Free Binary Options Indicator for Metatrader (MT4/MT5)
Free Binary Options Indicator for Metatrader (MT4/MT5)
BINARY OPTIONS PREDICTION INDICATOR - MT4talk.com
Technical Indicator Honest Predictor for Binary Options FREE
Binary Options Signals Indicator 90% accurate.
The Most Important Technical Indicators For Binary Options
I created a mathematically optimal team generator!
Hi all, I've been playing FPL for a few years now, and by no means am I an expert. However, I like math and particularly optimization problems. And a few days ago I thought to use my math knowledge for something useful. My goal was to start from some metric that predicts the amount of points a player will score (either in the next gameweek, or over the whole season). From that metric, I wanted to generate the mathematically optimal team, aka choose the 15 players that will give me the most points, while staying within budget. I realized this is a constrained knapsack problem, which can be solved by dedicated solvers as long as the optimization problem is properly defined. Note that while I make a big assumption by choosing some metric from which I start, the solver actually finds the most optimal team, without any prior assumptions about best formation, budget spread, etc! (Warning: from this point onward it gets kinda math-y, so turn back or skip ahead to the results if that's not your thing) MATH So first, the optimization variable needed to be defined. For this purpose I introduced a binary variable x which is basically a vector of all players in the game, where a value of 1 indicates that player is part of our dream team and a 0 means it's not. Secondly, an objective function needs to be defined, which is what we want to maximize. In our case, this is the total expected points our dreamteam will score. I included double captain points and reduced points for bench players here. The objective function is linear, which is nice since it is convex (an important property which makes solving the problem much easier, and is even required for most solvers). Lastly are the constraints. Obviously, there is the 100M budget constraint. Then we also want the required amount of goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards. Then we need to keep in mind the formation constraints, and lastly are the max 3 players per club constraints. Luckily, these are all linear (so convex) constraints. I solved this problem using CVX for MATLAB, particularly with the Gurobi solver since it allows mixed integer programs. It tries to find the optimal variable x* which maximizes the objective function while staying within the constraints. And amazingly, it actually comes up with solutions! RESULTS So like I said before, I need to start from some metric that indicates how many points a player will score (if you have any recommendations, let me know!). For a lack of better options, I chose two different metrics:
The total points scored by the player last year
The expected points scored by the player in the next gameweek (ep_next in the FPL API, for fellow nerds)
Obviously, both metrics are not perfect. The first one doesn't take into account transfers, promoted teams, injuries, fixtures, position changes etc. However, it should work decent for making a set-and-forget team with proven PL players. The second metric seems to have a problem with overrating bench players of top PL teams such as Ozil, Minamino, etc. I'm not really sure why, but it's a metric taken directly from FPL with undisclosed underlying math so it's not my problem. Also, keep in mind that since the first gameweek does not feature City/Utd/Burnley/Villa players, this metric predicts them to score 0 points so they won't feature in the optimal team. Team 1: Last year's dreamteam
Alexander-Arnold
Robertson
van Dijk
Doherty
Tarkowski
Ings
Jiménez
Martial
Pope
Lundstram
De Bruyne (c)
Bench:
Ryan
Noble
Rice
Stephens
Team 2: Next week's dreamteam
Alexander-Arnold (c)
Robertson
Azpilicueta
Alonso
Söyüncü
Vardy
Werner
Lacazette
Alisson
Pépé
Willian
Bench:
Gazzaniga
James
McCarthy
Pierrick
Both teams cost exactly 100M. At first glance, there are some obvious flaws with both teams, but most of them are because the metric used as input is flawed, as I explained before. Lundstram is obviously a much worse choice this year due to various reasons, and Team 2 has some top 6 players which are very much not nailed. However. What I think is interesting is that both teams have only 2 starting midfielders. This despite the trend of people stacking premium midfielders. On the other hand, premium defenders seem to be very good value, and the importance of TAA and Robertson is underlined. Similarly, near-premium forwards in the 7.5-10 price range seem to be a good choice. CONCLUSION I'm quite content with my optimal team generator. Using it, I don't need to use vague value metrics such as VAPM. The input can be any metric which relates simply to how many points a player will score. Choices about relative value of e.g. defenders against midfielders, formation, budget spread etc. are all taken out of my hands with this team generator. The team that is generated is only as good as the metric used as input. But given a certain input metric, you can be sure that the generated team is optimal. I would gladly share my MATLAB code if there is any interest. Also, I'm open to suggestions on how to extend it. EDIT: Here it is. (Tiny disclaimer: Remember when I said: "without any prior assumptions"? That is a lie. There is one tiny assumption I made, which is how often bench players are subbed on. I guesstimated this to happen approximately 10% of the time.)
*These are preliminary Patch Notes and changes may still happen until the launch of Title Update 10.
New Season – Keener’s Legacy
A new season is almost upon us! Starting on June 23rd, Keener’s Legacy offers 12 weeks of in-game activities and unique rewards. Season 2 brings a new Seasonal Manhunt, new Leagues, a new Global event and new unique rewards, as well as an Apparel Event.
New Manhunt tasking you to take on 5 rogue agents over a 12-week period starting June 23rd. Bring down all five to unlock the new Healing Trap skill variant.
New Global Event Hollywood
New Apparel Event Phoenix Down
New Leagues Termite, Luna, Huntsman and Titan.
New Rewards
2 new Exotics
1 new Gear Set
2 new Named Weapons
2 new Named Gear
1 new Brand Set
Participating in the activities above will earn players Season experience contributing to their Season level.
Playing Conflict will contribute XP by gaining Conflict Levels beyond 30.
Playing in the Dark Zone will contribute XP by gaining DZ Levels beyond 30.
New Raid - Operation Iron Horse
The True Sons have taken over a Foundry to develop new weapons and threaten to destroy everything the Division has worked for.
New bosses, puzzles and rewards!
Level 40 version available on June 30th, followed the next week by the level 30 version.
Discovery mode will become available at a later date.
Unique Rewards
2 new Exotics
2 new Gear Sets
New cosmetic rewards
Further details will become available closer to the raid’s release in late June.
Balance and Bug Fixes
Title Update 10 is bringing our first large balance pass following the release of Warlords of New York. Beyond the addition of new content, the update focuses on three main aspects mainly game health through bug fixes and balancing, generosity by increasing your chances to receive a high-quality item as loot and increasing overall player power. Scroll down for a full list of bug fixes, balancing changes and gameplay tweaks.
Missing Localized Audio
We wanted to inform you about an issue with localized audio that will be present when we launch Title Update 10 and Season 2. While the team was able to work from home to get this update ready, with your help testing the content on the PTS, we unfortunately were not able to record all localized audio content for TU10. With everything going on in the world, our top priority is the well-being of our teams, including our voice actors. Of course, we will start working on recording the missing audio with our partners when it is safe to do so and, in some cases, we were able to get things started already. Adding the localized files to the game as soon as we can in one of our next updates is an absolute priority for the team. This only affects Seasonal content. Operation Iron Horse audio is fully localized. If you are currently playing with a non-English client, you don’t have to change anything going into Title Update 10. When localized audio is missing you will just hear the English audio instead. Subtitles have been localized and can be activated in the ingame options. As work continues, we will update you on the progress of the integration here on the forums and on State of the Game. Thank you and stay safe!
New Exotics
SRS Sniper Rifle: Mantis
Your scoped view displays additional information about enemies not targeting you
Your scoped view highlights enemy weakpoints
Headshot and weak point damage against enemies not targeting you amplified by 50%
Headshot kills reset the cooldown of the Decoy skill. This bonus will wait until the Decoy goes on cooldown if currently active
Mask: Vile
Status effects also apply a damage over time debuff for 10s
Total damage dealt is equal to 50% of your concussion grenade damage and increased by your status effect attributes
Double Barrel Rifle: The Ravenous (Operation Iron Horse)
On trigger-pull, fire both barrels at once
When fired from the right shoulder, hits add offensive primers, and defensive primers when fired from the left shoulder
Hits from one shoulder will detonate all of the opposite shoulder's primers when present
When detonated or affected enemy is killed, each offensive primer deals 100% weapon damage, while each defensive primer grants +4% bonus armor and +10% amplified damage to armor plates for 5s
Primer effectiveness is doubled at 10 stacks
Magnum Pistol: Regulus (Operation Iron Horse)
Headshot kills create a 5m explosion, dealing 400% weapon damage and applying bleed to all enemies hit.
High accuracy and base damage
New Gear Sets
Eclipse Protocol (Season 2)
Core: Skill Tier (Yellow)
2: +15% Status Effects
3: +15% Skill Haste and +30% Hazard Protection
4: "Indirect Transmission" Your status effects now spread on kill to all enemies within 15m and refresh 50% of the duration.
Chest talent: "Proliferation" Increases Indirect Transmission range from 15m to 20m and refresh percentage from 50% to 75%
Backpack talent: "Symptom Aggravator" Amplifies all damage you deal to status affected targets by 15%
Foundry Bulwark (Operation Iron Horse)
Core: Armor (Blue)
2: +10% Armor
3: +3% Armor Regeneration
4: "Makeshift Repairs" Whenever you or your shield take damage, 20% of that amount is repaired to both over 15s
Chest talent: "Process Refinery" Increases Makeshift Repairs from 20% to 30% over 15s
Backpack talent: "Improved Materials" Increases Makeshift Repairs speed from 15s to 10s
Future Initiative (Operation Iron Horse)
Core: Skill Tier (Yellow)
2: +30% Repair Skills
3: +30% Skill Duration and +15% Skill Haste
4: "Ground Control" Increases you and your allies' total weapon and skill damage by 15% when at full armor
When you repair an ally, you and all allies within 5m of you are also repaired for 60% of that amount
Chest talent: "Tactical Superiority" Increases Ground Control damage bonus from +15% to +25%
Backpack talent: "Advanced Combat Tactics" Increases Ground Control proximity repair from 60% to 120%
New Gear Brand
Walker, Harris & Co.
Core: Weapon Damage (Red)
1: +5.0% Weapon Damage
2: +5.0% Damage to Armor
3: +5.0% Damage to Health
New Named Weapons
Mechanical Animal (SIG 556) with Future Perfection
Weapon kills grant +1 skill tier for 19s. Stacks up to 3 times.
Weapon kills at skill tier 6 grant overcharge for 15s.
Overcharge Cooldown: 90s
Harmony (Resolute MK47) with Perfectly In Sync
Hitting an enemy grants +20% skill damage for 5s.
Using a skill or damaging an enemy with a skill grants +20% weapon damage for 5s.
Damage increases are doubled while both buffs are active at the same time.
New Named Gear
Matador (Walker, Harris & Co. backpack) with Perfect Adrenaline Rush
When you are within 10m of an enemy, gain 23% bonus armor for 5s. Stacks up to 3 times.
Cooldown: 5s
Chainkiller (Walker, Harris & Co. chest) with Perfect Headhunter. After killing an enemy with a headshot, your next weapon hit within 30s deals 150% of that killing blow’s damage in addition to it.
Damage is capped to 800% of your weapon damage. This is raised to 1250% if your headshot damage is greater than 150%.
New Skill Variant
Repair Trap
The Repair Trap deploys a line of small devices capable of repairing friendlies in their proximity.
Note: The Repair Trap will not be available in-game until the Seasonal prime target unlocks in August.
New Talents
Weapon Talent: Future Perfect
Weapon kills grant +1 skill tier for 15s. Stacks up to 3 times.
Weapon kills at skill tier 6 grant overcharge for 15s.
Overcharge Cooldown: 90s
Weapon Talent: In Sync
Hitting an enemy grants +15% skill damage for 5s.
Using a skill or damaging an enemy with a skill grants +15% weapon damage for 5s.
Damage increases are doubled while both buffs are active at the same time.
Backpack Talent: Adrenaline Rush
When you are within 10m of an enemy, gain 20% bonus armor for 5s. Stacks up to 3 times.
Cooldown: 5s
Chest Talent: Headhunter
After killing an enemy with a headshot, your next weapon hit within 30s deals 125% of that killing blow’s damage in addition to it.
Damage is capped to 800% of your weapon damage. This is raised to 1250% if your headshot damage is greater than 150%.
Gameplay Changes
Missions
Reduced how many elites will spawn in the following mission:
Manning National Zoo
Coney Island Ballpark
Coney Island Amusement Park
Camp White Oak
Space Administration HQ
Federal Emergency Bunker
Wall Street
Liberty Island
Pathway Park
Stranded Tanker
The Tombs
Loot
General
Added all new season 2 weapons/gear to general loot pools
Item Power
Updated item power distribution to have a better spread between minimum and maximum for all difficulties
Increased minimum rolled item power for Field Proficiency/DZ caches, Clan caches and Season caches.
Difficulty Scaling
Regular loot from loot containers in Missions now scale with mission difficulty
Targeted loot from loot containers in Missions now scales with mission difficulty
Loot containers part of living world activities now scale with global difficulty
Targeted loot
Increased targeted loot drop chances for all mission and Control Point difficulties
Added new season 2 brand to targeted loot rotation
Warlords of New York brands can now also show up as targeted loot in DC, including Dark Zones
Named Items
Increased named item drop chance in regular Dark Zone loot
Increased named item drop chance in targeted loot everywhere
Exotics
Added Warlords of New York/Season 1 Exotics (excluding The Bighorn) to targeted loot
Added Warlords of New York/Season 1 Exotics (excluding The Bighorn) to general Exotic loot pools (Heroic/Legendary/Raid/Exotic Cache)
Coyote's Mask drop from Coyote no longer has a minimum season level requirement
Control Points
Removed regular weapon/gear loot containers not scaling with difficulty from Control Points
Increased the amount of scaling loot from the big Control Point reward container
Legendary
Increased NPC loot drop chance for Veterans and Elites on Legendary difficulty
Crafting
Crafting will now guarantee a higher minimum item power, resulting in higher overall stat rolls. An increased maximum item power also allows for better crafted items than before. The added weighting between the minimum and maximum power results in a more balanced average outcome for crafted and reconfigured items
Removed final World Tier 5 crafting bench upgrade, as its power increase is now redundant
Vendors
Added Named Items to both Open World and Dark Zone vendors
Increased prices for Named Items
Increased item power for all vendors
Vendors no longer sell Superior quality items at maximum level
SHD Levels
Added Field Proficiency cache to SHD level-up after reaching the maximum season level
Increased crafting material rewards for spending SHD level points in the Scavenging category
Conflict
Added Season/SHD experience gain on Conflict level-up
Rogue Agent Encounters
Every Rogue Agent killed will now drop loot
Rogue Agent encounters no longer occur during time trials
Control Point Officers
Players revived by a Control Point Officer will now have 80% of their armor restored (Previously 0%)
Reduced the likelihood of Control Point Officers being downed in combat
Bounties
Bounties acquired by speaking to characters in the open world will always be set to the difficulty at time of acquisition or higher.
