There are some significant balance changes being made today. Please be patient as these changes are tested across our player base and feedback is received, as they may undergo revisions.

There are now limits to how many times a single ship can be hacked, raided, or disabled in a 24 hour window. When that player performs one of those actions against someone else, this limit will increase. Once a ship is hacked/raided/disabled too many times within a 24 hour window, that action cannot be performed again.

The [current] limits for various actions in a 24 hour window is as follows:

Hacks: 5 (+1 for each time this ship has performed an offensive action against another player in 24hrs)
Raids: 5 (+1 for each time this ship has performed an offensive action against another player in 24hrs)
Disables: 3 (+1 for each time this ship has performed an offensive action against another player in 24hrs)

The disable limit is waived if you target a ship that is guarding a planet that is ready to be invaded.
In addition, players with truce effects can be attacked IF they are targeted in this specific situation as well.
The base limits mentioned above are subject to change.

Due to limits being added to hacking, the quantum firewall effect trap duration has been reduced to 2 hours, down from 8.
Due to limits being disabled, the halcyon trap effect duration has been reduced to 1 hour, down from 4.

Enemy player alerts will now ONLY send to members of your legion within the rank range of the target. This rank range is +/- 40% of the rank of the player being alerted, rounded up 5 ranks. So, if you alert a player that is rank 100, members that are rank 60 - 145 will be able to respond to the alert.

The help tooltips for alerts have been enhanced to indicate the rank ranges of the eligible players. This is true for NPC elites/bosses as well.

The max cap on hull repair cost has been raised to 200M credits, up from 1M.
The repair cost remains the same at (up to) 15% of your daily upkeep.

Racial Bonuses and professions have been given adjustments:
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Aerlen now recieve a 30% defense bonus (up from 20%) - this is to balance the extra benefit Konqul receive to invasions.

Physicist bonus to shields increased to 30% (up from 10%)
Hacker/Raider bonuses increased to 30% (up from 20%)
Fixer bonus to hull increased to 30% (up from 20%)
Biologist bonus to max pop increased to 30% (up from 10%)
Explorer bonus to scanning increased to 20% (up from 10%)
Merchant bonus to cargo space increased to 30% (up from 20%)

Good changes! That should help DOO information a lot when aggressor had enough of the beating and move on without getting over-ganged by mistake.. By looking at that number will inform us tell us a lot..

One thing I want to see is to nerf planet flux to prevent a planet thief to steal planet from us and we WANT to have chance to reclaim that. Under old system, we can simply constantly hacking that player to recover one of his equivalent planet to reclaim then call it fair.. But under new system, planet thief has huge advantage now by stealing then flux.. I suggest to nerf flux that prevent players to steal then cannot flux for maybe 24 hours so we can have chance to reclaim. If that player cannot defend that planet after steal then he/she has no right to hold it cuz he/she simply isn't strong enough or he/she got no legion to support his action.. We could always be able to reclaim our planets by force after steal within time limit. If we are taking too long, that's our loss cuz we are wasting our time and that thief can hide it cuz he earns it..

Now, DOO can "restore" their reputation after the changes that they could use nice information tabs on aggressor tabs and won't be able to piss them off too much cuz of that mechanic changes..

Nice about class/racial changes!

I'd like to put forth points about these two aspects I snipped from the post.

1. I'd like to know if / how this effects planet defending or invasions. Does it mean I can still invade any player's planet that I've scanned, or have defenders of any level defend my own planets? Or legion alerts for help in planetary invasions?

2. 200M credits for hull repair? That sounds a bit extreme. Consider this- if hull repair goes by 15% of upkeep, you'd need an upkeep of 3 BILLION credits to hit a 200M hull repair cost.

200M credit is MAX that you can go. You won't see that cost at low rank.. For me, 200M is easy.. Plus, there is more reason why we need to take advantage of shield use. If we wanna minimize the cost, we simply attack til shield gets depleted then WAIT til it recharges then attack again and repeat. Slower yes but most cost effective if you are patient. If you got no patient or fighting players in PVP then gotta take hull damage for quickest damage but that comes with a cost. Sounds fair to me..

