The first few days, hardly an Ice Anomaly appeared in my Ice Mining system. I guess I logged on at the wrong times. And once they did appear, about 70 pilots swarmed onto the Glacial Masses and destroyed the belt in about 30mins (or less). Checking Dot.Lan however showed another Ice system near by. And lo and behold there were only a dozen or so pilots there. So I have my Mackinaw parked there now. Other people found out as well and once the anomaly appears there are about 20 or 30 peaks in the weekends mining. So not too bad. Don’t forget that the cycle times are 50% of what they were previously so you do mine more in less time.

There will be less Ice coming into the economy though, what was once an endless supply that could be mined 23/7, is now a less common appearance. I assume that eventually once the old stock runs out, the price will go up. It’s not too bad at the moment (as I type this reasonably steady at around 200k a block for a month).

Also there are now periods of time where there is no ice to mine. My ice miner already had some scanning skills, he is now sometimes flying around, scanning in a Gnosis to kill the time in between Ice Spawns .

Clicking the lower left screen to undock for the 100th time …

As it turned out later CCP’s servers were under a DDOS attack. The monday after, the servers returned.

Links:

CCP details DDOS attacks

Massively had two articles (at least) : No threat to customers and the initial news article.

And of course the official post by CCP_Spielmann.

New gate effect

The new animation in itself is nice, the first few times you see it. It does get a bit old after that and it seems longer than the new one (which is probably not true), but as it disables the UI it is more intrusive than the old one. An on / off button would be nice. Browsing the market or taking care of your PI while on autopilot is annoying right now.

Scanning changes

I was a bit disappointed with these changes. I can see how they want to make it a bit easier to get into, but there is a bit too much handholding right now. You can only launch 7 probes and they’re either in pinpoint mode or wide broad scan mode (can’t remember the exact term). I usually only use 5 which works perfectly well, and was even 2 sister probes short on the first character I tried on Sisi ! Also the shift key now has another function and I was dragging the probes out of formation. Probably something you get used to, but I would rather have my old keys back. The pinpointing itself wasn’t much different, but seems to take longer as I was struggling a bit with the new interface and key setup.

The onboard scanner is now much more powerful and immediately shows all anomolies in the system ! The sites are presented on your regular screen, you can turn that on and off. Which isn’t very handy in my opinion. I don’t use the client full screen, sometimes I have three clients open in windowed mode, and don’t have that much screen estate. The list of sites is currently still there though CCP does plan to remove that, which I think is a very bad idea. Most feedback seems to agree with me here, so I hope they change their mind.

Ice Mining

Ice belts are no more ! You can now use the on board scanner and an ice belt anomoly will appear in the former Ice mining systems. I tried this out in Eygfe as you can see on the screen shot.

The mining times themselves have been halved, so it takes around 90secs now for a full cycle (with no Orca boost). The ‘belts’ themselves aren’t very big, so I assume the ice miners will spread out more or there will be a race for the new anomoly to appear. I don’t think these can support the almost 200 people in local in Eygfe at peak times, it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, once this goes live !

Links

Mabrick has made a nice video on the Odyssey changes, you can find it on his blog.

Test server feedback forums

UPDATE: Around the time I posted this, a dev post appeared in the feedback thread that addressed several of the issues mentioned above. Very nice .

EVE smashed its previous Peak Concurrent User total during the festivities by a clear margin, replacing 2011′s record of 63,170 with a new figure of 65,303 players logged in simultaneously.

http://kotaku.com/the-extraordinary-mischievous-too-short-life-of-sean-481060252

There is nothing wrong with these changes, they’re all very welcome as far as I am concerned. Finally players can get their own little space in the ships hangar and so on. What delight me the most is the ability to finally change T3 modules at the hangar. It’s really dumb you must have 2 or 3 tengus just because you can’t change them on the fly like you’re supposed to.

The starbase code is quite old and complicated; so it is quite possible we will hit road blocks when addressing some of these features, road blocks that in some cases could render one or more of them undeliverable.

Now what is more important is what is missing. What I would really like is a more convenient way to refine minerals. The current modules are probably from  early on in the game when Mining Barges didn’t even exist. A new module or an ‘ iteration’ of those modules would be very welcome. Unless CCP does not want us to be self sufficient in the Wormhole and wants us to ship the minerals to Empire.

Also there is no mention of roles and the corp hangar and ship hangar. Although probably not everything has been fleshed out entirely, but a lot of people would be grateful if this was added. It might be getting a bit too complicated for June however.

A re-imagined scanning system, intuitive navigation and new exploration modules will aid you as you search the heavens for your next conquest.

This sounds rather intriguing. Another attempt to get people out of hisec ? Or make 0.0 more accessible ?

A rebalance of major areas of space from highsec to nullsec include changes in exploration sites, industrial resources, some types of NPC loot and more

Furthermore a lot of little things, including POS changes, dozens even !

This all sounds promising, I am sure there’ll be more info to come before Odyssey hits .

http://www.eveonline.com/odyssey

The sad news that Eon has come to an end didn’t come as a surprise as printed magazines are dropping left and right. It still is sad to see a part of Eve die.

Browsing through a few older issues, some of the articles get rather outdated, like ship guides and the like. But interviews with devs, the short stories and spotlights on players were always nice. I wrote an article on communication in Issue #21, which was nice to have done. I was supposed to write a guide on the then new P.I., but through some miscommunication (ironically enough) that didn’t happen.

I did take the opportunity to buy the poster bundle at the EON store for cheap though.

In years to come, may you pull an issue from the shelf, blow away the cobwebs and remember what EVE was once like. Until then, fly safe.

Links:

Gameskinny – nice article

Official announcement

ps. Bit odd to come out with this somewhat old news at the moment the Battle of Caldari Prime is going on, but this one had been sitting in my Live Writer for a while, just realised I hadn’t send it out yet.

Patchnotes are at http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp.