CCS v1.0.1

Heres the low down on where we're at with CCS v1.0.1.

We are currently running the beta RC4 version of it amongst the CoLA GM group. Melanie and I have spent many hours burning the candle at both ends to get where we are and things are looking pretty good but there are still a few flaws and bugs that we are trying to iron out of the code base. 

We have completely rebuilt how the system processes and handles skill usage, consolidating what used to run from 4 separate scripts down to 1 script and one skill template to manage all three categories of skill type, this has produced some extremely fast performance even under the most overloaded of conditions. I did some testing in CoLA with 50 people in the region at the time and while the region was performing fairly badly and the main menu, targeting menus and skill menus were near to instant and had almost zero delays and this was in a situation where the region time dilation was 0.08 and sim FPS was about...7 at the time. So performance wise the update is extremely promising, but as stated there are still a few bugs in the code base that I want gone before we release to live, some of the major show stoppers have been fixed, a few oddities have popped up along with those fixes that we're working on.

Heres the low down on the full release plan and features:

CCS v1.0.1 Features/Release Plan:

The original plan to reduce the point base from 6 points per level to 4 points per level has been put on the back burner for this release (which is fine, we can do this at ANY time should it become evident its needed as its all back end controlled now and not controlled from the meter and requires no update for it to occur), the reason we decided to scrap this idea temporarily is because not only have we added a 7th stat, but every stat in CCS now has extremely critical use so characters must spread their stat points around to be effective, if they don't, they're going to be extremely vulnerable in some situations and easily killed. Here is the explanation of how stats will work in CCS 1.0.1

• Strength - Strength is now class configurable, the base melee damage of 10 / total strength x 5  = bonus melee damage. So if you have 45 strength, your bonus damage is +23 points per hit, so you hit for 33, that is the base melee damage strength factor of 1. Now since strength is now class configurable, Tanks and DPS classes will actually get a strength factor modifier of 2 and 3, so bonus damage per hit is multiplied x2 or x3 depending on whether you are a Tank or DPS class. So your 33 damage becomes 66 or 99 damage per melee hit, with 45 strength, using un-enhanced weapons and using no damage increasing abilities. Healers and Casters will remain at the Strength Factor 1 modifier. The reason DPS classes are getting an x3 modifier is explained further below in tank class changes.
• Fortitude -  As per usual Fortitude will determine your total Hit Points along the same math in use in CCS 1.0
• Endurance - As per usual Endurance will determine your total Stamina along the same math in use in CCS 1.0
• Intelligence - Intelligence now gives a base modifier of base damage / intelligence score x10 = bonus, for all caster spells, as well as healer heals. So if you have an intelligence score of 55, and you have a spell that hits for 295 damage base, there is an additional 54 points of damage added to the total base damage of the attack. This applies to heals as well, this factor is also configurable from the back end and can be increased/decreased as needed to improve its performance. Only healers and casters gain these bonuses to their skill based attacks and support skills. Intelligence also now allows you a max total of 33% CCS skill damage avoidance (at 100 intelligence), which means that people using CCS skills against you, at 100 intelligence will have a one in three chance of missing you entirely with a CCS Skill because you're just too damn smart for their clumsy attacks. So its extremely useful for Healers and Casters in their roles, and gives them a defensive boost, but is also very useful for Tanks and DPS classes to increase their damage mitigation capability. So, as you can see, being "dumb" in CCS is no longer the smart road to travel.
• Willpower - Willpower as per usual determines your resistances to status effects, but has had its base maximum total mitigation reduced to 33% at 100 Willpower.
• Perception - Perception now only manages RANGED damage avoidance, and is capped at a total of 33% max total avoidance at 100 Perception
• Finesse - Finesse our new 7th stat, works along the same lines as Perception, but applies only to MELEE damage avoidance and is capped as the other stats are at a total mitigation of 33% at 100 Finesse

So as you can see, the new stat base does not have a single useless skill in it. And because there are no skills that are more critical than the others, and all of them have very heavy value in regards to investing developmental points into them (versus really just...3 stats in 1.0) plus the addition of the 7th stat Finesse, we've decided that reducing the points per level on initial release may gimp people to the point of unplayability since you're really going to have to spread your points around a lot more equally now to be effective. And since maxing any one defensive stat doesn't make you impervious to damage, having to concentrate on managing resistances between four separate mitigational stats means you probably are going to need the points you have to even be viable.

