A GLOBAL MANDATORY RESPEC HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE ADJUSTMENTS TO CCS FOR THIS RELEASE PLEASE DO NOT IMMEDIATELY ASK GMS OR ADMINS FOR A SECOND RESPEC A SECOND FREE RESPEC WILL BE ISSUED TO THE NETWORK APPROXIMATELY TWO WEEKS AFTER THIS BALANCE PASS HAS GONE THROUGH.


FIRST OFF: DO NOT USE INTERNET EXPLORER 9 TO DO YOUR RESPEC IT WILL NOT WORK, IE9 DOES NOT WORK WITH OUR JQUERY COMPILE AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO RECOMPILE JQUERY TO MAKE ONE BROWSER WORK. USE FIREFOX, CHROME, SAFARI, OPERA OR EVEN THE INTERNAL SECOND LIFE BROWSER. NOT IE9!

Secondly we're pushing a new meter to incorporate a small fix to stop the meter bugging that has been caused by stack heap overflows and to introduce some more security to the meter unit.

Changes to CCS Balance are as follows:

• Lycan Point Method changed to Lacerate
  
• Neko Point Method changed to Claw
  
• Human Point Method changed to LegSweep
  
• Undead Point Method changed to Gore
  
• All Racial Caster intelligence modifiers increased to 1.25x to increase overall damage for intelligence investment.
  
• Increased Felshield by 10 points of armor per level of the ability. I agree +1 Armor was sort of a joke...right? Get it...+1? Damn no one gets my jokes.
  
• All Racial Caster chance to hit increased to 98% to match melee DPS chance to hit.
  
• Cyborg PleasureBots and NanoMedics had their Intelligence Mod increased to 1.15x
  
• BioField Ability Removed - This was generally a throw away ability for most healers and was only used to cancel racial regens.
  
• Malice changed to single target, damage base increased to 67 points of damage (scales with intelligence) curse duration 25 seconds, 98% chance to hit
  
• Neko Reflexes increased to 15 second duration/decreased cool down to 25 Seconds
  
• Removed attacking/attacked animations from all racial point method generation skills to balance out quick use abilities with ones that get slowed down by an animation delay.

Lets see how it plays before everyone screams and cries, thank you.

Spanish:

UN RESPEC GLOBAL MANDATORIO HA SIDO EXPEDIDO PARA LOS AJUSTES DE CCS EN EL NUEVO LANZAMIENTO. POR FAVOR NO APABULLEN INMEDIATAMENTE A LOS GMS O ADMINS DE INMEDIATO PIDIENDO UN SEGUNDO RESPEC. EL SEGUNDO RESPEC SERÁ EMITIDO PARA TODOS APROXIMADAMENTE EN DOS SEMANAS DESPUÉS DE QUE HAYA SALIDO EL NUEVO BALACE.

PRIMERO: NO USES INTERNET EXPLORER 9 PARA HACER TU RESPEC, NO FUNCIONARÁ. IE9 NO TRABAJA CON NUESTRA COMPILACIÓN JQUERY Y NO VAMOS A RECOPILAR TODO NUEVAMENTE SOLO PARA HACER QUE ESE NAVEGADOR FUNCIONE. USEN FIREFOX, CHROME, SAFARI, OPERA O HASTA EL NAVEGADOR INTERNO DE SECOND LIFE. NO IE9!

En segundo lugar, estamos sacando un nuevo meter para incorporar pequeños arreglos y detener los meter bugs que han estado siendo causados por sobrecargas. tambien para introducir algunas mejoras de seguridad a la unidad del meter.

Los cambios de balance son como siguen:

El método para ganar raciales para los Lycans es ahora Lacerate
El método para ganar raciales para los Nekos es ahora Claw
El método para ganar raciales para los Humanos es ahora LegSweep
El método para ganar raciales para los Undead es ahora Gore
Todos los modificadores de inteligencia para los Casters ha aumentado a 1.25x de incremento de daño por inversión de inteligencia.

Incremento de Fleshield por 10 puntos de armadura por nivel. Estoy de acuerdo que +1 de armadura era casi un chiste.
El chance de golpe para todos los casters se ha incrementado a 90% para igualar el chance de golpe melee de los DPS.
El modificador de inteligencia de los Cyborg Pleasurebots y NanoMedics ha incrementado a 1.15x
Habilidad de Biofield removida - Esta habilidad era normalmente inservible para la mayoría de healers y solo era usado para cancelar regens raciales.
Malice cambió a objetivo personal, daño básico incrementado a 67 puntos (escala con inteligencia) duración del curse 25 segundos, 98% de chance de golpear.
Reflexes de los Neko incrementado a 15 segundos de duración y se le bajó el tiempo de cooldown a 25 degundos
Animaciones de ataque/atacado removidas de todos los métodos para ganar raciales para de esta manera balancear el rápido uso de habilidades de los que se colgaban con la demora de las animaciones.

Vamos a ver como funciona hasta que todos empiecen a gritar y llorar. Gracias.

As some people may be aware on May 8th around 11pm SL Time, I found myself locked out of the database. After getting in via one of the many back doors I have back into my own system, it appeared that four major French/European Sim Owner/Admin figures had gone on some kind of rampage, removing the passwords of multiple GM's/Global GMs and CCS Admins.

The four admins that appeared to be doing this were Ice Nyoki, Klein Bury, Abaddon Ryba and Demonia Arliss.

As it turns out none of these individuals were involved at all, while the audit log from the system recorded their names as taking the actions, we pulled the server connection log for the 8th and lo and behold one single IP was using all four accounts. And the IP belongs to none of the listed GM's.

