Patch Notes - 11/5/09

[Crateos]

Patch notes as of 11/5/09
(through build FC.10.20091026.8)

Audio:

• Fixed broken flight travel power audio.

Costumes: General:

• Full masks and partial masks to work in high collars category
• /ChangeMood is not private anymore so it can be executed from chat. (No cost to change, currently only exposed in tailor, not limited to a single costume.)
• Fixed a crash that has been occurring with pet costumes.

General:

• Fixed bug with aggro being assigned to the owner of a pet, even for cases where this was not desired.
• Players can no longer share an Escort mission after the escort is finished, since it would be impossible for your teammates to complete the mission.
• All instances of Heroes Inc. have been changed to Advanced Concept Industries or ACI.
• Powerhouse trainers should now have information on their roles.
• Players failing to enter Andrith Ruins will now get a message listing the requirements to enter.
• Teammates across the map should no longer be flagged as in-Combat.
• Interactive doors and objects should no longer become locked by another player.
• When requesting reinforcements, a random critter of the lowest rank will make a break for it, where previously the highest ranked critter did so.
• Millennium City Hall: Swapped out scaffolding with one that's easier to climb.
• Powerhouse Battle Station: Added fake collision to prevent players getting stuck.
• Fixed a crash caused by players with an extraordinarily large number of items in their inventory.

General: Items

• Experimental Artificial Life Injector: The damage resistance buff now lasts for 12 seconds to bring it in line with player active defenses. The costume scaling now lasts for 2 minutes and has a cap on the size the player can get.
• Runes of the Quickening now has the correct Physical Defense and Energy Defense (16 PD 16 ED instead of 1.8 PD 1.8 ED)
• Foxbat's gun, found in the tutorial, now has a proper description.
• Stronghold Rucksack will no longer display the Loadout power incorrectly.
• Magician's Dust and Magus Dust Placate effect will no longer work on critters higher than Villain rank. Charges have also been set to 6.
• Amorak Channeling is now correctly set as a Primary reward to match its stats.
• All random bag drops off of critters should no longer have minimum level requirements.
• HOT Bots, Ablative Shield, Mystic Shield Evocation, Temporary Forcefield, Heal/Damage Invocation and Healing Patch have new icons.
• Ablative Shield and Mystic Shield Evocations now grant as many health points as they raise maximum health points.
• Mystic Shield Evocations and Heal/Damage Invocations have had the delay before the backlash damage dealt increased to 90 seconds (up from 30 seconds), increasing the odds you can complete a fight before they wear off. The bonus health still has a 30 second duration.
• The blueprint that Majorly Enhanced Intelligence on Utility Upgrades is now called Discernment instead of Force.
• Corrected numerous text bugs in items.

Mission Items:

• Corrected various spelling and grammar errors for the mission items for the following Canada missions: Multiplicity and Ace of Space.
• Corrected various spelling and grammar errors for the mission items for the following Millennium City missions: Ninja the Scrolls" and Psi of Relief.
• A Growing Nuisance: Radiation Serum is now reusable until the mission is completed.
• Changed the mission reward, Targeting Reticule, in the Devil's Head Mesa mission, Free Their Minds, from mysticism to arms crafting school.

Missions: General:

• Corrected text, spelling and grammar errors in various missions.

Missions: Canada Crisis:

• Blight of the Living Dead: Zombies should correctly agro players once again.

Missions: Canada:

• Undead on Arrival: Fixed an issue with the totem effects not going away when a totem was destroyed.

Missions: Desert:

• Bonding With A Grondling: Mission will now give credit once the grondling is turned friendly.
• Fixed issue with many stacked throwable tables in the Snake Gulch Saloon.

Missions: Lemuria:

• Commotion in the Ocean: Reward is now scaled correctly to the mission.
• Ship of Fouls: Mission text now better explains the mission objectives.
• Arvad Alone and Dethroned: Mission now available after completing Safely to Sealab.

Missions: Millennium City:

• Bullet Bound For Biselle: Viper soldiers dropped by the osprey should now target the closest player and attack. Osprey patrol should no longer get stuck on the city hall building.
• Bank Job: The mission completes when using either door.
• The upgrades dropped at the end of Dr. Destroyer's Robot Factory have been moved to the Mega Destroyer to fix some potential timing issues that might cause loot drops to be lost at the end of the fight.
• Foxbattle of the Network Stars: Fixed a bug that could cause Rob Mahogany's voice-over not to play during his first line. Minor tweaks to line and camera timing in the cutscene.
• PSI-chonaut: Added an open mission to Adina Monroe's mindscape. This will direct players to exit through rift over her bed.
• PSI-chonaut: Changed Adina Monroe encounter so it doesn't de-spawn. Which prevents players from getting trapped in the park.
• PSI-lent but Deadly: Entering mission map should now be more team-friendly.

