Patchnotes – May 2013

Hi Space Pilots,

We know that we post a lot of announcements about features and events, but that you cannot always see what we are doing to improve the game. This is precisely why we publish these monthly patch notes.

We implemented the following features, events, etc. in May:

New features

• * Credit Ship Rework
  
  * We relaunched the Nostromo with slightly modified values to make it more competitive. The values for the Piranha and Bigboy have also been adjusted accordingly. The Bigboy’s design was reworked and looks now much fancier than before.
  
  * Bigboy Ship Design
  
  * Solemn D-SO-01: The Solemn Design is our first ship design for the Bigboy. It is available in the Shop for 150,000 credits. Once your Bigboy is equipped with the Solemn Design, it gives you a 10% bonus on all EP gained in the game.
  
  * Veteran Designs
  
  * To give the Citadel, Spearhead and Aegis a new look, three Veteran Designs have been introduced to the game. Once equipped to one of the class-based ships, those designs will give the player bonuses of 5% Honor and 5% EP.
  
  Events (global and local)
  
  * May Day 2013 (global)
  
  * This event celebrated May Day, and so took place on all servers on May 1st, 2013 with the following features:
  
  * Special Event Quests without level restriction, event games (Level Invasion Gate, Sector Control), special bonus boxes with a flower design, and standard free base repairs. Additionally, Drones did not take damage upon ship destruction.
  
  * Victory Day (FR, CZ and RU only)
  
  * The event took place on May 8th, 2013 on all French and Czech servers, and on May 9th, 2013 on all Russian servers. It had the following features:
  
  * Event games (Sector Control, Level Invasion Gate), special bonus boxes with the respective national flag design on them and standard free base repairs. Furthermore, Drones did not take damage upon ship destruction.
  
  * Father’s Day (DE only)
  * The event took place on May 9th, 2013 on all German servers and had the following features:
  
  * Event games (Sector Control, Spaceball and Scoremageddon), special bonus boxes with a coaster wagon design on them and standard free base repairs.

Bug-fixes

• * Ship Skills: Weaken Shields & Fortress now calculate the damage to the shields correctly.
  
  * Booty Boxes: The Veteran Designs have been missing as loot for Booty Boxes but were added shortly after the Veteran Design’s release.
  
  * PvP rewards: High level players will no longer receive overly low rewards if they kill other players in a PvP fight on x-1 maps.
  
  * Galaxy Gates: In some cases the Uridium reward for finishing a Galaxy Gate was rewarded multiple times. This will not happen anymore.

Client

• * Hades Gate:
  
  * The Hades Gate is now only accessible if you are in a group of at least 4 players in total.
  
  * Fixed a bug where players would not get the final reward for the Hades Gate if they are in the killscreen when the gate ends.
  
  * Emperor Lordakium started moving without any interaction from the player. His behavior now once again works as intended.
  
  * Kronos Gate: There will no invisible NPC’s anymore in the Kronos Gate if you play it with Citadel, Spearhead or Aegis.
  
  * Titles: All titles should now be displayed correctly in the game client.
  
  * Space Maps:
  
  * The background graphic of the Pirate maps will no longer be displayed incorrectly.
  
  * Some map assets (e.g. ship wrecks, base) were not being removed correctly and caused memory leaks. This problem was solved and should not happen anymore.
  
  * WIZ Rockets: Victims will no longer show as Police ships with corrupted names if hit by a WIZ rocket.
  
  * Lordakias NPC’s have been displayed as Police ships. This was fixed and they appear as Lordakias again.

Website

• * Hades Gate: The log entry in the Uridium Balance for killing the bosses in the Hades Gate will now be displayed correctly and no longer state that the player has collected a Bonus Box.
  
  * EPPP: The restrictions for the visibility of the EPPP will now work as intended again.
  
  * Trade: Special characters will now be displayed correctly.
  
  * Galaxy Gate Materializer: You can no longer get more Galaxy Gate parts than needed to complete a Galaxy Gate.
  
  * Shop: The video for the Combo Guard Mode Gear (Level 1) is now displayed again.

Improvements

• * Hades Gate:
  
  * The EP and Honor rewards for the Emperor NPC’s have been adjusted.
  
  * An exit gate was added to the first stage of the Hades Gate in case players are unable to start the gate due to a lack of group members.
  
  * Messaging system:
  
  * The messaging rate limitation is stricter now for all users. The users are only allowed to send 1 message per level and day to players they are not befriended or in a clan with.
  
  * Credit Drones Repair for Credits:
  
  * To make the game more consistent the Flax Drone can now be repaired for Credits, similar to the way we changed it for the Credit ships. The price for the repair of one Flax Drone is 12,500 Credits but 7,500 Credits for Premium users. One side effect of
  
  this change is that the sell price of the Flax Drone has been adjusted to a fix value of 100,000 Credits each.
  
  * Clan Battle Station:
  
  * Players will now only get Uridium rewards from CBS modules if they destroyed it completely. This change was made to close a loophole where players dealt damage to CBS modules and then exchanged them before they got destroyed. With this exploit players were able to gain large amounts of Uridium. The exploited Uridium has been removed from the exploiter’s accounts.
  
  * Landing page: * We updated the trailer on the DarkOrbit landing page www.darkorbit.com to the most recent version.

Furthermore, we carried out quite a few additional bug fixes, text corrections and other improvements.

Regards,

Your DarkOrbit team

Thank you to Energy for their assistance with this thread.

Originally posted 18.06.13