Developer’s blog (25.03.15)

Hello space pilots!

Spring has finally arrived(at least officially)! And as the days are getting longer, we are preparing to bring online some of the awesome updates, we’ve been working on for quite a while.

Most of our efforts are now aimed at fixing problems and rolling out long awaited features, like moving the inventory from the website to the game client, and performance optimizations – which you might have noticed with the client refactoring. We’ve also been addressing other game issues, for instance, the Battleray fix I’ve mentioned in the previous blog, which went live already. We are also looking into some other pressing issues in the honor system, and also taking measures against pushing.

The design team is working closely with community management to identify and close loopholes. I admit that sometimes it takes us a while, but in many cases we have to introduce a very precise fix in a very complex system. Because of that, we’d rather spend more time up front, and carefully consider changes that won’t make matters worse.

On that note I want to use this opportunity to thank our moderators, who are doing a great job in collecting and summarizing feedback. Although it may seem like a long path from a player’s comment in chat or a post on the forum, to an actual design decision - but, as I’m literally sitting next to our Community Managers -please know that they immediately bring pressing issues to my attention, and we also discuss all the reports you send in. And as always, I’ll be reading the reply thread to this post on English, Russian and German forums. I hope this month I’ll have more time and will be able to reply more frequently.

Finally, as I’ve promised in the last month’s update, here are some details on what we are planning to do next:

• By the time this blog is published, the Domination event should already have started – I hope that you enjoy hunting that Demaner, which now appears every day of the event!
• Coming up next is a brand new event that is planned for April – the whole Galaxy is about to be infected with a mysterious virus, that slowly takes control over the mind of its victims. There will be a whole lot of different surprises in this event, but I must warn you that if you’ll get infected, you’ll start hearing voices! That means, apart from normal missions, there will be special missions for infected pilots, because, as I said, the virus will influence minds.
• And of course, we also continue working on major features, such as moving the inventory from the website to the game. We’ll get back to you as soon as we’re ready to begin beta tests, and we’ll greatly appreciate your feedback, once the time has come.

This spring is going to be really exciting! See you in the Orbit.

Yours truly,
KrisKelvin
Lead Game Designer, DarkOrbit

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