William, the flag you are talking about was a flag that had already gone through the approval process, and transferred to another user. I approved the transfer and requested that the flag be approved, so you can blame me directly.

That being said, you are absolutely right. The current process for approving flag and sail submissions is failing our customers. It isn't that we aren't working hard, because we are. It isn't that we don't care about User Content as a program, because we really do.

But let's be honest with each other for a moment- the ratings/voting system just isn't scaling well to the size of our community. We are getting hundreds and hundreds of flag and sail submissions in a single day, and even with the help and coaching of some of our most talented flag and sail designers, that leaves the FLS team with TONS of submissions that we need to evaluate, and then approve or deny (with feedback for each, mind you). There are only so many hours in a day.

So beyond the admission that "Yup, we know the UC process isn't serving our community as well as it should.", I do have some good news to share:

We are completely revamping the User Content program. From the way you vote and submit items, to the way they are accepted. The system is being redesigned in such a way that it will speed up the approval process, and make it easier to submit new designs.

We are putting the final touches on this plan now, which we intend to share with the community at large for your evaluation and feedback.

In the meantime, I apologize for the crazy-making nature of our current User Content process, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on what's to come.

Best,
Aether

BlackJack - you say certain islands make green streaks appear on your screen. Can you post a screen shot or at least tell me where in the OS (or in a port) that you see this. I just put in a 6600 to try to repro, but haven't seen any oddness.

Thanks

Right click on 'My Computer' and bring up the properties dialog. On the front page under System it'll say something like 'Microsoft Windows XP'. If there's a 64 in there somewhere you are running 64 bit. 32bit is what you have if nothing else is specified.

The purpose of unrest supplies is to generate unrest. The fact that they reward you with a Mark of Victory is meant to be a nice bonus, not your motivation for creating the bundles and turning them in.

I expect the price of Marks to be well below 2,500db, and that they will come in a steady stream from dedicated PvP players who need money to replace their losses much more than they need the loot items provided from Mark turnins.

SWBgHz, if I had a nickel for every time you said the game was going nowhere good I'd set up a PvP server.

The Marks of Victory system was something we added very late, it didn't get much testing, and we didn't give it enough consideration before it went in. We're working to get it right and I believe we're making progress.

We've gotten confirmation from Packeteer that our traffic is being filtered as 'gnutella-cmd' traffic, and we're working on getting an exception in place.

In the mean time, you can ask your IT department to allow an exclusion for 66.150.168.0/22 in the PacketShaper, which in theory should allow our traffic through.

Sorry, I was citing the two extremes of the relationship.

If non-economy PvE players want to buy Marks, I expect them to have the money to do so. PvE players shouldn't be losing ships and outfitting nearly as often as PvP players, and that's the biggest financial drain in the game.

From what we can see in the game, PvP is where players lose the most money. PvE is generally much, much less risky and therefore PvE players should have more money to spend on buying Marks.

Nope.

Marks don't drop for any victim whose ship is below level 10, or any fallback/civilian ships. So if you can keep your level 30s with an infinite supply of level 10+ ships to keep losing, you could do this. Of course, level 10-19 ships only drop 1 Mark, not 3.

I don't think that would be profitable.

These drivers should work with all flavors of NVidia GeForce cards. I haven't peronally tested a 7600 GS, but the 7600 GT is working just fine.

Performance/stability is going out a week from today. Also, if you have an 8800, we've just released some new drivers from Nvidia that will help. And we're working on a new plan to stop gold farmers from spamming so much, and will have a dev log out on it in a day or two.

We're actually spending that money on more customer support people so we can cut down on the backlog!