Jey

Still working on fixing the issues on the current beta client, progressing steadily but still unable to give an eta, could be now or could be this weekend. There is a full patch in preparation, date will be announced once it’s certain. I also did some slight tweaks to our database configuration to reduce the website slowdown whenever the team scores are updated.

Blue Dwarf

Not a lot of interesting stuff going on in my world of late, but I’ve got some good stuff on my plate for next week!

Col Legno

I have had a horrible frustrating week of no internet! But despite that, I managed to fix the sentinel spawner issue in Trials of Adum. After it’s patched in you’ll be able to do the trials without being auto aggro to the sentinels.

Ryan

Moving!

Jeff

Working on a new look for the new account dialog.

Player questions!

Question 1

What are your favorite aspects of Star Sonata? Such as combat, building bases or the colony/ruin system.

Col Legno: I like having alts on everyone’s teams and know peoplg. Game politics and social interactions.
Jey: trading and politics
Jeff: building bases
Ryan: bases and teams
Blue Dwarf: Story, lore and universe generation and teams in the days when I was more active.

Question 2

Anything more you can tell us about the Steam launch, understanding you cant reveal everything now. Such as when it happens will be it be something mid-uni or timed to align with a uni reset? Are servers prepared to handle that big of a influx of new players in the Nexus? Any big changes or other things in the works you guys are doing specially to support and refine the game for the steam launch?

Jey: Uni reset is not needed for steam
Jey: Server have a queue system planned to handle the influx
Jey: Rest is content so I cant answer those, but i hope more cleaning / bug fixing to ensure as smooth as possible experience for new players

Here’s the link to submit a question!

Universe Reset

Ahab’s Bubble and Squeek brews have been dropping in quality lately and that can only mean one thing! The Space Rats are falling ill. Enquiring with Farmer John, Ahab has established this is because the binding forces of the universe itself are breaking apart! Creaky the Robot predicts the final collapse will occur at August 29th, 1PM in the Earth time of Eastern Daylight Time. We hope to see you all on the otherside!

It’s finally here! Apologies for May’s forgotten event, that was the weekend of my last uni exam for the year and then I was away the following weekend.

So to cut to the chase this event will include +150% XP, double DG and drop mod chances for six days (ending July 2nd, 13:00 server time).

Finally, starting with this event, all future weekend events will be every four weeks rather than the third weekend of every month and BobboBot on our IRC knows when the next event will be, which you can find out for yourself by sending ‘!countdown event‘ to him.

Enjoy the weekend folks!

The special bonus event:
In Improcerus there is a wave spawner, configured to spawn 9 iconic-ish AI in series. Improcerus only allows tech 0 ships and no slaves.

Provide me (post it in the forum) with a screenshot of the kill (in event chat) + your squad, and I’ll reward your squad once verified. The rewards will go to the squad leader, to be divied up.

For each kill there is a credit reward
1b credits for the first kill,
2b credits for the second,
4b for the third,
6b for the fourth,
8b for the fifth,
10b for the sixth,
14b for the seventh,
20b for the eighth and
40b for the ninth kill.

Additionally, if your squad makes over 30b your squad will get a free Zebucart skin (which’ll go on all Zebucart variations), if your squad makes over 10b your squad will get a permanent unique holoprojector.

We’re currently experiencing some unexpected downtime following the micro patch to address the source of the recent crashes.

It seems that the server is crashing on load and we’re currently looking into it.

Thank you for your patience.

**Update** The biggest part of the migration is now done, the web and game should be fully functional, but the migration is still in progress in parallel so expect a few hiccups here and here.

the new irc is accessible using irc.starsonata.com port 7777
or
kiwi irc
or
mibbit irc

As mentioned in http://www.starsonata.com/blog/new-servers-migration-soon/ we have been working on new server hardware / location to increase performance on the webserver/database/test servers and in doing so found upgrade for all our machines. The downtime will begin at 11h00 pm ET (server time) and will last about 8 hours

I have been doing just about everything that could be done without causing downtime to shorten / facilitate the final transition. But a final downtime is still needed to move the dynamic data (forum data, game database), to update the dns and tie everything together on the new servers.

