We are proud to announce the next chapter of the Star Sonata story:

The Rise of the Space Rat Empire

Rattie Moe has returned to unite his race under one banner and realize his vision of a dung covered paradise. They have descended upon Anatolia and claimed it for themselves. The Space Rat Empire has even brought the UrQa to their knees, enslaved them as a vassal race, and unleashed their full might onto their foes.

Their future reign of the universe has shattered the uneasy peace of Earthforce space. It will be up to the heroes of the universe to pass judgement on those who dare to steal the Terran Throne.

New Features

• New Ships: Players will wield the captured corpses of rats that have been hollowed out and outfitted with the latest in stolen technology.
• New Zone: Descend back to where it all began with your old friend Ahab against the Home nest of Rattie moe. Finding the space not how you left it, setting the tone for a cheese and dung filled wonder-land of squeaky-large proportions.
• New Customization: Improved Avatar Options: A host of new holoprojector appearance options for all ships will be made available to players when they defeat their enemies to emulate their Rodent enemies.
• New Weapons: Defecate all over your foes with brand new Dung Rockets, Dung Missiles and other Dung themed weapons.
• BvR: Enjoy a new side of Star Sonata with a new, RTS-capable Base Versus Rat layer replacing Wild Space. Battle teeming hordes of Moe’s minions that come to gnaw apart the universe.

Only you can heed Moe’s call of nature…

Coming June 2021

In response to an incident that occurred at 6:28 PM Eastern today, the server has been taken down. The server will be down for approximately 1.5-3 hours and have a 1 hour and 20 minute rollback.

The incident was the result of us turning off a parameter that stopped worker ration consumption. Unexpectedly, the workers had been counting all of their missed meals while they were not allowed to go on strike, and decided that since they could eat again, they would eat all of their missed meals as well. This event occurred due to the parameter being left in an enabled state for a long period of time and was missed during its testing phase.

We are currently working to fix the issue, but when the server comes back up it will be reset to its save state as of 6:00 pm Eastern. This will result in the ration event to be completely reverted and any stations to be in the state they were in before we enabled worker ration consumption.

We apologize for the oversight that allowed this bug to slip to live, and will be enabling double build speed and colony growth rate for two days in recognition of this inconvenience. As an added silver lining, the unexpected downtime will result in the fix to superlasers going live at the time the server is brought up again.

Greetings! Earlier this week, I posted a rundown of the big Update that’s hitting on February 7. Now that the contents of the patch are locked in, I’m back with a follow-up on a few items that missed the cutoff and will be included in Version 1.1 a few weeks after the initial patch.

What’s in the Update??

If you’re curious to see how the game will look after the Update, point your game client to the LiveTest server from the login screen. You can access the Community Testing Event galaxy from Sol, where all player-obtainable gear is accessible for your testing enjoyment. We are also working on updating stat tables on the wiki so that theorycrafters have easy access to this information. I’ll post on Discord when the wiki update is complete.

Jey worked extra hard and got several late changes into Version 1.0. These include the changes to shields that make balanced shields more useful and the work on shield transference weapons that introduced greater variability in healing output and weapon range and tracking. The quality changes to the loot of Bana King and Black Nightfury are also included in Version 1.0.

What’s Waiting Till Version 1.1?

Due to Jey’s hard work, all major components of the project are included in the first patch. However, we do have an assortment of side projects and one-off changes that will have to wait till Version 1.1. I want to make sure you feel able to get out there and explore the Update from the start, so I’m going to grant another universal augmenter reset upon release of Version 1.1. Just as the first one, this reset will be activated using the command /freeAugreset, and will be available on every ship that pre-exists the release of Version 1.1. Make sure you use up the one you’re granted on February 7, as any ships that still have their reset from the first round will not accumulate a second one with Version 1.1.

Here’s a rundown of biggest components of Version 1.1:

• Market Check command support added for wildcard and spelling errors, yields interactive list of matches.
• Ultimate Art class augmenters will remain Exotic but their stat distributions will be adjusted to better reflect their pre-Update stats.
• Perilous Augmenter’s quality tier will be increased to Exotic.
• All solar panels will be converted to hybrid functionality.
• Transference weapons with low tracking (20 degrees) will be adjusted for greater usability.
• Adjustments/script improvements to Twisted, Bana King, and Black Nightfury (see next section!)

