This Week in Elite:Dangerous. May 25-29 / 2015

Power play beta is out and this is huge update, even if you do not care about power play or new missions you should read changelog because there are so much to know!

Powerplay added

Princess Princess Aisling Duval as she will appear in Powerplay

Reputation Decay Power Specific Modules All Power Overview

Power map views added to galaxy map

Added power information and action screens

Power specific ship modules added

Power specific ambient traffic added

Spawn AI to hunt player if they defect

Power specific goods and actions added

The Power portraits will go in when we go live

Major factions (like the Alliance) are pan-systems entities that govern hundreds if not thousands of systems. There can be multiple powers within a major faction.

Major factions can have zero or more powers, minor factions do not constitute powers but can be affected by them.

Powers can provide some perks for explorers, but you'd need to work at it to gain those benefits.

Power specific modules

They're not meant to be super, over-powered monsters (and if they turn out this way we'll change that); they offer slightly more exotic benefits than their standard counterparts, though often with a counterbalance, such as requiring more power than an equivalent module.

They're meant to be fun rewards for taking part in the Powerplay system.

The mechanic would measure the average productivity of each power against every other power at the end of a cycle.

Powers depend on supporters

The power with the most productive average supporter would, for the following cycle, relax the rating 3 requirement, allowing all of its supporters to purchase the power's module.

The next two most productive powers would relax the rating 3 requirement, allowing supporters of rating 2 to also purchase the module for that cycle.

This would not affect the standard gate of being with a power for a month, and Commanders of rating 3 or above would always retain the ability to purchase the module.

Elevation to power

You need to control lots of systems to be considered for elevation to a power, there's a few minor factions that own several systems so are on their way, but not close yet. A minor faction is an organisation that owns markets (space stations at the moment), and they can be in a single system or across multiple systems. Powers exert controls over multiple systems - but the actual governence is done by the minor faction.

Playable ship Imperial Courier added

Playable ship Diamondback added

Diamondback is now called Diamondback Scout

There are many other factors not listed in text form that affect how capable a ship is. For example this ship is studier than a cobra with better base shields and tougher armour. It can turn well too and is suited to dogfighting. It's module layout limits the damage to modules when hit from above.

"The Diamondback Scout is Lakon Spaceways’ attempt to repeat the success of the Asp range at a medium price point. The result was a combat capable ship with good jump capability and was pitched as a light long range reconnaissance ship. After the ship’s maiden flight it was criticized for not having the same versatility as the Asp, but it has seen modest success in the long range reconnaissance, long range interceptor and fast picket ship roles for organisations not able or willing to invest in the heavy price tag of the Asp."

Different Drones added

Missions

Mission system overhaul, scaling up based on rank and reputation

Mission targets can be generated in supercruise rather than USSs

Spawned AI difficulty determined by mission (if spawned by mission)

Revamped military progression missions

Added Founders and Elite ranked missions

Another big change is the mission system (community goals are not affected), so much is new that any incomplete missions you have in progress at the time of the update will be removed from your mission list when the update goes live to the public. You will not be penalised for not completing them, but also won’t be rewarded, so complete them before then if they matter to you. This is expected to be next week, but will depend on what feedback comes in and what changes need to be made. Once the date is firm we’ll let you know.

Crimes

Major factions don't record crimes anymore, only minor factions.

Bounties cannot be paid off (Pilot's Fed contact is gone!), but expire after 7 days.

Fines now take 7 days to expire, but never coexist with bounties (bounties absorb fines and dormant bounties with the same faction).

The length of time bounties are active will scale according to the level of the bounty. So at the bottom end – an assault charge, for example – you would receive a bounty, but the time it remains active will be quite low, say 15 minutes. For more serious crimes the time will increase according to the value of the bounty, so at 1,000 credits it’s a day and up to a cap of seven days for bounties of 7,000 credits or higher. The active time will increase if you commit further crimes, so committing numerous assault crimes will increase the bounty value and the time that it is active. We think this will provide better proportionality for crimes that are committed

Other changes

Add select nav target functionality to system map

Added Painite and osmium as a minable commodity

Added low and high intensity resource extraction site scenarios

Loan ceiling scales based on player's highest Elite rank

Show progress to next rank

Allow any general purpose slot on any ship to contain a fuel tank module

NPC chatter works in supercruise

Galaxy map camera now caches its current position for retrieval on returning to the galaxy map

Make sure we spend fuel when we hyperspace, even if disconnect before the save-on-arrival