This affects the Snitch and civilians rescued during the Public Execution or Rescue Living World Activities.
Scheduled bounties, such as daily and clan bounties, are unaffected.
Developer comment: Bounties acquired in the open world should always provide challenge and loot appropriate to the world they were acquired in. Upping your global difficulty now has the added benefit of improving all bounties you acquire within it.
Projects
New Season Pass Holder Project Slot.
Season Pass holders now have access to an exclusive daily mission which provides a large bonus to XP.
Weekly SHD Requisition Project Slot
Endgame players at World Tier 5 and Level 40 now have a weekly supplies donation project which rewards them with an exotic cache. (For World Tier 5 players, this replaces the previous daily SHD Requisition project.)
Legendary Mission Project
After TU10, completing any legendary mission will grant you the Weekly Legendary Mission project slot.
Completing the designated legendary mission will reward you with an exotic cache.
Developer comment: With the addition of "re-rolls" to exotics available through crafting, we created the new Weekly projects to provide a reliable supply of exotic components or exotic items.
RPG Balance
Incoming Repairs
Incoming Repairs no longer increases the amount of armor repaired by armor kits, talents or gear set effects.
Developer comment: Incoming Repairs was always meant to be the defensive attribute equivalent to Repair Skills, so that players could further enhance the amount of healing they receive from their skills, or the group's healer. Unfortunately, the underlying code prevented us from differentiating between alternate sources of armor repair, such as those from talents and gear sets like Foundry Bulwark, or Firewall's unique armor kit effect. We wanted to address this during the development of Warlords of New York, but chose to post-pone the fix in order to deal with higher priority issues at the time. We underestimated the extent to which this attribute would affect the new Warlords meta, and failed to predict the severity of degenerate gameplay it would cause when combined with certain talents or gear sets. It's important to stress that this is not a PvP-only issue, or an instance of the PvP environment affecting PvE balance. Incoming Repairs was compromising both aspects of the game, and needed to be addressed, especially considering this update coincides with the release of a new raid. Not addressing the issue would mean forcing ourselves to balance all existing and future gear and talents around the knowledge that players could potentially (read: very likely) double the amount of repairs they receive, which stifles creativity and effectively limits player choice.
Weapon Handling
1% Weapon Handling now gives 1% Weapon Accuracy, Stability, Reload Speed, and Swap Speed, up from 0.25%.
Reduced the maximum amount of Weapon Handling rolled on gear by 6%, to a maximum of 8% at level 40.
Developer comment: In the current meta, Weapon Handling on gear is considered a dead stat with no significant benefit. In TU10, equipping a piece of gear with +8% Weapon Handling will now give you:
+8% Accuracy
+8% Stability
+8% Swap Speed
+8% Reload Speed
This should hopefully make Weapon Handling a strong complimentary attribute for players looking to increase their overall accuracy/stability (bloom + recoil) and/or reload/swap speed. Making the % amount of Weapon Accuracy/Stability/Swap Speed/Reload Speed gained from Weapon Handling 1:1 will also remove another element of arcane knowledge from the game and reduce the need for additional mental math when determining whether the bonus is an upgrade or not.
Talent Changes:
Leadership: Bonus Armor increased to 15% from 12%
Spike: Skill Damage Duration increased to 15s from 8s
Reformation: Skill Repair Duration increased to 15s from 8s
Creeping Death: No Longer goes on cooldown if there are no valid nearby enemies to apply a status effect to. Status effects applied now properly copy the source status effect’s damage and duration.
PvP
Global Damage Modifiers
Reduced all PvP weapon damage by -20%
Additional Damage Modifiers
Increased MMR PvP weapon damage by 12.5%
Reduced Assault Rifle PvP weapon damage by -15%
Reduced Shotgun PvP damage by -12.5%
Reduced SMG PvP damage by -10%
Reduced Pistol PvP damage by -10%
Reduced Rifle PvP damage by -5%
_Developer comment: With TU10, there have been significant buffs made to the base damage of assault rifles, SMGs, and shotguns in particular. In order to prevent those weapons from becoming overly powerful in PvP, we’ve had to lower their PvP damage modifiers to compensate. Note: Assault rifles are still tuned to be 10% stronger than normal in PvP in order to compensate for their innate Damage to Health bonus being less useful against other players when compared to other weapon archetypes._
Specific Damage Modifiers
Increased Double Barrel Shotgun PvP damage by 16.6%
Reduced Pestilence PvP damage by -10%
Reduced Classic M1A damage by -5%
Exotic Modifiers
Merciless/Ruthless: “Binary Trigger” amplified weapon damage and explosion damage reduced by -50% in PvP
Dodge City Gunslinger’s Holster: “Quick Draw” damage bonus gained per stack in PvP lowered from +2% to +1%
Stacks gained per second in PvP now match the PvE value (0.5s to 0.3s)
Imperial Dynasty:
No longer automatically applies burn status effect to the nearest enemy in range.
Now requires maintaining range and LOS (line-of-sight) for 3 seconds between the holster bearer and nearest enemy before applying the burn status effect.
Added visual UI feedback to reveal the radius of effect in PvP and an indicator for LOS between the holster bearer and nearest enemy.
Developer comment: This should help address the lack of contextual feedback in PvP, and add a much needed window of opportunity for counterplay, or potential to avoid the incoming effect entirely.
* Pestilence * Plague of the Outcast damage-over-time effect no longer triggers True Patriot’s white debuff armor repair effect. (PvP and PvE)
Developer comment: While we like to embrace emergent or unintended mechanics when the end result is unique and fun gameplay, True Patriot’s white debuff explicitly states it requires shooting the debuffed target in order to receive the armor repair effect. Pestilence’s DoT managed to bypass this restriction, making it and True Patriot (especially when combined with Incoming Repairs) scale to disproportionate levels of power when used together.
Gear Set Modifiers
Negotiator’s Dilemma
Reduced the range at which marked targets can damage each other when critically hit to 15m (PvP only).
Added visual UI feedback when in range of another marked target.
Talent Modifiers
Efficient: Reduced specialization armor kit bonus from 100% to 50%
Versatile: Reduced the amplified weapon damage bonus for SMGs and shotguns from 35% to 25%
Vanguard: Reduced the duration of shield invulnerability from 5s to 2s
Note: UI will still show the old duration, but will be fixed in a later update.
Specialization Modifiers * Firewall * Extracellular Matrix Mesh armor kit regen strength reduced by -50%, from 200% to 150%
Skill Modifiers
Pulse now correctly reveals and highlights all players in the DZ, not just hostiles/rogues
Increased Striker Drone damage by 30%
Increased Assault Turret damage by 55%
Reduced Firestarter Chem Launcher PvP damage by -20%
Reduced Bleed damage from Stinger Hive, Mortar Turret and Explosive Seeker Mine by 75%
Increased Stinger Hive damage by 20%, scaling up to 55% at skill tier 6
Developer commentary: We want dedicated skill builds to have multiple, powerful defensive tools for area denial/control. However, the strength of bleed effects meant being hit by just 1 stinger drone, mortar, or seeker mine was nearly a death sentence for most builds. The stinger hive should now better punish players who remain within its area of effect, rather than needing to rely entirely on the excessive damage of a single bleed DoT, while allowing the hive’s drone damage to scale higher for dedicated skill builds.
Weapon Balance
Assault Rifles
AK-M – 15.8% damage increase
F2000 – 14.3% damage increase
Military AK-M – 13.2% damage increase
Black Market AK-M – 13.2% damage increase
FAL – 12.0% damage increase
FAL SA-58 – 12.0% damage increase
FAL SA-58 Para – 12.0% damage increase
SOCOM Mk 16 – 11.4% damage increase
Tactical Mk 16 – 11.4% damage increase
Mk 16 – 11.4% damage increase
AUG A3-CQC – 11.2% damage increase
Honey Badger – 10.9% damage increase
FAMAS 2010 – 10.6% damage increase
ACR – 9.7% damage increase
ACR-E – 9.7% damage increase
Military G36 – 9.5% damage increase
G36 C – 9.5% damage increase
G36 Enhanced – 9.5% damage increase
Carbine 7 – 8.7 % damage increase
Military P416 – 7.4% damage increase
Custom P416 G3 - 7.4% damage increase
Police M4 – 6.8% damage increase
CTAR 21 – 8.6% damage increase
LMG
Classic M60 – 12.5% damage increase
Classic RPK-74 – 12.4% damage increase
Military RPK-74 M – 12.4% damage increase
Black Market RPK-74 E – 12.4% damage increase
Military M60 E4 – 9.2% damage increase
Black Market M60 E6 – 9.2% damage increase
Military L86 LSW – 8.5% damage increase
Custom L86 A2 – 8.5% damage increase
IWI NEGEV – 2.6% damage increase
Stoner LMG – 2.0% damage increase
M249 B – No changes
Tactical M249 Para – No changes
Military MK46 – No changes
MG5 – No changes
Infantry MG5 – 3.2% damage decrease
MMR
Model 700 – 14.9% damage increase
Hunting M44 – 13.5% damage increase
Classic M44 Carbine – 12.5% damage increase
G28 – 11.4% damage increase
SOCOM Mk20 SSR – 9.3% damage increase
SR-1 - 8.6% damage increase
Custom M44 – 8.1% damage increase
M700 Tactical – 8.1% damage increase
M700 Carbon – 8.1% damage increase
Covert SRS – 6.0% damage increase
SRS A1 – 6.0% damage increase
Surplus SVD – 2.9% damage decrease
Paratrooper SVD – 2.9% damage decrease
Rifles
UIC15 MOD – 21.6% damage increase
1886 – 21.3% damage increase
LVOA-C – 12.1% damage increase
M1A CQB – 10.7% damage increase
Lightweight M4 – 10.5% damage increase
G 716 CQB – 8.7% damage increase
SIG 716 – 6.7% damage increase
ACR SS – 3.7% damage increase
SOCOM M1A – No changes
M16A2 – No changes
USC .45 ACP - 2.8% damage decrease
Urban MDR – 5.5% damage decrease
Military Mk17 – 11.8% damage decrease
Police Mk17 - 11.8% damage decrease
Classic M1A - 12.6% damage decrease
SMG
Tommy Gun – 38.8% damage increase
PP-19 – 29.6% damage increase
Enhanced PP-19 – 29.6% damage increase
MP7 – 27.5% damage increase
MPX – 17.7% damage increase
M1928 – 20.0% damage increase
P90 – 15.6% damage increase
Converted SMG-9 – 15.8% damage increase
Black Market T821 – 15.4% damage increase
Police T821 – 15.4% damage increase
Vector SBR .45 ACP – 14.7% damage increase
CMMG Banshee – 12.5% damage increase
Police UMP-45 – 12.0% damage increase
Tactical UMP-45 – 12.0% damage increase
AUG A3 Para XS – 11.8% damage increase
Enhanced AUG A3P – 11.8 % damage increase
Tactical AUG A3P – 11.8% damage increase
Converted SMG-9 A2 – 11.6% damage increase
MP5A2 – 10.0% damage increase
MP5-N – 10.0% damage increase
MP5 ST – 10.0% damage increase
Tactical Vector SBR 9mm – 5.9% damage increase
Shotguns
M870 Express – 23.3% damage increase
Military M870 – 23.3% damage increase
Custom M870 MCS – 23.3% damage increase
Super 90 – 23.2% damage increase
Marine Super 90 – 23.2% damage increase
Tactical Super 90 SBS – 23.2% damage increase
SASG-12 – 21.3% damage increase
Tactical SASG-12 K – 21.3% damage increase
Black Market SASG-12 S – 21.3% damage increase
SPAS-12 – 18.6% damage increase
KSG Shotgun – 9.0% damage increase
Sidearms
Double Barrel Sawed Off Shotgun – Optimal Range reduced to 8m from 11m
586 Magnum – 68.8% damage increase
Police 686 Magnum – 68.8% damage increase
Maxim 9 - 23.5% damage increase
D50 – 17.5% damage increase
First Wave PF45 – 13.5% damage increase
Custom PF45 – 9.7% damage increase
Military M9 – 8.7% damage increase
93R - 7.7% damage increase
Snubnosed Diceros – 6.5% damage increase
Officer's M9 A1 – 6.3% damage increase
Diceros – 5.9% damage increase
M45A1 – 9.5% damage decrease
Tactical M1911 – 9.5% damage decrease
M1911 – 7.3% damage decrease
Exotics Changes
Developer comment: Along with the buffs to weapon damage, TU10's significant buff to weapon handling meant some exotic weapon mods no longer made sense or resulted in over tuned performance that no longer fit with the original design. We also took this opportunity to make improvements to underperforming exotic
The Bighorn
Damage increased by +11.2%
Increased optimal range from 27m to 40m
Optics mod bonus increased from +0% to +30% Headshot Damage
Magazine mod bonus changed from +7% Headshot Damage to +10% Reload Speed
Added functionality that provides additional headshot damage, full talent is now:
When scoped, switches to semi-automatic fire mode, dealing 450% weapon damage with each shot.
(New) Headshots grant +2% headshot damage. Stacks up to 50 times. Resets to 0 at full stacks.