In addition to these scheduled items, Version 1.1 will also contain any adjustments and fixes that result from player feedback on Version 1.0. It’s my highest priority to address any issues with Version 1.0 without delay, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep Version 1.1 on the fast track.

Endgame Boss Improvements

Thanks to some great testing work from players, we learned that certain bosses got a bit too easy at some point along the way. The ones that concerned us most are Bana King, and Black Nightfury, and the three top bosses of Twisted, as these bosses are the sources of some of the highest quality loot in the game. When we first got the reports, we could have simply cranked up the stats of the bosses and called it a day, but this wouldn’t really have addressed the root problem. These bosses just aren’t designed in a way that goes well with the Healing/Support Update: they all involve high pressure damage and are pretty oriented toward tank-and-spank. Going forward, we want bosses to rely less on pressure damage and more on burst effects with clear tells. We also want to pack more tactical moments into boss encounters and cut down on the average time to kill. For this reason, we’ve decided to substantially rework these five boss encounters, for release with Version 1.1. In fact, three out of five reworks are already complete as of today, but unfortunately it’s not possible to incorporate that work into the February 7 patch at this late stage.

As with the Healing/Support Update as a whole, it’s our responsibility to justify any disruptions we make to existing content (especially when the content has been around for years). I believe that these five bosses are going to be much more enjoyable to fight without being inappropriately challenging. As a side benefit, Bana King and Black Nightfury will also have increased drop rates of their highly coveted loot, enabled by some improvements I made to the dev tool for drop rates.

Since these five bosses are not currently in an acceptable state and are slated for revision in the very near future, I have decided to lock their zones upon Version 1.0 release until Version 1.1. I understand that this means missing several valuable lockouts, and have the following special event prepared to compensate. Starting with the Update launch and until the release of Version 1.1, we will have double augmenter drop rates, double item modification rates, and a major prospecting event. I picked these bonuses because they will make the rest of PvE content substantially more rewarding while you wait for us to unlock the five bosses in question.

Greetings! You’ve probably heard that the Healing/Support Update is going live on February 7. I’m writing this post to tell you what to expect in the lead-up to the Update and to summarize the contents of the Update itself.

Before February 7

In the next few days, the team will finalize the exact contents of the Update. We will let you know on Discord as soon as this is done. At that point, the LiveTest server will contain the exact stats of items, skills, and AI that will go live with the update. For extra information, we’ll fire up the Test 3 server as a simulation of the update with a new universe generated. We will also use a script to update the Wiki with all stats of common items so theorycrafters will be able to pull all that data directly into their spreadsheets and programs.

Even before Update Version 1.0 goes live, we are already planning Version 1.1 for release a few weeks later. There are two reasons for releasing the project in stages. First and foremost, we recognize that no amount of pre-release testing can compare to the volume of testing player-hours that occurs after a big update. We are fully prepared for some issues and errors to be uncovered soon after release and are committed to addressing these in a timely manner. Secondly, there are some last minute adjustments that weren’t ready in time for Version 1.0, mostly involving tweaks to bosses and less commonly used ships. Once the contents of Version 1.0 are finalized, I’ll be able to give more details on Version 1.1. I will announce those details before February 7.

On February 7

The update will go live on February 7. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that a lot of gear has changed in size, as well as the capacity of most ships. Certain items have changed in power, too: for example, pulse guns are a lot more powerful than before, while some particularly strong ships and items have been toned down in strength. The upshot is that you may find yourself wanting to change around some augmenter setups! Aside from the usual means of doing this (destroying equipped augmenters, using a reset mission, and using a paid reset module) we are providing three new ways to help you optimize your setup in the update:

1. Fifteen ships had their augmenter slots reduced. Popular examples are: Thatch, Battle Sphere, and Paxian Battle Frigate. Any ships you own that lost augmenter slots will automatically have all their augmenters unequipped as soon as you activate the ship or transfer any items in or out.

