The age of Dominion

And the Age of Dominion is upon us ! A surprisingly smooth patch I must say ! The #tweetfleet buzz was very active. People reporting how far their download was etc. And even an hour early, we were able to log on.

I checked my invention blueprints and it seems that we indeed need less highlevel moon goo related components and way more mid/low lvl (armor plates). I am going to hold off production for a while and see how it pans out.

I could see the alliance wormhole fleet in the fleetfinder, sent out a few emails to check the new client, browsed my blog to see if the ingame browser worked, and yes it all seem to work smoothly. The ui with all the squareness needs a bit of growing into, I guess, after all these years of roundiness.

Tengu flyby

Then undocking… WOW stars, nice planets. People just warping from planet to planet, very fun experience. I almost forgot, but people in corp chat started linking contracts to the new Navy ships. I couldn’t resist and got me a Navy Scorpion. People have been saving up LP and started dumping them, plus the FW nerf (of sorts) will not make these any cheaper in the future I hope, so I think it’s a good investment. Haven’t had quite enough time to fully deck it out, but I think it’s a lot easier to fit than the CNR. Plus a lot of tankage with 8 med slots and the resistance bonus !

Navy Scorp

All in all the first impressions are VERY good ! Smooth patchday, smooth graphics, every as advertised. And the positive tweets keep coming in. Gratz to CCP !

Dominion just around the corner

With Dominion less than a week away, I was planning on doing a dominion in a nutshell post, but Kirith Kodachi beat me to it. But I decided to go ahead anyway and sort of give it my own spin.

Changes / improvements that don’t affect gameplay:

  1. New email client (mails also available through API)
  2. New ingame browser
  3. New planetary graphics

These will make the game more enjoyable, but won’t have much impact on gameplay. The new email client was long overdue, the ingame browser will be very helpful.

Changes that might affect my gameplay :

  1. Project gun changes – more alpha, less rate of fire
  2. New Navy ships factional warfare store
  3. Assault frig afterburner boost
  4. New fleet finder interface.

My factional warfare character flies minmatar so he’ll have to test no. 1. I am not sure about no. 3, I cannot find much of it anymore in the patch notes. Did it get scratched or is it still in ? No. 2 might bring more people (at least temporarily) to FW, though I am not too sure about it. The fleet finder is a fine addition !

Update: The AF changes were scratched :(. Was looking forward to that…

Other changes:

  1. ‘Epic’ pirate missions
  2. Boost to pirate ships etc.

I don’t fly these ships as they’re a bit too expensive to my taste, but who knows I might one day ;). The epic pirate missions don’t interest me at all. I tried the Caldari epic mission line, and someone at CCP thought it would be epic to have people courier documents 28jumps… But some people might like it, more content never hurts !

Last but not least:

  1. 0.0 sovereignty changes
  2. upgrades to 0.0 space
  3. capital ship changes
  4. Moon goo income changes / T2 bpo changes

And here it is, the meat of this expansion. The thing is that CCP boasted these changes on fanfest and during the alliance tournament, but what actually will be deployed on dec. 1st is quite meager. The upgrades are nothing to write home about. The sovereign system was still subject to change two weeks before the whole thing is going live, and I have already given my thoughts on the mothership changes.

Best thing to do would be to go live with the first set of things I mentioned. Nothing controversial there, every one will have a better game. Give the 0.0 overhaul some more thoughts and testing !

But we all know that this is what will be going live next week. And for those that claim that 0.0 doesn’t effect them, think again ! The whole game is affected by T2 prices, demand of trit due to capitals being blown up etc etc.

There also seems to be  misunderstanding that the only people that complain the mothership / 0.0 sovereignty thread are those from the big alliances like Goons and Atlas etc.. I see plenty of empire / lowsec people complain as well. Not only on CCP’s attitude, heavily censoring, but also about a dev blog that was simply factually incorrect. How such a blog can slip through is quite beyond me.

Let’s hope things will work out for the better, it will certainly be very interesting to see what will happen, the coming weeks. And how the market will respond. To be honest I have no idea, but will watch it with excitement.

Update: CCP just put their features page online.

Uproar over Capital Changes

And yet again a dev blog has caused a lot of uproar on the forums again. This time CCP Nozh is the villain in the continued forum soap opera ! First of all let me make it clear I know nothing about capitals and cap warfare, so I cannot really comment on the proposed changes by CCP Nozh.

But from what I understand from the thread the following happened: for weeks players and team of devs (CCP Arbithar is mentioned a lot) have been testing and changing caps on the test server. The changes had the approval of the players base and the dev team alike.

