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