2. With the exception of ships whose augmenters were unequipped per #1, all ships that existed before the update are entitled to one free augmenter reset. The reset is activated by using the chat command /freeAugreset while the ship is active. You can save this reset as long as you like; it will never expire.

3. Lastly, every character will have access to three additional augmenter reset missions at the base in Shadow. These missions will work exactly like the normal ones except that you must use them by the universe reset in October 2021, as any remaining ones will be removed at that time.

Version 1.0 Summary

At the core of the Healing/Support Update is mitigation: how much punishment your ship can take. As we analyzed mitigation in the game, we uncovered a longstanding arms race between damage on weapons on the one hand, and resistance on ships on the other. This is pretty standard in themepark MMOs where each update totally supersedes the last, but in Star Sonata we want the power curve to be flatter so that older content remains relevant and new players are reasonably able to compete with experienced ones.

Our work on the power curve has led to a number of high profile changes, such as the standardization of augmenter slots by hull type, the elimination of modification effects from inactive weapons, and the standardization of repair costs to bring down excessive costs on expensive gear. We also instituted stricter standards on the quality tier of items and introduced two tiers above Exotic to give players more room to progress. Many existing items have had their stats adjusted due to adjustments in quality tier to bring them into compliance with the new standards. Quite a few items were listed as Exotic in spite of being rather simple to acquire in terms of time and cost; we couldn’t leave these items at that quality tier without eroding the reward of progression to items that are genuinely difficult to acquire.

Another impactful change from our analysis of the power curve has been a new the development tool for ship design. Here, the biggest change is that higher-tech ships don’t accumulate bonus resistance to damage. This source of “power creep” was one of the worst offenders in the mitigation arms race. Standardizing ship resistances runs the risk of making ships less distinct from each other; while we have done our best to give them bonuses appropriate for their tech and quality tier, we hope to continue polishing ships over the coming months by upgrading their inbuilt super items with more interesting and distinctive effects. The Kalthi ships have been selected for the first pass of super item improvement.

Clearly, taking on the mitigation arms race committed us to a pretty drastic rework of many item stats. This is why we are instituting a universal augmenter reset as explained in the previous section. These resets may be particularly important for the two classes most involved in squad mitigation: Shield Monkey and Engineer.

Shield Monkey Update

As soon as we started thinking about mitigation, our attention turned to Shield Monkey. After all, this is the class most clearly focused on keeping squads alive. The two aspects of squad mitigation that felt most off to us were:

1. Squad mitigation is driven principally by healers manufacturing shields through far-above-100% healing efficiency.

2. In many encounters, squads can wipe if healing is disrupted or redirected for even a very short period of time.

To address these issues, we have made healing occur at 1:1 efficiency in all cases, and we have dramatically increased the shield bank and shield regeneration available to players. We have also toned down the damage in certain boss zones to compensate for the lower healing output from the efficiency reduction. Lastly, we have enabled Shield Monkey to use their shield transference weapons to steal shields from enemies, replenishing their own. The upshot is that Shield Monkey has more gameplay modalities available to it, ranging over the traditional healer, the vampire healer, the drain-tanker, and the squad-sheltering capital ship.

Here’s a quick list of highlights and tips on the new Shield Monkey class.

• Shield Monkey can equip an extra Shield item on Support Freighters and Capital Ships.

• Zen of Shield gives a huge amount of shield bank for this class.

• Transference Mastery (40% range, 20% tracking) is rolled into Shield Monkey class, so you get comparable range with transference weapons and more range with all other weapon types. This change also benefits the range of your combat bots.

• The Transference Efficiency augmenter stat now multiplies your shield stealing.

• Stealing-oriented Shield Monkeys will want to obtain a lot of DPS multipliers to be effective, while non-stealing Shield Monkeys will want to obtain a lot of shield regeneration.

• None of the healing and mitigation changes affect stations and permanent drones, so the Wild Space meta is largely unaffected by this project.

