Hello everyone!
As of today, the droid uprising has been suppressed in the cities of Theed and Mos Eisley. Coronet still suffers from smaller rogue elements, but the presence of Obi-Wan has largely shifted the balance in favor of peace and civility. SR Birthday rewards can still be claimed by speaking with Dessert Rice in Theed, where he will remain until the end of the month. HK-47 may also have a message for you, nearby.
- Please see the edit at the bottom of this page for hotfix notes (3.1.6) as a direct result of this patch.
With this patch we have a few fixes going out, with one big one specifically that we hope will have a big impact on our server performance. Here’s a quick overview:
Fundamentally, we’re changing the way that groups work here on SR. The change boils down to this:
- We will be removing the requirement of large groups to be able to see higher level missions (‘solo groups’) and providing the ability to see all levels of missions at the terminal regardless of group size. (The mission difficulty can be selected using the radial menu at the terminal without a compass, as it is today)
- We will be bringing back the mission payout distribution model that splits the payout by the number of group members regardless of distance, but the member will only receive their portion if they are within range.
Why we are making this change:
We believe that solo groups are having a fundamental impact on server performance today. Unfortunately, since we haven’t been able reproduce some of the issues, it’s difficult to say whether or not this change will improve all of them. However, we know for certain that this change will dramatically reduce the chance of deadlocks and very likely will help us to reduce the frequency in which we need restarts.
Additionally, when we look at it from a purely gameplay standpoint, solo groups don’t seem to make much sense. You group so that you can get higher mission payouts doing content, content that you them complete by yourself. In practice, this has served as an artifical limitation placed on you to be able to do higher tier missions; one that isn’t necessary given that we already have a way to choose mission difficulty right at the terminal. Thus, for this change, we simply need the selection ability to stop factoring in group size. We hope that this comes as a big QOL improvement for players overall, in addition to the performance benefits we’ll gain.
To be clear – the overall goal here is to improve performance, with a secondary goal of improving gameplay QOL. Specifically, we are removing the requirement to be in a (large) group in order to be able to get high CL missions, and discouraging “solo groups” since they are no longer necessary. If we find that there are negative side effects outside of those goals then we’ll be looking to resolve those as soon as possible.
What this means for you:
- If you are doing missions by yourself to farm credits/xp/items then you should (now) do those missions without a group so that your payout is not adjusted. You can select very high combat level missions at the terminal without a group (previously not possible).
- If you are doing missions in a group, and all group members are participating then nothing really changes for payouts or behavior. You can continue to do this, assuming all group members are actively participating and moving from lair to lair together.
If you have any questions about how this change works please ask those questions in the SR Discord, either in the #questions channel or the #help channel.
Going Forward:
We will be monitoring this change very closely over time and, as with all changes, we will tweak as needed if we find that the change has unintended side effects or we find that the change has a negative impact overall.
Now, for the detailed patch notes:
Gameplay – Missions/Groups:
[MODIFY] Mission difficulty is now solely based on the selection made at the terminal using radial menu (group size is no longer a factor)
[MODIFY] Mission payouts will now be split based on the number of group members regardless of range, but a payout will only be received the if the player is in immediate range of the mission at the time of completion
Gameplay – General:
[FIX] Med Student buffs adjusted (improved)
[FIX] Kaas & Hoth WB buffs adjusted (reduced)
[MODIFY] NoSpawn task timer to be longer (prevent immediate npc/lair respawn on mission completion… maybe)
Professions:
[FIX] Fixes a possible BE crafting crash
[FIX] Fixes edge case scenario resulting in lower than intended BH payouts (player targets)
Admin/Staff:
[ADD] Dungeon Spawners added to EC Event Permissions
[FIX] cityInfo command changed to not crash server is mayor has been deleted
[FIX] Admin buffs (for events etc) re-enabled and adjusted
Backend:
[MODIFY] Optimize weapon fallback logic slightly. This is to address mobs not properly equipping/swapping weapons but is not fully fixed. Needs significant future work.
[FIX] Fixed edge case that could sometimes cause incorrect GalaxyHarvester data to be uploaded
Hotfix 3.1.6 Notes
Gameplay:
+[ FIX ] – Revert overly aggressive cleanup code that could result in NPC loot being removed from the world pre-maturely.( * )
+[ FIX ] – Correct some invalid loot group items which caused them to not drop correctly
Backend:
+[ MODIFY ] – Disable BE Crafting debug logging
+[ MODIFY ] – Additional Discord chat channel sync filter on player driven room creation
( * ) : This behavior was the result of cleanup code which was far too aggressive in nature, and could cause a race condition between creature & inventory clean-up vs player actions (looting). This situation was isolated to weapons dropped by humanoid NPCs. Apologies for this inconvenience and we appreciate the speedy reporting and discussion to bring this to our attention.