Patch Day

[Bosh]

source: www.chromecow.com (server down now)

US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0

Tue 20 Jan 2009


President

* Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
* A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
* Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President's friends list, or in the President's party. We are investigating.
* Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
* Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
* A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.


Vice President

* The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
* No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
* The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
* Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
* Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
* A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President's visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.


Cabinet

* There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.


Judiciary

* Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
* A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged "ideological." We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.


Homeland Security

* Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
* Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
* Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
* Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.


Economy

* Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can't make these fixes without your help.


PVP

* Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.


Quests

* The" Desert Storm" quest chain was displaying an erroneous "Mission Accomplished" message near the beginning of the chain.
* The quest chain that begins with "There's no Cake like Yellow Cake" and terminates with "W-M-Denied" has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.


Reagents

* Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.


Events

* The "Axis of Evil" event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the "Rebuilding Bridges" event starting in January.

[Unimatrix11]

meh - still waiting for US-Democracy II coming out. I just dont like the two-party majority system of I. To me, it seems to be a lot more about gfx than about actual gameplay. I mean playing as a ´voter´ gets very dull after a while, when all you can do is click ´Republicans´ or ´Democrats´ once every four years (that third button doesnt even seem to have any functionality attached to it at all - bug or intented feature ?). Since the result on screen makes not much of a difference really, it soon becomes boring and is not rewarding at all. I mean the consequences of your choice may be highlighted in the tooltips for the buttons, but what actually happens can be quite far from it, and often enough, i find myself asking, wether my choice really made any difference at all. In addtition i find the whole lobby-mechanic overpowered and you just dont get enough info about how it works, and when it works.

[-Jrabbit]

Rumor has it that this new patch will include a catastrophic event within the first 100 game-days of adoption. We can't really judge it until that plays out. Still, I'm encouraged, if only for the "differentness" factor.

While this v44 patch seems to be primarily cosmetic in nature, I'm still hopeful it will restore some of the functionality lost in the previous version.

[Lorizael]

to this thread.

[Bosh]

meh - still waiting for US-Democracy II coming out. I just dont like the two-party majority system of I. To me, it seems to be a lot more about gfx than about actual gameplay. I mean playing as a ´voter´ gets very dull after a while, when all you can do is click ´Republicans´ or ´Democrats´ once every four years (that third button doesnt even seem to have any functionality attached to it at all - bug or intented feature ?). Since the result on screen makes not much of a difference really, it soon becomes boring and is not rewarding at all. I mean the consequences of your choice may be highlighted in the tooltips for the buttons, but what actually happens can be quite far from it, and often enough, i find myself asking, wether my choice really made any difference at all. In addtition i find the whole lobby-mechanic overpowered and you just dont get enough info about how it works, and when it works.

True, the devs seem be working in implementing Democracy II at a snails pace but you have to hand it to them that they've been working hard at keeping the game updated after so long, although with the quality of their recent patches I'm not sure why they bother.

At least they've updated the character creation options for the President class, that was long overdue.

[DaShi]

Democracy II will only come out after the Revolution expansion pack. While I hear you can bring your current character into the xp, but you'll have to roll a new one for DII.

[-Jrabbit]

It seems they've nerfed the Lobbyist function. But the new "view President's email" function could be interesting.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President's friends list, or in the President's party. We are investigating.

Someone hasn't been following the news.

[Unimatrix11]

It seems they've nerfed the Lobbyist function. But the new "view President's email" function could be interesting.

I didnt hear about that option, yet, at all. Mind to elaborate, please?

[Unimatrix11]

Thinking about the game, i just realized, that it is really hard to tell, wether you are dealing with PCs or NPCs - so limited do the options seem. Sometimes i wonder: Am i a PC - or am i an NPC? Am i playing this game, or am i just part of it?