Engineer Update

While Shield Monkey is the official healer class in Star Sonata, Engineer has incredibly powerful healing from drones in the endgame. In fact, Engineer is a highly versatile class that can achieve impressive results in healing, DPS, and tanking. Players who select this class certainly appreciate the versatility, but a Jack of all trades isn’t supposed to be a master of all of them. As we worked on Shield Monkey, we became convinced that Engineer would become the undisputed king of healing if we didn’t make some changes there too. So, our mission with Engineer was to retain its signature versatility while dialing down its ability to perform multiple simultaneous squad roles at such a high level. In exchange, we’ve dramatically increased Engineer’s ability to customize their drone stats, as detailed below.

Here’s a quick list of highlights and tips on the new Engineer class.

• Engineer can equip an extra Energy item on Support Freighters and Capital Ships.

• Zen of Energy gives a lot of extra energy bank.

• Energy transference beams now share a portion of the target’s energy consumption with the Engineer instead of passing a flat amount of energy to the target.

• Mechanical Engineer adv subskill allows you (and your squadmates, with a Repair Drone from Lyceum) to pay the docked repair cost while in flight.

• Instead of giving resistance to damage directly, we’ve made a portion of the Engineer’s energy bank serve as an overshield to incoming damage. Only the top 50% of the energy bank can be used in this way, to prevent the Engineer from becoming crippled in combat.

• A fraction of your augmenter stats are now passed to your drones. The exact fraction is computed as 2% per level of Drone Deployment, plus 60% from Engineer class. This means that your ship augmenters benefit your drones at just over 100% effectiveness. Any augmenter that used to have Drone Ops has been reworked, so you’ll want to take a close look at the new stat distributions to see if they’re still to your liking. Don’t forget to equip a DPS augmenter if you want your drones to do damage!

Miscellaneous Changes

As part of the power curve analysis, we have made a number of other standalone changes that are chronicled here.

• Shield Chargers and Solar Panels have enhanced values but function exclusively out of combat. To benefit from these items, position yourself near a star and disengage from all combat interactions for 10 seconds. This means no receiving or dealing non-parasite damage, using or receiving tractor beams, launching missiles and fighters, and so on. You can also gain the out-of-combat effect by docking. Unlike an older draft of this effect, you do NOT need all hostile targets to be eliminated for out-of-combat status to kick in. Also note that we’ve updated the universe generation code to place at least one star in every random galaxy and dungeon.

• Damage-over-time weapons have been carefully analyzed and tuned. The main results are that parasites now do full critical damage (!), and we no longer have weapons doing more than 75% of their damage from parasites. Fire Extinguishers and Pest Exterminators are now out-of-combat items (except station-locked versions) and their power has been increased accordingly.

• Weapon damage types now have a theme and focus, leading to more pronounced use cases.

  • Laser damage => deprecated and converted to Energy or Radiation

  • Radiation => ethereal (even projectiles)

  • Ethereal but not radiation or laser => no longer ethereal (e.g. KMW)

  • Heat => Powerful damage-over-time effects

  • Mining => better against heavy fighters and capital ships

  • Physical => better against light fighters

  • Surgical => increased augmenter drop chance (up to +100% if used for the whole kill)

• A number of skills were revised a few new ones were created.

  • Bot PhD: +8 extra slots, passes 30% of your skill bonuses to bots

  • Bot Tweaking: passes 30% of your skill bonuses to bots, still gives agility and speed

  • Droney: +1 temp drone slot, passes 50% of your skill bonuses to drones

  • Zen skills (condensed from 100 levels to 50)

    • Shield: +2% bank up to 50

    • Energy: +2% bank up to 50

    • Spin and Acceleration: 2% up to 50

  • Lagrange: 10% damage / resistance when maxed at level 25, per damage type

    • Transference Mastery has been deprecated and is now Transference Control (Lagrange)

Breaking News! After vigorously combing the universe, Lyceum Scientists have discovered the origin coordinates of what we now call the “Great Stall Communication”. Hidden deep within a moon in Wild Space there appears to be ruins of an old Celestial Beancounter who left on his trans-dimensional wave radio. A new transmission was just recieved!

Boyle: “Kyle is a piece of work! Who drinks that garbage anyways?”

Robert: “The boss wants to know if the overhaul will be fixed before universe collapse.”

Boyle: “You can tell the boss that 667 will be overhauled by 2021.02.07!”

