjobs possible have been in the game for a while now, it doesn’t really take away much development time. We just missed a sensible game mechanic for it, which I’ll be presenting now.

Painting robots will be as simple as fitting a module on them: the equipment window will get a second tab, where you’ll see 8 color slots. There you will drag&drop paint items of different colors and mix them how you like - the result will be instantly visible on the 3D preview of your robot. Drop a red and a green paint, and you’ll get yellow. Drop another red after those and you’ll get orange. Add one black and you’ll get brown. Pretty straightforward I guess.

The paint color items itself will be available in the energy credit shops soon to come, and will include the basic red, blue, green, black and white colors that you can mix freely. However, beyond the paint colors you’ll also need a paintjob token if you want that color to stick to your robot.

As mentioned in the first part of this blog, this will be a microtransaction feature: for a small fee you’ll be able to purchase packages of multiple paintjob tokens that you can use to finalize colors on your robot. The exact pricing is yet to be announced, but since robots are pretty short-lived and packing one will also make it revert to its default color (just like paint decay), it probably won’t be too heavy on your wallets. (And refreshing an old paintjob with the same color will be probably for free.)

This system has also the advantage that those players who don’t care about the color of their robots can still participate in the economy of paint items, even if only to sell them on the market.

All the small things

Of course these are not the only plans we have, but at this point it would be too early to write in detail about them, simply because we have to collect all the ingredients before we can present you the full meal. Some of these already reach beyond our summer-list, but in order to make room for some healthy theory-crafting, here is a short menu: geoscan result trading, dynamic mineral nodes, free camera and other camera improvements, persistent (SQL-based) field containers, improved NPC AI with different behaviors, random assignment objectives, titles/achievements and more.

Bah, again nothing about player-built structures *grmbl* - I hear from the back rows. Yes, thank you for your question, that concept is alive and in the works, but still has a long way to go. While it’s one of our priorities, we don’t want to leave you with nothing in the meantime. But as mentioned in an earlier post, the target time for that is still the end of this year.

This post should have been already published a few days ago, but unfortunately we had to put out some fires - and I’m not talking about toasters here. Now that the smoke has settled a bit, it’s high time to take a look at the near future of Perpetuum again.

Most of the stuff that we promised in our candyshop post at the end of March is already in the game: global storage listing, the kernel change, geoscanning folders, the new market rates graph, the event notification system, CT trading, market order modification, trophy details and explosion damage. Only two things are still waiting to be done from that list: performance-based assignment rewards and the spark teleport. So in this two-part post I will not only talk about these, but I’ll show you much more of what will hit the world of Perpetuum during this summer.

A quick note before we begin: while most of these concepts are complete for the most part, there can be still a few changes or refinements until they get into the game in their final form.

Assignment love

Probably the most frequent criticism we get about the game is the lack of PvE content. The development of this type of content is the most resource and time consuming of all, but we are of course committed to progress in these parts as well. While our sandbox storyline assignments may not turn out as grandiose as those in other dedicated themepark-MMOs, they will still be a nice breeze of fresh air for those interested in the lore and the ones looking for non-standard objectives.

Geoscanning assignments will be converted into artifact scanning assignments, which will send you out to pinpoint special artifacts within a relatively large radius. We won’t banish geoscanning from assignments though, they will get their new - and much more logical - place as initial objectives in mining assignments. No more complaining that there is no imentium right under objective point A.

For a few days now some of us have been analyzing existing assignments with the goal to bring their difficulty and rewards into the right balance. A lot has changed since these assignments were introduced, and even then they weren’t necessarily balanced regarding walking time or risk versus reward, but better late than never I guess. This is only the first step, in the future we intend to raise the quality of most assignments by adding more objectives and generally making them more interesting.

We’re also planning the introduction of dynamic reward bonuses, based on the average completion time of assignments.

Career tips

Admittedly, this feature is a bit late since we already intended it to be in the Terra Incognita expansion. Since this is such an important feature for newcomers, we didn’t want to release it half-done and possibly confusing, but it will now surely be a part of our next patch. For those who don’t remember, this will be an extension of our help system, an “I want to do this in the game, give me some short tips” sort of thing.

