March 2024
Greetings Auraxians, For this March's development letter, we have some news, updates, and a special treat; the reveal of a new facility type!Public Test Server
The Warzone rotation, Oshur Alert, and Friends List updates will be hitting the Public Test Server shortly after the next patch. The Friends List has been rewritten from scratch to solve a myriad of various bugs and issues. We are confident that this rewrite should solve the existing issues, however since it is a new system there could be other issues we have missed. The Warzone rotation system has been changed to be non-static. That is, the rotation order can shift slightly so that the oldest Warzone is not necessarily the next to be unlocked, although it usually will be. This also allowed us to set Oshur to an infrequent rotation schedule. There is a new meltdown alert on Oshur that should trigger almost immediately, setting a cap on how long the continent will remain open. More details, if needed, will be in the PTS Patch Notes nearing release.Sunderer Update
The Sunderer is in active development and still going through quite a bit of internal testing. Once we are confident that we have brought them to a state where you can provide us with valuable feedback, we will be releasing a new cert tree to the test server. This *may* happen in batches so that as much testing as possible can be done before live release.New Facility Type
Finally, on to the special treat. We are currently working on an **Assault Facility**. This is an entirely new type of Facility that is dramatically different from the existing ones, and we wanted to try some new things to see how they affected the way players select equipment and approach combat. Our goals are to give the Facility a much clearer and directed sense of flow. We also wanted to have more stable and recognizable phases for battles with distinct beginning, middle, and end phases each of which will require slightly different strategy and tactics. Finally, we wanted to have a base design that more elegantly integrates vehicles so that they will have a clear, crucial role without being oppressive to infantry. Assault Rules The basic rules for the mode are simple and follow the general pattern of an Assault Game Mode that many games have with some PlanetSide 2 wrinkles. An Assault Facility comes under attack when an opposing faction captures the first, and only unlocked, Capture Point from the current owner (i.e. Defender). This does a few things:- The ability to capture the remaining points becomes locked to the initial faction
- A hard spawn for that faction is unlocked within the Hex
- The facility's Energy Pool becomes active
- Respawning at the Hard Spawn
- Spawning at the Sunderer
- Spawning via Squad Beacon
- Spawning via Steel Rain
- Deploying in any of the above manners