This recent expedition returned with 3 cans of condensed Baobab milk that don’t appear to be from this dimension. Inside one of the cans named “Healing and Support Revamp” appears to be a date and it reads: ”New New New New New Universe 667: 2021.02.07”

The Healing and Support revamp will be patched in on February 7th, 2021.

Earthforce Bulletin:

“We here at Earthforce pride ourselves in protecting and informing the citizens of the intergalactic community. Due to the sheer arrogance of the Kalthi, the universal rupture has reached near critical mass.  Outlying sectors of the universe are experiencing spatial anomalies and abnormal time dilations. We have instructed the Lyceum Observatory to closely monitor the situation.

Whether you reside in our space or mingle with the Kalthi scum, we would like to remind all citizens of the impending destabilization of the universe. Anyone that has instituted automated trade routes, erected trading posts or left random space junk inside or outside of Earth Force borders are recommended to cease operations and collect your assets.  The universe will collapse on February 13th, 2021.  Destabilization is imminent! “

Dev Note:  Credits on active bots, bases and permanent drones will be lost at the end of the universe. Player ships will not be affected.

The universe reset will be held on Saturday, February 13th.
GMT: 18:00
EST: 13:00
CST: 12:00
MST: 11:00
PST: 10:00
UTC: 18:00

Tentative Future Reset Dates
June 12, 2021
October 9, 2021

Breaking News: Lyceum scientists have intercepted a trans-dimensional transmission!

Robert: “He did it again!”

Boyle: “What”

Robert: “Kyle spilt baobab milk on Universe 667′s server hamster. The entire universe has stalled!”

Boyle: “Well…the boss isn’t going to be happy. This requires a complete overhaul!”

Robert: “We talkin 30 days or 3 years?”

Boyle: “I should have it done before the planned universe collapse…maybe”

Robert: “Great. Just great!”

Lyceum scientists predict massive changes to life as we know it on a universal scale. They are working on pinpointing the origin of the communication to uncover more details

EMERGENCY NOTICE

BREAKING NEWS:

Reports are coming in from multiple expedition teams that an unknown organism is rampaging through known space!

According to an unnamed Earthforce official and an eyewitness report, an unidentified interplanetary fishing trawler managed to catch a rare species of Cosmic Space Lobster in the midst of Earthforce Space. According to the eyewitness, instead of properly reporting the rarity to the authorities, they decided to store the creature — improperly — in the officer’s mini fridge.

By the time the workers returned to their shift the next day, the fridge was missing along with half of the desks! The organism was last seen engaging in numerous battles with civilians and militant groups in Perilous Space.

Earthforce has officially posted a warning to avoid the entity as a battle with it could result in a destabilization of the universe as we know it if it absorbs any more space fairing travelers.

The Kalthi have ignored the warning, and the scientists at Lyceum have reported rupturing of the space-time continuum that will reach its peak on February 13th 2021.

At that time, the universe will implode, creating another in its place — credits on active bots will be lost at the end of the universe alongside any bases and permanent drones. Player ships will not be affected.

The universe reset will be held on Saturday, February 13th.
BST: 18:00
EST: 13:00
CST: 12:00
MST: 11:00
PST: 10:00
UTC: 18:00

Tentative Future Reset Dates
June 12, 2021
October 9, 2021

The long-awaited healing/support revamp is in preparation for patch. Over the next few days, I’ll release a series of blog posts detailing what you can expect with this release. To start, here is a basic FAQ about the project and its release schedule.

When will the project be released?

The release date isn’t scheduled yet as our server programmer Jey is still in the process of setting up the patch. We can expect a patch date around November 13 (yes, Friday the 13th). This has been revised a week later than our original estimate due to the patch preparation process taking longer than expected.

What’s included in the project?

The project includes major changes to the combat classes of Engineer and Shield Monkey. I’ll give more details on each of these classes in a dedicated blog post over the next few days. The project also involves major changes to three other aspects of the game: hulls (aka “ships”), certain skills, and modded weapon bonuses.

What’s happening to my ships?

