Those of you who have video cards with less than 128MB of dedicated RAM but that share RAM with the CPU to get above 128MB (such as Turbocache or Hypermemory cards) have been unable to play. We have made a change that should let you play. Please try it and see.

You can now turn in Marks of Victory to get refit ship items. These are available from the same NPCs who have always handed out rewards for Marks of Victory.

This may be the last build we’re able to get to you before the pre-Boarding Party starts on January 7th. We wanted to push more server fixes, particularly to fix the bug that was taking the clusters down every 12 hours or so.

And we’ve made a few more tuning changes to both ship and avatar combat.

Differences between 1.0.29.0 and 1.0.32.0 include but aren’t limited to:

Ships / Combat:

• Tweaked the range at which group-mates auto-join an ad hoc battle. They should spawn a little closer.
• Ship combat difficulty was ramping up around level 12, which meant it was way too easy for way too long. Changed this to make it ramp up a little around level 8. NPC spawns in this 8-12 range will be slightly harder.
• Made NPC ships a little bit more dangerous by increasing their damage and accuracy by around 3-5%. (Please note that NPCs already have substantial penalties to their damage and accuracy. This change actually lessens their penalties slightly; their damage and accuracy are still well below that of a player in the same ship. It’s more of a lessened nerf than a buff.)
• Increased the required levels on the refit ships so they are closer to their true level, but still slightly below. This means refit ships are slightly more powerful than their level, but are no longer massively more powerful for their level.
• Expedition: Increased armor/structure.
• Arrow: Increased armor/structure.
• Myrmidon Refits: Reduced structure/armor, increased mast integrity.

Swashbuckling Combat:

• Decreased the duration of the close-combat effect by almost half. This will cause players to exit close combat more quickly when they are not being attacked. This change makes it easier to stun some enemies, back away to get out of close combat, and then use a healing skill to remove the Bleed effect and regain some HP.
• First Aid, Advanced First Aid: Added a 10 point instant-heal effect to all of the self-targeting medical skills, so that you heal 10 points immediately upon use and then gain the normal healing over time. In tandem with the above change, this should let you get out of close combat just long enough to regain 10 HP before the enemies unstun and come at you again.
• Improved Flash Powder: Increased the duration slightly (from 3 seconds to 4 seconds) and added a 10-second offense debuff to it. Your enemies will be stunned longer and have a harder time hitting you.
• Fixed some log spam caused by a typo in a skill definition.

UI:

• Tweaked the Quick Reference UI (both ship and avatar) to better accommodate localized text.
• Tweaked the Keybind UI to better accommodate localized text.
• Moved some drop-downs in Preferences UI around a bit in order to better accommodate localized text.

Sound:

• Another music mix pass. More work is needed, but you can hear the music better now.
• Added more nationalized crowd sounds in more lively town areas.
• Attempted to fix a ton of log spam reporting problems with sound files. This may not be entirely fixed yet, though. (QA can still make it happen sometimes.)

Performance / Stability:

• We now try to let you bypass the VRAM check. We still warn you that the game may not run but this may enable folks with Turbocache or Hypermemory cards to run the game.
• On low-end machines, if you turned shadows off, graphics looked HORRIBLE! Better now.
• We have a primary server that manages all the other servers (like the mission server and the zone servers). We’d turned him into a serial killer and he was taking the cluster down about every 12 hours. Fixed?
• Fixed a race condition in communications between the cache server and the mission server that could cause mission status on your character to get a little borked while zoning in missions on rare occasions.
• Fixed a cache server crash that could occur if it took too long to write your data. That was bad. Luckily, we only hit it a few times and most of those were during automation runs.
• We think we’ve fixed a rare cache server crash on shutdown. By the time it’s shutting down, cache server should have written all your character data already but we figured we’d fix the crash, you know, just in case.
• Fixed a rare zone server crash.

Misc:

• Fixed a bug that enabled you to repeat some missions when you shouldn’t. Pressing X to talk to the NPC wasn’t triggering everything correctly but clicking on the NPC to talk to them did.
• Added additional Mark of Victory turn-in missions to get refits.
• Integrated more localized text from SOE.