Diometrius wrote:Gonna C&P something I posted to Seleene's AMA on Reddit before this post was up. Its not directly related to Black Ops but appeared in that same section of the Minutes.
Something minor that jumped out at me was in the Ship Balancing section. Trebor asked about Covert Cynos being usable by T3 ships using the covert ops subsystem. Fozzie and Greyscale said its a technical limitation with the way the Covert Cyno is enabled for ships types and not the other way around. Immediately I asked myself why they didn't re-tool the fitting stats of the Covert Cyno to be like the Covert Ops cloak itself. Add a role bonus to all current Covert Cyno capable T2 ships to reduce say CPU usage by 99% while increasing the CPU fitting requirements on the Cyno to 5000. Then add the same 99% role bonus to only the covert subsystem while all other offensive subsystems remain the same. Top it off by adding Strategic Cruisers to the "can be fitted to" attributes on the Covert Cyno and the changes should be done.
A combination of the "can be fitted to" attribute and the fitting requirements should keep any nonsense like the officer co-proc fitted Covert Cloak Avatar from surfacing, and the change in fitting requirements via bonus from the subsystem will keep non-covert T3's from fitting the Cyno.
The 99% CPU reductions as a method of restricting what ships a module can be fitted to is a old and poor practice that has a number of problems, from confusing the process of fitting ships, to allowing weird edge cases (Test server Covops Avatar is one example). They also require those very hard to explain bonuses (97.5-100% reduction to cloak cpu per level? Virtually nobody understands that the first time they read it). You'll notice that all the newer modules that are restricted to certain shop types avoid the CPU method.
The good news is that I spent a good chunk of this week reauthoring the way all those legacy modules get restricted, and that should open up some very nice doors.
mynnna wrote:So Fozzie, does this mean the test server will be up today?
That was the hope but it appears the client issues being faced earlier were unable to be fixed before the end of the day.