I have seen 8 Serco transports being spawned within the last 30 minutes, while only 1 Itani transport got underway in the same time window. Either somebody found a way to exploit the transport spawning or something is seriously screwed up server-side.

I'll say it again...convoys are broken.

I really think the devs need to start worrying about these things (game balance) now that the game is released.

<rant>
This is ridulous, seriously. A couple of issues:

1. For every Itani transport 3-4 Serco transports spawn.
2. UITs can kill our transports in Itani space and the defbots don't give a damn. They don't even get a significant faction penalty. To add injury to insult, I got a huge faction penalty for killing an UIT right after he blew up our transport in Itani-defended space _and_ the defbots tried to kill me. WTF?
3. A prom can fly with infinte turbo and carry stuff home. No valk can catch it.

I understand mining is important and all, but these are small things that totally kill the gameplay and they all can be fixed in 5 minutes. If there is no time to fix it, take out CTC until it makes sense again. Its the only RP element right now and its very frustrating if its totally broken and nobody seems to care.
</rant>

I think that spawning is based on when cargo is brought to its destination. I've noticed that if an Itani convoy spawns and a Serco spawns, the next time a convoy spawns is related to who gets cargo to the ending destination first. I think also if a convoy is killed, it will spawn more frequently than normal.

As for the Prom infiniboosting and not being caught by a Valk, tell that to the guy who flies an infiniboosting Axia Bus.

the convoys leave 1 per hour (45 minutes?) from each station

when they leave within that time is random

you might get a serco convoy at the end of one slot and again at the beginning of the next

I've been on all day and the convots have been equal all day in number.

I was on yesterday and RelayeR can confirm that there were 8-10 Serco convoys under way at any given time. Sometimes 4 of them spawned at the same time. Oh and btw, the Axia Bus is totally nuts. No disagreement there.

Edit: Just look at the numbers. Itani and Serco were still tied around noon. 10 hours later Serco delivered 400 more cargo than Itani. Thats 25% of the cargo delivered during the rest of the week (10 hours vs 7 days).

Wait a second... the axia bus isn't THAT amazing. Yes it's a bus that's almost as good as the good vults (better than the mkI and mkII). But it's nothing game breaking. Certainly it doesn't come close to touching a VALK! I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who flies an axia bus... if you guys really don't believe that the bus is balanced I can fly a IDF valk or a Serco/Corvus/IV vult from here on out and show you how much worse the axia bus is.

I do think the bus is somewhat unbalanced. For its low mass it can carry too much cargo. But yes, the engines are a lot more unbalanced in general and the faction system is just totally broken.

andreas: There were 8-10 transports underway at one point but those included 6 transports that went out 3 to a convoy each and 2-4 others that were frozen or stuck in a storm.

There were no more releases than are normal.

As to the comeback by Serco on Friday night, Saturday... a large part of that effort was due to Lin, Ruby and others organizing a bunch of us to either attack Itani transports or guard Serco's. It was a massive effort by those involved and worked like a well oiled machine. THX and kudos to all involved.

the 400 point change was largely due to an organized effort by some of us serco over the course of the day. We concentrated on 2 things,
1-Getting ALL of our cargo home safely.
2-Preventing Itani cargo from getting to its destination. We didnt always try to take it back to serco space, as long as it timed out, we accomplished our goal.

See, players can make a difference in Vendetta! :)

Well, I think the loss of our milamar transports and the other disappearances of our transports can be called an exploit. From itani's side.

Same would be the warping-when-shot behaviour the itani transports fall into as soon as they reach Pelatus.

Or why not the Itani station on the outside of itani space, cutting down our attack opportunities with one compared to itani?

Or perhaps our endpoint being next to a grey system where yours is deep inside itani space?

hmm.....

eh?

"exploit" is when someone is actively using a bug to gain an unfair advantage.

If noone is behind this happening and it's "just" a bug then there is no exploitation going on.

Spellcast, Spider, Lin, Ruby and everyone else involved, I wish that I could have helped out more in the last few days, but I'm at the point in my school quarter that a bunch of papers are getting due, so I've been unable to play Vendetta as much as I'd like to. If I'm on, you can count on my helping, though - although there's some point where I'll have to spend some time leveling so I can get my Prom :)

Frankly the real "exploit" here is UIT players attacking the Itani transports in Itani space and not being penalized for it.

and in serco space, but yes, the UIT being able to blow up a transport in nation space and only get a -15 instead of the -1000 rep penalty is a major bug.

Aye, thats a bad one, Spellcast and celkan.

I've branded a few UIT players as KOS due to that behaviour. Its quite annoying.

Agreed ... the escorts are acting a little weird against uit. Sometimes I can kill transports with them completely ignoring me.

Dunno about the penalities. I got -200 once for killing a itani transport in jallik, but the escort actually reacted for once. Maybe that had something to do with it. *shrug*

There is only one thing i have to say ... we all know, that the convoys - for _both_ nations - are buggy atm. So, the only thing we can do, is wait for the fix and meanwhile deal with it.

That Serco won the contest has nothing to do with exploiting, it was a kind of - let's call it - straight management. Yoda gave the kick for it. Itani was nearly 200 cargos in the lead when we started on friday. We grouped and all players involved to that had a hard weekend with not much sleep and/or real life - some of us played for over 13 hours, died often, lost a lot of credits ... but we had fun ... ;)

So, just let's see what the update will bring us.

Linda
<Time spent online: 5 days, 1:12:29>

P.S.: My very special thanx to a great team ... let's make Lady Serco proud ... ;)