Hulls (aka “ships”) have had their resistance profiles reduced with boss zone DPS reduced to match. The upshot is that you should be able to survive longer when taking fire from most enemies (although certain bosses may still kill you pretty fast). Resistance no longer scales up with tech level, making it easier for us to balance hulls going forward. Resistances are also more consistent with most hulls having only one or two damage type vulnerabilities.

Hulls with more augmenter slots than typical for their type have lost those slots in exchange for better stats in other areas. Hulls that lost augmenter slots will automatically have their augmenters unequipped on release of the project so that you can re-gear them appropriately. All other hulls will be entitled to one free reset of their augmenters using the command /freeAugReset while the hull is active. This will unequip all the equipped augmenters on the hull, allowing you to re-gear it appropriately. Lastly, every character will have access to three extra augmenter reset missions that can each be used to unequip the augmenters from any one of your ships (just like the reset missions in Shadow). These missions will eventually expire (no earlier than February 2021–exact date TBD), so make sure to take advantage of them as you experiment with new augmenter setups. The test server with the Community Testing Event galaxy will also be kept available at least until February 2021 for experimentation with setups.

What’s up with skills?

The most impactful skills are Zen of Shield and Zen of Energy, each of which provides a 2% boost to your shield and energy stats (up to 100% at level 50). The Zens of Acceleration and Spin have also been changed to percent-wise bonuses: 2% each to thrust and turning for 50 levels. Lastly, the control and resistance skills in Lagrange have been converted to percent-wise bonuses (up to 10% damage or resistance for a single damage type at level 25).

A few skills affecting bots and drones have also been changed. Bot PhD grants 8 extra combat bot slots and also passes 30% of your skill bonuses to your bots. This includes special skills like Might of Atlas. You can get another 30% of your skill bonuses to your bots by maxing out Bot Tweaking, which still has its speed and mobility bonuses from before as well. Similarly, the Droney advanced subskill now confers 50% of your skill bonuses to your deployed temporary drones in addition to the +1 drone slot bonus.

What’s up with weapon modifications?

Weapons with modifications and/or augmenter stat bonuses will now only grants those bonuses when they are the active weapon. This means equipping a sleek Hermes Caduceus will not increase your speed unless you select it as your active weapon, for example. The classes most affected by this change are Berserker and Gunner, both of which had been using many extra equipped weapons to garner a passive bonus to damage (and hostility, in the case of Berserker). However, several other classes had also been using a few extra equipped weapons for a more modest bonus to damage. We are compensating the following classes with extra damage to help make up for the expected loss in damage from this change:

• Berserker: +55% damage
• Gunner: +33% damage
• Sniper: +18.75% damage
• Speed Demon, Seer, Shield Monkey: +7.5% damage

Note that this change has no effect on item modifications on non-weapon gear.

What other things will change?

A lot gear stats have been adjusted as a part of this project. Partly, this is due to us performing some much needed maintenance on our internal balance formulas. This maintenance will help us produce new content faster and ensure that things remain balanced. Generally, you can expect shields to have more bank and a LOT more regeneration, to help compensate for the lower resistances on hulls. Shield chargers now only work out of combat, so you can expect much higher stats on those items. You can expect energies to have a fair bit more regeneration to help compensate for the fact that solar panels now only work out of combat.

Weapons with damage-over-time (especially fires) have been analyzed with much greater scrutiny before. Our new depth of understanding of these weapons has helped us to tune them to be very good on the longer time scale (30+ seconds) but less useful for very short engagements. As part of that analysis, we realized that fire extinguishers and pest exterminators were an unnecessary complication to balancing the weapons, so we’ve converted these item types to work only out of combat (but at much higher effectiveness).

The cost to repair your equipment has been standardized to scale with tech and rarity. This means that you will no longer encounter powerful items with an unreasonably high or bizarrely low cost to repair. We have balanced things so that an endgame player can expect to pay around 500 million credits to repair from a single death (actually, most setups we tested came in around 350 million). Furthermore, towing now only incurs one death’s worth of repair costs instead of the three deaths’ worth that it cost before. Drone repairs are extra, since drones don’t take durability damage when the player dies and only require repairs if they’re destroyed in the field. We’ve balanced drone repair costs to come to around 500 million at the highest rarity tier of tech 22. This means that it’s somewhat costly to lose all your drones, but only as much as another death or two in your player ship.

