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Alduin
12-04-14, 09:19
Hello Runners,

Testing Release Candidate Six
There is a lot to do! We need your help!

Details on how to get the resistance values for your shields can be found in Bragi's post (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155325-R-186-T-186-T-191-Patch-Discussion&p=2226631&viewfull=1#post2226631).

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Since the balancing related changes affect all weapons in game (so also mobs!) we also need to make sure that PvE is not broken. Please log in on your PvE chars and hunt down a few Warbots, Ceres Trooper, a few of Regant's soldiers and more. On top of that, the low level PvE balance might have changed considerably, so please also have a look at how hard it is/has become to level a new character on Vedeena now. Release Candidate Two touched again quite a lot of PvE related settings, so please head over again to Vedeena to test!

Last but not least: tell your friends about these changes and kick their asses to go with you to Vedeena and have some PvP there, however do not expect your previous setups to be as good as before, experiment, try out new things and tell us whether the possible choice of weapons has now increased and whether everything feels more balanced now. Please test 1vs1 as well as group PvP. It would be great if we could even get some feedback from a larger fight at an outpost.

Anyways thank you very much in advance for all your testing! It is time to take the first step towards a better balancing in Neocron together!

UPDATE - How to test/what to test
Have a look at Bragi's excellent post (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155325-R-186-T-186-T-191-Patch-Discussion&p=2226631&viewfull=1#post2226631).

UPDATE - T#197 - Release Candidate Six:
Balancing related changes:

Fixed the enormous amount of psi some spells were consuming
Fixed a bug preventing psi users from buffing themselves
Removed the range effect from Devourer-like, Ray of God-like and Lightbringer-like weapons
Hitpoints restored to their original value
Reticule closing speed of the Disruptor has been lowered


UPDATE - T#196 - Release Candidate Five:
Balancing related changes:

APU spells: psi use is now proportional to the damage per shot of a spell (this will probably still need very heavy fine tuning), except for the anti spells whose frequency is too low for this approach to work
Barrels damage output is now approximately equal to the damage output of other AoE weapons
Single target heals now do 50% less heal per tick
Sanctum and group heals should do ~ half the healing per tick than in 195
Overall player hitpoints have been lowered by 1/3 to compensate for the lower PvP damage
Casting time of the "Holy Unprotector" has been changed to 4 seconds
Casting time of the "Anti Protector/Absorber/Deflector/Heal" spells have been changed to:

3.5 seconds in case of the normal version
3 seconds in case of the blessed version
2 seconds in case of the holy version

APU aiming correction has been changed, details see below


Technical changes:

High frequency spells should now work as intended
Calculation of the effective frequency for weapons in the item information window should be fixed


APU aiming correction: previously, the apu did by default 65% of his intended damage if "his aim was closed less than 65%" if it was closed further he did more damage, up to 100% if it was fully closed. This has been implemented to compensate for the fact that opposed to other weapons the apu's casts would not miss their target. We have changed this as follows: the baseline damage output of the apu is now 90% instead of 65%. Depending on how much his aim is closed when starting the cast this will increase to 100% if the apu's aim is fully closed.

UPDATE - T#195 - Release Candidate Four:
Balancing related changes:

Drones have been balanced according to the same rules as for the other weapons, AoE of drones has not yet been taken into account
Drones damage output is 10% less than heavy combat weapons (which are at the moment the reference and therefore set to 100%)
The test NPCs have been dromified, because the collision model of the elves is broken
Frequency of all APU spells has been raised
Clip size differences between rares and normal weapons has been removed
Unprotector has now been also moved to the APU
Duration of psi based heal effects has been halfed (30 seconds instead of 60 seconds)
Duration of hacknet heal effects has also been halfed (60 seconds instead of 120 seconds)


Technical changes:

A minor bug in the calculation of the casting time for spells has been fixed
STORM laser showing the wrong model has been fixed (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155580-01166-R-186-T-194-S-T-O-R-M-Laser)
Beam weapons should now work exactly as burst weapons do
The burst nature of bursts has been fixed, so instead of a monotonous pew, pew, pew, pew... burst weapons should now do a pew, pew, pew, wait, pew... again


Drones deal less damage than all other weapon types, because Droners do not need to engage in combat situations physically they only engage in combat remotely via their drones.

The duration of the psi based heals has been halfed, because with the move of the anti shielding spells from PPU back to the APU, the PPU has lost quite some of his workload.

State of the hacknet: at the moment, according to the few reports we got so far, the hacknet is rather messed up. Whether it will remain this way when this patch hits retail will mainly depend on two things: our time schedule and your hacknet testing efforts. If everyone agrees that we can safely ignore hacknet throughout phase one, we will ignore it and not spend time on it. Phase two will be delivered faster than phase one. Balancing patches as well as patches in general will move to smaller sizes in the future, so we can iterate more often!