Missions: Monster Island Crisis:

• Monster Island Crisis: The queue will now wait up to 5 minutes for a full team of 5 players before launching with however many players are in the queue (previously, it would wait 3 minutes).

Missions: Monster Island:

• Growing Nuisance: Removed the timer from both the mission item and mission.

Nemesis:

• UI: The name of your old Nemesis' should no longer appear in mission text when repeating a Nemesis mission with a new Nemesis.
• Municipal Showdown: Corrected various spelling and grammatical errors in mission items.
• Villains, Vandals, and Vermin (Nemesis Bunker Showdown): Fixed a bug where if the first player logged out and logged back in, NPC heroes would forget who they're supposed to be following. The NPCs will now resume following the first player when he or she logs back in.
• Volcano Lair Showdown: Nemesis should no longer become unresponsive when controlling the Lava Demon.
• Volcano Lair Showdown: Nemesis clones will no longer drop the same blue items as the Nemesis (sorry!)

Perks:

• Perks for "Demon" and "Demons" will now awarding the correct titles. Players who have already been awarded these perks will see the correct titles in their displays.
• The perks for defeating Demons have been renamed! Players will now see these perks as Behemoth, Ifrit and Mephistopheles, with the appropriate titles. Players who have already received these titles will see the new, cooler titles in their displays.

Powers:

• Celestial: Fixed the illumination advantage to work when you have a target.
• Celestial: Fixed the friendly version of illumination to work for self.
• Celestial: Redemption: Changed glow color on icon to blue.
• Celestial: Imbue: Changed glow color on icon to blue.
• Celestial: Iniquity: Removed old/incorrect icon, and changed to a more appropriate one.
• Gunslinger: Energy builder has new animation where both guns are actually used.
• Travel: The Travel powers; Earth Flight, Hover Disk, Fire Flight, Jet Boots, Ice Slide, and Rocket Boots now have unique descriptions.
• Gadgeteering: Orbital Cannon will no longer defeat some members of a group of enemies without agroing the rest.
• Telepathy: Mindful Reinforcement: Revitalizing Boost: The timing of when this effect would trigger vs. when the shield broke could be off, this should be fixed now.
• Force: Protection Field: The strength of the shield was increased back to the old value.
• Darkness: Ebon Void: The life drain effect was increased back to the old value.
• Darkness: Drain Life: Vampiric Sympathy: The AoE heal was increased back to the old value.
• Sorcery: Eldritch Shield: Imbue with Power: The Radiant Shield HoT effect was increased back to the old value.

PvP: General:

• Fixed a bug that would cause kill counts for PvP to display as zero.

PvP: Zombie Apocalypse:

• Zombie Apocalypse is now available from levels 5 - 40.
• The rewards have been tweaked to put more emphasis on surviving and less on being a zombie.
• Fixed issue where players got stuck on a cabin easily.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the score report from displaying when players click on the "report" button mid-game.

[Crateos]

Patch Notes, continued ...


User Interface:

