Announcements

Two player organised events at 21:00 CET.

Check out the Official Forums for detailed information or contact Sgt. Gonzo on Titan.

Good luck to all participants !

We're pleased to announce the release of Patch R#189 to Titan. This patch concentrates on fixing bugs and addressing wider reaching issues introduced in the first release associated with the Balancing Project.

You can find details of all included changes in the Patch Notes, we also welcome feedback and discussion on the Neocron Forum.

Today we have updated our Public Test Server Vedeena to the next patch level! As always we really value your feedback and invite you to join us and other members of the community on Vedeena over the coming days. 

We look forward to seeing you on the PTS! You can find all the details of the current test patch in our Testing & Development Forums.

Our German players can find a translation of this post, here.

We are now a couple of weeks beyond the highly anticipated release of Patch R#186 and it's subsequent hot fixes R#187 & 8. First of all we would like to apologise for the rough ride we have had since deployment, a number of circumstances converged to create a less than desirable landscape. This of course wasn't ideal when our hopes (and we're sure yours too) were set on this being the start of a new phase of resurgence for Neocron.

As of right now we're in a much better situation than we were. General stability of Titan is now back to normal, with a further server-side softpatch removing the last reproducible crash introduced in the patch.

There is much still to do. Along with unexpected side-effects caused by load differences on Vedeena and Titan, it was problems in our workflow which lead to the recent stability issues. Additional discrepancies between Vedeena and Titan introduced during August 3rd's rebuild, as well as between Server and Client files in the patch, were accidentally introduced through those workflow problems.

Once Titan was stable we spent the rest of last week reviewing our workflow, have pinpointed where things went wrong and have implemented changes to the way we work over the weekend. With those changes in place, adding additional checks and renewed focus on internal testing, we have also drawn up and started working towards a short term roadmap to address outstanding issues introduced in Patch R#186/7/8.

In this two week block (this up to now and next) we are focusing on the most significant of those issues. By applying our updated workflow we aim to release a new bug fix patch to Vedeena by Sunday 31st of August. The aim is that the patch will be "Titan Ready" upon deployment to Vedeena but we will then call on the community to review the patch for around a week, before releasing to Titan. The dates given are of course subject to change should it take longer than we have estimated to address and test the problems we're focusing on.

The focus points of our development sprint over these two weeks are:

• Committing changes introduced in post-R#188 "soft patches", via a traditional patch to the Client and Server.
• This will mainly cover changes made to fix stability issues. The emergency change to the Devourer will be addressed with the below.
• Fixing drone movement issues introduced in R#186.
• Investigating changes to the Resurrection animation. This change was not directly intended and we must identify the cause of this change.
• We will open a new discussion on how the Resurrection's usage/animation/fx could change in the future, as a result of some positive reaction to this unintended change.
• Automatic Pistol line damage output.
• Changes to overall balance have impacted this weapon line with unintended side effects, discovered since deployment to Titan. The cause must be identified and compensated so this weapon line falls in line with others.
• Neocron Client assigned to a single core on multi-core processor system.
• We will add a user configurable control to the Hardware Configuration UI for core assignment. This change was intended for use on the server-side only, so we can better manage our resources. Rather than revert this change entirely we will give the choice to the player, as some older/low powered systems have seen a performance increase due to this unintended change.
• Problems with Damage over Time (DoT) weapons and effects (AKA the Devourer Problem).
• While the Devourer is the headline of this issue, it has brought wider reaching issues with how DoT works as a whole to the surface. We will address these issues at a much deeper level which will also bring the Devourer back into line with the rest of balance. Currently the damage of a single DoT stack is not correctly calculated. Over the course of this week, we have carried out in depth internal testing and have identified the source of the problem. A fix is now being implemented. Details of how the fix will impact game-play, will be included in the Patch Notes at time of release.

This is not an exhaustive list of things that need addressing. However to ensure we can bring you a quality solution within the two weeks we've outlined, we have had to keep the list concise and focus on these key areas.

We're aware there are important issues not on this list, important issues brought to our attention by the community such as; Pyrolizer Nanites, rocket damage, area of effect weapons and inconsistencies with sanctums. We have chosen the above over these issues due to their impacts on performance and in some cases their game breaking nature. The rest will be addressed in a future patch.