Then someone else steps in (CCP Nozh), voids all these changes and implements something totally different, and also showing that he doesn’t have much experience in 0.0 cap warfare (according to the players). So the big question here is “What happened ?”.

pitchforks

Was someone somewhere higher up not happy with the proposed changes and assigned the project to someone else ? Some sort of explanation is in order because this doesn’t sit well with the people that helped work out the first set of changes. They offered their spare time to help and think with the devs, and then just to scrape it all ? Is CCP getting more arrogant ?

Another trend that is noticeable is that the player base (especially the 0.0 one in the last two forum events) is getting more personal and vocal. It’s scary to see all these 0.0 alliances band together !

Update: Apparently posts are being deleted from the above thread ! Where have I seen that before ?

Update II : Eve Tribune has posted an excellent summary !

The fail that is Dominion ?

The bomb has dropped on a friday afternoon in the form of a dev blog on the eve online community. You can read the responses here on the forum, lots of references to the SWG NGE.

What’s the problem with the changes posted in the dev blog ? It costs 2bil to fully upgrade a system (yes a single system) in 0.0 and claim sovereignty. How are you ever going to make that system cost effective ? How can a small alliance afford to do this ? Even bigger ones, will be in trouble. They’ll probably just develop a few key systems and lock off the rest of a constellation for the rest of the people. CVA with their NRDS policy is especially screwed. They don’t make anything from their visitors.

CCP claimed that the goal of Dominion was to attract more people to 0.0. As I see it now, this will do the exact opposite. And if you think ‘I don’t do 0.0, this won’t effect me’, please think again. A lot of materials for T2 etc come from 0.0.

If people don’t / can’t bother with those anymore, markets will plummet and it will effect everybody in the game.

UPDATE : CCP Soundwave is now trolling posting in the above mentioned thread and says (amongst some other nonsense) As I said, if the costs become an issue, they can always be looked at.

It’ll be too late. People will have giving up and moved on. Anyone with some common sense can see that these changes are ridiculous.

Update II: CCP Chronotis posted in the feedback thread and it seems CCP is starting to backpaddle already. Which makes you wonder where they pulled the original numbers from in the first place… Post nr. 1000 btw raises some excellent questions.

Dominion and T2 production

Unless you have a crystall ball, these is no way to tell how the supply of T2 components will turn out. CCP have stated that they want to end the moon mining madness. And that will make T2 production cheaper and hopefully more profitable ? Well at least more accessible ;).

They are also tweaking the BPC/BPOs. Take a look at a Jaguar invented –4/-4 one run BPC as it is now.

jag_now

And this is the same BPC on the test server.

jag_testserver

Especially a lot less Nuclear Reactor Units ! And those are usually the most expensive items, along with the Shield Emitters.

We probably won’t see a lot of T2 production in november, as everything will change once Dominion comes in December !

The Fleet Finder

Most of the attention for the upcoming Eve expansion ‘Dominion’ will be directed to the sovereignty changes. 0.0 space is about to be revamped ! But there is more to Dominion than just that.

One of the neat new additions is the Fleet Finder. I took a series of screenshots to show you how it works.

First you open up the fleet window with a new icon on the left hand bar, which then brings up a welcome screen.

finder1 finder2

In this case we pick to form a new fleet, and that’s what you get, a regular fleet like it was before. But the fleet screen has an extra tab with fleet finder options.

finder3 finder4

As you can see, here you can set what the restrictions are for people to join. You can add a description of what you’re doing. This is changed from what it was earlier on the test server. There were a few categories you could pick and it was only open for alliance / corporation. Now you can just type your own description.

I am not sure it’ll be a good idea to open your fleet up for anybody with a decent sec status. Maybe I am being paranoid (and you should be in Eve), but there are plenty of asshats about who will try to ruin your day.

finder5

And there you go, I checked on another character and the above screen comes up in the fleet finder when you pick ‘join a fleet’. You can join from here, no need to x up, ask where the fleet is etc.

A very welcome edition, especially if your corp. maybe has a mining and a missioning fleet. Or you’re in 0.0 and there is a pvp scout op and a mining op. Straight from logging in, you can see what’s happening and join right off the bat !

Cosmos and the new browser

On the test server amongst a lot of other new goodies, you can preview the new in game browser.

new_browser

As you can see, it actually displays this blog exactly like it should :). I assume they took some rendering engine like webkit and used that to pull it off. The new blog on cosmos is interesting. Cosmos doesn’t interest me all that much, but the new email client will be such a blessing. The current one is so horrible, it’s not even funny any more ;).

UPDATE : Link to technical devblog on the new browser.

UPDATE2: The new browser presentation @ fanfest : EveOnlineFan Blog