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Uncapped Freemium Play on All Platforms

Vendetta Online is now effectively Free To Play on all platforms, including Windows, Mac and Linux. What does this mean?

• All level caps have been removed from the game, across all platforms.
• Freemium users may now create Guilds, and submit Events.
• New PC accounts now default to Freemium membership (just as Mobile has for years), and expired Subscriber accounts will fall back to that status.
• Lite Members may construct and use Goliath-class Capital Ships, and may gain 50% more Crystal per day from NPC kills.
• Premium Membership is still required for usage of Trident-class Capital Ships, and some other features. More "endgame" content and bonuses will be added to Premium, as well.
• Technically, all players may now construct Capital Ship components, but final assembly and usage is limited by membership tier.
• Secure In-App Purchasing is now available on PC version of the game, using our in-house billing system.
• The entire Freemium model will continue to evolve, as time goes on. Systems may be adjusted, new ways to spend "Crystal" will appear, as well as ways to earn it.

This change has been long planned, making things more consistent and comprehensible across all platforms, and we're happy to see it finally launch.

We hope you'll stop by and say hi! A lot of things are changing, and it's a great time to be a part of the process.

Corporate Sector Run and other Events

Prizes for the Corporate Sector Run, the persistent Event and in-game race run on Saturdays at 9pm UTC (4pm CDT) have been enhanced, with the wording clarified about the availability of prizes both for people who race, as well as those who hunt the racers.

Further expansions can be expected here, with simpler events during the week, leading to high prize events on the weekend, as well as eventual Monthly and Quarterly finals, and perhaps a Yearly points system and ladder ranking. Permanent Badges are also likely, for event winners.

The Open TeamDX is also being hosted on Saturday the 22nd, and we recommend stopping by for that Player-run Event as well.

Prediction Monitoring

PvP combat against players on poor internet connections has long been an area of some contention, as people with a lot of packet loss will sometimes visibly jump around in the game, making PvP more frustrating.

In the last few years, we've added features, like the ability to see a "color" associated with a selected ship target, giving you a ballpark idea of that player's connection quality, before engaging.

Recently, this has been expanded with Prediction Monitoring. This is a much more complex and aggressive system, that monitors whether flight behaviour maps to server-predicted expectations, based on the user's network connection.

If there's too significant of a variance from what's expected, the Game Server will forcefully re-position the player to a more reasonable position, while leaving them continuously in motion (so they are not a "sitting duck", but are possible to attack).

This mitigates would-be cheaters who intentionally cause packet loss on their own connections, to make their movements more challenging to track.

To minimize the impact of this system on most "daily life" in the game, it is limited only to interactions involving multiple players within a limited range, who are not in the same group.

This means most "botting" and other solitary activity is unaffected, and grouping up with friends during PvE play will give best results to players on difficult network connections.

The system will continue to be tweaked and tuned as time goes on, but we expect this to be beneficial for PvP moving forward, including planned enhancements to the Duel system.

Deneb Conflict Changes

Deneb Warfare, between the Itani and Serco, has been re-structured around feedback from the Suggestions Forum.

• Deneb "Conquest Points" are now the determining factor for which side wins in a given week, and listed on the game website. The skirmish sizes have been separately weighted at 12 for Battle, 8 for Large, 5 for Medium, 3 for Small, and 1 for Fighter.
• Players are no longer kicked out of the mission for friendly kills.
• Friendly kills in Deneb no longer count against your nation's casualty count.
• Valkyrie and Prometheus NPCs in Deneb have been replaced by Vultures in "Fighter" sized Skirmishes, and no longer carry Rockets in other sized Skirmishes.
• The winning "side" of Deneb is now able to purchase Neutron Blaster MkIIIs in their home nation for the following week.

More work remains to be done on Deneb, such as better equalizing the initial locational advantages of the Itani vs Serco sides, along with Badge related accomplishments, and related content availability.

Improvements for High Ping Players, Game Performance

We've drastically shortened load-times for all players in the last few months, but especially for individuals on high-ping network connections. Switching sectors is a much more rapid process, now.

Client-side Physics Prediction also makes the new "dynamic" physics objects more satisfying to knock around, over the network.

Performance in debris-intensive sectors has also been further improved, in some cases drastically (PCs with full shadow support), making the more widespread usage of debris something we're likely to see in the near future.

Multi-core performance has also been enhanced, particularly on Windows machines. These improvements will become more relevant we as roll out more intensive content.

Other Announcements Coming..

Significant plans exist for the rest of the year, and 2021, but we'll have to wait for the September newsletter before we start to discuss that in more detail.

Update History

Here's a recap of other updates, since the last Newsletter. As usual, this doesn't really represent "everything we've been doing", but it shows some of the player-visible changes that have been made:

• Mitigated a bug with duplicate NPCs (Leviathans, etc) showing up in some locations.
• Threaded AI path generation, plus other tweaks, to improve startup time on certain complex sectors.
• Network protocol optimization for requesting information about multiple players.
• Added NPCs to the new star system that may pursue you throughout the system.
• NPCs may continue to aggro on pilots after they dock and re-launch from capships.
• Queens now defend the Leviathan instead of drifting away.

..And many other changes.

Download the Game

You can install the game client for Android, iPhone and iPad, Samsung GearVR and Oculus Go, Google Daydream VR, as well as find the game on the Mac Store. Or, you can directly download the game installation for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Keep in Touch

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