Admittedly, the recent 48 hours weren't the particularly the merriest ones in Perpetuumland, so let me try to attempt to address some of the major issues that arose and have been discussed during this period.

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.

Gamma Frontier

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 time has finally come to announce the opening of the floodgates - PBS will roll out to our temporary test server and you're all welcome to rip it to shreds during the following few weeks.

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.

We received a large package addressed to "DEV GARGAJ" in the mail today. After the obvious security measures, we controlled our little EOD-robot towards the box, and as soon as the dust, debris and toxic fallout settled, we uncovered this:

I'm not exactly adept at expressing gratitude on a poetic level, but a gesture like this is not only appreciated for what it is, it also inspires on a more personal level to work harder/more on the upcoming patches. (Although that might be just the sugar rush.) Thank you very much on behalf of the remainder of the DEV team!

It also reminded me that we (somehow) forgot to mention our previous goodie-bag-by-mail, received last summer from Shea:

Again, thank you so much! <3

The time has arrived to wrap up the final phase of the anniversary events, and our final step is to perform some sort of prize ceremony, for the lack of a better method, here on this blog. (We'll see if we can work on this somewhere down the line and add fireworks, ribbons and glow for the next occasion; right now you have to make do with overwrought verbal gymnastics and crude image manipulations.)

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!