Cross-posting from News..

There have actually been several server-side releases over the last few weeks, covering a lot of ground, and including (as of tonight):

- Destroying Unaligned Pirate fighters and capships now rewards with Light and Heavy Weapon XP
- Unaligned Pirate fighters have a greater variety of occasional drops.
- Game protocol has been tweaked to enhance sector load times and network performance. Further tweaks coming.
- Lone Hive Queen escorts are now fundamentally more aggressive.
- Smaller NPC ships are now generally more effective at queuing and docking with stations, in large numbers.
- NPC Capital Ships are better at navigating around obstacles, and adaptively learning sector layout.
- Implemented and tuned a variety of strategies to make NPCs better at navigating "extreme" density asteroid fields.
- Enabled active monitoring of NPC performance analytics across the entire universe.
- Tuned the AI "learning" algorithms to better adapt to dynamic changes in sectors, over time. Some of this may take a little while to evolve.

A great deal of work went into all of this development, and it should put us in a much better position to build content that was effectively "blocked" by problems with NPC navigation and the like.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

YAY! Thanks!

This looks really exciting. Thank you for the content update with respect to the unaligned pirates, looking forward to checking it out.

These sound awesome!