Developer’s blog - May

Hello space pilots!

I hope you have had a great action-packed spring with all the Demaners invading our systems! However these are not all the surprises we have in store for you. This update will be fairly short, because as we are pressing forward with all of our long-term complex features we’ll be rolling out this year, we are also looking into pressing game issues, which were brought to our attention by you. And there is one particular point I would now like to put forward for a discussion.

After dealing with LoW gate and Battlerays next thing on our plate is the so called PvP-misson pushing. Some of our PvP-missions were designed to be very accessible to all kinds of players. Unfortunately, that leads to them being exploited by players with multiple accounts.While we are looking for ways to fix these problems long-term, we also have a few ideas for quick fixes, which we don’t quite like, and that’s where we want to hear your opinion.

The problem with these missions is that players kill each other over and over and just earn the mission reward. Generally, we have the anti-pushing system which makes sure that players don’t get rewarded for killing the same enemies too often, but it doesn’t apply to missions. So here are two options I would like to discuss:

• Count cooldown.If you kill the same player over and over, he would be counted for missions only once per X minutes, let’s say 45 minutes. This is a stricter rule than we have for general pushing, but I think we need strict rules for missions.
• Apply anti-pushing to missions. The other option would be to apply the general anti-pushing rules to missions. So whenever a player would stop getting rewards for a certain enemy, that enemy would also no longer be counted for missions.

We are not particularly happy with either of these ideas because they would just make multi-accounting more time-consuming, but would not solve the problem. However, that would be one step in the right direction. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

Yours truly,
KrisKelvin
Lead Game Designer, DarkOrbit

P.S. Several pilots have been taken ill with symptoms of the unknown disease. I thought you’d want to know.

>Feedback thread