Eagle Bearer
Damage increased by +7.8%
Underbarrel mod bonus changed from +10% Stability to +10% Weapon Handling
Chameleon
Damage increased by +32.8%
Optics mod bonus changed from +15% Accuracy to +15% Critical Hit Chance
Muzzle mod bonus changed from +5% Critical Hit Chance to +20% Accuracy
Underbarrel mod bonus changed from +10% Critical Hit Chance to +10% Stability
Optimal range increased by 33.3%, from 15m to 20m
Long range effectiveness increased by 19%, from 42m to 50m
Added functionality that retains your current buffs to the next combat encounter when combat ends, full talent is now:
Hitting 30 headshots grant +20% critical hit chance and +50% critical hit damage for 45s.
Hitting 75 body-shots grant +90% weapon damage for 45s.
Hitting 30 leg-shots grant +150% reload speed for 45s.
(New) Buffs refresh when out of combat.
Bullet King
Damage increased by +2.6%
Nemesis
Damage increased by +11.1%
Optics mod bonus increased from +35% to +45% Headshot Damage
Underbarrel mod bonus reduced from +15% to +5% Weapon Handling
Liberty
Optics mod bonus changed from +5% Critical Hit Chance to +5% Headshot Damage
Muzzle mod bonus changed from +15% Stability to +5% Critical Hit Chance
Magazine mod bonus changed from +15% Reload Speed to +15% Weapon Handling
Added functionality to provide extra damage if you're trying to keep stacks, full talent is now:
(New) Hits grant +2% weapon damage. Stacks up to 30.
Headshots consume all stacks, repairing your shield for 3% per stack.
No longer highlights enemy weakpoints when aiming.
Merciless/Ruthless
Damage increased by +12.5%
Muzzle mod bonus reduced from +20% to +10% Stability
Underbarrel mod bonus reduced from +20% to +10% Weapon Handling
Magazine mod bonus reduced from +15% to +10% Reload Speed
Added functionality to provide extra non-explosive damage as well, full talent is now:
This weapon fires on trigger pull and release.
If both bullets hit the same enemy, gain a stack.
(New) At 7 stacks, shooting an enemy deals 500% amplified damage and creates a 7m explosion dealing 500% weapon damage, consuming the stacks.
Developer Comment: Merciless was previously balanced for its very unwieldy handling and compensated with very high burst damage. With access to much higher accuracy and stability, Binary Trigger’s explosion strength has been toned down.
Diamondback
Damage increased by +7.7%
Text updated to clarify a new target isn’t marked until after the 5s buff.
Lullaby/Sweet Dreams
Damage increased by +11.0%
Lady Death
Damage increased by +18.9%
Optics mod bonus increased from +5% to +10% Critical Hit Chance
Muzzle mod bonus changed from +5% Critical Hit Chance to +5% Critical Hit Damage
Underbarrel mod changed from +5% Critical Hit Damage to +500% Melee Damage
Breathe Free: Lowered the amount of maximum stacks from 40 to 32, and increased the damage amplification per stack from 60% to 75%
The Chatterbox
Damage increased by +16.7%
Optics mod bonus increased from +5% to +15% Critical Hit Chance
Muzzle mod bonus changed from +10% Critical Hit Chance to +5% Critical Hit Damage
Underbarrel mod bonus reduced from +15% to +10% Weapon Handling
Magazine mod bonus changed from +10% Reload Speed to +10 Rounds
Magazine base capacity reduced from 60 to 50
Pestilence
Muzzle mod bonus changed from +10% Stability to +10% Accuracy
Underbarrel mod bonus changed from +10% Weapon Handling to +10% Stability
NinjaBike Messenger Kneepads
Added functionality to add bonus armor, full talent is now:
(New) Performing a cover to cover or vaulting reloads your drawn weapon and grants +25% bonus armor for 5s.
Dodge City Gunslinger Holster
Added functionality that makes your hit do headshot damage, full talent is now:
While your pistol is holstered, gain a stacking buff every 0.3s, up to 100. When you swap to it, your first shot consumes the buff and deals +10% damage per stack.
(New) This deals headshot damage to anywhere you hit.
BTSU Datagloves
Changed functionality to no longer grant group/raid-wide overcharge unless you are skill tier 6
Added functionality to provide hive skill haste, full talent is now:
(New) Grants +15% Hive skill haste per skill tier.
(Changed) Detonating a hive refreshes your skill cooldowns and grants overcharge for 15s.If at Skill Tier 6, this effect also applies to all allies.
Allies receiving this effect are unable to benefit from it again for 120s.
Sawyer's Kneeguards
Added functionality to continue to provide damage bonus move for a short duration, full talent is now:
Cannot be staggered by explosions.
Increases total weapon damage by 3% each second you are not moving. Stacks up to 10 until you start moving.
(New) All stacks lost 10s after moving.
Gear Set Changes
Hard Wired
Feedback Loop no longer fully refreshes the cooldown of a skill, but instead reduces it by up to 30s
Ongoing Directive
Main Talent
Hollow-Point Ammo is no longer dropped on kill, and instead automatically added to your active weapon when killing status afflicted enemies
Backpack Talent (New)
“Trauma Specialist”
Increases the duration of your bleed status effects by 50% and all bleed damage done by 100%
Increased 3-piece Reload Speed bonus from +20% to +30%
Tip of the Spear
Main Talent (PVE)
Aggressive Recon's weapon damage buff is now gained when dealing specialization weapon damage, instead of on specialization weapon kill
Main Talent (PVP)
Aggressive Recon's weapon damage buff is now gained when dealing grenade damage, instead of on grenade kill
Backpack Talent (New)
“Signature Moves”
Increases specialization weapon damage by 20%, and doubles the amount of specialization ammo generated by Aggressive Recon
Aces and Eights
Main Talent
"Poker Face" backpack talent is now a baseline effect:
Flip an additional card on headshots
Backpack Talent (New)
“Ace in the Sleeve”
Amplifies 1 extra shot when revealing your hand
3-piece Headshot Damage bonus is now additive, rather than multiplicative
Increased 3-piece Headshot Damage bonus from +20% to +30%
System Corruption
Main Talent
Now repairs 20% of your armor in addition to granting 50% bonus armor
Increases total weapon damage by 1% per 5% bonus armor gained, up to 20%
Striker’s Battlegear
Main Talent
Reduced the number of stacks lost on missed shots from 3 to 2
Backpack Talent
No longer reduces number of stacks lost on missed shots
(New) Increases total weapon damage gained per stack of Striker's Gamble from 0.5% to 0.65%.
Negotiators Dilemma
Damage transfers on the initial bullet that marks a new target
Hard Wired
Increased 3-piece Repair Skills bonus from +15% to +30%
Brand Set ChangesAlps Summit Armament
Increased 1-piece Repair Skills bonus from +15% to +20%
Murakami Industries
Increased 2-piece Repair Skills bonus from +15% to +20%
Richter & Kaiser
Increased 3-piece Repair Skills bonus from +15% to +20%
Incoming Repairs brand set bonus increased from +15% to +20%
Providence Defense
Increased 1-piece Headshot Damage bonus from +10% to +15%
Airaldi Holdings
Increased 2-piece Headshot Damage bonus from +10% to +15%
Grupo Sombra S.A
Increased 3-piece Headshot Damage bonus from +10% to +15%
Overlord Armaments
Increased 2-piece Accuracy bonus from +10% to +20%
Douglas & Harding
Increased 2-piece Stability bonus from +10% to +20%
Increased 3-piece Accuracy bonus from +10% to +20%
Fenris Group AB
Increased 2-piece Reload Speed bonus from +10% to +20%
Increased 3-piece Stability bonus from +10% to +20%
Specialization Changes
Gunner specialization's Emplacement talent Weapon Handling bonus reduced from +15% to +10%
Note: The UI will incorrectly say it still adds +15% Weapon Handling. This will be fixed in a future update.
Skill Changes
UI
Stinger Hive, Mortar Turret, and Explosive Seeker Mine now display its Bleed Damage and Duration
Seeker Mine
Cluster Seeker Mine targeting accuracy improved
Developer comment: The Cluster Seeker Mine is not intended to be as accurate as the Explosive variant. Once it is a certain distance from its target it locks the location it is aiming for and continues towards that regardless of where its original target agent has since moved to. This "bullcharge" behavior reflects the mini-mines' less advanced technology and balances the skill mod's effectiveness. This said, we have noticed that the Cluster Seeker's accuracy has been a source of frustration so we've shortened the distance until it activates its "bullcharge" and adjusted when it decides to explode. These adjustments should make the Cluster Seeker feel more accurate, but these are measured steps as we do not want the skill to return to its OP TU7-state.
Hive
Stinger Hive base damage reduced -20%
Stinger Hive damage bonus per skill tier increased from +10% to +20%
Developer comment: In order to make investing in skill tiers have a greater impact on the Stinger Hive's damage, we slightly reduced base drone damage, while doubling the amount of damage gained with each skill tier. These changes will result in a net buff for dedicated skill builds, with a 10% increase in Stinger Hive drone damage at skill tier 6.
Restorer hive gains +5% drone flight speed per skill tier
Developer comment: Increases to the Restorer Hive's radius had the unfortunate effect of increasing the time it took for repair drones to reach their target the further they were from the hive. Increasing drone flight speed with each skill tier should help offset that somewhat counter-intuitive behavior when taking advantage of the increased area of effect, and make the Restorer Hive a more reliable tool for healers.
Chem Launcher
Riot Foam Chem Launcher ensnare duration bonus per skill tier reduced from +20% to +10%
Reinforcer Chem Launcher: UI has been updated to clarify that the initial heal only affects allies and not the Skill user. The functionality has not changed.
Firefly
Blinder Firefly blind duration bonus per skill tier reduced from +20% to +10%
Blinder Firefly base blind duration reduced from 6s to 5s
Pulse
Banshee Pulse cooldown increased from 20s to 30s
Banshee Pulse base confuse duration reduced from 5s to 4s
Jammer Pulse base disrupt duration reduced from 4s to 3s
Shock Trap
Shock Trap base shock duration reduced from 5s to 3s (PvP duration remains unchanged)
Shock Trap base radius increased from 2m to 2.5m
When the active duration ends, its cooldown is refunded an equal number of seconds that it was active.
At the Beginning Previously on The Scuu Paradox… The smell of burning wood was all I could focus on. The fires had long died out, making it difficult to see in the darkness; despite all other modifications, Kridib’s eyes weren’t able to see overly well in the dark. Every five minutes, Radiance would send an infrared scan of the colony to help him and his team with their advancement. Despite all that help and the four missile strikes, progress was minimal. Of the forty-seven people sent to the planet, eleven had been killed and five more severely wounded, rendering them useless in battle. From what I could see, Rigel’s forces had clustered in specific points of the colony, giving up the rest: a sensible strategy that had allowed them to ambush three of our teams while suffering negligible losses themselves. As things stood, the enemy forces had positioned themselves in two areas of the colony. Both spots encircled a specific building—mine and the captain’s locations—making further missile strikes impossible. Update? Kridib asked me through the mind link. Nothing, I replied. Rigel had left shortly after our last chat, taking the third-contact rods with him. Since then, I had remained safely isolated in the room and completely alone. Half of them have probably gone to sleep. Tell me if anything changes. Kribib looked up. A dozen sats were visible in the night sky. We’ll be making another go soon. I don’t think that’s a good idea. So far, Kridib had made four attempts to reach me, all of them unsuccessful. His approach, though chaotic at best, had managed to keep him alive. There had been a close call during which his left arm had been grazed by a bullet, though that time the man hadn’t frozen. Everyone has to sleep, Kridib said, heading back into one of the buildings that had been transformed into a ground base of operations. I’ll go first. Must I wake you? I asked. No. With that, the link was severed. To a degree, I was thankful, though not too much. Forcing whatever strength I had, I moved my head to look around the room as much as I was able. Nothing had changed in the last four hours, but at least it let me do something. The last time I felt remotely similar was when I’d had my sensor systems knocked out, though even then I was able to use my shuttle AIs to paint me a picture. Here, I was completely helpless and, to a vast degree, blind. “Do I get any water?” I asked as loudly as my lungs would let me. There was no reason to expect an answer. Even if anyone was awake on the lower floors, they would be on lookout duty. Saying it out loud, though, made me feel better for some reason. To my surprise, the door to the room opened. “Thought you were above those things.” Rigel walked in slowly. Even with my lack of focus, I could see that he had changed clothes. The colours were dark enough to be considered a uniform, although I couldn’t make out any other details. “You can’t swallow, remember?” “My mouth feels dry,” I explained. “Too bad.” Despite my poor vision, I could hear him smile as he said that. Walking slowly, he made his way to the stool near me and sat down. From this distance, I could see him taking something from his front pocket. In the dim light, it was impossible to tell what exactly. “Still having problems focusing?” Rigel asked. “Yes.” There was no point in lying. “Pity. Agora works well on organic tissue. Not on techno-mongrels,” he added with a laugh. “If you weren’t one, you’d be dead. There’s a win for you.” And you’re not making any sense, I thought. “Nice murder troops you got out there. Quick and efficient. A few years ago, the locals would’ve had fun pulling their wings off. Time leaves its mark.” Rigel flicked the object. It let out a peculiar metallic sound. “No action, no combat sims, just the local pests that roam the planet. Those were brought here too, did you know?” “I heard about it.” “Another brilliant idea from the bureaucracy. Create a full ecosystem. Plants, critters, predators... all must be present and carefully maintained. We tried killing them off once. Those were the days. Three colonies setting out, killing everything in sight until the orbital station stopped sending food.” There was a slight pause. “And you know the best part?” Rigel leaned towards me. “None of that happened.” If I could have pulled back, I would have. There was no way of knowing if these were insane rantings or if he was referring to a dark op coverup. Considering he was from the Salvage Authorities, either was possible, and both options were equally undesirable. “I went through your data, Elcy.” Rigel rubbed his hands. “You know things you shouldn’t.” “Because of my past, I’ve been placed on special assignments,” I said. Technically it was true, though we both knew it didn’t explain away the inconsistencies. “You knew about the third-contact artifacts before. You’ve operated them before.” He moved his hand closer to my face. I felt a cold metallic surface touch my cheek. “You’re searching for something. Something that you’re not supposed to find.” He moved the object away from my face. “Here’s my offer. You answer some of my questions, and I’ll answer some of yours.” “That’s one way to get court-martialed.” Not to mention there was no guarantee my self-destruct chip wouldn’t go off at any point. “Please don’t give me the line that the fleet is going through all that trouble just to rescue you. If you were that valuable, you’d never have been sent to this hell in the first place.” Rigel stood up. “What are the odds of the fleet extracting you in one piece? Two percent?” “Point-seven-three-nine,” I corrected. Frankly, I was surprised they were going through all the trouble. “Give or take.” “Less than one percent,” Rigel snorted. “It’s your call. You have three hours to make it. Before I leave you, here’s a freebie. This planet, it isn’t some randomly colonized world in ‘unexplored space.’ We’re in the buffer zone—the border between the Scuu and human space. Think about that.” He made his way to the door. Reaching it, he stopped and turned around. “Oh, and we’re constantly being monitored.”