We are unsure of the motive behind this breach of security, other than to potentially attempt to cause CCS administration to over react and severely punish a major part of the French/European CCS Community based on just the top level evidence of the audit trail alone. We are also unsure of the motives specifically behind the use of the four names in question but we do know who did this as they were a bit sloppy about it.

The following GM's need to either change their passwords or create stronger passwords as this all started with a brute force attempt on a single GM's password and all these accounts were accessed by the person we have identified to Interpol as the alleged hacker. There is no way they actually "got" your passwords, all passwords are stored in a 256 bit hash and not even I can read them once you set them, but obviously some people were using some fairly weak passwords as this individual did get into the system using one access they brute forced then used that to change the passwords for several other individuals to access their accounts as well.

Lobo Hapmouche
0biwan Alter
titiagege Anatine
Talia Felwitch
Celine Zamani
Ice Nyoki
NALINE Yoshikawa
ABADDON Ryba
Demonia Arliss
Mogul13 Asp

As stated we do have a very solid idea of who the person that did this was, it was a single individual and they are not a GM for any sim in CCS. I can simply assume that their intent was to attempt to get CCS Administration to cut off a major part of the French/European community in reprisal, and for some reason did not think we could see past the names in the audit trail on the database, which is not the case.

A complaint has been filed with the Interpol Cyber Crime Division, we rather doubt it will get much done but we have given the legal authority that has jurisdiction over the area the hacker is in all the information in regards to the illegal access of our servers, I hope it gets followed up on but I won't hold my breath either.

Anyways, Anonymous you are not. For the love of god at least use a proxy next time, we're not idiots you know.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this attempt. Again I will stress, no personal or confidential data has been compromised, it was simply a case of someone with a weak password and someone else brute force accessing their account. So stiffen up your passwords folks, if you need to read up on it please feel free to read this Guide on How to Create Strong Passwords.

Heya all, as you may well know by now we're currently in the process of development for CCS API 3.0, which will be bringing some much needed equality, balance and sanity to the API weapons market and also do a lot for allowing developers to create extended capabilities for their items using 1024 character strings allowing for a single communication to do multiple things rather than a weapon having to use several communications per swing or bullet to achieve the same thing, lowering overall total communications in use during combat and improving the effectiveness of API weapons in high load sim environments.

Regardless its heading towards summer 2011 and as we work on API 3.0 I'm also getting ready to do a balance pass for CCS to tweak some races and racial issues. The reasoning behind this is fairly simple. Back in 2009 I put up our total user numbers and racial spread in a pie chart.

CCS has a total registered user count of near to 500,000 players. So when you actually do a total user cross section the overall racial base looks fairly well balanced between all the available races, but CCS doesn't have 500,000 active players, it has around 500,000 REGISTERED players, some are alts others are people that may have played for a week or two then stopped playing SL or moved on to other interests.

So I did a SQL analysis of all active CCS Users, this number works out to around 80,000 total active unique SIDs over a 90 day period. Once I ran the numbers for the active user base it turns up that we've got a 43% Lycan majority.

Lycan's have always been a popular race there have been points in time where one might have stated that they were stronger than they are now. And I would not disagree with that but I will also state that Lycans as they are now while heavily adjusted over the last couple years still remain superior to any other race in CCS and its simply by an accident of dynamics that this is the case.

The Lycan race is built to be a DPS powerhouse and largely it is, even Lycan Healers and Casters are effective melee combatants though of course not as effective as Tanks and DPS they can still mix it up in a melee and come out pretty good. Most people would expect this means I'm going to nerf the Lycan's DPS capabilities...but the DPS focus of the race is not the problem.

The problem with Lycans and why they're coming out further ahead than all other races is due to an accident of convergent dynamics creating a secondary racial superiority for the Lycan and that secondary superiority is regeneration. Lycans are able to use and access their regenerative HoT's more effectively than any other race because as they are taking damage they are generating points which can then be turned around to reuse racial HoT's, and since I cannot simply nerf the Lycan racial HoTs as that would be unfair, I have to address the core issue that is creating a secondary Lycan racial strength, which is generating points by taking damage.

Now don't get me wrong I don't hate Lycans, some of the best RPers I've known have been Lycans (though I've known good RPers in all the racial categories), but this is pretty much unarguable in the math. Each race is supposed to have a single specific racial strength. But the Lycans have ended up with two because of their point method generation.

While Neko's and Human's have the same point method they aren't actually creating a secondary strength from it because their racial abilities focus on totally avoiding damage or reducing the amount of incoming damage they can take...this means they generate points less efficiently than the Lycan and thus do not create a secondary racial strength from their point generation method.

So for this the 2011 Summer Balance Pass (Intended to be pushed to the live game environment in May, exact date as yet undetermined) I will be removing point method damage from CCS entirely, and having each CCS race use a specific point method attack to generate points, with an emphasis on each races racial strength to make each racial point generation method individual to that race.

So just a heads up I am running numbers and writing up the adjustments and doing dynamics theory on how this is all going to go down. While this means that everyone will be balanced up together on their racials (equal cool downs, equatable effects) I do understand that many may feel this is a directly targeted "Lycan Nerf" but overall if you think about the dynamics as they're presented I think its pretty easy to see my points here as logical and making adjustments for them is for the better of the game.

As per usual when we do major dynamics adjustments a free respec will be issued to the entire network to allow people to adjust their characters to suit their interests after the changes, please keep in mind that the intention of this balance pass is to ensure that all the races in CCS have an equal footing and play to their individual racial strengths and doesn't allow for any one race in CCS to be fundamentally superior to any other race in CCS by accident of dynamics assigned to them.

Feel free to add your opinion on this upcoming Balance Pass in the 2011 - Summer Balance Pass thread on the forums!

A French translation of this article can be found in the articles section.