Tranquility, patch and proposed cloaking
The patch went relatively well, we got in a number of good fixes and our work on server stability and lag seems to be paying off (knock-on-tritanium). There are still some more things to be done to address the recent situation on Tranquility. We have added bandwidth, audited local networks and hardware, gone over operating systems and software and hundreds of thousands of lines of server code. This will get solved, or like Shaft would say: "We are on the mother". If this week is stable, we'll start adding the 32 nodes that were quarantined.
Client side lag was also reduced, but still remains under various circumstances, increased EVE client memory usage could be the fault for many of you with only 256MB of RAM. If you are encountering severe client side lag frequently, I would very much appreciate a Log Server log during this period, along with a dxdiag log submitted through our Bug Report section. This also applies to the most annoying bug of all, the "Oh-my-ship-turned-into-an-asteroid-having-wierd-relations-with-my-Raven-on-a-secure-container" syndrome. I would very very very (very) much like more logs of this happening.
Channel part/joins will be default off from next client patch (no ETA) and will be removed altogether from the Local channel. This should make many a pilot happy. Also a number of bugs in our usual Patch Feedback Thread are being addressed and some have been deployed in downtime server updates already.
Turret changes got very close to our goal, making large guns for large targets and small guns for small targets. They will still get some tuning over the next weeks but nothing major. Oh, and don't try to shoot a 2000m/s Interceptor with an 425mm Rail. It won't hit, and thats on purpose. Use Smartbombs, Drones or Missiles which are getting the love now. Follow that in the Ships&Modules forum. TomB is asking for opinions and ideas, everything is open. Drones are next btw, they need some serious fixing and lub.
Last, but not least a possible fix to cloaking is on Entropy. We don't all agree that it's the correct one, and I'd like your opinion on it. The problem was area of effect weapons in Empire space, specifically Smartbombs. Now, the proposed change is that the Smartbomb is now acting a bit smart and as a countermeasure to cloaks (I like countermeasures). A Smartbomb encountering a cloaked ship within it's blast radius will break the cloak and disable itself, preventing it from being a hostile action.
However current solution only addresses one Smartbomb, the next Smartbombs would tear through the the then de-cloaked party, so to be safe in Empire, you can use one. If you are really hunting cloaks, you would fit multiple. The current hotfix of 10Km decloaking range would of course be reverted. Good thing is we don't need a client patch for this, we can do a server update in the scheduled downtime, after it's been through QA.
Another solution would be to have cloaking a hostile action - without you glowing red with the criminal flag of course - but that would need some bigger changes, including it being flagged for more than the standard 15 minutes and removing the visual flag from cloaked entities in the engine. This would most likely require a client patch.