Gamma-Ligata, Cassandrian Front—615.11 A.E. (Age of Expansion) The third wave of shuttles approached my forward left hangar one by one. The instant they came within three hundred meters, I was handed over direct control of the AIs. As with the previous batches, the first thing I did was to have a set of isolated subroutines flash the memory and purge the entire operating system. That done, I sent out a mini-sat to latch onto and assume control of the shuttles. It was a slow and tedious process, but necessary considering the circumstances. “How are things?” Wilco asked from the bridge. Augustus had gathered most of his officers to a private meeting in his quarters, leaving Wilco in command. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, but each time it did, it felt strange. “Everything’s going as planned,” I said, as the first shuttle went under my control. A quick internal scan revealed that there were sixty-two people aboard, all cuffed and tagged. All of them were tagged as infected, and, to my surprise, none of them were sedated. The instructions were to take them in and monitor their actions at all times, and only to engage if they threatened the ship. Normally, I’d be confident that Augustus knew what was going on. With everything we’d gone through since I’d joined the front, I didn’t think there was anything in the galaxy that could surprise him. I was wrong. Finishing my internal check of the shuttle, I directed it to the outer hangar doors and had it dock. The passengers—all of their identities classified—waited till I covered the walls with disembark notifications, then stood up and quietly proceeded to get off, in orderly fashion. I could tell by Wilco’s expression that he found it unnerving. “A thousand and eighty-two passengers on board,” I said on the bridge and in the captain’s quarters. The moment the last person set foot in the hangar, I would eject the shuttle from my hangar-bay, self-destruct it, and proceed with the next. Delegating the task to my isolated subroutines, I reviewed the instructions I had received. The proper ident protocols and authorisations had been used, ensuring that I would do as instructed without asking questions. An emergency transmission from an unidentifiable ship had led me here. I knew nothing about the ship’s name or specifics, and I wasn’t allowed to get close enough to get a visual. The only things I was allowed to see were its shuttles and mass. Everything else was open to interpretation. “Have any of them said anything?” Wilco asked. “No.” I displayed images of the hangar bay and the corresponding corridors surrounding it. As part of my instructions, the entire section was sealed off and quarantined. “They’re eating.” They also appeared to be healthy, although the instructions stressed no one was to come into contact with them under any circumstances. “I’ve received no indication of how long we’re to keep them. Did the captain get an indication?” “No,” Wilco said in his usual somber voice. “Is everything sealed off?” “Yes.” I rechecked. “No way in or out without captain’s approval.” “Set a buffer zone.” The man went on. “No one goes in or out without my permission.” “If you say so.” It wasn’t difficult. The area in question had been made empty to accommodate the quarantined arrivals, though it seemed a bit too much. “Want me to put sentinels?” “No. We don’t have to hurt anyone, just hold them.” He slinked down in his chair. “They’re the Med boys’ toys. We don’t get to play with them.” Med boys… Only Wilco referred to the Medical Core in such fashion. As most organisations, they were part of the fleet, yet their specific area of expertise gave them as much authority as the Salvage Authorities and the BICEFI combined. As a ship, I knew fairly little about them: they had the power to impose quarantines and cordon off entire planets if they wished. They were also the only organisation with the power to hold an active captain in check. Possibly, that was the reason Augustus didn’t get along with any of his medical officers. According to the public files, the Med Core had created the inner-body nanites and were instrumental in getting humans into space. There were also whispers that they were involved in creating the first ship-cores, although I found that unlikely. Even so, they had more authority than anyone aboard. Even on the front, we had no option but to obey. “It won’t be practical heading into war with them,” I said as the second shuttle entered the hangar bay. “Not our call. We’re to hold them until a Med ship picks them up,” Wilco sighed. “And monitor everything they do.” “How is that different from anyone else aboard?” I ventured a chuckle. “You don’t need to know,” the lieutenant said darkly. Another thing about Wilco was that he had the uncanny ability to make any topic of conversation dark. I ran a few simulations testing various responses, then decided not to respond further. In the best-case scenario, there was a twenty-seven percent chance he found my reaction funny. “Elcy.” Augustus granted me sensor access to the captain’s quarters. “What’s the ETA on the cattle?” “The passengers will be all aboard in seven minutes, captain.” A decade of attempts to mellow his behaviour had brought me no results. “Five, if you need me off in a rush.” “Get it done in five,” he barked. “We’ve got new orders. We’re joining a purge fleet. Go on yellow. Get the grunts prepped.” “Aye, sir.” I issued the order to everyone aboard. Seconds later, ground troop officers and sergeants were shouting their troops into order. “What about the passengers, sir? Won’t combat expose them to unnecessary danger?” “There’s no unnecessary danger,” Augustus barked again. The rest of the command staff had already started leaving the room. Their expressions ranged from mild annoyance to disapproval. Whatever discussions had taken place, they must have been unpleasant and one-sided. “Monitor them at all times and don’t interact until I say so.” “Understood.” It sounded like another escort mission, and I didn’t like escort missions. Normally, it would just be troop detachments or—if we were very unlucky—some mid-level bureaucrat or admiral’s aid sent to do a front-line inspection. Transporting quarantined personnel wasn’t in my usual purview, although if it had been, I’d never know. “What’s the course of treatment they must undergo?” I asked. “No treatment,” Augustus grumbled. “That’s for the Meds to figure out.” “All passengers are tagged as infected. Regulations require we provide immediate medical attention.” I felt my words sound hollow. If Augustus had the authority to provide such, he would have told me already. The only thing I was left was to go through the motions, expecting to receive the obvious denial. “Just monitor them, Elcy! That’s what we’ve been told. And whatever happens, don’t interfere.”
Just monitor them. I had spent three months and thirty-nine hours monitoring the passengers onboard. Through battles and repairs, every single action had been carefully observed, recorded, and stored on external data storage. For the most part, nothing happened. The people would live boring, perfectly organised lives, almost as if they knew they were being watched. There were no scuffles, few arguments, and only one incident resulting in injuries when a Cassandrian fighter managed to slip through my external defences and fire a salvo at the hangar bay. Their health condition also seemed no different than when they had come aboard. I had dedicated a dozen subroutines to collect any potential symptoms in an effort to determine the type of disease they had, but had come to no conclusion. Then, one day, they were all gone. I had no memory of the Medical ship that had taken them, or where that had happened. The only thing I was certain about was the time—precisely two thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine hours since the last of them had come aboard. Everything else remained restricted. Looks like there’s always someone monitoring someone, Sev. If Rigel was to be believed someone was monitoring the planet. The question was who. Seconds turned to minutes, then hours. Hundreds of times, I considered looking into my restricted memories for information regarding the third-contact artifacts or the events in gamma-Ligata, and each time I found a reason not to. As Rigel had said, the chance of me getting off the planet alive was less than one percent, but the knowledge of the existence of the possibility kept me acting. And then there was Rigel’s offer… Rad, are you monitoring me? I asked, attempting to latch on to any open communication protocols. A connection was established, but instead of linking to Radiance, I found myself connecting back to Kridib’s mind. On cue, an info burst from Radiance followed, giving the latest scan. This time, I could see the location of our forces. The total number had increased to seventy-four, Kridib included. Nearly eight percent were gathered close to the captain’s expected location. Kridib and five more were closer to me. Get ready, Kridib said. Moments later, bursts of gunfire echoed in the distance; they were going for the captain first. The mission had begun. From here on, I could see several potential outcomes. In all of them, there was a high probability that Rigel attempted to make a deal. When I was a ship, Augustus had taught me one key thing when it came to missions: regardless of the depth of predictions and the computing power at their disposal, humans always boiled down a situation to a simple binary choice. Rigel wanted something from me and had invested too much to let his chance slip. Before the outcome of Kridib’s rescue mission, Rigel would come here to get an answer to his proposal. All I had to do was wait. As I lay, I watched Kridib run through the darkness towards my location. Unlike before, he was wearing night vision goggles, letting him make out his surroundings better. No thermal? I asked as Kridib made his way through the streets. The smell of burned vegetation could still be felt. That’s what you’re for. Not a reply to be thrilled about, but one to be expected. Cross-referencing Radiance’s latest scan, I started analysing every frame of Kridib’s stream. The first few minutes passed without incident. Judging by the intensified background gunfire, the locals were more focused on keeping Renaan isolated than stopping Kridib. Twenty-eight seconds, later the first shot sounded. Sniper! I shouted straight in Kridib’s mind. “Cover fire!” he shouted, rushing for cover. Watch out for a cross, I warned. The shooting intensified. Based on the area scan, the group was a few hundred meters away. One strong push and they’d be here. That said, I knew that the building was guarded by more than seven people. If I were in Rigel’s place, I would have dedicated at least three dozen. Concentrated fire focused on the second floor of a building, blowing off the entire wall. There was a brief scream before a rocket flew into the spot, hollowing the entire structure with a blast. Heavy weapons? I asked Kridib. I didn’t think Radiance’s captain would resort to such firepower, considering third-contact artifacts were involved; one direct hit, and the entire colony might well end up a smouldering crater, not to mention the potential communication repercussions. Maybe there was truth in Rigel’s statement that Flight Commander Nitel was getting desperate. As I was following Kridib’s advancement outside, the door opened once more—as predicted, Rigel had returned. He was wearing the same set of clothes as three hours ago. I found it puzzling that I couldn’t spot any semblance of a weapon on him. “Your masters have gotten desperate,” the man said in suspiciously calm fashion. “Looks like they’ve sent everything they had to get Renaan.” He walked up to me, then leaned over. “And just a handful to get you.” “Are they winning?” I tried to smile. “Beats me.” Rigel didn’t seem bothered. “You thought about my offer?” “I did. And I don’t think accepting would be a good deal. If I wait for them to rescue the captain, your bargaining power ends.” “Oh?” The man chuckled. “There’s nothing else the fleet would be willing to trade.” Except potentially the pyramid artifact. Even then, I didn’t see them sacrificing the Gregorius. “Once the captain boards a shuttle, it’s over.” A person of Kridib’s squad fell as they were approaching my building. I heard the unmistakable sound of bullets piercing armor, then silence. That was the thing about sound suppressors: one could get killed, and there still wouldn’t be any sound of one hitting the ground. I wanted to turn around and see what had happened, potentially to help. There was a seven-point-three chance that the wound wasn’t fatal. Kridib kept on moving forwards. That’s what made him a ground trooper… it also caused me pain. “What if I kill Renaan?” Rigel mused. “I won’t lose much. Everyone down here’s dead anyway. Someone in the fleet has gone through a lot of shit to get Renaan back. They’d lose a hell of a lot more.” “What if they save the captain?” I countered. “Either way, we’ll soon find out, and you’ll have no offer.” “Quantum paradox logic?” Rigel sounded surprised. “Strange hearing that from you, missy. I’ll have to skim your file once I’m out of here.” He paused for a moment, then dragged the nearby stool over—making a deliberate sound—and sat down. “Truth is, once the moment ends, we both lose our chance. Are you okay with that?” Why are you so confident? I wondered. Even if I were to agree, he wouldn’t be able to get much from me in the next ten minutes, even less if Kridib managed to reach my room. His squad had already made its way to the building proper, facing less than expected resistance. From what I was able to see, there were two snipers left on the upper floors and two machine-gunners on the first. All auxiliary positions on the nearby buildings seemed to have dealt with, although there was no sign of Ogum. “You’ve dealt with Salvage before, I can tell,” Rigel pressed on. “You won’t get another chance like this.” The old man’s with me in the basement, I told Kridib. No guards in the room. He’s ex-Salvage Authorities. Take him, and the mission is over. Saying that hurt slightly. Despite being the enemy, and a threat to the war effort, he remained human. “Then I guess I’ll never know.” As I spoke, I saw Kridib charge at the building. As before, there was nothing fancy about it, just determination and insanity. Several bullets flew so close to him I could hear them, but this time none of them hit. “Your bargaining window is over. No deal.” Kridib emptied his sidearm at the door in front of him, then rushed in. I could see no guards inside, just a set of hastily built staircases. Whatever the original purpose of the building was, it had been transformed into a field center at some point—likely during a previous escape attempt. Probably a group similar to ours had made it their temporary base, then left it as it was once they had completed their mission. No wonder Rigel had had me transported there. Kridib didn’t waste time making parallels, instead drawing his second sidearm and rushing down. At least two floors down, I said. I’m not hearing any of the gunfire. Is he armed? Kridib asked. Unsure. Not that I can tell. There are artifacts, though. “Such a teacher’s pet.” Rigel sighed after a long silence. “In the end, you’re nothing but a ship.” He stood up. He’s standing directly from the door, I said to Kridib. Seven degrees from center. Small frame, average height. Kridib fired three shots. Three bullets drilled through the alloy surface. Half a second later, Kridib followed kicking the door in. “Just one small thing.” Rigel took a tube-shaped object from his vest pocket. Meanwhile, I was staring at an empty room from Kridib’s eyes. It was at least three times smaller than the one I was in, bare and completely deserted. There was no Rigel, no me, no equipment, just a single metallic cube the size of my fingernail placed neatly on the floor. “Renaan was never the target.” The old man bent down and injected something in my neck. A new cascade of connection requests followed. “You are.” —- Next Chapter
Unkle Mike. Culling Of Invisible Objects In Quake Related Engines
Intro Despite all these great achievements in video cards development and the sworn assurances of developers about drawing 2 to 3 million polygons on screen without a significant FPS drop, it’s not all that rosy in reality. It depends on methods of rendering, on the number of involved textures and on the complexity and number of involved shaders. So even if all this really does ultimately lead to high performance, it only happens in the demos that developers themselves kindly offer. In these demos, some "spherical dragons in vacuum" made of a good hundred thousand polygons are drawn very quickly indeed. However, the real ingame situation for some reason never looks like this funny dragon from a demo, and as a result many comrades abandon the development of their "Crysis killer" as soon as they can render a single room with a couple of light sources, because for some reason FPS in this room fluctuate around 40-60 even on their 8800GTS and upon creating second room it drops to a whopping 20. Of course with problems like this, it would be incorrect to say how things aren’t that bad and how the trouble of such developers are purely in their absence of correctly implemented culling, and how it is time for them to read this article. But for those who have already overcome “the first room syndrome" and tried to draw – inferior though, but, anyway - the world, this problem really is relevant. However, it should be borne in mind that QUAKE, written in ancient times, was designed for levels of a “corridor" kind exclusively; therefore methods of clipping discussed in this article are not applicable to landscapes, such as ones from STALKER or Crysis, since completely different methods work there, whose analysis is beyond the scope of this article. Meanwhile we’ll talk about the classic corridor approach to mapping and the effective clipping of invisible surfaces, as well as clipping of entire objects.