Ouch. I'll miss the fight at lower rank range. It was fun while it lasts! But I definitely am going to slow down my rank advancement so the average rank of players can catch up so I can re-participate in the majority of the players..

I believe that this change will really give hopes and motivation in new players and they will feel alot more safer and play GL and hopefully give good PR to any interesting people to join GL. You also need to start adversize little harder to get new players to sign up especially once the changes are polished..

Oh by the way. No nerfs against NPCS. We can mass-gang on any NPCs without any limitation.. After all, they got no emotion.

shh noc if you talk about ganging npcs people will start whinin bout it too lol. good patch btw dan.

I'm not complaining about the issue, but rather, questioning why Dan set the max cap to such a high number. I don't think there's gonna be upkeeps in excess of 1+ billion credits until players hit tier 20+ in tech's. Also, you'd need mining income of 10,000 minerals per hour to make a billion credits a day or something like that.

Is that for successful raids and hacks or does it include failures? If it doesn't include failures, then someone could potentially still get hacked only for planet locations every 5 minutes for quite some time. How does the rollover work? 24h from first contact? I still think humans need some sort of buff, being a human IRL and all. The bonus xp only accounts for 3-4 levels at any given point, which usually accounts for less than 10% of someone's decks (like sillix)... or less than any other bonus really.

My best idea to nerf planet fluxes was to make the "Xplanet was taken over by Xplayer" notification act like a share for the player and planet. It could not be reshared and it would last through any fluxes, just like a normal share. Since this would leave the defender/victim at a disadvantage in terms of not being able to notify their legion, it might also be prudent to make it impossible to share a "new colony". It could get interesting, but not very unfair if it constantly gets reinvaded from the original share.

basically I thought it would be a good idea to take legions and groups somewhat out of the picture. The original defense or invasion shares would do what they normally do and only leave the people that had actually occupied the planet in somewhat of a death match after it expires. I guess a defensive share could serve a secondary role if the planet gets invaded and fluxed.

edit: I have an idea: lets all totally exhaust the limitations of the new update by attacking/hacking/raiding everyone in sight... GO!

Some of the changes I am pleased with, some not, some I don't like at all.

I don't like the upkeep increase but will live with it.

I don't like the legion alert / level cap. There is no one within 40 levels of me. They are either more than 40 below or more than 40 above. It really sucks that I am alone now. Half the fun in the game is reading the alerts and so on.

I'm pissed by only one thing: the timing for the update, I just used my last 2 glaviz devices for an ultimate scan blitz 2 days ago ... And if I knew, I would have wait until now to profit from the new 20% scan bonus (instead of the 10% I had) ... It took me almost 3 months to prepare that uber scan blitz ... I was already screwed at my last scan blitz where Metallic planets were introduced a few days after it ... Go figure, it's never good to be ahead ^^


If that update had come last week I'd be the happiest man, now I just feel I got ripped on that one

Ship upkeep remains the same.. Only hull cost went up. That makes shield more attractive than ever and also makes repair bots artifacts attractive ones now..

No, it's not a flat 40 level in your range. It is 40% of your level. Read carefully. For your case, you can see anyone of 205-470 range.. Yes, you are outside the majority range but that comes with the price of being very high rank player ahead of most players. You could either slow your ranking up speed down to let the majority to catch up OR just live with your new life in quieter environment. I can see anyone over 115 so it's little high but its fair cuz it was rather silly for me to attack anyone below rank 100 and they will feel so scared that way that will de- motivated them and prompt them to quit game.. I definitely will slow my ranking up alot afterwards so in new months, I'll be back in majority of combat where I can have fun once again..

Hey! I have nice idea!! Should bring alert back so anyone can see it but stick to 40% rule for attack, hack and raid. For example, Kaos sees alert shared by rank 10 but the hack and attack is still greyed out telling him that he is too strong.. Likewise, a rank 10 sees alert on Kaos and tried to help but was told that he is too weak.. I think that solution is more reasonable so Kaos can see alerts often like before but his action will be restricted to 40% rule.. Perfect solution. I would suggest to add a toggle choice to allow players to see alerts or not outside 40% range to reduce noise ratio if they want..

