Are you ever in Wasteland? Do you find yourself, and your teammates, in low spirits AND low health? Don't have the credits to pay for a full heal AND your taxes?

Well, let me tell you, this product right here fresh out of X-Corp's oven is sure to make you feel better!

Presenting... the Deployment Kit, the earliest latest stolen development in medical nanotechnology! A scientific breakthrough of an intersection between drone technology and nanotech.

Use this bad boy (internally known as Good Boy) in Wasteland and find yourself and up to 4 other teammates basking in the glow of healing nanites!

Wondering how it works? Me too! Let's see:

• A little bit after this post, Deployment Kits will be available in the Warfare Shop for 200 Warfare Points.


• When a kit is in your held items, use /deploy heal in WL, immediately consuming the item, to spawn a visible gang NPC called 'Healing Drone'.


• Every minute tick, the healing drone will expend healing power (currently set at 100HP), consuming it from its own HP bar.


• If there are friendly gang members on the square, the expended healing power is split evenly among the gang players who need heals (up to a max of 5 players).
  
  (eg. If only 1 player needs heals, they get the full +100HP. If 2 players, 50 each..etc up to 5 players, 20 each,).


• Once its HP <= 0, the single-use drone will become useless (like my future).


• Higher gang ranks (not me ) can use /alert heal to explicitly create a new type of alert ("Healing drone"), but gang chat messages also go out when someone deploys a healing drone (also logged in Warfare log).


• Each gang can only have up to 3 of its own healing drones active simultaneously.


• Right now, anyone can deploy a healing drone once they have the item (which is also tradeable, fyi).


• You cannot stack drones/deploy a drone on a square that already has another healing drone (friendly or otherwise).


• War lords and above can go to a new drone management page in the citadel to destroy any active gang drone.


• Healing Drones are not combat-equipped other than having really strong armor! Defend them with your life!

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Feel free to discuss in the WL & Raids forum! As always, report any bugs or things that come up and I'll do my best to address them.

Also dev is down for ...erm reasons. Feel free to speculate, but I promise you it's nothing exciting.

~Aldo

We’d like to expand, elaborate, and introduce more considerations to the previous blog.

Although done so under a different context, the Radiation Cannon was once again used in a manner that meets the interpretation of the Game Rules, specifically Rule 2.0, Farming/Funding Accounts: “You also are not allowed to help enemy gangs gain warfare points or territory in the wasteland. All participants in such activity will be punished”. This leads us to begin considering a few things that I’d like to share.

1 - The Radiation Cannon and its place in Gang Warfare - Where we have now encountered multiple uses of the Radiation Cannon that have fallen under grey areas of the rules, the question begs to be asked as to whether it should be included in the roster of available objectives for future Wasteland Map use. I am not saying it is going to be removed, however there will be discussion regarding its place.

2 - Game Rules - There are portions of the Game Rules, with an emphasis on Rule 2.0, that have not stood up to the test of time, and this has made it difficult to properly enforce. Voluntary Helpers, Legacy Affairs, and Zorg himself will be reviewing the games current rules and will attempt to clear as many grey areas as possible so that we can better enforce them.

3 - Dealing with Gang Concerns - This is more of a reminder than anything, but we please ask that if there is something regarding Gang Warfare that you’d like to have investigated, that you reach out to your directed Gang Rep as a starting point. That’s what they’re there for, and we ask that you use them for the resource that they are.

A coinciding Thread will be put up in the Main Forum to allow for some constructive discussion regarding the above. We value your opinions, stances, and expertise and ask that you kindly and calmly communicate any concerns or suggestions you have.

Thank you,
Matt

We'd like to address an issue that took place on Friday.

For those who are unaware, the Radiation Cannon was used wholly on the Cannon-controlling gang's land on one of the three islands in the Wasteland. The Phase Disruptor was also used at the same time, thus avoiding any potential enemy gang member taking advantage of the self-inflicted Cannon damage. The player who used the Cannon then sat and regained the territorial control on these squares. This allowed the uninterrupted gain of Warfare Points while the control of the territory was regained.

The use of the objectives in this way falls into a potential grey area of the rules. The entire volunteer team has discussed this issue, and have concluded that this usage falls under Warfare Point farming i.e. cheating. We'd like to remind everyone that using game mechanics to engineer a situation in which you can gain an unfair advantage amounts to cheating, which is forbidden by the "Game Bugs and Cheats" section of the HCS Terms of Use. If a way to gain Warfare Points (or any other in-game currency or resource) seems too good to be true, it's probably cheating.

We want to take this opportunity to remind you all of the rules, and to ask you to think twice before engaging in any questionable behavior that could put you in breach of the Terms of Use. While we can't list each and every situation that would count as cheating, we hope this post clears up any potential confusion that may exist as to the sort of actions which would fall under that umbrella.

Any further questions you might have can be directed to the Voluntary Helpers.

The recent wasteland browser lag has been fixed in an upcoming patch (available whenever Zorg has a chance to sync the codebase next).

This 'browser lag' specifically refers to the lag/slowness nearly all WLers have reported when on the wasteland page for too long, leading to really slow cursor movement on the map or making it hard to even type a chat message (or do anything on the page really) unless you refreshed.

The issue, for anyone curious, was a memory leak on our end in the rendering code that for some reason wasn't a big issue before but has now become a majorly apparent issue in recent browser versions (likely due to changes in the browser's rendering capabilities). I've fixed that memory leak so once the patch is live, things should be pretty smooth.

Note: This lag does not affect 'network lag', which is the lag in your responses from the server (i.e. here's what the map looks like now!) and your requests to the server (move here, click this, use this ability..etc).

I'll comment below once I know the update is live.

~Aldo