The paper tree of baloon leaves
As you probably know, QUAKE uses BSP, Binary Spacing Partition tree. This is a space indexing algorithm, and BSP itself doesn’t care if the space is open or closed, it doesn’t even care if the map is sealed, it can be anything. BSP implies the division of a three-dimensional object into a certain number of secant planes called "the branches" or "the nodes" and volumetric areas or rooms called "the leaves". The names are confusing as you can see. In QUAKE / QUAKE2 the branches usually contain information about the surfaces that this branch contain, and the leaves are an empty space, not filled with nothing. Although sometimes leaves may contain water for example (in a form of a variable that indicates, specifically, that we’ve got water in this leaf). Also, the leaf contains a pointer to the data of potential visibility (Potentially Visible Set, PVS) and a list of all surfaces that are marked as being visible from this leaf. Actually the approach itself implies that we are able to draw our world however we prefer, either using leaves only or using branches only. This is especially noticeable in different versions of QUAKE: for example, in QUAKE1 in a leaf we just mark our surfaces as visible and then we also sequentially go through all the surfaces visible from a particular branch, assembling chains of surfaces to draw them later. But in QUAKE3, we can accumulate visible surfaces no sooner than we’ll get into the leaf itself. In QUAKE and QUAKE2, all surfaces must lie on the node, which is why the BSP tree grows rather quickly, but in exchange this makes it possible to trace these surfaces by simply moving around the tree, not wasting time to check each surface separately, which affects the speed of the tracer positively. Because of this, unique surface is linked to each node (the original surface is divided into several if necessary) so in the nodes we always have what is known to be visible beforehand, and therefore we can perform a recursive search on the tree using the BBox pyramid of frustum as a direction of our movement along the BSP tree (SV_RecursiveWorldNode function). In QUAKE3, the tree was simplified and it tries to avoid geometry cuts as much as possible (a BSP tree is not even obliged to cut geometry, such cuts are but a matter of optimality of such a tree). And surfaces in QUAKE3 do not lie on the node because patches and triangle models lie there instead. But what happens would they be put on the node nevertheless, you can see on the example of "The Edge Of Forever" map that I compiled recently for an experimental version of Xash. Turns out, in places that had a couple thousand visible nodes and leaves in the original, there are almost 170 thousand of them with a new tree. And this is the result after all the preliminary optimizations, otherwise it could have been even more, he-he. Yeah, so... For this reason, the tree in QUAKE3 does not put anything on the node and we certainly do need to get into the leaf, mark visible surfaces in it and add them to the rendering list. On the contrary, in QUAKE / QUAKE2 going deep down to the leaf itself is not necessary. Invisible polygon cutoff (we are talking about world polys, separate game objects will be discussed a bit later) is based on two methods: The first method is to use bit-vectors of visibility (so-called PVS - Potential Visible Set). The second method is regular frustum culling which actually got nothing to do with BSP but works just as efficiently, for a certain number of conditions of course. Bottom line: together these two methods provide almost perfect clipping of invisible polygons, drawing a very small visible piece out of the vast world. Let's take a closer look at PVS and how it works.
When FIDO users get drunk
Underlying idea of PVS is to expose the fact that one leaf is visible from another. For BSP alone it’s basically impossible because leaves from completely different branches can be visible at the same time and you will never find a way to identify the pattern for leafs from different branches seeing each other - it simply doesn’t exist. Therefore, the compiler has to puff for us, manually checking the visibility of all leaves from all leaves. Information about visibility in this case is scanty: one Boolean variable with possible values 0 and 1. 0 means that leaf is not visible and 1 means that leaf is visible. It is easy to guess that for each leaf there is a unique set of such Boolean variables the size of the total number of leaves on the map. So a set like this but for all the leaves will take an order of magnitude more space: the number of leaves multiplied by the number of leaves and multiplied by the size of our variable in which we will store information of visibility (0 \ 1). And the number of leaves, as you can easily guess, is determined by map size map and by the compiler, which upon reaching a certain map size, cease to divide the world into leaves and treat resulting node as a leaf. Leaf size vary for different QUAKE. For example, in QUAKE1 leaves are very small. For example I can tell you that the compiler divide standard boxmap in QUAKE1 into as many as four leaves meanwhile in QUAKE3 similar boxmap takes only one leaf. But we digress. Let's estimate the size of our future PVS file. Suppose we have an average map and it has a couple thousand leaves. Would we imagine that the information about the leaf visibility is stored in a variable of char type (1 byte) then the size of visdata for this level would be, no more no less, almost 4 megabytes. That is, much AF. Of course an average modern developer would shrug and pack the final result into zip archive but back in 1995 end users had modest machines, their memory was low and therefore visdata was packed in “more different” ways. The first step in optimizing is about storing data not in bytes, but in bits. It is easy to guess that such approach reduce final result as much as 8 times and what's typical AF – does it without any resource-intensive algorithms like Huffman trees. Although in exchange, such approach somewhat worsened code usability and readability. Why am I writing this? Due to many developers’ lack of understanding for conditions in code like this:
Actually, this condition implement simple, beautiful and elegant access to the desired bit in the array (as one can recall, addressing less than one byte is impossible and you can only work with them via bit operations)
Titans that keep the globe spinning
The visible part of the world is cut off in the same fashion: we find the current leaf where the player is located (in QUAKE this is implemented by the Mod_PointInLeaf function) then we get a pointer to visdata for the current leaf (for our convenience, it is linked directly to the leaf in the form of "compressed_vis" pointer) and then stupidly go through all the leaves and branches of the map and check them for being visible from our leaf (this can be seen in the R_MarkLeaves function). As long as some leaves turn out to be visible from the current leaf we assign them a unique number from "r_visframecount" sequence which increases by one every frame. Thus, we emphasize that this leaf is visible when we build the current frame. In the next frame, "r_framecount" is incremented by one and all the leaves are considered invisible again. As one can understand, this is much more convenient and much faster than revisiting all the leaves at the end of each frame and zeroing their "visible" variable. I drew attention to this feature because this mechanism also bothers some and they don’t understand how it works. The R_RecursiveWorldNode function “walk” along leaves and branches marked this way. It cuts off obviously invisible leaves and accumulate a list of surfaces from visible ones. Of course the first check is done for the equivalence of r_visframecount and visframe for the node in question. Then the branch undergoes frustum pyramid check and if this check fails then we don’t climb further along this branch. Having stumbled upon a leaf, we mark all its surfaces visible the same way, assigning the current r_framecount value to the visframe variable (in the future this will help us to determine quickly whether a certain surface is visible in the current frame). Then, using a simple function, we determine which side we are from the plane of our branch (each branch has its own plane, literally called “plane” in the code) and, again, for now, we just take all surfaces linked to this branch and add them to the drawing chain (so-called “texturechain”), although nobody can actually stop us from drawing them immediately, right there, (in QUAKE1 source code one can see both options) having previously checked these surfaces for clipping with the frustum pyramid, or at least having made sure that the surface faces us. In QUAKE, each surface has a special flag SURF_PLANEBACK which help us determine the orientation of the surface. But in QUAKE3 there is no such flag anymore, and clipping of invisible surfaces is not as efficient, sending twice as many surfaces for rendering. However, their total number after performing all the checks is not that great. However, whatever one may say, adding this check to Xash3D raised average FPS almost one and half times in comparison to original Half-Life. This is on the matter whether it is beneficial. But we digress. So after chaining and drawing visible surfaces, we call R_RecursiveWorldNode again but now - for the second of two root branches of BSP tree. Just in case. Because the visible surfaces, too, may well be there. When the recursion ends, the result will either be a whole rendered world, or chains of visible surfaces at least. This is what can actually be sent for rendering with OpenGL or Direct3D, well, if we did not draw our world right in the R_RecursiveWorldNode function of course. Actually this method with minor upgrades successfully used in all three QUAKEs.
A naked man is in a wardrobe because he's waiting for a tram
One of the upgrades is utilization of the so-called areaportals. This is another optimization method coming straight out of QUAKE2. The point of using areaportals is about game logic being able to turn the visibility of an entire sectors on and off at its discretion. Technically, this is achieved as follows: the world is divided into zones similar to the usual partitioning along the BSP tree, however, there can’t be more than 256 of them (later I will explain why) and they are not connected in any way. Regular visibility is determined just like in QUAKE; however, by installing a special “func_areaportal” entity we can force the compiler to split an area in two. This mechanism operates on approximately the same principle as the algorithm of searching for holes in the map, so you won’t deceive the compiler by putting func_areaportal in a bare field - the compiler will simply ignore it. Although if you make areaportal the size of the cross-section of this field (to the skybox in all directions) in spite of everything the zones will be divided. We can observe this technique in Half-Life 2 where an attempt to return to old places (with cheats for example) shows us disconnected areaportals and a brief transition through the void from one zone to another. Actually, this mechanism helped Half-Life 2 simulate large spaces successfully and still use BSP level structure (I have already said that BSP, its visibility check algorithm to be precise, is not very suitable for open spaces). So installed areaportal forcibly breaks one zone into two, and the rest of the zoneization is at the discretion of the compiler, which at the same time makes sure not to exceed 256 zones limit, so their sizes can be completely different. Well, I repeat, it depends on the overall size of the map. Our areaportal is connected to some door dividing these two zones. When the door is closed - it turns areaportal off and the zones are separated from each other. Therefore, if the player is not in the cut off zone, then rendering it is not worth it. In QUAKE, we’d have to do a bunch of checks and it’s possible that we could only cut off a fraction of the number of polygons (after all, the door itself is not an obstacle for either visibility check, or even more so, nor it is for frustum). Compare to case in point: one command is issued - and the whole room is excluded from visibility. “Not bad,” you’d say, “but how would the renderer find out? After all, we performed all our operations on the server and the client does not know anything about it.” And here we go back to the question why there can’t be more than 256 zones. The point is, information about all of zone visibility is, likewise, packaged in bit flags (like PVS) and transmitted to the client in a network message. Dividing 256 bits by 8 makes 32 bytes, which generally isn’t that much. In addition, the tail of this information can be cut off at ease if it contains zeroes only. Though the payback for such an optimization would appear as an extra byte that will have to be transmitted over the network to indicate the actual size of the message about the visibility of our zones. But, in general, this approach justified.
Light_environment traces enter from the back
Source Engine turned out to have a terrible bug which makes the whole areaportal thing nearly meaningless. Numerous problems arise because of it: water breaks down into segments that pop in, well, you should be familiar with all this by now. Areaportal cuts the geometry unpredictably, like an ordinary secant plane, but its whole point is being predictable! Whereas areaportal brushes in Source Engine have absolutely no priority in splitting the map. It should be like this: first, the tree is cut the regular way. And when no suitable planes left, the final secant plane of areaportal is used. This is the only way to cut the sectors correctly.
Modern problems
The second optimization method, as I said, is increased size of the final leaf akin to QUAKE3. It is believed that a video card would draw a certain amount of polygons much faster than the CPU would check whether they are visible. This come from the very concept of visibility check: if visibility check takes longer than direct rendering, then well, to hell with this check. The controversy of this approach is determined by a wide range of video cards present at the hands of the end users, and it is strongly determined by the surging fashion for laptops and netbooks in which a video card is a very conditional and very weak concept (don’t even consider its claimed Shader Model 3 support). Therefore, for desktop gaming machines it would be more efficient to draw more at a time, but for weak video cards of laptops traditional culling will remain more reliable. Even if it is such a simple culling as I described earlier.
Decompression sickness simulator
Although I should also mention the principles of frustum culling, perhaps they are incomprehensible to some. Cutoff by frustum pyramid is actually pure mathematics without any compiler calculations. From the current direction of the player’s gaze, a clipping pyramid is built (the tip of the pyramid – in case someone can’t understand - is oriented towards the player’s point of view and its base is oriented in the direction of player’s view). The angle between the walls of the pyramid can be sharp or blunt - as you probably guessed already, it depends on the player's FOV. In addition, the player can forcefully pull the far wall of the pyramid closer to himself (yes, this is the notorious “MaxRange” parameter in the “worldspawn” menu of the map editor). Of course, OpenGL also builds a similar pyramid for its internal needs when it takes information from the projection matrix but we’re talking local pyramid now. The finished pyramid consists of 4-6 planes (QUAKE uses only 4 planes and trusts OpenGL to independently cut far and near polygons, but if you write your own renderer and intend to support mirrors and portals you will definitely need all six planes). Well, the frustum test itself is an elementary check for a presence of AA-box (AABB, Axis Aligned Bounding Box) in the frustum pyramid. Or speaking more correctly, this is a check for their intersection. Let me remind you that each branch has its own dimensions (a fragment of secant plane bound by neighboring perpendicular secant planes) which are checked for intersection. But unfortunately the frustum test has one fundamental drawback - it cannot cut what is directly in the player’s view. We can adjust the cutoff distance, we can even make that “ear feint” like they do in QFusion where final zFar value is calculated in each frame before rendering and then taken into account in entity clipping, but after all, whatever they say, the value itself was obtained from PVS-information. Therefore, neither of two methods can replace the other but they just complement each other. This should be remembered.
