Hfs Gameplay Patch

[Navaron]

World Reset (and Patch Notes) -- 5/9/03

The world state is being reset tonight. Characters are NOT being deleted, and your world position is not being reset...but the state of the world is being set back to Day One conditions. All facilities and towers will revert to original ownership.

Why?

We've changed the global lattice ("war web") and this dramatically changes ownership potential of the buildings.

Why did we change the lattice?

Because the old one was static and boring. The three "backyards" (the one-hop continents that were three-hops for all other Empires) were always continent locked and hardly ever fought over. The three "hot continents" (the one-hop continents shared between two Empires) were great to fight in...but they were always population locked.

What this resulted in was you getting boxed into your Sanctuary with only the locked "backyard" to trudge through or the drop pods as your only ways out.

We've changed the world grid so that now, each Sanctuary has three one-hop continents...and all other continents are two-hops from your Sanctuary. There are no longer any "three-hop" continents.

The objective of this is to spread out the fights across more continents, as well as to make all of the continents valid combat areas by making them less likely to population lock nor by making them incredibly easy to continent lock.

Other changes include:

1) You can no longer loot enemy knives.

2) The death penalties (time added to your respawn duration) have been reduced slightly. You incur the following penalties depending on how many times you have died during the last 10-minutes:
0-1: No delay
2-4: +5 sec
5-7: +10 sec
8-10: +15 sec
11+: +20 sec

3) The additional delay in respawning to the Sanctuary, after either choosing it on your respawn interface, or after the 30-second timer expires when "Recall to Sanctuary" is used, has been removed. This was the equivalent of a design "appendix" and has been removed.

4) Additional CTD bugs were resolved. One when using terminals one was due to the way we map the terrain in the VR Driving Area, and a few others were fixed as well.

5) Greatly enhanced network optimizations for objects at rest.

6) The reticule accuracy has been improved significantly through a code fix. The center of your reticule is now accurately the center of your Cone of Fire.

7) Found an error in the xp system that was causing incorrectly assigned BEP and CEP whenever a promotion occurred in a squad (whether intentionally done or whether automatically done when the current leader quits out and someone else becomes leader). This is fixed now and experience should be correctly distributed now.

8) When you /quit out of the world, you will now go to the Server Select screen (instead of just disconnecting).

NOTE: The Shuttle bug from last night's patch (where people would get dropped when trying to use the shuttle) was fixed in a server rev earlier this morning. Just including that note here in case you weren't aware that it was fixed.