• Added tooltips to team loot settings.
• Powers UI will now go back when out of points rather than close
• Advantages on the Remove Powers UI now show the name of the power they belong to.
• Changed "This item starts a mission" on mission items to "Starts a mission"
• Chat tooltips should appear again for linked items, powers, etc.
• Chat box tooltips should never go offscreen anymore (e.g. when linking to an item in chat).
• Primary Equipment no longer shows double tooltips.
• The tooltips for tabs in the powers UI now appear above the tab, and have a 0 second delay.
• The charge bar should no longer appear when attempting to block.
• If an item's minimum equip level is 1 the level of the item is no longer shown
• When attempting to learn a blueprint when you do not have the correct skill, specialization or skill level, a message will pop up telling you so instead of silently failing.
• Item tooltips now display the crafting skill for blueprints slightly different. If the blueprint requires a specialization of one of the crafting types (arms, mysticism, science) then it will only display the specialization and not the type.
• Item tooltips do not show crafting skill necessary when the skill level is 0.
• When multiple interact options are available, the object or NPC that your camera is facing is now selected by default after pressing the interact key.
• A button for the C store has been added to the minimap. Some minimap UI elements have been adjusted to make room.
• The game now auto-scales for resolutions lower than 1024x768. What this means: if you want, you can shrink the window to a tiny gameboy-like size and everything will shrink down with it, so the game will be completely playable!
• Buff tooltips no longer take so much space if they don't need it
• Updated Mini-map C-Store button sprite.
• Updated C-Store Respec icon sprite.
• Updated C-Store Rename icon sprite.
• Psionic Healing, Empathic Healing and Summon Nightmare have new icons
• Ego Placate, Mind Lock and Ego Sleep and Ego Hold have new icons
• Players on the same map will appear at the top of the player search and their map will be highlighted.
• By default, opening the player search UI it will automatically initiate a search for players on the same map.
• Do Not Accept Invites has been added to the chat popup menu.
• Players should longer get stuck with no UI when trying to create a new character.
• Destructable objects will no longer have their name or life bar appear off the screen.
• The option to "Choose one of" will no longer display when there is only one option.
• The C Store tooltip now shows the item description for items.
• The minor power combo list now display the appropriate description.
• Right-clicking a mission area on the minimap should properly open the mission journal.
• Power enhancements are now displayed as Power Name: Advantage Name, rather than just Advantage Name as before.
• The list of interaction options is now sorted such that talking to NPCs appears at the top of the list.
• If more than one mission was shared at once, accepting or declining the first one will no longer decline the next one as well.
• Buying an item from the auction will no longer fill your results list with duplicate items.
• When typing /who, Players in current instance will appear at the top of the list.
• Players will no longer be able to delete their costumes
• We've cleaned up the City! NPC should no longer appear to be using profanity.
• Fixed an issue with profanity not being properly filtered in chat bubbles.
• Added stronger indicators of when a framework/power is disabled.
• Updated guild info/who messages to work with the new Guild and GuildMember message formatters.
• The game should no longer crash when a team leader denies a team request.
• Players cannot use a respec when the cost of the respec is nothing.
• The recommended team size for a mission is now displayed on the mission offer screen.
• When sharing a mission with a timer, the current remaining time will be displayed in the contact offer screen instead of the initial timer length.
• Objects should once again display their proper name on interact.
• Fix for micro transactions UI to get the correct category.
• Crafting tooltips will now show crafting specialization.
• Fixed the Set Description button on the character screen info screen.
• Enabled showing of harvest nodes on the mini-map. Also increased sight range of the harvest nodes to a minimum of 125 (instead of default 100).
• Market: "Would you like to purchase" prompt when trying to remove items from the Market.

[Valentine]

I see a whole lot of nothing

[Halorin]

It would appear STO really is the main focus.

[Agathorn]

Thanks for the notes. A little confusing since I KNOW some of these items are in fact from PREVIOUS builds (some are even on Live) but we'll chalk that up to there being so many

[Legominism]

Originally Posted by Valentine

I see a whole lot of nothing

Fixes are always good, even if its not power set related.

Hats off to Cryptic for the bug fixes. You guys are really giving good support to the game. Believe me folks patches don't come this often, the only game that I seen with lots of support was Guild Wars.

[Valentine]

Originally Posted by Legominism

Fixes are always good, even if its not power set related.

Hats off to Cryptic for the bug fixes. You guys are really giving good support to the game. Believe me folks patches don't come this often, the only game that I seen with lots of support was Guild Wars.

Really?

I'd rather have more icon changes because those are really game breaking :/

[Ras_Avatar]

yeah I do have to agree. There has been some serious primary issues regarding at least half a dozen powers (not to mention the underpowered sets as a whole) I do not see anything in regards to fixes concerning these and alot of them have been out of sync since the beginning. I won't even mention the broken missions that are still in the ticket queue in game and have been reiterated over and over again on these forums.

I do notice alot of UI changes that could fix some minor annoyances but other than that, this looks like alot of polish and just accents how unpolished this game is even two months after release.

My faith will remain strong, for now, but I do hope that their priorities get re - aligned and soon. Stuff in this patch needed to be done, but instead of making a rather large patch that is blah....fix stuff that is critical and thta has been here since the beginning then sprinkle the patch with fixes to new stuff and fluff polish with the important stuff.

Never should a patch just be so blah.

[Agahnim]

So a nerf to magician's dust and life injector? Uh...yay?

[Redoubtable]

The UI developers are not the same people who look after the powers. I'm guessing that the UI guys have been continuing to work on live issues while many of the other devs were diverted to Blood Moon, hence the UI dominance.

Personally, I like QoL improvements and I like these notes.