There's something on the potential feature list that I call fair PvP rewards. It's basically a system that rewards you more for taking on hard fights and less for uneven fights. I can't disclose any details and it's not on the schedule, but there's a significant amount of overlap with this suggestion.

What? I've never said that privateer ships are supposed to be slower than other ships. Privateer ships are generally scout refits. Scouts are quick and maneuverable but have low top speed. Privateer refits get a max speed boost over the base scout ships.

The timer hasn't changed recently. It went from 60 to 90 once due to problems with joining fights, then back down to 60 once auto-join was re-enabled.

File bug reports for individual cases where there are problems with the spawns.

If he's not fighting, then you + your crew have a massive advantage against his crew. Running around is only really useful if you're trying to delay, and that's a separate issue to address.

Refits are not supposed to be comparable in cost to normal ships. They're supposed to be expensive and a little - not a lot - better.

It may be possible to see an Out of Range message when they're out of your firing arcs.

I had a post all typed up and then iexplore crashed. It was great!

So in looking at your dxdiag and client log it the line:

ERROR Startup: Vertex shader version too low (0.0 < 2.0)

Indicates that directx isn't able to get the correct vertext shader version from your card, which should certainly support it. I believe (the person who would know the answer for certain is out of the office) that from the dxdiag you do not have full support of DirectX 9 installed which is needed to run the game. Try running the installer from the Microsoft site and restart. If that does not work, it would would be worth trying to download and install the DirectX 9 SDK.

Microsoft DirectX 9 End User web install

/flogs you

Take that back!!! *sniffles*

We're patching testbed to live this morning at 1.30am. Estimated downtime, as usual, three hours.