Interdictions do 10% of the damage of a normal emergency drop

Chance that NPC escorts won't flee but stay and fight

Give turret mounts the ability to track 5 degrees down past horizontal, to help ships like the python be able to actually hit small ships in front of it

Friendly fire rules should apply to player Vs player, not just AI

Prevent docking after the police 'notice' that a player is wanted. This is the same reaction with committing a violent crime near the station

Make sure that an NPC appears after an interdiction if it has been interdicted by more than one player

Mines now do both thermic and explosive damage

The contents of an asteroid are now deterministic again, and will be the same every time a players logs in and for every player

A history of mined asteroids is stored per player on the web server. If a player tries to mine a previously mined asteroid, they get nothing

Asteroids can now contain up to 3 minerals, chunks still contain 2 minerals

Chaff now affects turrets and gimbals by the same amount

Pilot and chair added to external cockpits

Cap bounties to 10 million per jurisdiction - fines remain unlimited

Allow players to adjust their power pips in Supercruise

Make every capacitor recharge at max rate while docked, since station UI can steal the power controls, leaving players without any sys energy to bring their shield back up

Tweaked ammo amounts for multicannon and rail gun.

Shipyard now accounts for fitted modules in the Shields and Armour values

Increase persistence for NPCs that are hunting player ships for various readings

When we are docked, do not allow anything to add wear to our ship

Show whether a black market is present on the station in the system map

Modules can be repaired partially from the repairs screen

Indications to commodity descriptions for their legality (if applicable)

Popup message to go with the inbox message when the player gains a Pilots Federation rank

Added a bit more bass to Cannon fire.

Added interactive mixing to combat music which responds to how much is going on; fights stay exciting throughout an engagement.

10% charge for selling modules

The implementation of the 90% money back/10% charge for selling back used modules and weapons has proved to be a popular discussion! It was always the intention that you shouldn't be able to swap parts of your ship for free and the way most of us here play the game is to own several ships for differing roles – I tend not to sell any of my ships and spec them out for different roles. It is clear that some of you take a different approach to how you set up your ships and that is exactly what a beta is for – to gain feedback on changes. So we’ll take the comments onboard from all sides of the discussion and make a call on this before the end of beta.

Changes to Turrets

When firing at a moving target turrets confusion is affected by distance so that turrets are more easily confused by sharp manoeuvres at short range than long

Further changes to how people manage turrets:

Turrets not in a firegroup won't do anything.
Turrets in Fire at Will cannot commit Assault.
Turrets in Fire at Will won't fire at illegal targets.
Target Only is now a manual/latched fire mode, and can be used on illegal targets.

Server side changes

Apply 10% price penalty when selling modules

Reduced cooldowns on minor faction states: expansion, war, election

Increase minimum tech level required to activate the shipyard and outfitting shops

Reduced the bounty cap to 1 million credits per voucher

Increased outfitting stock levels by 20%

Extremely high and extremely low faction reputations now slowly decay towards less extreme values

Smuggling profit will start count towards the trading profit in 1.3.

Reputation Decay

To let you know we have changed the rate of Reputation decay today to make it a bit slower. The effect may not become apparent instantly (as servers need to update etc) but hopefully over the next few days you will notice a difference. Also just to clarify, your reputation should never decay below friendly (or above unfriendly).

Major and minor faction slowly decays over time to just inside friendly/unfriendly boundaries if above/below them.

This decay takes at most (if you're right at the extremes of reputation) around 20 days. This decay only occurs when you are offline.

There are two reasons for this decay:

It helps Commanders to escape a potentially permanent hostility trap with minor and major factions.

It makes it slightly harder for Commanders to be allied with multiple major factions at the same time.

Mass Inhibition Factor by Ships

6 Sidewinder, Eagle, Hauler

7 Adder, Courier, Viper

8 Type 6, Cobra, Diamondback

10 Vulture, Type 7

11 Asp

12 Clipper, Fer-De-Lance

14 Federal Dropship

15 Orca

16 Type 9

17 Python

23 Anaconda

Shield tech discount

Shield tech discount at 78 Ursae Majoris (will last around 12 days)

A7 shield is available there for 43 Mil

Elite: Dangerous Steam Keys

All Elite Dangerous store players can now generate a Steam key to add it to their Steam library.

Instructions to redeem:

Log into the Elite: Dangerous store.
Go to your account dashboard.
Click on ‘Partner Keys’
Click ‘Claim an Elite: Dangerous’ key.

Warning: from an account connected to Steam Frontier will receive 30% less income for all future purchases, so do redeem steam code only if you don't care about that! :)