Hi folks! This update has some pretty major changes in it that we’re excited to finally roll out, starting with:
Shared Cargo
Today’s build includes a substantial rework of plane cargo. The old system had some long-standing problems:
- Difficulty moving items between planes: Players would store items on spare planes and then would need to engage in a time consuming dance in which they’d swap planes and move items to storage on a regular basis.
- Confusing pricing on storage slots and plane cargo: It was hard for us to come up with a fair price for additional plane cargo, which we’ve always hoped we could sell to help support the game’s development, since the old system effectively encouraged players to buy hangar slots and use planes as storage, which is not (as noted above) very convenient.
So we are trying out a new and hopefully simpler system. Now all planes share a single cargo container. When you switch planes, the cargo container is detached from the old plane and automatically bolted onto the new plane. Our feathered engineers assure us this is perfectly safe. Here’s how this plays out in practice:
- Simplified inventory management: There are now only two places to put items: Rebel City Storage and Plane Cargo. If you want to transfer items between storage and plane cargo, you no longer need to constantly swap planes.
- Expanded default storage: This change will make players want to put even more stuff in Rebel City Storage, and we know that many players already feel that the free storage amount is insufficient, so we’ve upped the default free storage to 12 spaces. All players will get their extra storage immediately – it is in addition to any storage you may have already purchased.
- Expanded default cargo: We’ve also increased the default plane cargo to 12 spaces, from the current 8, which is something we’ve wanted to do for a while anyway since some players have been very vocal about how cramped their current amount of plane cargo feels. (Reminder: If your plane goes down, you still lose *everything* in the shared cargo. Expanding it is, in that way, a bit of a mixed blessing!)
- Plane cargo expansions for sale: It will now be possible to purchase plane cargo, beyond the 12 spaces that everyone receives for free. Four cargo spaces (one full row) will cost 7000 gold, with a nice discount of that price the first and second time you purchase it (just like how we discount the first few purchases of Rebel City Storage.)
What happens to current players who have items spread across multiple planes?
We really didn’t want to wipe your collected items in the middle of this beta test. So instead, there’s a one-time migration process that will occur in which items are incrementally filtered out of old plane cargo and into the new shared cargo. It is a little weird, and might have some odd edge cases that we haven’t identified, but we figured it was better than simply doing a wipe.
- First, all of the items currently stored in all your various plane cargo holds will be temporarily transferred into a hidden list. These items are not deleted! You just can’t see them.
- Next, when you log on, we then take the first items from the hidden list and put them into your shared cargo until it is completely full.
- At this point, you can move the items from your plane cargo to storage if you want to keep them.
- If you drop items, or otherwise empty out your plane cargo, the next time you log in or switch planes, we will magically fill up any empty cargo space with more items from the hidden list. This process will continue until your hidden list is empty.
- You’ll know your hidden list is empty when you login or switch to a plane in the hangar and there is at least one empty slot. From that point on you’ll never need to worry about the hidden list again!
- After a few weeks, we’ll remove the hidden list system from the game in order to eliminate unnecessary edge cases that could hinder future development, since the hidden list serves no purpose other than to help us avoid a wipe in this one and only situation.
Difficulty Scaling Experiment
Another long-standing issue we’ve had in the game is that bosses become almost trivial if you have a very large group of players. When large group hits a boss, it previously would die so quickly that many players were not even able to qualify for loot. That feels bad. So in this update we’re also experimenting with some dynamic scaling, where a boss will become a little more difficult with more players.
Our goal is that more players will always be better, but you should never be able to mindlessly steamroll a boss. Right now the system scales difficulty along a curve; if you have 10 players instead of just 1, the boss might have just 50% more health. Not 10x health, because we always want you to be happy that you have your friends around. The scaling is dynamic and will adjust automatically if players join or leave the boss fight.
We’re still playing with these numbers, and for now we’re testing this only on Meowza. Our suspicion is that difficulty scaling will be especially important near launch when the servers will be a lot busier. Let us know if you think this scaling works well, we’re eager to get some feedback!
Art
There’s a totally cool trailer happening behind the scenes, the bird rebels are looking their coolest, we can’t wait to show it to you. Not so behind the scenes, the raceboss has new art and quest enemies are getting shined up as well!
Content
- Added Copper and Dark Steel to quest drops
- Buffed Meowza health a bit
- Buff arc guns
- Buff to bandit fire (+15%)
- Fixed broken daily event loot
- Fixed trail DPS
- Fixed Goose mission
- Fixed Greater Pooper mission
- Fixed treasure sniping exploit/troll
- Fixed loot drop holes
- Added engines to basic recipes
Polish and Bugfixes
- Polish: new inventory item move menu
- Polish: setting to disable red near-death bars
- Fixed Ol’ Faithful tutorial bug
- Fixed bug with plane color conversion (prevented some old accounts from logging in)
- Fixed bug with overridden quest goals (for special quest goals that don’t follow the regular format)
- Fixed self-friend bug: it was possible to self-friend.
- Fixed local ip/port issues that might affect joining servers
- Invisible bullets have more logging and one potential cause fixed.
- Fixed more causes of duplicate bullets
- Fixed bug where you could ‘equip’ quest items from storage, which would basically throw them into the aether
- Fixed bug where inventory items are vertically offset if you try use an unusable item
- Fixed bug where planes wouldn’t undock from buildings sometimes
- Fixed health/steam exploit with quickly equipping different items
- Polished automatic quality adjustment to be more robust and (hopefully) less likely to cause undesired downgrades. Should only be in effect for the first 5 minutes of play.
- Fixed leak with bullet particle emitters.
- Players are no longer able to teleport to themselves.
- Fixed some missing sound bugs.
- Fixed an issue with analytics, where we would potentially lose up to 90% of them in some situations.
Other
- Audio: lots of new sound effects!