You can get a full list of changes to items here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ji0EVBL3t0J0qD1_PmBAdihetThdvpFi/view?usp=sharing

Status of the revamp

Over the past few months, the dev team has been working hard on a revamp that focuses on the Shield Monkey and Engineer classes. While the project’s main goal is to give these classes more interesting and active combat roles, it has also led to broader changes to ship stats as we attempt to produce a more balanced damage mitigation experience in the game.

We held three community testing events over the summer to solicit player feedback on the project. While we did receive a lot of feedback that helped us improve the project, the testing events were plagued by glitches and the overall lack of polish, resulting in much frustration and wasted time for the players who signed on to help us. While our goal was to make our development process more transparent, we lacked the capacity to receive and process the massive amount of community feedback that you all provided. We had aimed to close testing on August 31 and move the project into patch preparation, but we didn’t hit this goal and are currently reassessing to develop a new timeline.

To the players who participated in the testing events or otherwise spent time discussing and theorycrafting this project, we are sorry for the frustration we have caused you. The dev team has lost a few members over the past year and this project is just too big for the current team to finish as quickly as we had hoped. However, it was still my responsibility to make an accurate assessment of the team’s capacity, and I apologize for falling short in this respect.

Player concerns and our reponses

To help show that we’re listening and attempt to repair some of the damage, Jeff and I held an emergency meeting a few days ago to address the concerns brought up by the playerbase. The meeting focused on responding to a list of five concerns that had been circulated by the player Jiraque. We’ve listed those concerns below, along with a summary of the responses we gave during the meeting.

1. Never again use the player base as an ad-hoc QA team. If there is insufficient testing manpower in the development QA team to test changes, extend the duration of your testing events and/or decrease the scope of your projects.

The last few community testing events were too early and disrespectful of your time as players. We won’t open up testing events in the future until they are much more polished and ready for community testing.

2. Be fair to your players. If you are changing augmenters or ships, compensate the player base accordingly with augmenter resets and/or opportunities to ship form (once per affected ship).

We had assumed that five augmenter resets would be enough for players to adjust to the changes in this project. We didn’t realize how large of an impact these changes would have on heavily invested players. Now that we have a better understanding, Jeff has authorized me to grant a free augmenter reset to every ship that logs in before February 6, 2021, plus three additional augmenter reset missions that will also expire on February 6, 2021. We will give more details on how to use your free reset when we are closer to launch. Note that the Community Testing Event galaxy on the Test Server will also stay open until February 6, 2021 to facilitate player theorycrafting and setup testing.

3. Respond to our concerns about the feel of the classes we play. The feel of playing the game is just as important as the numbers are. If there’s a general sentiment that something feels bad, prioritize fixing it.

We’ve taken this to heart and we will be asking focus groups of the classes that are changing for their opinions on the reworks to make sure any changes are considered fun or helpful.

4. If there is an extremely overpowered object of any kind in the game (item, ship, augmenter, equipment, etc.), make it your top priority to correct it. Do not let it linger in game and become the meta, then punish the player base for adopting that meta by nerfing it.

Distorting ships or strategies like the PBF, Battle Sphere, passive mod-stacking, and solar panel stacking all fall into this category. We’re working to address these and others in a way that satisfies the player base in order to open up design space in Tech 23 onwards.

5. If you increase the cost of things in-game (repair costs, AI base items, blueprints, etc.), add or tune active/passive income sources to compensate. Inform people of scrap price changes before patching.

We are dialing back repair costs in the project (see below). More broadly, we are making better communication and documentation a priority as we continue working on this project. This includes a changelog (of which we have started doing on test) and better patch notes.
All Test Changes
Outline of Healing Revamp (but see below for possible changes to Engineer)

Specific changes and initiatives

Here are a few noteworthy changes that we have made to address some major concerns before the next version of testing:

Lastly, we’re currently evaluating an experimental change to Engineer. In the spirit of Concern #3, we acknowledge that our earlier concept for the class wasn’t quite doing what we wanted, resulting in imbalances and lack of enjoyment. Early testing suggests that the following change would move the class in a promising direction: