Good morning @everyone,
As promised here is the very important announcement covering a couple of important topics. Let’s jump straight in:
#HWS is a trusted server!
In the multiplayer lobby you will now see that the HWS EU and NA servers are trusted servers (see on the right side the “badge”)
You can read here a bit what it means in detail.
New players seeking to join an MP server he or she can see straight away if a server is official (yellow) or trusted (blue).
why play “trusted”?
You have to fulfil a few criteria to get approved for being “trusted”, and it can be revoked any time if you abuse / do not follow the principles of being a “trusted server.”
Overall it should help the community to get the best Empyrion MP experience on servers who have demonstrated upstanding community values. This is not an HWS feature; and will help all players identify other great servers to spend their time on.
Note: Being “Trusted” does not entitle a server to any sort of special bonus or perks from Eleon, including financial backing.
#!! HWS Feature Update!!
HWS NPC Trader
As a lot people have seen, we are still not 100% feature complete (Thanks for all the feedback!). Some things are still missing and we are feverishly working on supporting you in game AND adding/updating these features. We appreciate your patience and support.
On HWS EU Server (NA coming soon!):
6.0 has introduced a new workflow, even for me – but I think I found a good one now.
For existing HWS NPC Trader donators, make sure you have read this thread and adjust your package accordingly. If your NPC trader is not listed, and you have not adjusted for 6.0, now you know why.
#EGS Auto Miner NPC Trader
To address one major complaint around availability of Auto Miner Cores, with the new use within Orbital AMs, we have implemented a whole new EGS NPC Trader POI on Elemental Capital City (ECC) to provide you Auto Miner Cores and Auto Miner for a reasonable price, but with a convenience premium, of course.
So just in case you don’t want to raid the POIs but have some credits available make sure to check them out!
Note: we will keep an eye on player market and adjust NPC values accordingly if we see a negative impact on player trade.
#Elemental Garage
The HWS Garage is now officially reopened!! Since it was quite successful and popular in HWS 5 we have also provided more ships and even more to come for you.
Two things to keep in mind now, once again:
- The credits are well spent on these ships - They are not cheap, but you cannot get these elsewhere.
- There will be no refunds. Period.. We don’t take Garage ships back or replace them anymore. They are like stocks - it is your investment - know before you buy, don’t crash it into a POI, etc.
Very special cases are still valid where we may “repair” your ship for a fee - our discretion
#MOBA system and the Bunker / Vault Your
We will make sure you get more information during your gameplay but once again make sure that the MOBA Nebula and its planets are a high risk / high reward system. Once you warped in you are locked till Friday there! No excuses anymore.
But there are two things worth to mention to ease your wait:
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the Capture the BA POI / event where everyone can control a super base surrounded by hundreds of thousands of gold ore deposits… but only if at least one guy is in the control room at the top! no absentee owners here, you have to hold it.
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the EGS Vault / Bunker you can buy for 25 million credits and have a perma-super secure place on a permanent PvP planet for one season. (You have everything you need to survive a world war 3 there)
#EGS Recycle
The EGS Recycle feature now officially open! Located near the NPC Trader Mall in ECC space, there you can recycle your ships for a fee. Remember that you can upgrade your EGS (type egs:? in faction chat)
Note: At level 5 you don’t need EGS Recycle Zones for that anymore - you can do it globally.
#Missions
A few mistakes in the PDA missions got corrected and implemented.
Please make sure to explore the universe and find and play these missions! This content adds much more to your HWS experience, including nice rewards! I’m very curious as to how your feedback regarding them all may be. Please share!
Yes, Some of them are very difficult (Elemental Bank Heist) and need at least 3-4 players to succeed.
But hang tight and keep telling us what you like/hate and more will come - some for solo players and maybe a few more a bit easier.
#All the rest
We are trying hard to finish the rest of the missing pieces by the end of the week so we can have a clean a great season to learn from for the coming seasons!
#Starter Planet wipe delay
Because of an important profile benchmark for the devs we delay the District Starter planet wiped to ~12 hours and restart the wipe schedule immediately after the 6.1 patch! (will be done ~3PM server time & depends on public drop)
Please make sure to spread the word and wait till the wipe before returning to the planets!
