Patch 13 Coming Soon: New Beta Outpost Features and SAP QoL!

Dear Patrons,
Wow! We are so happy to announce that we finally have things coming together for our next patch!
This proved to be a very complex undertaking from a feature development and game balance perspective.  Beta outpost control and siege is a critical mechanic with very immediate consequences in the game.  
Not only that be we knocked out a few bugs and outstanding issues raised by you patrons, and other community members!

As we previewed in our Reddit post a few months ago - We have delivered on a new set of features to augment the Beta territory pvp experience.
SAPs alone don't allow for different playstyles, or players to engage with beta outpost control activities.  We are adding to this with 2 new features that augment this part of the game experience:
1 - Intrusion Relics: Just like any other Relic except these give 1pt of stability (based on the same relations mechanic as SAPs).
2 - Outpost Guardians (and Invaders): These new NPC bosses spawn around outposts that they associate with, the guardian gives -2 stability and the invader gives +2 stability, regardless who kills them.  

The primary idea with these features is that they are a "high frequency, low magnitude" event.  Meaning they occur more frequently that SAPs.  The NPCs respawn in ~6 hours, and the Relic in ~4, for few points.  This provides more, varied, available, opportunities for players to engage with Beta outpost siege or ownership during more hours of the day!

SAPs are great for what they do: they are high-magnitude, low frequency, with query-able times to allow players to plan around.  This is an important mechanism for organized pvp.  However, we all remember how on official, PVP would ONLY happen when there was a SAP up.  Otherwise people would stay docked because they didn't have anything at risk.  Now we hope that, while SAPs would still be popping up and being nexuses of activity, these other mechanics will create more organic activity on beta, in offensive, defensive, or even PVE activity.  

What about SAPs?

They are largely staying the same except a few things...
All SAP Loot is COMPLETELY overhauled and redesigned.
Most loot was garbage, TAPs (we will find better incentives for these later), PL's, and misc stuff just was not worth it.  Further more the scale from 0-100 was steep - the 100 level loots being so superior, it forces players to obsessively control their outposts for fear of losing their superior loot levels.
To address this, the SAP loot is now more linear, and in a stepped model where all loot is the same for 0-50, 50-100, 100-150.
Further more, we added unique loot to 0-50 for all SAP types to incentivize taking enemy stations down, not just for pvp, but for loot!

Specimen SAPs were the primary target of our SAP rework.  
Most people skip it - which tells us it is dead content.  20 stability points generally isn't worth it, and the loot certainly isn't.  Furthermore it is far more complex for a newer member of the community to understand, prepare and execute on - especially compared to the other SAP activities.
We saw a few opportunities here:
1 - lower the barrier to entry
2 - engage players of different backgrounds to be a part of this activity.

Specimen SAPs have an "industrial" theme to them, so we decided to move the requirements from a bunch of materials and modules, to 1 specifically manufactured item, that requires not only raw material, but a new "Flux" material obtained from recycled T0 (artifact) gear!

The balance of the number of items required, their size, and what it takes to do a Specimen no longer requires a full lithus to be able to account for all possible combinations.  Instead it is feasible with a Daidalos size cargo, or 2 sequers worth.  

Because of the ease we lowered the points, and increased the number of rounds, to make sure that the player is exposed to counter-attack for a period of time comparable to the other SAPs.  Otherwise, we realize this would be too easy, and an over-correction from prior specimens.

It is also important to point out, all these new changes introduce more ways stability can be attacked.  To compensate, we computed the fastest average time an outpost could be taken down before, and with the new features after.  This led us to increase the Outpost maximum stability to 150, providing more buffer for the increased possible stability affecting events they now have to contend with.

Another Feature, but not as exciting, is Stability Decay.  After 3 days, if an outpost does not have any SAPs completed (by anyone) then the stability of the outpost will decay at 5 pts per day.  With the 3 day grace-period and the increased buffer, we see this only as a stop-gap measure for periods of major inactivity.  We hope this would signal to other more timid corps that these outposts are free for the taking!  At the end of the day, an unused outpost is just more dead content.  And if a big AFK corp occupying it is keeping other players from enjoying beta - that is something we are keen to fix!

We are very excited, and have a lot of cool stuff to show!  We have a full tutorial video on Beta SAP mechanics, old and new, so all players can be informed.  And we will have a blog detailing all of this publicly before the release!

In closing, I'd like to give a special shout-out to all the volunteers on the team - our testing team was critical to this process due to the number of iterations we went through to get this right!  
Everyone on the team thanks you, the Patrons of our humble open-source volunteer project to (re)build Perpetuum into the MMO we all love, for the Perpetuum community, by the Perpetuum community.

Stay tuned for our blog and video and release announcement!