VO 1.8.220 through 1.8.223 highlights included:

- New accounts now are free to play in the training sectors until the trial time begins. The trial time begins the first time any of your characters leave the training sector.
- Added an idle-timeout of 30 minutes and a captcha challenge every 6 hours in the training sectors for free-to-play accounts.
- Added ability to enter promotional keys to the in-game new account signup menu for the Android version.
- To reduce lag problems, the training sectors are now instanced when they fill up too many players or the load exceeds a certain value.
- Fixed audio problems on Windows Vista/7 for surround or 7.1 (anything more than stereo) setups.
- Your home station info is now properly updated when your home station is forcefully set by the server.
- Added subscription support through the Google Play Store. Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or higher and an app update is required for full support.
- It is now possible to create new accounts for the game within the game client on Android.
- Fixes for the in-appp account creation captcha. It now uses lower-case letters.

We've been quiet for the last few months. A lot of intensive development has been going on, which has not been public, and I've personally spent some time on business trips. The above touches on a few of the things we've released, but I want to go into a little more detail for those who haven't been following closely.

Free to Play training sectors: Instead of starting the clock on the new user's trial from the moment they enter the game, we now start it when they leave the training sector. This gives them a less pressured experience for initially figuring things out, and hopefully will let them use their trial more effectively.

The scalability changes (training sector instancing) are also paramount and should be very useful with launches coming later in the year.

In other news, we've hired a new full-time artist, who is currently working on some new graphics and effects content for the game. It's my plan to revamp a lot of the game art, interface and effects this year.

More announcements and releases are forthcoming, but for right now I'm just going to leave it at that and cover the recent history. As always, please post any issues you find on the forums. Have a great weekend, everyone.