You can join us to discuss this announcement, here.

All the best,
Your Neocron Support Team

UPDATE: 13/08/2014 @ 17:41/18:41 BST/CEST

Dear Runners, 

Titan is now back online after we fixed the bug which caused the sync issues with a serverside patch. Have fun playing!

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Dear Runner,

as a result of the ongoing "Sync Issue", we're currently shifting things in our internal infrastructure. As a result we had to shutdown Titan and may shutdown other services (like IRC) temporarily if we need to.

More information soon(tm).

Sincereley,

Your Neocron Support Team

UPDATE: 13/08/2014 @ 12:49/13:49 BST/CEST

Dear Runner, 

Titan is now back online. Have fun playing!

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Dear Runner,

we are currently experiencing some issues with Titan not going online after todays daily reboot period. We are currently investigating the issue and are working hard to get Titan back as soon as possible.

More information soon(tm).

Sincereley

Your Neocron Support Team

The DEVOURER overall damage was reduce by ~ -33%.

This is just a temporary fix

Hello Runners,

since there was some confusion whether Titan is still in test mode or not, let's make this clear: Titan is back in retail mode! Everything is back to normal, well, mostly everything... double xp is on! Double xp will be on until monday.

Sincereley

Your Neocron Support Team

UPDATE: 06/08/2014 @ 21:00/22:00 BST/CEST

We've restored the data and applied another client side hotfix R#188. So we're finally back. Have fun playing! Test mode is over, double xp is on until monday morning!

UPDATE: 06/08/2014 @ 10:40/11:40 BST/CEST

Another server side hotfix has been applied, the server is still in test mode. Please do as much testing as you can and please invite others to test, we need as many people online as possible! Do as much as you can while online, there will be a rollback afterwards so you may safely go crazy, as long as you do not disturb others while testing!

UPDATED: 06/08/2014 @ 00:45/01:45 BST/CEST

Hotfix R#187 has now been applied to Titan. 

With the release of R#187 Titan remains in "test mode" until we can be sure stability has been restored. As of this post the "test mode" operation of Titan will continue until 19:00 BST on Wednesday 6th August 2014 (tomorrow).

Once we are satisfied with the stability of Titan, a full database roll back will be performed at the end of the test mode period. Any progress made between the deployment of R#186 and 06/08/2014 @ 19:00BST will be reset. Titan will be rolled back to it's pre-R#186 state at this time.

No specific patch notes are provided for R#187, this patch addresses the stability and functionality issues discovered in R#186 when applied to Titan. Many issues experienced under R#186 were caused by the knock on effects of internal server crashes, which should now be resolved.

This includes but is not limited to the following: Hacking (including HackNet), drone combat, spell casting, vanishing shields/buffs, foreign affects sticking and server (visible and internal) crashes.

For more details, please see the forum where you can also find a statement regarding the source of the issue.

We appreciate your continued support and patience.

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Dear Runner,

as we are experiencing some issues, Titan remains in testmode from now on.

Please have a look at the board for more information. 

We're sorry for all inconvience that may cause.

SERVERS ARE ONLINE

The time has finally come, it is Patch Day!

Patch R#186 marks the beginning of a new era concerning the balancing in Neocron. It marks only the beginning, not the end. This is only the first patch and more will come. We only started the project and there is still a lot of work to do. Nevertheless we felt that the current status is a large improvement over what is currently on Titan and that we now need to collect large scale feedback from you.

We now need to test the first phase of the balancing project in a real environment. Nothing is final and a lot will still need tuning, but we hope that you will agree with us that this patch improves the situation. Please tell us what you think is good and what you think is bad and even more importantly: spread the word and get on Titan to enjoy Neocron!

Throughout the past few days we also did some maintenance work to improve Titan's stability, although we are confident that Titan is prepared for a huge wave of returning players, please do not hesitate to report problems in terms of stability even in case you got used to those problems, we are here to try our best to fix them!

You can find the full list of changes for Patch R#186 on the Neocron Website and of course discuss the changes on the Official Neocron Forum.

Sincerely,
Your Neocron Support Team