If it can be grabbed by the browser for display on the site (which it must be) then it can be grabbed, and no browser-optional "hey, don't, you know, make it easy for the user to download this" is going to stop a determined "borrower".

However, we do have a mechanism in place to prevent folks from easily stealing and submitting coming in the upcoming UC revamp. A devlog detailing the work we're doing is coming next weekish, and I'll make sure this topic is specifically addressed either in the devlog or in a follow-up post.

We're not actually seeing all these players having troubles. Can you encourage them to log support tickets? It helps us look for patterns as to what's happening.

We'll be seeding the testbed AH with all sorts of ships and goodies. I'm not sure when that's happening, but it's probably soon because I expected it to be seeded already.

It's on the list but it's low priority.

There are no Princes on any server.

There are lots of accuracy changes in this build, so that's an important area to test. I'm especially interested in knowing if the new values are too high and hurt small ships too much. It should be easier for small ships to hit each other. Against large ships, small ships should be hard to hit at long range, moderate at mid range and easy at close range. They should have good survivability at range.

Large ships should feel like they can take more of a pounding, but should still be easier to hit than small ships. A large ship shouldn't lose to a small ship in a close range broadside exchange.

As a general rule, I believe nothing in the personal inventory is supposed to be unsecured.

This is basically correct. It was introduced recently, and it isn't always visible. I suspect these accuracy changes are a little on the high side, and there's another set ready to deploy to testbed depending on how the testing goes.

I'm tired, so hopefully this is coherent.

Both of these values are additive. Are you speaking tactically? Otherwise, the same relative diminishing returns apply to damage. Looking at the relative gains of reload versus damage, they're the same as you get higher values. Reload values are not subtracting, although the effect lowers your reload rate. If reload values were subtracting, then the returns would actually get better relatively the more you add. For examlpe, say you have 90% damage resistance. You take 10 damage from 100. Add another 5% damage resistance, and now you take 5 damage from 100%. While that 5% had the same absolute damage reduction as the first 5%, it ended up cutting your end damage in half. -5 absolute, -50% relative, so a character with 95% resist can survive twice as long as one with 90% resist.

If you have 100 base DPS and 0% bonus reload rate and add 5% reload, you'll do 105 DPS. +5 absolute, +5% relative. If you have 100 base DPS and 95% bonus reload rate, you'll do 195 DPS. Add 5% reload and you'll do 200 DPS. +5 absolute, +2.56% relative. The same applies to damage. Reload starts to lose out more at higher values because of DR and maneuverability.

There are good points in this thread, and I want to be clear that we're listening and it's something we take seriously.

1) The contention system has lots of issues and it'll get receiving lots of attention as we progress. The reason we still have spawn problems is because it's insanely hard to fix, not for lack of wanting to improve the system. Virtually all of the fixes that are simple in theory are technical disasters and would blow up the game. So, we've been working on making adjustments to the surroundings and planning out long-term fixes. DevCo has some ideas they're experimenting with to allow us to get more out of the OS spawns without overloading the game, and it looks promising. I expect to see changes in some of the near-future updates.

In light of that, we have to work on other areas to make contention feasible. That's one reason why we have unrest turn ins (which in turn are getting their own fixes), unrest generating missions and we've been making changes to contention rates. Right now, there's work being done on some custom contention generating missions.

I have a long list of improvements I want to make to the contention process. We've already mentioned some of those changes - like having the PvP flag generate unrest. In addition, there are other plans such as improved Ad-Hoc battles.

I know you don't like hearing it, but in the meantime the best thing you can do is bug report places where the spawns are really bad. We can work on those areas one at a time in order of severity while more global solutions are in the works. I'll contact people to get all the deep harbor ports tested to see about spawn problems at key locations. Turning contention off doesn't solve anything, because that just means no PvP. Winning maps doesn't significantly impact a nation's strength since writs aren't the logistical chokepoint for SOL production. The labor costs are so massive that the writ acquisition is practically trivial in comparison.

2) We changed the way Ad-Hoc spawning works and the changes in 1.2. I wanted to see them hit live earlier, but it's a moderately dangerous change so we had to play it safe. With the changes:
*It'll be really hard to spawn close to another ship. It might be impossible if you don't coordinate it with both sides.
*There's extra error checking and limitations to prevent you from spawning a great distance away from your group.
*Spawns players as groups instead of individual entities, thus maintaining group cohesion and reducing the exploit potential.

As for the amount of contention generated by killing players, I looked into this and it looks like there's a bug that's causing too much unrest generation. We're going to dig deeper into this and see what needs to get fixed. Players are supposed to generate more unrest than NPC kills, but they can't give too much. Otherwise, absenteeism often becomes the best defense (like it may be now).

Try it out when it's on testbed and find out for yourself. This is a pretty big change, so we really need as many people trying it out as possible. It's definitely not perfect, and I expect to make adjustments real soon. I suspect the accuracy values are a little high. I want small ships to be difficult to hit at long range, but not at close range.