State of the Game June/July 2016

Hello everyone,

If you have been with the game for more than a few months, you will know that many things have changed recently. We are making an effort to give all kinds of players access to previously expensive “power” items by adding the Assembly, running special sales to make them more affordable, by introducing ship designs through Ship Customization and providing new approaches to progress in the content in general.

In the course of developing these things we had to touch several old systems – like the ship management or our item database. You might compare this to the refurbishment of an old and dusty clockwork: the clockwork still runs but there have been so many additions that at first we have to disassemble the thing, clean the cogs, repair and replace broken parts, and then put the whole thing back together. Sometimes this goes flawlessly, sometimes we find that certain cogs and wheels now do something unexpected.

It is not our intention to release buggy or unstable updates, but the impressively long live time of DarkOrbit offers a lot of unique challenges. The game has been organically growing for a long time and we sometimes fail to foresee all the potential issues that come with adding and repairing even tiny pieces of code.

Our QA has long lists of all the things that have to be tested over and over again, in every single new version we prepare for release – but in a game with this many complicated and interconnected systems, these tests can never cover all possible scenarios. Even a public beta test, where we activate the biggest pool of testers available to us, we can’t always reveal every remaining issue – as we witnessed again in the recent past. Sometimes they are not noticed as errors during OBT, and sometimes they only turn up under real live conditions.

Please believe us that we are as disappointed and upset as you are when we find out that things did not go according to plan.

It is our continued mission to move DarkOrbit away from being “pay to win” by making several features easier to be affordably accessible for our players. We are running discounts so you have to pay less Uridium for e.g. creating Galaxy Gates or increase the return on your investment; we have added the assembly to make certain items accessible through game play (with permanent recipes) alone; we are working on concepts to solve the population issues, to address requests for features that are important to our players and to the future-proofing of the game.

What we are doing right now is to fix bugs and coordinate our compensation efforts before adding more functionality to the game. Also we are improving and extending our tool-set so that scheduling errors, like we saw in the past weeks, are less likely to happen.

All in all we want you to know that we are not deliberately trying to make your game experience worse, but exactly the opposite – it’s a result of us trying to improve the game and repeatedly stumbling across hurdles built years ago that we just now come across.

We are really, really sorry for all these issues, and we hope to continue having you on board for many future years of DarkOrbit to come.