Friend approval

Don’t worry, we don’t want to turn the game into facebook any more than necessary, but with the addition of event notifications it became just too easy to spy on your enemies. A simple extension of the system by request/approve mechanics should solve this issue. Unfortunately we will have to wipe your friend-lists for this to work, but we hope this will only mean a slight inconvenience for a greater good.

NPC balancing

Electronic warfare NPCs are annoying little bastards. We play our game too (srsly), and the feeling that they are a bit too much for the newbies has been growing in us for some time now too. They are usually easy to kill, but when they get together with their damage dealing friends, they can easily overwhelm an inexperienced player. If you get in trouble near one of these spawns, it’s already too late to run.

With the introduction of the new islands we’ve got some more playroom for balancing, so we’ll lighten up the old starter alpha islands a bit by either removing EW NPCs from spawns, or reduce them to one. We’ll also remove or replace high ranked NPCs that are too close to the alpha terminals, so new Agents who are not so familiar with NPC names won’t get slaughtered after a few steps on Nia.

Changes in outpost ownership

The recent political events have been very eye-opening for us and brought up the necessity of a system which would be able to prevent one corporation to gain total dominance in the ownership of outposts. (While we know now that there have been other factors in play, the possibility still remains.)

To this end we’ll introduce outpost maintenance fees. The first outpost will be free for every corporation, with no upkeep necessary, but every additionally owned outpost will have exponentially higher maintenance fees. Corporation leaders will be able to set a priority list for their owned outposts, which will control which outpost ownership will be lost first, in case the corporation is not able to pay the upkeep for all of them. This system will hopefully make corporations appreciate more what they own, and prevent them from expanding lightheadedly.

Furthermore, corporations in possession of outposts will be able to designate one of them as headquarters. A HQ-outpost will have multiple advantages, bringing more incentives to both own and to keep them: for one, corporations will be able to control access of others to the outpost, based on their relation settings towards them. And it will be also possible to purchase various upgrades for it, which brings us to...

The energy credit system

I have already talked about the EC system in The future of Perpetuum, and I’m happy to report that the concept has been steadily growing more and more solid since February, to the point where we’re close to finishing it.

Allow me to not repeat the basic premise here again, for the lazy ones it should be enough that you will be able to collect energy for credit points, which you can use to buy shiny stuff.

Collecting energy will be possible on both Agent and corporation levels:

Agents will be able to collect energy from natural fields found on Nia. These fields will work quite similar to normal mineral fields, but they will be only visible at night, and you can’t use scanners to find them. To collect energy, you will have to deploy rare energy crystals found via artifact scanning, and if necessary, defend them until they are fully charged. The charged crystals can then be brought back to a terminal and sold to the Syndicate for credit points.

The current list of things you will be able to purchase with EC includes mission ammo, Niani modules, possibly some prototypes, and *drumroll* ...robot paint. (And sorry to burst your bubble right away, but the sooner you know the better: paintjobs will be tied into microtransactions for a small fee, because we're greedy capitalist pigdogs - details about paintjobs will come in part 2 of this post.)

Corporations owning outposts will be able to collect EC on a corporate level. This is the only part of the concept that’s still missing some puzzle pieces, but our intention is to make them actively work for those points and not just sit on their outposts which simply generate it for them.

We have decided to separate the Agent and corporation “EC-shops” in order to keep a healthy balance, so corporations won’t be able to purchase things from the Agent EC-shop and vice versa. However, Agents will be able to donate their points into the corporate EC-pool.

The things corporations will be able to buy using EC will hopefully give a nice boost to the incentives of owning an outpost:

• Outpost upgrades: these can be temporary manufacturing boosts, higher level facilities, or even outpost auras, which will pretty much be the outpost-class version of NEXUS modules, affecting either the corporation’s robots on the island in some way or possibly accelerate plant or mineral growth within a certain range around the outpost.
• Special assignments which can be activated for a fixed time, for corporation member use, or even better: for the public, so they can lure more taxpayers to their outpost.

So that’s it for now, in the second part I’ll talk about the spark teleport, changes to waypoints and a new addition called waypoint routes, artillery and second generation weaponry, and we’ll also have a look at paintjobs. Promised.