Yes, I used the E-word. We screwed up handling the situation with the turn-ins in several ways, but the biggest is that we didn't call it an exploit and condemn it in the first place. Mea culpa.
As a direct result of the fact that we didn't label using the turn-in missions in this way as an exploit from the start, we can't very well go around punishing the people who did it. They spent hard-earned doubloons putting those ports into contention using the rules that the game enforced. Then they
won the port battles. It took us far too long to fix those rules, but we spent the whole time specifically avoiding calling it an exploit, so we can't very well treat it like one retroactively.
So the first thing we're doing is that we are not resetting port ownership or conquest state on any port on any server. Somebody suggested that this first conquest victory be considered a practice run, and I think that's a good idea. You decide how much credit you want to give the first server victory, but to me the second one is worth a lot more in the way of bragging rights. We are looking into what it would take to give the same rewards to both winning and losing nations for the first server victory. If we can do it, hopefully that will take some of the sting out of the loss.
The second thing we're going to do is fix the port contention system. Over the past month we've been applying a series of bandaids to try to make what we have work. Things are better than they were (you now can't push a port all the way to contention with any time to defend), but the system is still fundamentally flawed. One of the things on our list for 1.3 is to fix those fundamental problems.
I can't tell you exactly what those fixes are (because we don't know yet), but these are the issues we want to address:
- Instant state changes - Players are supposed to have a chance to react when another nation starts to influence their ports
- Little econ impact once a port goes pirate PvP - Turning off the unrest missions at pirate PvP locks econ players out from participating.
- Too easy to push noobland ports into hotspots - These ports are supposed to resist contention more forcefully than higher level ports. They aren't doing a great job of that now.
- More hotspots in general - When a port battle happens another hotspot should open fairly quickly. There are too few of these hotspots.
- More port battles - More hotspots will naturally lead to this, but port battles should be happening all the time. Fighting is fun!
Please bear with us as we work on these things. I'll do my best to keep you in the loop and respond to your concerns, but it's going to take some time to get conquest fixed for real.
Joe