I will go ahead and make this warning right now in bold text for the people that aren't quite up to speed on what all this means:

IF YOU PUT ALL YOUR POINTS INTO FORTITUDE AND ENDURANCE TO GET AS MUCH HP AND STAMINA AS YOU CAN YOU WILL GET RIPPED IN HALF LIKE A WET PAPER BAG IN COMBAT DUE TO YOUR LOW DAMAGE MITIGATION ABILITIES, IF YOU MAX ALL FOUR DAMAGE MITIGATION STATS YOU WILL STILL BE HIT BY SOME FORM OF ATTACK 2 OUT OF 3 TIMES, IF YOU IGNORE STRENGTH YOUR MELEE OUTPUT WILL BE HORRIBLE, IF YOU IGNORE INTELLIGENCE YOUR CASTING DAMAGE/HEALING/AND ABILITY TO AVOID CCS SKILLS WILL BE HORRIBLE. YOU CAN NO LONGER MIN/MAX 3 OR 4 STATS AND WIN IN CCS

There I think that explains the stats situation a little better hopefully it answers a lot of questions.

On top of the way stats work, we are adding the following:

• New CCS HUD - The New CCS HUD has the addition of a Offensive and Defensive Target slide out window, its very simple to use, once opening it, click the Offensive Target button, it will only choose targets in your direct line of sight, choose the target from the menu and it assigns it to the targeting system as your primary target. Now, once this is done, all hot keyed skills, if you are within range of the target you've specified, hit that target WITHOUT the need for you to click a name on a target dialog window like you do now. So instead of hitting say, F3 to use Fracture, then clicking the intended targets name from the drop down window, you hit F3, and your Fracture hits the target you have set in your CCS targeting window as your offensive target. The same applies to Defensive Target but Defensive Targets are the primary recipients of all your beneficial skills, heals, damage blocking and buffs, so if you have a team you play with, your team can set up your support and tank characters to automatically support specific people in the group defensively, and the same applies, you do not need to depend on clicking a skill then clicking the target, you simply hit the hot key for FirstAid, and FirstAid is immediately applied to your defensive target without the need for mouse clicking another drop down.
• RP Tool - The CCS HUD now has an integrated simple RP Tool which will allow you to change your name and speak as a different character while in RP without the need for attachment of secondary systems that use variant formatting. Simply click Set name, type /4 Your Name, and you will see it sets the name of the character you wish to speak as there. Then to speak as that character name you simply type everything you wish to say on channel 4. RP Tool chat is easily distinguished from normal chat as it is green in color. It is the first of several additions to the HUD that will come over time.

These two additions are in slide out panels that don't actually "slide out" at all, thus they see very little slowdown from lag, we're using texture animation and once again, TexPos button activation to lower prim counts in use and because of this, and the fact to even access SL you must have a viewer running viewer version 1.23 or higher (Emerald is a 1.23 compile, for those wondering) the old Legacy HUD for CCS is being discontinued and will no longer function with CCS at all as of the 1.0.1 release.

New Abilities Level 70 and Beyond:

The skill system will be updated to add in the appropriate scaled to level abilities for players that have exceeded level 70, adding new versions of their class based skills at the appropriate tier in the 70 - 80 level range.

Tank Changes:

Tanks have always had a bit of an ill rep, their armor always helped with basic melee damage, but did nothing for status effects and skill damage. Resolute Armor and its variant forms now also gives a base willpower boost while using it, that has helped Tanks a bit in regards to avoiding status effects while armored, but it still doesn't seem to have been enough in regards to making the Tank class viable against DPS and Healers in regards to its role. So with that in mind we've added the following new passive ability to Tanks called the Adamant Factor:

• Adamant - Passive tank archetype base ability, it applies to all tanks. And in basic it means that the more damage you take, the more damage you put out, we will be starting all tanks out at an Adamant Factor of 3, this means that if you lose 25% of your total health, your melee damage output doubles, if you lose 50% of your total health, your melee damage output triples, if you lose 75% of your total health your melee damage gets !!!QUAD DAMAGE!!! (old school reference there). So basically the idea is, while you are harder to damage than other classes and can survive more punishment than other classes, as these other classes get you beat down....you become like THE HULK and the angrier you get, the more damage you do, the closer to death you become as a Tank, the more dangerous you are. This plus armor, plus willpower boosts while armored, should make the tank almost as good as it can get until we add in their Defensive Target Shielding ability, which will allow them to absorb 50% of all damage directed at a target they choose to defend (Not in 1.0.1, but will be added after the release).