UPDATE - T#194 - Release Candidate Three:
Balancing related changes:

Fall damage should be back to normal, the synchronization between client and server has been fixed
Mob versus Player damage has been reduced by 25% or in other words: reverted the change in damage of mobs versus players
Melee damage raised by another 2.5% they are now 7.5% stronger than heavy weapons at the same TL
Fixed a bug in the damage balancing for shotguns
Nanite and psi heals on the same tl should now be en par
The frequency of several single target apu spells has been increased, primarily of those which previously had a very low frequency, like e.g. the holy lightning or the fire apocalypse
Damageboosts have been fixed. Instead of even the lower damageboosts reaching the damage amplification cap with one cast, they should not be able to do so anymore
Frequency of all apu spells has been limited to at most 1 cast per second due limitations in the state machine controlling the different stages of casting
The following spells have been moved back to the APU:

Anti Deflector
Anti Absorber
Anti Protector
Anti Heal
(The Unprotector will be moved with the next patch)

Removed the healing effect from the following spells:

Anti Contamination
Anti Energy
Anti Poison
Anti Fire
Anti X-Ray
Catharsis


UPDATE - T#193 - Release Candidate Two:
Balancing related changes:

Damage output of most AoE weapons has been raised again by a factor of 2 compared to T#192, except for barrels
Barrels keept their damage output from T#192, because of their special nature compared to other AoE weapons
Player versus Mobs damage has been raised by a factor 2
Mob versus Mobs damage has been raised by a factor 2
Mob versus Player damage has been raised by 25%
Nanite tools should be correctly balanced now
An additional damage boost of mobs depending on their level has been removed, this is already achieved by the tl dependence of weapons
Disruptor burst lowered to 3 instead of 4 shots

UPDATE - T#192 - Release Candidate One:
Balancing related changes:

Weapons now receive an additional damage boost of at most 2.5% depending on their aiming speed
Weapons now receive an additional damage boost of at most 2.5% depending on the number of shots in a burst
Damage output of most AoE weapons has been lowered by a factor of 4 (see below)
Fall damage should be back to normal
Overall damage has been lowered a bit
Hacknet weapons/shields/heals have been balanced according to the same rules as other weapons/shields/heals
Shield strength has been increased a bit compared to T#191
Damage boost should be working again

Technical changes:

Character stats updates *should* now be enforced right after the synch so the instant death after zoning out of hacknet bug (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155294-01023-Instant-death-hacknet-zoning) should be fixed
The update rate of health and damage related packages has been increased to decrease the number of players dying due to heartattacks while hunting


Altered AoE weapons: all AoE weapons (psi barrells, psi multi target bolts, rocket/grenade launchers, raygun and fusion cannons) except the ball blast spells have been altered. The ball blast spells have been excluded for now. We need to know whether some AoE suffer from this too much or whether some do not suffer enough from this change! Please compare the damage output of e.g. baralles to comparable single target spells at around the same techlevel.

Aiming speed correction: is a multiplicative correction calculated as follows: correction = 1 + 0.025f * ((highestAimSpeed - w.AimingSpeed) / aimingSpeedDifference), where aimingSpeedDifference denotes the aiming speed difference is the difference in aiming speed between the weapon with the highest aiming speed and the lowest and w.AimingSpeed denotes the aiming speed of the current weapon to be balanced.

Burst correction: is a multiplicative correction calculated as follows: correction = 1 + 0.025f * ( 1 + (w.shotCount - highestBurstCount) / burstDifference), where an analogous naming convention has been used.

UPDATE - T#191:
Shields have been rebalanced
Heals have been rebalanced
Overall damage has been lowered by a factor ~ 2

UPDATE - T#190:
Added actor definitions needed to be able to warp to the new shooting range, placed one entrance to the shooting range at Plaza 1.

UPDATE - T#189:

Aggressive damage over time effects - contamination, fire, x-ray, poison and energy stacks - have been reworked and should now work as intended.
Weapons with the same tech level from the same category (pistol, rifle, etc.) should now do the same amount of damage per minute/second, this is now independent of whether they do damage over time or instantly.
Due to the heavy refactoring of underlying code the corresponding particle effects now look slightly different.


Compared to the damage per minute/second of cannons:

Melee weapons do 5% more damage
Pistols and Rifles do 10% more damage
APU Spells do 15% more damage


Support abilities such as PPU heals and shields are still broken.
"Reverse LoMs" have been re-enabled on the test server.
We have added a "shooting range" which lets you test your damage output on, static, dummy NPCs. These NPCs only have 20% overall resists.
The frequency values in the weapon's info window have been also fixed.
UPDATE - T#188:

The damage of different ammo mods has been equalized. The only difference between different ammo types is now that they deal different types of damage.
UPDATE - Hotfix T#187:

There was an issue in the dpm curve which distorted it heavily. This issue has been fixed.
A temporary background of the new, still work in progress, NPC dialog has been added.