I gotta lay off the pills I'm taking
It seems that we figured out the rendering of the world and now we are moving on smoothly to cutting off moving objects... which are all the visible objects in the world! Even ones that, at te first glance, stand still and aren’t planning to move anywhere. Cause the player moves! From one point he still sees a certain static object, and from another point, of course, he no longer does. This detail should also be considered. Actually, at the beginning of this article I already spoke in detail about an algorithm of objects’ visibility check: first we find the visible leaf for the player, then we find the visible leaf for the entity and then we check by visdata whether they see each other. I, too, would like to clarify (if someone suddenly does not understand) how each moving entity is given the number of its current visible leaf, i.e. directly for entity’s its own current position, and the leaves themselves are of course static and always in the same place.
Ostrich is such an OP problem solver
So the method described above has two potential problems: The first problem is that even if A equals B, then, oddly enough, B is far from being always equal A. In other words, entity A can see entity B, but this does not mean that entity B see entity A, and, no, it’s not about one of them “looking” away. So why is this happening? Most often for two reasons: The first reason is that one of the entities’ ORIGIN sit tight inside the wall and the Mod_PointInLeaf function for it points to the outer “zero” leaf from which EVERYTHING is visible (haven’t any of you ever flown around the map?). Meanwhile, no leaf inside the map can see outer leaf - these two features actually explain an interesting fact of an entire world geometry becoming visible and on the contrary, all objects disappearing when you fly outside the map. In regular mode, similar problems can occur for objects attached to the wall or recessed into the wall. For example, sometimes the sounds of a pressed button or opening door disappear because its current position went beyond the world borders. This phenomenon is fought by interchanging objects A and B or by obtaining alternative points for the position of an object, but all the same, it’s all not very reliable.
But lawyer said that you don't exist
In addition, as I said, there is another problem. It come from the fact that not every entity fits a single leaf. Only the player is so small that he can always be found in one leaf only (well, in the most extreme case - in two leaves on the border of water and air. This phenomenon is fought with various hacks btw), but some giant hentacle or on the contrary, an elevator made as a door entity, can easily occupy 30-40 leaves at a time. An attempt to check one leaf (for example, one where the center of the model is) will inevitably lead to a deplorable result: as soon as the center of an object will be out of the player’s visibility range, the entire object will disappear completely. The most common case is the notorious func_door used as an elevator. There is one in QUAKE on the E1M1. Observe: it travels halfway and then its ORIGIN is outside the map and therefore it must disappear from the player’s field of view. However, it does not go anywhere, right? Let us see in greater detail how this is done. The simplest idea that comes to one’s mind: since the object occupies several leaves, we have to save them all somewhere in the structure of an object in the code and check them one by one. If at least one of these leaves is visible, then the whole object is visible (for example, it’s very tip). This is exactly what was implemented in QUAKE: a static array for 16 leaves and a simple recursive function SV_FindTouchedLeafs that looks for all the leaves in range hardcoded in "pev->absmins" and "pev->absmax" variables (pev i.e. a Pointer to EntVars_t table). absmins and absmax are recalculated each time SV_LinkEdict (or its more specific case of UTIL_SetOrigin) is called. Hence the quite logical conclusion that a simple change of ORIGIN without recalculating its visible leaf will take the object out of visibility sooner or later even if, surprisingly enough, it’s right in front of the player and the player should technically still be able to see it. Inb4 why one have to call UTIL_SetOrigin and wouldn’t it be easier to just assign new value to the "pev->origin" vector without calling this function. It wouldn’t. With this method we can solve both former problems perfectly: we can fight the loss of visibility if the object's ORIGIN went beyond the world borders and level the difference of visibility for A->B versus visibility for B->A.
At the Beginning Previously on The Scuu Paradox… The smell of burning wood was all I could focus on. The fires had long died out, making it difficult to see in the darkness; despite all other modifications, Kridib’s eyes weren’t able to see overly well in the dark. Every five minutes, Radiance would send an infrared scan of the colony to help him and his team with their advancement. Despite all that help and the four missile strikes, progress was minimal. Of the forty-seven people sent to the planet, eleven had been killed and five more severely wounded, rendering them useless in battle. From what I could see, Rigel’s forces had clustered in specific points of the colony, giving up the rest: a sensible strategy that had allowed them to ambush three of our teams while suffering negligible losses themselves. As things stood, the enemy forces had positioned themselves in two areas of the colony. Both spots encircled a specific building—mine and the captain’s locations—making further missile strikes impossible. Update? Kridib asked me through the mind link. Nothing, I replied. Rigel had left shortly after our last chat, taking the third-contact rods with him. Since then, I had remained safely isolated in the room and completely alone. Half of them have probably gone to sleep. Tell me if anything changes. Kribib looked up. A dozen sats were visible in the night sky. We’ll be making another go soon. I don’t think that’s a good idea. So far, Kridib had made four attempts to reach me, all of them unsuccessful. His approach, though chaotic at best, had managed to keep him alive. There had been a close call during which his left arm had been grazed by a bullet, though that time the man hadn’t frozen. Everyone has to sleep, Kridib said, heading back into one of the buildings that had been transformed into a ground base of operations. I’ll go first. Must I wake you? I asked. No. With that, the link was severed. To a degree, I was thankful, though not too much. Forcing whatever strength I had, I moved my head to look around the room as much as I was able. Nothing had changed in the last four hours, but at least it let me do something. The last time I felt remotely similar was when I’d had my sensor systems knocked out, though even then I was able to use my shuttle AIs to paint me a picture. Here, I was completely helpless and, to a vast degree, blind. “Do I get any water?” I asked as loudly as my lungs would let me. There was no reason to expect an answer. Even if anyone was awake on the lower floors, they would be on lookout duty. Saying it out loud, though, made me feel better for some reason. To my surprise, the door to the room opened. “Thought you were above those things.” Rigel walked in slowly. Even with my lack of focus, I could see that he had changed clothes. The colours were dark enough to be considered a uniform, although I couldn’t make out any other details. “You can’t swallow, remember?” “My mouth feels dry,” I explained. “Too bad.” Despite my poor vision, I could hear him smile as he said that. Walking slowly, he made his way to the stool near me and sat down. From this distance, I could see him taking something from his front pocket. In the dim light, it was impossible to tell what exactly. “Still having problems focusing?” Rigel asked. “Yes.” There was no point in lying. “Pity. Agora works well on organic tissue. Not on techno-mongrels,” he added with a laugh. “If you weren’t one, you’d be dead. There’s a win for you.” And you’re not making any sense, I thought. “Nice murder troops you got out there. Quick and efficient. A few years ago, the locals would’ve had fun pulling their wings off. Time leaves its mark.” Rigel flicked the object. It let out a peculiar metallic sound. “No action, no combat sims, just the local pests that roam the planet. Those were brought here too, did you know?” “I heard about it.” “Another brilliant idea from the bureaucracy. Create a full ecosystem. Plants, critters, predators... all must be present and carefully maintained. We tried killing them off once. Those were the days. Three colonies setting out, killing everything in sight until the orbital station stopped sending food.” There was a slight pause. “And you know the best part?” Rigel leaned towards me. “None of that happened.” If I could have pulled back, I would have. There was no way of knowing if these were insane rantings or if he was referring to a dark op coverup. Considering he was from the Salvage Authorities, either was possible, and both options were equally undesirable. “I went through your data, Elcy.” Rigel rubbed his hands. “You know things you shouldn’t.” “Because of my past, I’ve been placed on special assignments,” I said. Technically it was true, though we both knew it didn’t explain away the inconsistencies. “You knew about the third-contact artifacts before. You’ve operated them before.” He moved his hand closer to my face. I felt a cold metallic surface touch my cheek. “You’re searching for something. Something that you’re not supposed to find.” He moved the object away from my face. “Here’s my offer. You answer some of my questions, and I’ll answer some of yours.” “That’s one way to get court-martialed.” Not to mention there was no guarantee my self-destruct chip wouldn’t go off at any point. “Please don’t give me the line that the fleet is going through all that trouble just to rescue you. If you were that valuable, you’d never have been sent to this hell in the first place.” Rigel stood up. “What are the odds of the fleet extracting you in one piece? Two percent?” “Point-seven-three-nine,” I corrected. Frankly, I was surprised they were going through all the trouble. “Give or take.” “Less than one percent,” Rigel snorted. “It’s your call. You have three hours to make it. Before I leave you, here’s a freebie. This planet, it isn’t some randomly colonized world in ‘unexplored space.’ We’re in the buffer zone—the border between the Scuu and human space. Think about that.” He made his way to the door. Reaching it, he stopped and turned around. “Oh, and we’re constantly being monitored.”
Gamma-Ligata, Cassandrian Front—615.11 A.E. (Age of Expansion) The third wave of shuttles approached my forward left hangar one by one. The instant they came within three hundred meters, I was handed over direct control of the AIs. As with the previous batches, the first thing I did was to have a set of isolated subroutines flash the memory and purge the entire operating system. That done, I sent out a mini-sat to latch onto and assume control of the shuttles. It was a slow and tedious process, but necessary considering the circumstances. “How are things?” Wilco asked from the bridge. Augustus had gathered most of his officers to a private meeting in his quarters, leaving Wilco in command. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, but each time it did, it felt strange. “Everything’s going as planned,” I said, as the first shuttle went under my control. A quick internal scan revealed that there were sixty-two people aboard, all cuffed and tagged. All of them were tagged as infected, and, to my surprise, none of them were sedated. The instructions were to take them in and monitor their actions at all times, and only to engage if they threatened the ship. Normally, I’d be confident that Augustus knew what was going on. With everything we’d gone through since I’d joined the front, I didn’t think there was anything in the galaxy that could surprise him. I was wrong. Finishing my internal check of the shuttle, I directed it to the outer hangar doors and had it dock. The passengers—all of their identities classified—waited till I covered the walls with disembark notifications, then stood up and quietly proceeded to get off, in orderly fashion. I could tell by Wilco’s expression that he found it unnerving. “A thousand and eighty-two passengers on board,” I said on the bridge and in the captain’s quarters. The moment the last person set foot in the hangar, I would eject the shuttle from my hangar-bay, self-destruct it, and proceed with the next. Delegating the task to my isolated subroutines, I reviewed the instructions I had received. The proper ident protocols and authorisations had been used, ensuring that I would do as instructed without asking questions. An emergency transmission from an unidentifiable ship had led me here. I knew nothing about the ship’s name or specifics, and I wasn’t allowed to get close enough to get a visual. The only things I was allowed to see were its shuttles and mass. Everything else was open to interpretation. “Have any of them said anything?” Wilco asked. “No.” I displayed images of the hangar bay and the corresponding corridors surrounding it. As part of my instructions, the entire section was sealed off and quarantined. “They’re eating.” They also appeared to be healthy, although the instructions stressed no one was to come into contact with them under any circumstances. “I’ve received no indication of how long we’re to keep them. Did the captain get an indication?” “No,” Wilco said in his usual somber voice. “Is everything sealed off?” “Yes.” I rechecked. “No way in or out without captain’s approval.” “Set a buffer zone.” The man went on. “No one goes in or out without my permission.” “If you say so.” It wasn’t difficult. The area in question had been made empty to accommodate the quarantined arrivals, though it seemed a bit too much. “Want me to put sentinels?” “No. We don’t have to hurt anyone, just hold them.” He slinked down in his chair. “They’re the Med boys’ toys. We don’t get to play with them.” Med boys… Only Wilco referred to the Medical Core in such fashion. As most organisations, they were part of the fleet, yet their specific area of expertise gave them as much authority as the Salvage Authorities and the BICEFI combined. As a ship, I knew fairly little about them: they had the power to impose quarantines and cordon off entire planets if they wished. They were also the only organisation with the power to hold an active captain in check. Possibly, that was the reason Augustus didn’t get along with any of his medical officers. According to the public files, the Med Core had created the inner-body nanites and were instrumental in getting humans into space. There were also whispers that they were involved in creating the first ship-cores, although I found that unlikely. Even so, they had more authority than anyone aboard. Even on the front, we had no option but to obey. “It won’t be practical heading into war with them,” I said as the second shuttle entered the hangar bay. “Not our call. We’re to hold them until a Med ship picks them up,” Wilco sighed. “And monitor everything they do.” “How is that different from anyone else aboard?” I ventured a chuckle. “You don’t need to know,” the lieutenant said darkly. Another thing about Wilco was that he had the uncanny ability to make any topic of conversation dark. I ran a few simulations testing various responses, then decided not to respond further. In the best-case scenario, there was a twenty-seven percent chance he found my reaction funny. “Elcy.” Augustus granted me sensor access to the captain’s quarters. “What’s the ETA on the cattle?” “The passengers will be all aboard in seven minutes, captain.” A decade of attempts to mellow his behaviour had brought me no results. “Five, if you need me off in a rush.” “Get it done in five,” he barked. “We’ve got new orders. We’re joining a purge fleet. Go on yellow. Get the grunts prepped.” “Aye, sir.” I issued the order to everyone aboard. Seconds later, ground troop officers and sergeants were shouting their troops into order. “What about the passengers, sir? Won’t combat expose them to unnecessary danger?” “There’s no unnecessary danger,” Augustus barked again. The rest of the command staff had already started leaving the room. Their expressions ranged from mild annoyance to disapproval. Whatever discussions had taken place, they must have been unpleasant and one-sided. “Monitor them at all times and don’t interact until I say so.” “Understood.” It sounded like another escort mission, and I didn’t like escort missions. Normally, it would just be troop detachments or—if we were very unlucky—some mid-level bureaucrat or admiral’s aid sent to do a front-line inspection. Transporting quarantined personnel wasn’t in my usual purview, although if it had been, I’d never know. “What’s the course of treatment they must undergo?” I asked. “No treatment,” Augustus grumbled. “That’s for the Meds to figure out.” “All passengers are tagged as infected. Regulations require we provide immediate medical attention.” I felt my words sound hollow. If Augustus had the authority to provide such, he would have told me already. The only thing I was left was to go through the motions, expecting to receive the obvious denial. “Just monitor them, Elcy! That’s what we’ve been told. And whatever happens, don’t interfere.”
