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:
- New email client (mails also available through API)
- New ingame browser
- 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 :
- Project gun changes – more alpha, less rate of fire
- New Navy ships factional warfare store
- Assault frig afterburner boost
- 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:
- ‘Epic’ pirate missions
- 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:
- 0.0 sovereignty changes
- upgrades to 0.0 space
- capital ship changes
- 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.
Agree with your assessment Morph. I do feel a bit guilty of tending on the negative side. But really will refuse to be part of a camp that candy coats everything and makes it all look like a win. That is just deception and a close kin to censorship.
I don’t think the impact will be to huge. The unfortunate aspect is more could have been achieved with better communication and maybe a little more patience.
But here’s to new release!
It’s alright to vent sometimes :). That’s what a blog is for and makes it more entertaining.