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Oct
12

Vendetta Online 1.8.495

VO 1.8.495 includes:
- New experimental unaligned pirates show up in Latos on Saturdays around Noon Central (5-6pm in Europe). They are more likely to drop high-value capship parts, although it's still a rare occurance. They are independent of the other unaligned pirates.
- Fixed issue where swapping Aim and Throttle input regions on mobile didn't get applied immediately.
- Owners of User Access Keys no longer see other owners of the key unless you also own the Owner Key.
- The Keychain.list command is rate limited to one query at a time. Subsequent querys are queued up until the current query finishes. This may affect the speed of plugins that query all keys in a keychain in rapid succession.

We've spent a lot of time on server maintenance, over the last few weeks, but it's been paying off very well. Practically every single server and aspect of our infrastructure has been migrated, upgraded, and otherwise re-done. Some things have been made anywhere from 2x to 100x as fast, or more robust, or easier to maintain, or better monitored. This was much-needed maintenance, and puts the game in a much better place moving forward.

It may not sound like the most relevant thing to gameplay, but it directly bears on our plans. For instance, it's difficult for us to make major changes to large-scale gameplay (say, economics or mjoar nation-level AI) without effective analytics on the results, and our analytics system was aged and not really up to the task, so that needed a serious upgrade.

Similarly, we've been doing capacity tests on how well NPCs can scale on a given (single) CPU of the server back-end cluster, which clarifies for us exactly how far we can try to "push" things in a Universe Redux and other gameplay updates that directly impact on the number and distribution of NPCs.

Last night's addition of some new Pirates was a quick thing to hopefully a little content that people might gather around on Saturday afternoons (or evenings, European time), as people had been asking for more Unaligned-Pirate related content. We do have a lot more complex plans for the Pirates, but we only had a small window to try and add something new.

As always, thanks for your patience and support everyone, and have a great weekend!