#Third HWS EU Server (aka Care bear server aka PvE server) removal
This is / was by far not an easy decision so straight out with it:
~ We will discontinue the third HWS EU server on 22nd of June 2017 ~
In summary, it means that we will only have two official HWS server again - HWS EU and HWS NA (that is the reason why I didn’t request a trusted label for the HWS EU PVE server)
So why are we doing this?
Because of three primary reasons:
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After a runtime of over ~ 6 months, we got 150 Euro donation for the server. In contrast, we paid 160 Euro per month for that server alone. Our goal is that each server can maintain itself with donations so we don’t run into a potential bottleneck. This is not always the case, and that’s OK - but with other considerations and the lack of usage, we felt it was best to find other uses for the money.
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The time it takes to maintain and setup the server is not a good investment of our time for the community. We do realize that in some cases, players may feel that more is better, and more options are better, and we do like to try to please you all. However increasing the input (HWS PVE, Experimental, etc.) and keeping the same amount of output (Jascha and me) does not scale, it simply does not work. As an example, my own personal time I have to spent for HWS is already over 120 hours per week… for two servers + PVE (well and the Eleon official ones, QA, etc.). Again, we felt it was best to find other uses for our time.
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The idea sort of failed. Even though we had cool plans like dedicated PvE setups, dedicated PvE survival missions and a very special limited way of CSW between the other two HWS servers, we simply can’t chase these ideas due to a lack of resources. Additionally, the main reason why we created the server was “PvE”. If you want PvE on HWS don’t cry on the PvP servers but instead just go to the “care bear” server etc.
In the end, however, the average active player count was only ever 1-7 players. I think this is a significant sign.
But even if it did work in HWS 5, in my opinion, we have tried a special experience with the HWS 6 Universe of both PvE and PvP, but we hope in a very balanced and good way. The future will tell if it’s true but it feels a 100% PvE server is just not satisfied for MP and such an expensive server anymore. And of course, your feedback always matters.
Now this has two big consequences:
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all donator (10) on the PvE server will get their donation transferred to the EU main server and 50% of people OCDs content by the date of now will get transferred also to the main EU server as a compromise
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See below…
The HWS EU server will get a hardware upgrade (To Be Announced)
This is quite huge and after some discussions, it’s our next big step forward.
Just quickly: why EU and not NA - as “promised”?
First of all, in the last few months, NA was not so good shape player population-wise, so naturally, investing massively in a population that can evaporate quickly is a challenge. We realize that not swinging to the EXP branch prematurely as some other servers did also impacted the populations, but the math doesn’t change. We do not cap the server in NA, where we consistently do in EU and populations maintained during the end of 5 which help support the investment. Lastly, the performance on NA is not as problematic as it is on EU my any stretch.
**So what’s a “Crazy monster machine” look like and cost?
2x CPUs with 28 cores (56 threads)
384 GB RAM
And all that for 577 Euro per month
You math wizards out there may have figured out that leaves us 176 Euro gap every month to fill. As usual, hopefully donations will help keep us all net neutral and we can see how this plays out!
The first idea with this “monster server” is at the beginning a test how much the game really eats. I really don’t know but with 40+ open playfields right now in prime time we are on constant 100% CPU which causes glitches, bugs or worse.
The second idea, and becoming more attractive with each CB:reset, might be to use this power better overall. Maybe in hosting a Factorio server for fun 
Anyways we can always return to the current server but 177 people / 100% CPU are at the moment not good for you and us. And Sure, we could reduce the amount of player slots; and it’s a good technical good decision. But we really want to have people having fun together and don’t waste their free evening in raping the Refresh button all the times till they get a free slot to play. Also taken into account that we have factions which are 50+ people big.
So yeah, a quite huge and important update.
We hope these are all good decisions, even though there are always pros and cons with them.
But if nothing changes you don’t make progress, right?
Let’s make good progress together!
With that said thanks once again for all of your support! Sure, we can pour thousands of hours into HWS because we enjoy it (and we do), but of course it motivates us if we see that you actually like our hard work and that it’s improving your gameplay (or doesn’t, even). It really means a lot to us, no matter if you donate or not.
seeing compliments and happy players is very awesome for us and keeps us motivated to continue our work.
Really very much appreciated girls and boys and thanks a lot; really!
#Your HWS Team
. Although better hardware for EU server is actually even better.
awsum