During that downtime, the website will be switched over to a maintenance page. Forum, wiki and blog will all be disabled to allow for a clean transfer. The game server will also be stopped to allow for the database and website communication interface to be transfered without problems.

Website and other secondary services will come back up as they become available. The game server will be the last thing to come back up and in all likelyhood won’t happen before those 8 hours are elapsed.

It’s that time of the year again, with all kinds of fun easter stuff!

Until the 13th of April, Easter Warren’s in Sol for a lot of fun missions to do.

The (Zombie) Easter Bunny is back as well, with a vengeance! Can you manage to kill him?

We also have the roaming rats and egg crates, as well as some Easter drops which drop… Everywhere!

Are you ready to hunt some eggs?

As an added bonus, we’ve added a +40% XP bonus until the end of the event. Enjoy, everyone!

This weekend, we’re doing a bonus XP event focuses on the new Perilous Perilous area! AI there will be dropping global +5% xp boosts like crazy! We’ll also have some powerup spawners like the last event going at the same time. Like last time though each account can only have 1 boost active at a time, so the more people in perilous perilous the higher the boost will be. Unlike our last event though, these aren’t tied to limited time spawners. So the XP limit will be based only by how many people participate! If everyone on at the time of the post were to go scoop an XP buff, we’d have +500% xp! We’re also introducing a limited time item that will be a rarer drop that will give a level to any character that uses it (up to level 9000). Like the global xp boosts, it’ll be dropping from AI in Perilous Perilous as well as dungeons there.

We hope everyone enjoys the event!

This weekend we are adding Global XP Boosts into Perilous Space. Each one will trigger a +5% XP for everyone in the game for 30 minutes. There are 40 randomized spawners, and the effects stack, so if people manage to collect all 40 at once, there will be a bonus of 200%. The only caveat, is that each account can only have one boost active at once, so you will need 40 different people in order to stack 40 boosts simultaneously.

There’s a bug in the text, where when you trigger it, it says the total boost is currently 0%, but when you log in, there is a message stating the correct amount, and when you get XP, it tells you correctly how much additional bonus XP you get.

I’ll start you guys off with a special boost that adds 25% for one hour.

The universe is becoming unstable. It is expected to collapse into a big crunch January 31. All deployed bases and drones will be lost, but out of the crunchy ashes, a new big bang will erupt and a new universe will be born. All ships will somehow survive and be able to quickly colonize this new universe for the glory of … whoever happens to colonize it the greatest.

Expect to see some “Perilouser Perilous Space” amongst other additions.

Some of us admins are tired of you guys killing everything so easily, so we’ve gotten together and built up a galaxy of bases in Porellis in Perilous Space. This galaxy has been set to allow placement of user bases. We challenge you to take us down!

There is no gear on any of these bases that normal players don’t have. And I only have, like, 30 Station Mastery skill, I swear. And just one pet helping to guard the galaxy.

5 Tarnished Imperial Chests will be awarded to anyone listed as the killer of any of these bases in their black box reports.

It’s finally here!

All things are a go in the universe for Christmas. Lapland has appeared, Astro-Santa is giving gifts in Earthforce Space and Sol has been donned it’s santa hat, unfortunately it brings with it that reject of a Grinch roaming Perilous Space in a pair once again.

A slight change of plan

Due to requiring a patch to add this years christmas letters from the competition and there’s no one to do it right now, I’ve pushed ahead with the main event, using last years letter’s. These will be replaced soon, and the missions will change when they do. To remind you, last year’s winners were:

• epicninja
• Tom Daedalus
• reaper pride
• Platinum
• AfriendlyCanadian

Once this year’s winners have been picked, things will be sorted for their letters to go live and I’ll update this post with the winners

That’s it, so from everyone at Star Sonata, Merry Christmas! Have fun!