@Zhorgul, ouch! That blows..

It's +- 40% of the enemy rank not the rank of the guy who shares. +5 rank on the upper limit.

Since Kaos is lvl 334, he can receive shares on enemy with rank (334-5)/1.4 = 235

So if you are friend with Kaos and you share a guy ranked 235 or higher, he's gonna see it. That's precisely 3 person in the whole game. And there's high chance Kaos added them as friends ...

Oops! I misread the update and thought it was Kaos' rank but it's alerted player's rank.. Gotcha. That sure narrows down the range especially at lower rank realm but widen the max allowed if higher rank player got alerted.. Sounds fair. Kaos being alone with just 2 others can be lonely.. PSIcore is even worse. He only is able to see Kaos but that's it.. He's most loniest guy in the galaxy now in the PVP enivornment. At least, he can play with NPCs that he loves as proved with his record high NPC kills..

@Veristek about hull cost.. It's very obvious that Dan prepared the hull max cost way ahead of the future that he definitely is going to add more tiers to the research branches plus other sources to increase hull size along with increased ship upkeeps.. I DEFINITELY have zero problem with my hull repair cost at all. My old max repair cost for my 2,600 hp hull was 1M but now it's ~5M. Only 5x and it's still very affordable. It's much more scalable and more fair for ANY rank. Old hull cost benefits high rank players too much due to hard cap of 1M.. It's now more balanced across the ranks..

I have an idea to revise the + / - 40% cap on PvP.

Instead of capping it on levels, why not apply the cap to attack (for attacks and raids), and cloak (for hacking)?

Example:

Player A has 1000 attack. He can view and PvP players who have 600 - 1400 attack.

Player B has 100 cloak. He can view and hack players with 60 - 140 cloak.

So regardless if the player is level 10, 100, or 500, they'll always have targets of opporunity in PvP instead of being starved like Kaos and PSICore.

the update is nice but im getting alot of legion members complaining about getting attacked and not having anyone near their level range that can get the legion alert. ie they cant have one of us higher levels persuade the person that attacked/hacked/invaded them(which apparently was what made most of em join the game was protection of higher rank players. anyways just lettin ya guys know that the level cap on legion alerts is more of a deturant to new players than a attraction.

I personally hope that it only applies to successful raids and hacks... otherwise it just gives folks a reason to spend all their RPs and minerals because there is less of an overall chance that someone gets something from them...

I am against the idea that someone cannot Flux a planet as soon as he conquers it, but if this (or a similiar idea) is implemented, I would like to see it work both ways... in the event you cannot take/damage the planet, its owner cannot flux it for 24 hours either... giving both sides the chance to bring in allies and modifying their ships.

So I would basically be saying I would not complain much if Fluxing was modified so that you could not use it on a planet that had been attacked/conquered in the last 24 hours (and I would not think that artifacts would count on either side as attacks).

Thanks for reading!

[edit: darn... in the time it took me to come up with that, I missed the less-than-14 minute window to attack a Drannik Hub. Heh! I actually would like to see assistance caps on NPCs too, so that these "bosses" actually last more than a couple minutes...]

bringing a legion into it can make things ridiculous. They can just build it up to 2000 population and have 20 people guarding it. Thats 600 energy just to get rid of the guards and 500 energy to actually take down the population at the minimum. It would all be in vain if even 1 of those 20 people are actually online, especially if its the planet owner. Having a legion help with invasions can be even more ridiculous, but I'm not going to get into that. Thats why I had the idea I stated earlier. If big fish can't eat little fish then there is no reason to be a big fish... unless you happen to be the biggest fish and that probably costs almost $1000.

ok its official i hate the level cap for legion alerts. whole day gone by and no legion alerts. made me look for a dif game to play while energy recharges from boring missions.

I recommend WoW, StarCraft, and if your into drama every week BattleDawn.

I recommend daily exercise, a hair cut and laying off the Hunt's snack packs. You will be amazed at what a difference having friends off of Facebook wili make in your life.

ROFL, i also concur with this. Heck play some DnD or Warhammer 40K or something.