UPDATE - Testing focus:

Since the balancing approach used a brute force balancing, PPUs, tools and such will be completely out of balance. However, as detailed below, they are not to be tested, instead focus on testing classes amongst themselves!

UPDATE - (by Baldur):

How to cap your character on Vedeena (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155325-R-186-T-186-T-188-Patch-Discussion&p=2225938&viewfull=1#post2225938)


ORIGINAL POST

It has been a while since we’ve done this, so bear with us throughout this post!

It is patch time however! We have reset Vedeena’s database so that it matches Titan’s as of a couple of weeks ago. As a result, please pay important attention to the next set of information!


If you do not do this, you will not be able to get onto Vedeena! This build of the test server is using the current R#185 patch, so you must do the following:
Important: You have to start from the current retail client! So make a new copy of your current retail client and inside the ini subfolder edit updater.ini and change the HOMEURL to read: http://testserver.neocron-game.com
If you find that you only receive a landing page in your Launcher window, or an error, please make sure you have correctly changed the HOMEURL to the one listed above.

Apart from some buffer overflow and memory leak fixes, this patch also has some more interesting components, for example; Turrets have been enabled, anchored, and are not able to be placed inside each other anymore! Several AI scripts received a bit of love, several exploits have been fixed. Bugs have been fixed, and some fancy lighting options for weapons have been added.

However that's not all! This is also the first patch that contains balancing related changes! Extensive investigations have shown that the dependency of the frequency of weapons on the player's skill setup, messed up our initial balancing efforts on Sparta. Therefore we now implemented a new option which enables us to turn off this dependency, which we have done. In addition we balanced the damage output of weapons according to their tech level, eventually establishing a hierarchy between weapons based on their tech level.

Please keep in mind that this is just the beginning! This patch is intended to create a foundation (we probably all agree that the current status cannot be regarded as a proper foundation for further balancing efforts!) which we can build upon. In this patch the classes will only be balanced amongst themselves. Having fights across classes will probably not be balanced. Please focus the balancing related testing on fights with the same class: e.g. Tank vs Tank, Spy vs Spy or PE vs PE.

Further corrections to the balancing will be applied once we know that fights amongst the same class are balanced. To judge this we need your help! Please focus your testing on fights with the same class and send us your feedback. Please state which class you used, which skill setup and also which weapons you tried. Also please test whether there indeed is a DPM hierarchy amongst the weapons based on their tech level. The progress of this patch series will heavily depend on your feedback!


The question of, ‘Will the balancing related changes make it directly onto Titan?’ will depend heavily on your feedback, so please get involved! So after testing head over to the discussion thread (http://forum.neocron-game.com/showthread.php?155325-R-186-T-186-Patch-Discussion)!


Now for some really interesting stuff!

Patch Notes R#186 - T#186

BALANCING

The frequency of weapons has been fixed. It does not depend on the player's skills anymore
Balanced the damage output of weapons according to their TL, see Alduin's post
Characteristics (frequency, shot count, handling, ...) of weapons have been left untouched

NETWORK SETTINGS

Changed the use of USELOCALPORT in 'path/to/neocron/ini/updater.ini':

USELOCALPORT=0 now randomises the port on every client launch
USELOCALPORT=1 means using a predefined port via LOCALPORT=xxx

The availability of randomisation allows multiple clients to be launched without player intervention

OUTPOST TURRETS

Outpost Turrets are available again
Outpost Turrets no longer move when fired upon or damaged
Outpost Turrets can no longer be placed inside of each other

AI UPDATES

CopBot AI has been updated to include previously unused/deactivated audio when ending dialogues, pursuing players, killing players, and upon losing their target
NPCs with the (currently unused) PMAN AI now stop and face the player when talking or trading with them
NPCs with the PMAN AI now correctly greet runners
NPCs with the PMAN AI now only flee from players with weapons and no other NPCs such as CopBots
NPCs with the (currently unused) WAITER AI now correctly hide/duck to "evade" players with weapons

MISCELLANEOUS

WORK IN PROGRESS - The display of NPC dialogue has been revamped. This is our first step to become more familiar with the implementation of the RPOS
Client.exe now has an appropriate icon, players who use Windowed Mode will be able to more readily identify the Neocron Client
New configuration options added to the driver dialog window, giving players control of the dynamic lighting of shots, casting of shadows and more!
The decrease of intensity from dynamic lights, with the distance from the light source has been flattened. Dynamic lights now cast light over longer distances
When leaving a clan the Runner will keep his sympathy rating towards the faction instead of getting the one from the clan
Locked messages for Gene Replicators, Venture Warps, Apartment Interfaces and Vendors have been updated
Players are no longer kicked for being AFK with a drone in flight. You will still be kicked for being AFK if the drone becomes idle
Behaviour of AoE weapons has been updated to prevent abuse by LE equipped players


Sincerely,
Your Neocron Support Team