We're about halfway through the last quarter of year 16, and there was no update provided for the third quarter, so it's time to assess progress and discuss goals for the next month and a half before year 17 begins. The development targets flowchart is shown below; unfortunately not much has been completed since last time. Hooks and CP ships are the main completed targets, and CP ships weren't even listed last time (intentionally so) to maintain the mystery. Some minor objectives made the flowchart as well this time: mining explosives were a minor economic change to motivate the production of explosive items as preparation for allowing them in combat as well, and multi management to reduce the asim workload.

However, the flow chart doesn't show the many small changes, such as the updated NPC shop system, rules pages overhaul, quality of life enhancements to scanners and squads pages, many series of improvements to SWC LISP, and UI modernization efforts. Also missing are the introduction of a second combat beta arena, datacard restructuring, and a lot of effort put into code cleanup and reorganization to make future improvements possible. The number of in-progress items has increased, and power pools will eventually be released (soonTM), but other things have continuously interfered. The action slot system (Actions 3+) needed for the new force skills, announced nearly a year ago, is on the verge of implementation. Our team has been working steadily, trying to balance time spent managing technical debt with time spent on visible results in the form of new or updated features.

I mentioned a special surprise being included today; unfortunately this won't be the case. We had several issues with our hosting provider this week: first, a problem with a nameserver that took half a day to explain to them and was never properly resolved, and second a server crash that took their tech support staff 3 hours to simply reboot. As a result I spent almost all of my time since the last sync either dealing with hosting or working on the hosting migration. We will be leaving our current provider for Amazon Web Services as soon as everything is in place to do so, because it will offer significant improvements in performance, reliability, administrative control, and even cost savings. We have experienced nearly constant problems with email for over a year that Amazon will be able to resolve almost immediately. I expect the transition to happen by the end of November, in time to start year 17 on fresh hardware. There will likely be down time, for 2-3 days, during the transition, but there will be additional announcements regarding the timeframe when we are closer. We'll have the standard distractions (BNT, idleRPG) during the downtime, plus feel free to suggest others in General Talk.

That said, if you look at the dev targets carefully, one of the new orange boxes includes something that would have had a preview today, instead it will probably be next week.

Today's sync is minor, it includes fixes for two bugs:
- Unable to arrest NPCs (#3894)
- Character level shown on party page

Admin tools were also updated to add RMs to the new CP ships.