We rolled a minor patch to 1.2.67.0 today, please bang on it a little.

1) They're mostly different resources anyway. Redoing a town to be pillaged (in our first pass) is expected to be less than 2 days. We haven't been doing new towns since we've been working on Point, and we'll be doing new rooms for the next milestone. We're waiting on some tools from our new tools dev before we hit towns again, because they'll a) make us much more efficient and b) I have a new approach I want to use, which is a combo of seamless and instancing.

2) We're not doing a lot of new avatar work for this. Where we're mainly spending resources is AnimCo and, well, JodiCo, who's responsible for putting placers in a town. And, of course, our sound guru. Well, and some of ConCo. Nothing is ever free, but it doesn't hit the two specific areas you mentioned.

You're right, but our economy is player controlled, and we don't want to do the work that would be required to take that and dynamically change the pillaging based on it.

Currently this is how the system works:

When the time for the port battle arrives, we give every player who earned at least 1 contention point for this port battle a number of lottery tickets.

First we take the number of contention points you have earned for this port battle and add the number of general contention points you have remaining. We then divide that number by 10, rounding down. If the result is less than 1, we round up to 1 instead. This is the number of lottery tickets you get.

We build a pool of all lottery tickets and begin drawing tickets out of that pool. If one of your tickets is chosen, you get an invite to the battle, and all of your tickets are taken out of the pool.

If you accept that invite, we set your general contention points to 0, and you go into the battle.

If you decline that invite, we add one half of the contention points you earned for this port battle to your general contention point total.

We continue drawing lottery tickets until the port battle is full.

If the port battle is full and none of your lottery tickets were drawn, we add one half of the contention points you earned for this port battle to your general contention point total.

To be clear, if you do not join the port battle, either because you declined the invite, or because your ticket did not get drawn, you keep the general contention points you had before, and add to that one half of your personal contention points for this battle.

We are not likely to change the way this type of port battle selection works. We are thinking about alternate port battle selection mechanics as a possibility for some port battles. That said, if you can give me a compelling reason we should change the way this works, we'll definitely consider it.

We didn't push you to 1.1.71.0 because the one month rewards for US/EU were really the only changes between 1.1.69.0 and 1.1.71.0.

Invincible will upgrade to 1.2 within 48 hours of the US/EU servers upgrading. It definitely won't be at the same time because the standard US/EU maintenance window is right in the middle of prime time for Australia, but most likely the patch will happen later the same day. I should have more details for you on Monday (our time, so Tuesday morning for you.)

Our plan, in general, is to keep AU and US/EU running the same version, and to push the AU patches 5-6 hours after we push the US/EU ones. This is our first patch for AU though, so I don't want to promise that this time around.


Joe

Good point. Counter-argument?

This is something I very much want to do. Instead of creating a separate system to customize the appearance and fighting abilities of your crew, I want to roll this into a concept we call side parties.

The basic idea is that you're the captain of a ship, and while you might occasionally get into a brawl without your trusty crew by your side, most of the time, when you get in a fight, your crew has your back. We haven't worked out the details of how this will work, but the big picture looks something like this:

You have one or more side parties. These side parties are composed of crew from your ship, possibly including ships officers (which is a whole other system), roughly equaling six grunts in effectiveness. Most avatar missions define a number of side parties that you are allowed to take into the mission, and when you enter the mission those parties are waiting for you. Additionally you set one of your side parties to be your boarding crew (with special considerations for large size boarding crew).

When you set up your side parties you can customize a wide variety of things, including appearance, name (within limits), and fighting style. Additionally you can equip bonuses to the crew in your side party, things like special weapons that do more damage, or special training that gives them a new skill. The details of how that would work have not been determined, but the basic idea is that you would be able to specialize and improve your crew with items you acquired through gameplay (likely economic, PvP, and PvE gameplay).

Finally, we want to greatly improve the experience of actually commanding your crew in battle (both boarding and in missions). Currently we're thinking a display that shows the health, balance, and initiative of each member of your side party, as well as a directional arrow, and distance indicator. Commands that can be issued on a per crewman or per side party basis, including movement (stay here, go there, follow me/him), combat (attack him, protect me, protect him, stop fighting), and disposition (fight aggressively, fight defensively, retreat).

I know this steps a bit outside of your original suggestion, but that's what we're currently thinking. What do you think?

The discussion thread has been heavily moderated to remove the bad stuff and reopened. I recommend adding your questions/comments to it.

Cheers,
Dani

Off and on, threads have come up asking whether we'd consider opening up various pieces of data in the game to external sites and apps. As it happens, I've been putting the finishing touches on the first iteration, which will be used as a starting point for future work.

Right now, we're exposing server status (up/down, population values), landmark status (who owns the ports, what resources are there, scheduled port battles, etc.), and the nation vs. nation scoreboard information through a series of APIs accessible through a public web service.

For example, calling the server status URL (via HTTP POST) retrieves a chunk of XML:

More information on this first release will be available as soon as it's ready, and we have plans for exposing a lot more data than this release provides, but what would you like to see from the Data API in the future?

You're very wise.

No, but if you sell the deed now and buy a new one after the patch, I bet you'll pay slightly less. In the long run the prices should normalize but patch day is going to cause a blip up before the patch and a blip down after the patch.


Joe