Upcoming patch (updated 5/5/06)

Danjak

In Testing

Fixes/Updates being tested by Quality Assurance for an upcoming patch - Updated May 5:

• Respec feature added. Terminals in towns will allow players to purchase respec of attribute points, skill points and R&D points. Limit once every 48 hours and there is a cost. Players receive one free respec due to significant changes. Terminals can be found in: Tocado, Crossroads, Citadel, Upside, Apollo, Duenna.
• Loot linking now works within the same zone. Thus if you are in /say /general and /trade you can click on the item links and if the item is available it will appear. If the character is not in the same zone, the item will not popup, also there is a limit of 10 item windows at a time. There are future plans to make this work in the other channels across zones.
• Mission sharing: You can now see other convoy member's missions and the convoy leader can set the active mission for the convoy.
• Added new chat type: "4. Faction" (goes to all friendly players on an entire server).
• Many Enemies in the world of Auto Assault have become a little stronger and have adapted to player character assaults. Be warned, some of them may fight harder than in the past!
• Added new missions which include:
  • Biomek
    • 12 Level 19-20 missions
    • 3 Level 40 missions
  • Human
    • 4 Level 6 missions
    • 15 Level 38-40 missions
  • Mutant
    • 17 Level 30-34 missions
    • 10 Level 45-48 missions
• Added 12 new Level 80 missions with epic rewards.
• Added button to the clan window for accessing clan manager from anywhere.  Also, window should auto-resize display of the clan name with a smaller font if it's too big to fit in the window.
• All Bounty Hunter, Avenger, and Agent damage skills that are fired only while in stealth now have a significant bonus chance To Hit (+66%) and also have a Penetration bonus. In a future patch, there will also be a bonus chance for scoring a Critical Hit with these skills. The following skills have been updated:
  • Biomek - Total Surprise
  • Biomek - Explosive Nanites
  • Biomek - Ambush
  • Biomek - Acidic Surprise
  • Human - Electrical Radiation
  • Human - Crippling Bolt
  • Human - Explosive Wreckage
  • Human - Cheap Shot
  • Mutant - Avenger's Wrath
  • Mutant - Vengeance
  • Mutant - Looming Phase
  • Mutant - Excite
• Increased the chance of loot drops across all regions and levels in the game.
• All Bounty Hunter, Avenger, and Agent "stealth" skills now provide a significant Defense Bonus while in stealth.
• As soon as you memorize an item for the first time, now, it will be flagged as no longer being able to be memorized again from that point forward.
• When you equip a Rear weapon, you will now get a little indicator in the hit points window which shows when they are ready to be used (it will be a green dot when you can fire a rear weapon and it will be red if you cannot).
• High level Xeno bosses have become tougher.
• Removed Crafting Research Point awards from a select few missions. Now the only way you can get Research Points is through leveling.
• Prices that vendors pay for more rare commodities have been increased.
• Tweaked all motorcycle physics.
• Tweaked critical hit formula.
• Fix for enhancement restrictions based on class restrictions of the items.
• Fixed bug where clan member titles would re-appear in the clan manager boxes when deleted.
• Minimized Tournament and Arena Console windows shouldn't keep resetting to the center of the screen if you drag them around.  They'll also remember these positions if you cancel them and later re-open them (though they'll reset to default if you log out).
• Some weapon FX behave more appropriately on other vehicles (i.e. missiles not firing back on their owners).
• Fix for healing items bringing you out of stealth on the server only.
• Fixed a number of armor gadgets that were marked for chassis, and a number of chassis gadgets that were marked for armor.

In Development

Things we are working on for future updates - Updated March 28:

• General
  • Fixing bugs.
  • Improving game performance.
  • Particle limiter for lower end machines.
  • Veteran rewards – more news on this soon.
  • Add over 850 new chassis variants of existing vehicles.
  • Make all oil droppers work as expected - causing vehicles to spin out if they drive through them and try to turn.
  • Remove the class restrictions on all Medium weapons, making more weapons available to more players.
  • Formulate a new loot generator variance %, which will decrease the overall variance of player weapons from their base, resulting in more level appropriate weapons.
• UI
  • Improve clan and convoy UI.
  • Skill descriptions to make skills easier to understand.
  • AI vehicle tuning and better creature movement.
  • AI vehicles as drivable mission rewards.
  • Improve vehicle physics and drivability, including motorcycles and tanks.
  • Improve collision with ragdolls.
  • Loot link.
  • Language filter for text and names (player, vehicle, clan).
  • UI visual touchups.
  • Interface sounds.
  • Showing "live" skill data on active skill rollovers, for example number of charges left.
  • Obelisk/Outpost icons in Ground Zero.
• Balancing/Skills
  • Balance work on classes, skills, XP, rewards, economy, and stores.
  • Balanced reinforcement (pets) and damage skills to be consistent across race/classes.
  • Complete balance pass on skill costs, ranks, ranges, power consumption, and several other factors.
  • Add new defense and repair skills to make support classes more valuable in groups and PvP.
  • Increase and adjust loot drops across all races and all regions to be consistent and balanced.
  • Balance the overall mission XP payout across Race and Region.
  • Balance the overall mission Clink payout across Race and Region.
  • Balance the overall Experience Point requirements per level based on level, mission XP payout, race, and leveling philosophy.
• Crafting
  • There will be an auction house (after release) making things easier.
  • Continuing to balance the drop rates on salvaged commodities towards the goal of making crafting challenging, but not impossible to get through.
  • Drops are also being balanced to increase the amount of player interaction through trade.
  • Comparing and adjusting the amount of destructible objects of each commodity group type between the races for balance, and bringing the object counts into parity by changing assignments for areas of inconsistency.
  • Addition of rare drop commodities to item recipes for higher rarity objects. Items that are more rare also tend to have better stats and the recipes will be adjusted to reflect this.
  • Making some items drop only broken and never drop broken. As a reward to crafters, some items will be flagged to always drop a broken version and will have their stats adjusted upwards slightly.
  • We will be taking some objects and removing the recipes, enhancement slots and gadget slots from them so they never drop broken. For example, a high level Xeno weapon that we do this to, may have its overall DPS increased to 35 from 25. This will make a very usable and desirable weapon drop into the world, but since it can't be experimented on or gadgeted it won't ever be the best item.
  • Changing memorization: Memorization is becoming patenting. Instead of being able to create endless amounts of items when an item is memorized, the players will now get a limited patent from INC with the ability to reproduce an amount of copies equal to 10 plus their rank in the memorization skill (minimum 11 max 20).
  • Reverse engineering: Players will no longer be able to reverse engineer anything that has been crafted by another player. For example, when an item is repaired via a broken item kit or created through memory the item will be tagged with a "patented by <name>". This means that no one else will be able to reverse engineer that specific item except for the person it is patented to. This change will stop item spidering and players undercutting each other, giving the players the feeling of really being able to create a one of a kind item. This change will also lessen the impact of an uber items' effect on the game play.
  • We are changing the rarity on the more powerful enhancements. This is especially the case for enhancements that increase skill levels.
  • Enhancements that have no recipe on them will make the item unable to be reverse engineered. This stops people from getting enhancements on items for free through crafting.
  • We are revisiting the enhancement group breakdowns and adjusting the recipe groups to be smaller so the random experimentation is less severe. We are also revisiting the recipes in general on enhancements as some of the lower level ones are too difficult.
  • The algorithm for tinkering success is being revamped so that an increase in the skill is more rewarding. Right now 1 point added to tinkering may only increase your success chance by 1 or 2%.
  • More passes are being done on the crafting disciplines to identify and eliminate holes in the progression through the disciplines.