Happy New Years, Star Sonatans!  2013 was a pretty good year for us, and I hope 2014 will be even better.

Within the game, 2013 saw the new Subspace Assault Expansion, with a large new area, alien invasions, and tech 22.  We added prospecting, Bindomite, TSL, and transwarping.  We restructured Olympus, and improved the galaxy map.  We continued to improve the Nexus, and rearranged and improved a lot of the low to mid level content and missions.  We’ve continued to optimize and improve both the client and server and increased both the speed and reliability of both.

We did a huge revamp on the website, which now looks and functions way better than the old one, and is much more tightly integrated.  We did massive upgrades on the billing system, and improved the whole Space Point system.  We added the suggestion list, where we can propose new features that either we come up with or the players propose on the suggestion forum, and players can vote on them to let us know where out priorities should be.

We’ve recently updated the suggestion list so that it will better track what is currently under development and what has been completed.  As you can see, the solo wave-based challenges are underway, as are the class based super items that will be the rewards for those instances.  Both are coming along really well, especially the super-item rewards that we’ve been working very hard on to help make Star Sonata a little bit more action oriented and increase the cool abilities available to players.  These will be major improvements to the game that you guys should see in the early part of 2014.

Completed, and waiting for client and server patches are new extensive high score tables and improved in-game news that will bring all the lasted developer blog posts to the in-game log in screen.

The other major project we are making great progress on is a big class rebalance spearheaded by yclepticon and s_m_w.  There have been lots and lots of discussions, maths, and testing going on, and these class balance changes are already in large part on the test server.  This is going to give more active and interesting roles to every class and improve the game for everyone across the board.

After the class balance and class super items go in, we plan another big round of suggestions and suggestion voting to help determine the major improvements to bring you during the rest of 2014.

We love working on Star Sonata and constantly improving it.  Thank you to everyone who plays Star Sonata who make all of this possible.

It’s that time of the month for a monthly event! Since the new year is right around the corner, we’re gonna extend the event to the 31st! This month we have +75% experience and +25% augmenter drop chance!

It started on December 27th at 12:01am EST and it will end on December 31st (Tuesday) at around 12:30pm EST!

Enjoy!

EDIT: Surprise! We’re extending it through the 2nd at 12:30pm EST! Happy New Year!

This month is all about STUFF, and getting that STUFF and making it better STUFF. Okay, I’ll be serious. This weekend you’ll see a 25% increase in bindomite drops from dg’s, 50% increase in workers speed, and 25% increase in experience!

The event will run from Friday at 1:00pm EST to Monday at 12:59pm EST.

Now that we’ve hammered out most of the issues with the new website upgrade we’ve launched a new way of viewing all the patch notes, development notes, news articles, etc. Anything that comes as an official announcement from the development team will now go to this new page!

You might be wondering, “well how do I access this awesomeness?” To see the latest news, it’s just as simple as visiting http://www.starsonata.com! All of the latest articles will post to the front page. You can also click on the Community tab, and then click on News, to get to a nice page for all news updates. That page also has categories to the right, so you can sort by just patch notes, or just News articles.

Some of you are probably thinking, “Why’d you guys change this? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” The truth of the matter, is having our development posts separated from the forums improves something called “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization. Basically it will help our rankings on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. It also gives people a one stop place to check our news without being logged in. We still wanted the comments integrated into the forum. You’ve probably already noticed that every post that gets posted here will auto create a development notes thread for you to comment on. The existing News Forum and Updates Forum are now archived, and are sub forums of Dev Notes so you can refer to them if you need to.

We’ve also added RSS functionality to our new blog system, and we post all new articles straight to social media as well, so you’ll never be out of the loop on the latest happenings in the Star Sonata universe.

If you have any questions on how to access your Star Sonata news, send me an email to bageese@starsonata.com and I’ll help you out!

As part of our ongoing efforts to facilitate player feedback and better understand our players we are launching a biannual player survey! This survey asks all sorts of questions from demographic related questions to Star Sonata content questions! All responses are completely anonymous and will help out the development team tremendously. If you have any questions about the survey please email me at bageese@starsonata.com and I will address any questions you have.