So given the damage increase factors of Adamant in the Tank archetype, you can now see why the strength factor multiplier for Tanks is 2, and DPS is 3, because DPS will always need to put out that exta bit of damage as a general rule, but a tank as they get closer to closer to death, can start to out damage a DPS class as well, requiring careful tactics on the side of the DPS class to ensure they're not too close when HULK GETS ANGRY!!!

API v2.5

As of last night, in anticipation of the impending 1.0.1 release I released a new API module to the 3rd party developers group, it is NOT API 3.0, it is simply a minor API update for people that are already holding licenses and ONLY applies to weapons that use HUDChan user statistics to make their weapons cost stamina or adjust damage based on strength or whatever else. If your weapon does not use any user based statistic to modify its enhancements, then the 2.3e API module will still be functional for your designs, if your weapon requires HUDChan/User Statistic information to function, then you need to update to API 2.5 because API 2.3e will no longer function properly with those API calls.

PLEASE DO NOT RELEASE ANY WEAPONS UPDATED WITH THE API 2.5 MODULE UNTIL THE CCS V1.0.1 RELEASE OCCURS, DOING SO WILL MAKE THE WEAPONS NON-FUNCTIONAL AGAINST CCS 1.0 METERS

So yeah thats all great Suz but when is it being released?:

It is our intention to attempt to have the beta RC4 bugs addressed by tomorrow, January 28th, and release tomorrow night. Should this go awry due to new bugs popping up from fixes of old bugs, I will be putting the release in abeyance until February 8th to ensure we have a full 10 days to work on all remaining issues before release. I will not release this version of CCS only to have to turn around and fix bugs in it in bits and pieces after the fact, it comes out as perfect as possible and thats the long and short of it.

• THERE WILL BE A GLOBAL MANDATORY RESPEC ISSUED TO THE NETWORK ONCE THE 1.0.1 SYSTEM IS RELEASED, IT WILL BE MANDATORY, AND GIVEN THE CHANGES TO HOW STATS WORK, YOU WILL WANT TO BE FAIRLY JUDICIOUS IN YOUR STAT POINT ASSIGNMENTS AND NOT STICK WITH THE OLD MIN/MAX MENTALITY.

• ONE WEEK AFTER RELEASE A SECOND GLOBAL RESPEC WILL BE ISSUED FOR PEOPLE TO EITHER HOLD ON TO AND USE AT A LATER DATE, OR USE IMMEDIATELY TO FIX PROBLEMS THEY'VE IDENTIFIED IN THEIR SKILL ASSIGNMENT UNDER THE GLOBAL RESPEC.

After the second respec is issued no further respecs will be issued, on request, not for money, not for all the begging in the world, so play the two you're getting here smartly. RP based respecs will continue to be honored until the following additions are made to the CCS Character Profile:

Coming Soon to a Profile Page Near You:

• XP Purchasable Respecs - Very soon after the 1.0.1 release, if you wish to respec you can do so by simply "rerolling" the character, a base percentage of total XP that has yet to be determined will be the cost for said respec, but in a simple example if we did a 10% respec XP cost, and you had 10000xp, it would cost you 1000 of that XP to enable the respec. 10% is NOT the final decided on number, this is just an example, but soon you will have respecs at your fingertips whenever you want them and they won't cost you a real life dime.
• Secure Character Transfer - A lot of people sometimes need to get on a new avatar for various reasons, many of them legitimate, some of them not so legitimate, at this time in CCS we say no to 99% of transfer requests because there is no way for us to actually determine the validity of the request. We are going to be adding a system that will allow people to set up a secure password for character transfers which will allow them to transfer their XP from one character to another via their character profile. And it will ONLY work if both characters are using the same IP address at the time of transfer (no selling characters, I'm on to you, you RMT wannabees) Once the secure transfer is done, the original record is DELETED, and the new record carries on with the old characters XP assigned to it.

The Forums:

We've set up limited access priveledges for the Agora forum designer on our SQL system so they can log into it and make the necessary changes to the Joomla/Agora database to get everyones forum access re-enabled, this should happen in the next day or so from everything I understand, and as soon as its done Stormy will update the website to let everyone know that you can get back to hooting and hollering at each other on the forums. Sorry for the continued delay on this but I think we're just about done in regards to getting over this technological hump.

So thats the news, hope it answers a lot of questions and helps people to understand whats coming, when its coming, and why its taking the time its taking. Thanks all, and have fun out there!