Just monitor them. I had spent three months and thirty-nine hours monitoring the passengers onboard. Through battles and repairs, every single action had been carefully observed, recorded, and stored on external data storage. For the most part, nothing happened. The people would live boring, perfectly organised lives, almost as if they knew they were being watched. There were no scuffles, few arguments, and only one incident resulting in injuries when a Cassandrian fighter managed to slip through my external defences and fire a salvo at the hangar bay. Their health condition also seemed no different than when they had come aboard. I had dedicated a dozen subroutines to collect any potential symptoms in an effort to determine the type of disease they had, but had come to no conclusion. Then, one day, they were all gone. I had no memory of the Medical ship that had taken them, or where that had happened. The only thing I was certain about was the time—precisely two thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine hours since the last of them had come aboard. Everything else remained restricted. Looks like there’s always someone monitoring someone, Sev. If Rigel was to be believed someone was monitoring the planet. The question was who. Seconds turned to minutes, then hours. Hundreds of times, I considered looking into my restricted memories for information regarding the third-contact artifacts or the events in gamma-Ligata, and each time I found a reason not to. As Rigel had said, the chance of me getting off the planet alive was less than one percent, but the knowledge of the existence of the possibility kept me acting. And then there was Rigel’s offer… Rad, are you monitoring me? I asked, attempting to latch on to any open communication protocols. A connection was established, but instead of linking to Radiance, I found myself connecting back to Kridib’s mind. On cue, an info burst from Radiance followed, giving the latest scan. This time, I could see the location of our forces. The total number had increased to seventy-four, Kridib included. Nearly eight percent were gathered close to the captain’s expected location. Kridib and five more were closer to me. Get ready, Kridib said. Moments later, bursts of gunfire echoed in the distance; they were going for the captain first. The mission had begun. From here on, I could see several potential outcomes. In all of them, there was a high probability that Rigel attempted to make a deal. When I was a ship, Augustus had taught me one key thing when it came to missions: regardless of the depth of predictions and the computing power at their disposal, humans always boiled down a situation to a simple binary choice. Rigel wanted something from me and had invested too much to let his chance slip. Before the outcome of Kridib’s rescue mission, Rigel would come here to get an answer to his proposal. All I had to do was wait. As I lay, I watched Kridib run through the darkness towards my location. Unlike before, he was wearing night vision goggles, letting him make out his surroundings better. No thermal? I asked as Kridib made his way through the streets. The smell of burned vegetation could still be felt. That’s what you’re for. Not a reply to be thrilled about, but one to be expected. Cross-referencing Radiance’s latest scan, I started analysing every frame of Kridib’s stream. The first few minutes passed without incident. Judging by the intensified background gunfire, the locals were more focused on keeping Renaan isolated than stopping Kridib. Twenty-eight seconds, later the first shot sounded. Sniper! I shouted straight in Kridib’s mind. “Cover fire!” he shouted, rushing for cover. Watch out for a cross, I warned. The shooting intensified. Based on the area scan, the group was a few hundred meters away. One strong push and they’d be here. That said, I knew that the building was guarded by more than seven people. If I were in Rigel’s place, I would have dedicated at least three dozen. Concentrated fire focused on the second floor of a building, blowing off the entire wall. There was a brief scream before a rocket flew into the spot, hollowing the entire structure with a blast. Heavy weapons? I asked Kridib. I didn’t think Radiance’s captain would resort to such firepower, considering third-contact artifacts were involved; one direct hit, and the entire colony might well end up a smouldering crater, not to mention the potential communication repercussions. Maybe there was truth in Rigel’s statement that Flight Commander Nitel was getting desperate. As I was following Kridib’s advancement outside, the door opened once more—as predicted, Rigel had returned. He was wearing the same set of clothes as three hours ago. I found it puzzling that I couldn’t spot any semblance of a weapon on him. “Your masters have gotten desperate,” the man said in suspiciously calm fashion. “Looks like they’ve sent everything they had to get Renaan.” He walked up to me, then leaned over. “And just a handful to get you.” “Are they winning?” I tried to smile. “Beats me.” Rigel didn’t seem bothered. “You thought about my offer?” “I did. And I don’t think accepting would be a good deal. If I wait for them to rescue the captain, your bargaining power ends.” “Oh?” The man chuckled. “There’s nothing else the fleet would be willing to trade.” Except potentially the pyramid artifact. Even then, I didn’t see them sacrificing the Gregorius. “Once the captain boards a shuttle, it’s over.” A person of Kridib’s squad fell as they were approaching my building. I heard the unmistakable sound of bullets piercing armor, then silence. That was the thing about sound suppressors: one could get killed, and there still wouldn’t be any sound of one hitting the ground. I wanted to turn around and see what had happened, potentially to help. There was a seven-point-three chance that the wound wasn’t fatal. Kridib kept on moving forwards. That’s what made him a ground trooper… it also caused me pain. “What if I kill Renaan?” Rigel mused. “I won’t lose much. Everyone down here’s dead anyway. Someone in the fleet has gone through a lot of shit to get Renaan back. They’d lose a hell of a lot more.” “What if they save the captain?” I countered. “Either way, we’ll soon find out, and you’ll have no offer.” “Quantum paradox logic?” Rigel sounded surprised. “Strange hearing that from you, missy. I’ll have to skim your file once I’m out of here.” He paused for a moment, then dragged the nearby stool over—making a deliberate sound—and sat down. “Truth is, once the moment ends, we both lose our chance. Are you okay with that?” Why are you so confident? I wondered. Even if I were to agree, he wouldn’t be able to get much from me in the next ten minutes, even less if Kridib managed to reach my room. His squad had already made its way to the building proper, facing less than expected resistance. From what I was able to see, there were two snipers left on the upper floors and two machine-gunners on the first. All auxiliary positions on the nearby buildings seemed to have dealt with, although there was no sign of Ogum. “You’ve dealt with Salvage before, I can tell,” Rigel pressed on. “You won’t get another chance like this.” The old man’s with me in the basement, I told Kridib. No guards in the room. He’s ex-Salvage Authorities. Take him, and the mission is over. Saying that hurt slightly. Despite being the enemy, and a threat to the war effort, he remained human. “Then I guess I’ll never know.” As I spoke, I saw Kridib charge at the building. As before, there was nothing fancy about it, just determination and insanity. Several bullets flew so close to him I could hear them, but this time none of them hit. “Your bargaining window is over. No deal.” Kridib emptied his sidearm at the door in front of him, then rushed in. I could see no guards inside, just a set of hastily built staircases. Whatever the original purpose of the building was, it had been transformed into a field center at some point—likely during a previous escape attempt. Probably a group similar to ours had made it their temporary base, then left it as it was once they had completed their mission. No wonder Rigel had had me transported there. Kridib didn’t waste time making parallels, instead drawing his second sidearm and rushing down. At least two floors down, I said. I’m not hearing any of the gunfire. Is he armed? Kridib asked. Unsure. Not that I can tell. There are artifacts, though. “Such a teacher’s pet.” Rigel sighed after a long silence. “In the end, you’re nothing but a ship.” He stood up. He’s standing directly from the door, I said to Kridib. Seven degrees from center. Small frame, average height. Kridib fired three shots. Three bullets drilled through the alloy surface. Half a second later, Kridib followed kicking the door in. “Just one small thing.” Rigel took a tube-shaped object from his vest pocket. Meanwhile, I was staring at an empty room from Kridib’s eyes. It was at least three times smaller than the one I was in, bare and completely deserted. There was no Rigel, no me, no equipment, just a single metallic cube the size of my fingernail placed neatly on the floor. “Renaan was never the target.” The old man bent down and injected something in my neck. A new cascade of connection requests followed. “You are.” —- Next Chapter
As a financial capitalist, numerous individuals’ question: What is Binary Option? What are the opportunities as well as dangers of this noticeable lucrative industrial economic gadget? Simply just how is it different from the normal options of requestor terms, liquidity, advantages as well as likewise hazards in addition to negotiations? What is Binary Option? Binary Option is a monetary alternative that is classified as an international choice, which spends for capitalists. Depending on the area of the acquisition, Binary Alternative has different names such as managed return choices (US), all-or-nothing options, electronic options, and so on. Binary Choice can be accomplished very just. They simply require financiers to get (telephone call) or sell (put) according to their financial investment demands: When is the expiration day? Is the investment price greater or less than the price level at today? Predicting revenues as well as losses of the monetary investments is the biggest benefit of Binary Alternate trading. If successful, the collection incomes will certainly probably to you. If not, you will absolutely lose the cash spent. This makes it easy to determine which occupations have better revenues than losses perhaps. So, to make one of the most out of Binary Alternative trading, financiers call for to find a trusted system to spend and likewise trade on. ThisOption will certainly be such an option, a new system that is definitely most likely to produce a new age in the financing trading market. What is ThisOption? ThisOption is a Binary Option trading exchange with currently higher than 1 million participants energetic (2020). The exchange was founded in 2016 as well as is taken care of in Canada. ThisOption is proud to have among the greatest liquidity on the industry. The exchange promises fast order execution, assisting financiers perform thousands of successful as well as additionally seamless intraday professions. There are furthermore rather a range of trading possessions readily available on the exchange to purchase such as materials, indices, rare-earth elements, items, as well as forex money. Certainly, Binary Alternative is the highlight of the exchange capability, bringing brand-new possibilities to traders' profile. All these properties and also trading options are presented through an easy to use interface in addition to quickly browsed. In addition to that, the system provides a professional team of Customer Assistance constantly prepared to react to any kind of kind of worry 24/7. Getting Income with ThisOption When trading with ThisOption, individuals proceed via the rankings of the neighborhood as well as additionally get significantly much more benefits as they acquire a whole lot more experience as well as experience. Everybody begins as an essential trader that is self-trading with versatile time as well as likewise versatile sources which they handle themselves. Not everybody can succeed rapidly, though. They ought to not let their feelings overcome you when trading. Throughout trades, they need to find to grasp trading approaches, methods, to manage the threats, as well as also manage their funding’s suitably. There are devices to assist investors when they start in ThisOption such as the Expert Duplicate Tool, permitting them to pick up from exceptional and competent traders that have understood their trading strategies. Judgment ThisOptions expression is "Selection is more Important than Capacity". With all the choice of alternatives for trading, the platform ensures that its warranties are maintained with financiers throughout the globe. Website Link : https://www.extons.io Thisoption binary exchange : https://thisoption.com Whitepaper Link : https://www.extons.io/whitepaper Twitter Link : https://twitter.com/thisoption Telegram Link : https://t.me/thisoption ANN Threads Link : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263768 Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/thisoptionexchange Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb6ufyQv-hs5BcUx6j0q70Q Medium Link: https://medium.com/@thisoption.com Bitcointalk Username : tanushree My Bitcointalk Profile Link : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2541771
Addressing Canada’s Employment Insurance Gap For Self-Employed Workers
Source: TD Ksenia Bushmeneva, Economist Dated July 15th, 2020
Highlights
While the pandemic had devastated the overall labor market, workers in more precarious and non-standard work arrangements have been especially hard-hit.
Yet, many of these workers do not have access to employment insurance (EI) or run a higher risk than regular workers of not meeting qualification conditions. Only 64% of unemployed Canadians contributed to EI in 2018, meaning that millions would be left without financial assistance in the absence of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).
Extending EI coverage to non-standard workers does have challenges. However, there is a growing understanding among many countries that these workers require social protection. More than two thirds of the OECD countries offer at least partial coverage for the self-employed. Their experience offers valuable lessons if Canada decides to follow suit.
The labor market recovery is likely to be uneven and protracted. This is especially true for self-employed and other non-standard workers, since their hours and incomes are more volatile and less protected. Having a more inclusive system with a broader contribution base, which accommodates non-standard workers but also includes a larger number of regular employees would help strengthen the recovery and build on economic gains achieved so far through the temporary CERB program.
The COVID-19 pandemic delivered a sudden and devastating blow to the Canadian labor market. Between February and April, millions of people lost their jobs as employment plunged by 16%. Unlike in previous recessions, the impact this time around has been disproportionately felt by workers in more precarious employment arrangements: part-time, temporary and self-employed, who are less likely to have access to unemployment insurance (EI). These types of work arrangement are more prevalent in the service sector industries, many of which have been hard-hit during this downturn. As of June, year-over-year (y/y) employment in part-time and temporary positions was down by 17% and 24%, respectively (Chart 1). For multiple job holders, employment fell by nearly 40%. By comparison, the 7% y/y decline in permanent positions seems relatively modest.
As dramatic as these declines are, they may still under-represent the pandemic’s toll on employment and incomes. Notably, overall hours worked fell more than employment during the months of lockdown and social distancing. This is especially true for non-standard workers who were more likely to work fewer hours than regular employees. For example, while self-employed workers saw only a 3% drop in employment since February, 43% of self-employed worked less than half of their usual hours in May (Chart 2). By comparison, among all employees, only 9% worked less than half of their usual hours. Moreover, self-employed people who were away from work were more hard-hit financially as they were far less likely to still be paid. Among incorporated self-employed workers with zero hours, less than 1 in 10 received pay compared to 1 in 4 for regular employees in the same situation.
As a result of the significant drop in hours worked, a far larger portion of the labor force was underutilized than suggested by the unemployment rate alone. While the official unemployment rate was 12.3% in June (equivalent to 2.45 million people), Statistics Canada noted that nearly 27% of the potential labour force was ‘underutilized’. The significant gap between the drop in the hours worked versus the more modest decline in employment helps to explain why 8.3 million of people have applied the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) (at any point during this crisis).
