A pre information about Alpha 10 / HWS 10

HWS Announcements
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Good evening HWS Community,
well, no surprise anymore I guess: starting coming Monday Alpha 10 will hit the Experimental Servers.
From there, we go maybe 2-3 weeks until the public release.

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What is Alpha 10 at all and what does it mean for HWS 10 as a short info:

  • Shields. Structures will get Shield generators which run with Pentaxid. Try to stock up your OCD with as much Pentaxid as possible I guess. I’m also planning to bring more story into gathering / finding pentaxid (adding more Missions to get Pentaxid for new players especially to motivate PvP).

  • HWS Garage. Obviously, basically every HWS Garage ship has to be redesigned. At the beginning there won’t be any HWS Garage ships available maybe. We hope for awesome submissions later on.

  • New NPC Base Attacks. I have to rework the whole universe anyways. So I might try those out in the wild for 1 PvE and 1 PvP planet as a test. Otherwise I will create tons of dedicated “Defend the Base” Missions for 1-20 players, proper difficulty scale.

  • New Chat System. Since I’m responsible for that feature by Eleon, I will remove some rules about Chat behavior because you have a persistent mute for players / factions. At the same time we try to enhance the chat API integration for more possibilities.

  • New Blocks. You can expect a new “Community Content Contest” (CCC) early the next season to get more, fresh, cool POIs!

  • HWS Config / EWS. With Shields in mind I have to rework the whole HWS Config / EWS. Pulse + Plasma will do bonus damage against shields. Rockets normal. Pierce almost none. I try to carefully think about potential issues with Shields and “fix” them my way. (number 1 assumptions: PvP battles take even longer then)

  • Full wipe / Season. Alpha 10 requires a full wipe. More or less it means we will only have a 2 month season this time.

Well, there is more coming with Alpha 10 I can’t tell yet. Just be sure that a lot of work will be put into it again, even though time will most likely missing again.

If I don’t get burned out too much with A10 preparations and moving to a new home, I want to release a big HWS Survey again, asking for your feedback about things so far and suggestions for A10.

Overall great things are coming, requested for long time and my goal is to not change anything big this time and only concentrate in fixing what wasn’t good this season and improve from here on.

Stay tuned for more teasers and what to expect soon™.

Your HWS Team

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So basically we should expect full wipe in 2-3 weeks from now?

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It should answer that question.
Yes, 3-4 weeks.

It will depend on how many player will help testing Alpha 10 during the EXP time.

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Since i guess shields will be devices, will they be good against lagshots?

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I don’t understand.
As long as you have Pentaxid in your tank, there is no lagshot possible because your shield is up…

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So as long shield is up structure is indestructible, and shield is up as long there is pentaxid in tank - does this mean that getting hit will remove pentaxid from tank? Is there going to be a limit on number of pentaxid tanks for shields?

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I can’t tell all the details yet. Once EXP is released you can ask me anything.
But yes.

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What? No Homer with the bell?

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What is the probability of this wipe actually occurring within 3-4 weeks? What would delay it or expedite it?

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No one can possibly answer that reliably at this point. Until it hits the experimental branch and is tested by many people, there is no way to know what bugs might pop up and how long they will take to fix.

As long as nothing major happens before now and then, the public experimental branch release of A10 is expected to drop this coming Monday.

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Pls please think on a way like ‘pentaxis is consumed at a fixed time rate and generate shield charge, and there is only 1 shield generator/tank per ship’. or similar. (like solar panel+capacitor)
Don’t make it that you have to dedicate one player in the ship to constantly spam the ‘fill tank’ button, and as long as he keeps pumping pent the ship cannot be destroyed…