For PR points and to get people accustomed to PvP Shadow of the Lotus is holding Arkhe Tournaments.

Announced on the general chat, the event lasts for 1 hour. During the event, in the event location each player that is killed by arkhes nets 300 000 NIC for the killer(s) (distributed).

The agent with most kills wins an additional grand prize (to be decided on indivudal instance basis). There are no equipment or alliance requirements on the killer or victim bots.

Stay tuned in the bat-channel for more bat-events.

Battling game instability I have been referred a lot on to let a crash uploader to do its job so the devs know what they can try to fix. Sometimes when the game becomes unresponcive the main cocern is to reestablish the control to the agent (ie reconnect). However it seems that even when I let it crash "slowly" in a terribly controled way.

So what player behaviours can mess up the functionality of uploading crashes? Can I somehow check which crashes have been succesfully uploaded or not?

There are 2 big ways that perpetuum crashes for me. One is screen becoming totally unresponcive (freeze) and then turning a ligther shade as a pop-up window with "Perpetuum is not responding. Windows is checking whether the problem can be recovered from" with an indefinite progress bar and a cancel button. Soon this turns into "The program was stopped by an error" with "close program" button. Is this a controlled way of crashing or would the uploader itself crashing look also like this?

The second is having a "Visual C++ error" with "ok" which when pressed makes the program disappear and if not pressed in a midish amount of time leadds to before mentioned traditional crash.

I tried to look throught my firewall settings on whether I have blocked something relevant but nothing that would ring a bell hit my eye.

These types of crashes happen randomly but atleast they used to happen especially when docking and undocking.

The communication have had I regarding these has been pretty much "not raised by our code, so can't fix by altering our code"

However these crashes have altered their character somewhat. When the pop-up window appears one can actually ignore it for a while and the game works a little while even thought its complaining. However within 30s-3min the game does eventually crash. As the game seems to be pretty fine without that component it might be isolable or able to be restarted separately and transparently.

Sometimes when I crash reconnecting takes quite a while. The game manages to take me to my charcter selection. Could it be possible to explicitly say to the game to cut my other connections and treat this new connection as my main one?

Or when my previous game instance has not yet timedout the charcter login takes a big while (the logout button goes "disabled transparent") ending up failing with the second login attempt succeeding. Sometimes when I ma minig the disconnection doesn't produce any hickups. But if am suspectible to be in routes of red roamings spawns it reconnection time is quite critical.

Private Transport Assignment are not used terribly much and I suspect I might be about the only player that frequently uses them.

What they supposedly give is convenience at the expense of NIC but I have found that sometimes I choose to haul stuff myself just to avoid the paper work of setting the assingments up. There are certain things that I wish were more easy to set up. They all have to do with me having the idea of what I want transported at what terms but actually getting that thought transmitted to the game is unwieldy.

One of the needs is to avoid large packet size. A battle bot might have unused 5u when it transitions on a natural business form alpha2 to alpha2. It obviously can't accept a 100u assigment. So instead of doing 1 100u assigment you could do 25 5u assigments. However this is the difference of doing 25 dialogs instead of 1. Atleast when the thing to be transported is homogenous it would be handy to just have a "quantity of assigments" in the same way one can purchase multiple copies of the same item from one dialog box.

Another one would be to allow "create transport assigment" in the context menu when multiple transport boxes are selected. Each would be posted with identical but separate contract details (ie same destination, same collateral) all spesified with the same dialog box.

It would also be handy if you could tell a 100u stack of resource to split itself evenly into these 10 boxes. What you can now do it is to tell it to split into 10 equisizeable stacks but you still have to move each stack to its container. I could also see that for example when moving broken equipment I would just want the "stuff" to split itself into containers. If I later care what transports in what box I could later switch particualr bits to other boxes (such as check that the average value is not disproportional to the intended collateral).

Also alledgelly sparks might be removed. One big thing I use sparks for is to have my person be present to post assigment orders. Could this requirement to be physically present be lifted or be circumvented via extensions? I don't think this is the main downside sparks cause so I think an alternative to retain atleast the level of usabiliyt currently offered when it comes to transport assigments should remain. One other important factor is that you can not load transport assigmment containers remotely, there is also a phyiscal presence requirement. Having resources under your name in a far away terminal but being able to summon them to be nearer without entering said far of terminal would I think be a thing that would make sense for transport assigments. The person that actually transports the goods would have to be able to physically enter the proximity of the goods but the summoner need not. With sparks doing transport assigments between posts where you have sparks in both start and end is not really big trouble. But if comparable mechanism is not provided when sparks are taken away, kililng sparks can kill logistics with it.