Without further ado here is the link to the survey!

www.starsonata.com/survey

This blog post I am anticipating to be MASSIVE so I’ll bold all the important goodies so you can skim over my ramblings if you desire.

Recent Shenanigans

We really appreciate your tolerance and patience as we go through some nasty client and server crashes at the beginning of this universe. Unfortunately there are just some things that we just cannot test until it hits a new, live universe. As a dev team, we always try to anticipate bugs and crashes, and mitigate the new uni crashes, but they always happen, and it’s part of what comes with being a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Our server administrator, Jey, has been nothing short of a wizard without sleep looking at each crash with excruciating detail to fix it. He’s been also working with a select group of testers to address client crashing issues to push them live to everyone else.

We understand how you just want to curl up next to your dog on a Saturday and watch the universe explode into a fiery hot mess of chaos, then reestablish itself anew, so you can explore the uncharted territory. We understand how jarring it feels when you are establishing your empire and pumping those colonies full of those silly peasants and everything suddenly goes black. We understand the cold sweat and the fits of rage from that “connecting” message. We understand that you want to rip that keyboard from the computer and chuck it out the window, sending your dog to hide under the nearest table. We understand. And you shouldn’t have to deal with it, but we’re glad you stick with us, even through your dog’s whimpering and the tears of rage. So we’re going to give you stuff so maybe you’ll feel just a little bit better. Two days of extra subscription time has been automagically added to every pay to play account to compensate for the crashes. We’re also tweaking and boosting plans to the monthly event for compensation, but that’s at the end of the post.

Halloween 

Halloween in Star Sonata is just around the corner. We’re kicking off festivities on Friday, October 25th, and ending the sugary fright fest on November 8th. Blue Dwarf has added some frightfully awesome new items, that you’ll want to turn your sound on for. Scare the daylights out of your friends and enemies with our new Sound Projectors!

Monthly Event

It’s also that time of the month for your Monthly Event! We’re going to be doing things a little bit differently this time around and we’re going to be trying out DOUBLE the spawn rate on the Halloween AI for the weekend. We were also going to accompany this with some 50% experience boost, but in the wake of the recent shenanigans on the server, we’ve decided to up this to DOUBLE EXP. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL. This Monthly event will also last a whole extra 24 hours! 

October’s Monthly event will have Double Halloween Spawns, Double EXP, and begin on Friday, October 25th at 1:00pm EST, and end on Tuesday October 29th at 12:59pm EST. 

Thanks for sticking with us through the frights and the chaos. We’ll see you in the universe.

-Marty

EFNN NEWS BULLETIN

Subspace has been stirred…

Defenders have reported a dangerous increase in hostile alien activity! Could this hostility be a feint to hide an even more nefarious plot? It is according to the Lyceum! A report recently released by top researchers claims the aliens are destabilizing the anomalies scattered throughout their sectors. This report further theorizes that should this activity be left unchecked, our universe will see increasing levels of gravimetric flux! Although graviton theory is still in its infancy, preliminary research has led the team of Lyceum researchers to believe these forces could shred the very fabric of space-time! It seems the Aveksaka have ‘gone nuclear’. Let’s hope our brave soldiers can stop them in time!

Chaz Manly, EFNN

—–

The Universe is at it’s end. The current universe will end on:

October 19, 2013 at 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

All ships will carry over, but permanent assets such as bases will not. For more information, check out this guide on Universe Resets.

So in the old tried and true we’ve decided to do Double EXP before we start making our monthly events more exciting, and dare I say, more dangerous. So level those alts and get that experience!

This monthly event will start at 12:00am EST on Friday September 27th and end at 11:59pm on Sunday September 29th.

Well well, it’s getting to that time of year again. Before you know it you’ll be blasting open presents and beating up that Astro-Grinch for his goodies, and remembering the pain that is Spiked Egg Nog. But before all of that, is a very special day, a day of candies and costumes.

To lead up to this lovely occasion, which is obviously Halloween, we, the Dev Team would like to hear all your scary stories, the more terrifying the better! The best ones will be justly rewarded.

You have until October the 13th to submit your stories. Good luck. Please post your submissions here.