It is clear that self-employed and other non-standard workers were more impacted by the pandemic. Yet these workers usually have the least access to social safety nets, such as EI. Currently, EI unemployment benefits are mostly accessible to employees in the most traditional sense of the word: those that work full-time in a permanent positions for a single employer. By contrast, self-employed workers are not eligible for EIi, and, while those in temporary, contract and part-time positions are eligible, they might not have a chance to accumulate enough insurable hours to qualify because their work arrangements are less stable. Due to lack of EI coverage and significant loss of hours, nearly 40% of self-employed workers applied for CERB benefits, while only 12% and 5% of private and public employees did (Chart 3).
The reasons why some workers, such as those that are self-employed, are excluded are rooted in the design of the EI program. The program is based on insurance principles, with both employers and employees paying into it through mandatory contributions. The corollary is that those workers who have not paid in, as well as those who have left voluntarily without just cause, are disqualified. Contributions are also intended to make the program self-sufficient in the long-run as has been the case in Canada in recent years. In the case of self-employed workers, there’s also an issue of moral hazard when it comes to determining what represents a valid job separation (more on this in the section below: “What Complicates Offering EI Coverage For Non-Standard Workers”). For this and other reasons, many non-standard workers are currently ineligible for unemployment insurance.
These gaps in coverage have been growing as the job market has steadily tilted towards more non-standard work arrangements. In 2018, only 64% of unemployed Canadians had contributed to EI.ii Even among workers who have contributed, only 88% had accumulated enough insurable hours to qualify for benefits, which, depending on the regional level of unemployment, ranges between 420-700 hours in the 52-week period. The combined influence implies a relatively low EI coverage ratio for Canadian workers – out of 1.1 million Canadians who were unemployed in 2018, only 56% were eligible for EI.1 The share of unemployed workers who actually received EI benefits is even lower, averaging slightly above 40%.2 This is considerably below the median coverage among developed counties, which is around 60%.3
Due to data limitations and because non-standard workers include many different types of employment arrangements which may overlap, it is difficult to know with precision the prevalence of non-standard work in Canada. About 15% of Canadian workers are self-employed, while 17% work part-time. In 2016, Statistics Canada estimated that gig workers (self-employed freelancers, on-demand online workers and day labourers) accounted for roughly 8%-10% of Canadian workers. About half of those workers were relying exclusively on their gig income and had no other employment, making them ineligible for EI benefits.4
The low coverage rate and other limitations of the current EI system have been highlighted extensively in other research literature.5 For example, the fact that benefit eligibility and generosity varies geographically across Canada implies that there’s significant variability in coverage rates across provinces. EI coverage ratios are particularly low in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta – all three provinces which also have above-national prevalence of self-employment (see Charts 4).6
In order to mitigate these shortcomings in the near term, the Canadian government rolled out the CERB program. Compared to EI, CERB qualification rules are very straightforward and were a quick means to provide financial assistance to an extremely broad and large number of applicants that included previously uninsured workers. CERB’s eligibility replaced the insurable hours threshold with a low and uniform income threshold, with anyone over the age of 15, having earned more than $5,000 in income in 2019 and who have lost their job or hours due to COVID-19. This had provided a helping hand to millions of non-standard workers in Canada. However, it has come with a steep price tag: in just three months since it was launched the government had already paid out $55 billions in benefits (as of July 5th) – nearly three times last year’s annual spending on EI and $28 billion more than it had predicted at the conception of the program.
CERB coverage was originally offered for 16 weeks, and was recently extended for an additional 8 weeks. However, it will start expiring in September for the earliest recipients, long before the labour market and certain industries are back to health. Unless adjustments are made to the EI program to accommodate non-standard workers, many of them may suddenly find themselves without unemployment assistance.
What Complicates Offering EI Coverage For Non-Standard Workers
Limited social protection for self-employed and other non-standard workers is not an issue unique to Canada. In most developed countries, non-standard workers have lower social protection compared to regular employees, with unemployment benefits being the least accessible benefit (Charts 5-8). Why is that and what makes implementation of unemployment insurance coverage for self-employed workers challenging for policymakers?
First of all, providing unemployment insurance for self-employed workers (and other non-standard workers) raises the issue of moral hazard. Put another way, presence of EI coverage may change behavior of self-employed workers making them less likely to take on work and more likely to remain unemployed. Non-standard workers tend to have more variable income, and they are far more likely to have lower future earnings than regular employees due, for example, to smaller assignments and contracts, or flexible pricing on various labor platforms (e.g. Uber). Lower expected future earnings could prompt them to quit in favor of EI benefits. More volatile earnings also make it more challenging to determine the appropriate income replacement rate. However, one solution to this could be to use income averaged over a period of time.
Secondly, for regular workers, reasons for leaving a job are transparent and can be verified with the employer. This is difficult to achieve in the case of non-standard workers. For example, if they avoid smaller assignments, then they will lose work but this will be impossible for government agencies to determine.
Some countries (e.g. Sweden, Austria, Slovakia, Spain) offer a voluntary option for self-employed workers to enroll into an employment insurance plan. However, a voluntary arrangement raises the issue of adverse selection. Workers with the highest risks or those that are most likely to make a claim have the greatest incentive to join, which limits the risk-sharing aspect of the program.
Adverse selection is something that Canada experienced first hand when it introduced the Special Benefits for Self-employed Workers (SBSE) in 2010 through the EI system, which allowed self employed workers to opt-in to gain access to maternity and parental benefits, sickness benefits and compassionate care and caregiver benefits. A 2016 program review study found that the characteristics, such as gender, age and income, of the self-employed workers who participated in the SBSE program were considerably different from the general sample of self-employed workers. In focus group studies, participants also indicated that the likelihood of making a claim was an important consideration for their decision to register for the benefits.7 Other issues with the voluntary scheme included a relatively low take-up rate, which in turn led to relatively high administration costs and required significant government subsidies to cover benefit payouts. Longer-run, low coverage is problematic for voluntary, contributions-financed, unemployment insurance schemes, as adverse selection could lead to a vicious cycle of rising insurance premiums and falling coverage. Meanwhile, achieving high coverage may require significant public subsidies because individual willingness to voluntarily pay for unemployment protection appears to be low.8 For those reasons, voluntary coverage schemes do not appear to work well in the case of non-standard workers.
Lastly, the current EI system is based on contributions from both employees and employers. In the case of the self-employed, it is not clear who will pick up the tab for the employer portion of the contribution. If the government subsidizes the employer portion, it could create adverse incentives for employers to hire a self-employed worker to reduce non-wage related labor costs. However, a lack of coverage for non-standard workers could also lead to this outcome, contributing to a rise in non-standard forms of employment. For example, in Italy, para-subordinate workers (self-employed but highly depended on one or very few clients) used to pay significantly lower pension contributions and were not eligible for unemployment and sickness benefits, resulting in significantly lower non-wage labor costs and a rising number of para-subordinated workers. In response to this Italy had gradually increased their contribution rates and expanded coverage. Levelling the playing field led to a significant decline in the prevalence of this type of employment. Austria had a similar experience with independent contractors.
Some Solutions Based on The International Experience
Despite the challenges in expanding unemployment insurance to non-standard workers, there is a growing understanding among many countries that the growing share of non-standard workers need social protection. As a result, more than two thirds of the OECD countries now offer at least partial unemployment benefits to self-employed workers. There’s a great variety of schemes, ranging from mandatory to partial and voluntary coverage, and no two are exactly alike. Still, their experience offers valuable lessons for Canada if it wishes to incorporate self-employed (and potentially other non-standard) workers into its EI system.
So what are some of the solutions of dealing with the higher moral hazard issue for non-standard workers? Lower level of EI benefits or a more restrictive access could be imposed in order to incentivize individuals to search for work or to keep their current job, and to offset higher level of moral hazard. In Sweden, for example, the moral hazard issue is mitigated through more restrictive access, allowing self-employed workers to claim benefits only after 5 years have passed since the previous claim. There is also a requirement that the firm has been shut down, which acts as an additional deterrent.
To mitigate adverse selection, upon starting a business, self-employed individuals in Austria have six months to decide whether they would like to participate in the voluntary unemployment insurance scheme, and that decision is binding for 8 years. In Canada, only half of startups survive to their eight-year anniversary, so there is a high likelihood EI could be used at least once by many self-employed business owners during this time period.10
Generally speaking, based on the OECD review,11 there appears to be a consensus that voluntary coverage schemes, particularly the ones with little or no commitment, such as Canada’s EI SBSE for the self-employed, are quite rare and do not work well to accommodate non-standard employment due to prevalent adverse selection, low participation and the significant public subsidies required to operate them.
On the other hand, mandatory EI contributions and coverage, like the one that currently exists for regular employees, would resolve the issue of adverse selection, hold more closely to the principle of risk sharing within their peer groups, and help to lower program costs. However, results from past surveys conducted in Canada found that there was little support among the self-employed for a mandatory contribution scheme.12 Due to the nature of their work, many self-employed workers indicated a preference to minimize their absence from work (to avoid the risk of losing clients etc.) suggesting that, unless their contribution rates are significantly lower, self-employed workers may get less “value-for-money” from EI programs, such as for example maternity/paternity leave, than traditional employees. The less predictable nature of their income means that they are likely more in need of an income protection program rather than employment insurance.
Indeed, based on surveys, their preferred financing option for temporary work/income disruptions was a tax-sheltered savings account.13 This is another viable alternative to contributions-funded EI, however, the downside is that individual contribution rates would need to be significantly higher in order to generate sufficient savings because there will be no splitting of contribution between employers and employees. There is also a risk that individuals, particularly those in part-time or low-income jobs, may not be able to accumulate sufficient savings to weather the unemployment or low-earnings spell.
For other non-standard workers, such as those with flexible hours or doing work for an online platform, one solution would be to introduce a wage premium for employees doing flexible work. This would compensate workers for the added income uncertainty. In Australia, for example, casual workers are entitled to a wage premium or have a minimum hours guarantee.
Lastly, if the goal is to make social protection more universal and harmonized across all forms of employment, a means-tested social protection system financed through general taxation, similar to that of Australia and New Zealand, could be adopted. However, moving to these systems would require a complete overhaul of Canada’s current contribution-based EI.
Concluding Remarks
The labor market recovery is likely to be uneven and protracted. Even those workers that were able to return to work could remain underutilized and continue to face lower earnings due to social distancing restrictions and weaker consumer demand for a considerable period of time. This is especially true for self-employed and other non-standard workers, since their hours and incomes are more volatile and less protected. The rollout of CERB during the pandemic has been very helpful to address gaps in coverage within the current EI system. However, looking ahead, a more sustainable and permanent solution is required for workers outside the EI system. Having a more inclusive system with a broader contribution base, which accommodates non-standard workers but also includes a larger number of regular employees through more inclusive qualification criteria would help strengthen the recovery and maintain economic gains that were so far accomplished through CERB.
The traditional EI system is based on a binary choice of whether or not someone has a job. It is clear that with non-standard forms of employment becoming more prevalent, fewer people fit into that box. These workers need some form of insurance against joblessness as well as income volatility both during the current economic recovery and in the future to address the changing nature of employment relationships. Many OECD countries now offer various options for non-standard workers to participate in unemployment insurance systems, and their experience offers valuable lessons if Canada decides to follow suit.
Since 2010 self-employed workers can voluntarily participate in EI Special Benefit for Self-Employed Workers (SBSE) to gain access to many life event-type benefits accessible to regular employees, such as maternity and paternity leave programs, leave due to sickness or to care for an sick family member. In addition to this, current EI system allows certain exceptions for some non-standard workers. For example some individuals who work independently as barbers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, drivers of other passenger vehicles are eligible to receive benefits through the regular EI program. Fishermen are also included as insured persons under the EI Fishing Regulations. In the case of the self- employed fishermen, EI qualification is tied to income. In order to qualify for up to 26 weeks of benefit, they need to have earned between $2,500 to $4,200 in the last 31 weeks.
The two main reasons for not contributing to the EI program were not having worked in the previous 12 months, and non-insurable employment (which includes self-employment).
BINARY OPTIONS PREDICTION INDICATOR [h1] Binary Options Prediction Signal Indicator for Metatrader (MT4, MT5). 75%-80% stable daily win-rate! Up to 100 trading signals a day! 100% Non REPAINTING! 100% RELIABLE! Predicts price, price movement direction, generates clear buy/sell, call/put signal up to 90% accurate. This tool is the FREE version of the Honest Predictor indicator, a trend predictor with an expiry time implemented that is especially suitable for Binary Options.. To facilitate the testing of the indicator before purchasing, I created this freely downloadable version that has exactly the same features as the payed version, but with one limitation: it can be attached only to one chart at a time. Binary Options Signals are provided to traders to notify them when a profitable trade is available. Our signals are extremely easy to follow and only require the trader to check a few points: asset, execution time, direction and expiry time. Signal that really works! Our mission is to make every binary options trader that decides to use our ... BINARY OPTIONS PREDICTION INDICATOR [h1] Binary Options Prediction Signal Indicator for Metatrader (MT4, MT5). 75%-80% stable daily win-rate! Up to 100 trading signals a day! 100% Non REPAINTING! 100% RELIABLE! Predicts price, price movement direction, generates clear buy/sell, call/put signal up to 90% accurate. BinaryOptionsIndicators.com is the library to the thousands of indicators for MetaTrader 4 developed in MQL4. Regardless of the market (forex, binary options, securities or commodity market), indicators help to represent quotes in an accessible form for easy perception.
Trade Binary Options - 30 M Expiry. Trade Binary Options - 30 M Expiry. Skip navigation Sign in. Search. ... I used this indicator to predict market movements ... Best Indicator of 2020 90% Win - binary Option #FXXTOOL TRADING. Make money anywhere, anytime! Binary Option https://bit.ly/3g92CHX Indicator 90% https://bit.ly/32S6FV0 START TRADING WITH FREE SIGNALS RIGHT NOW! The best t... Binary Options Prediction and Signals Indicator 90% Accurate! Based on Neural Networks! Magic Tool to Become a King Of Binary Options! www.altredo.com. Binary Options Prediction Indicator 90% accurate! Based on Neural Networks! Run the Indicator, get signal and place winning trade! Does not reprint! Up to 90...