Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => General Non-RP EVE Discussion => Topic started by: kalaratiri on 10 Oct 2012, 14:23
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Right, instead of having 3 or 4 different threads, I'm just going to post everything new I find out about Retribution as of now, in this thread. Feel free to add anything I've missed, or comment on and discuss the changes.
First things first, a new video dev blog has been released, and you can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7FPA2Bh6g0g
Second, a new devblog has been released to do with the targeting UI, and that can be read here: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73448
Looks to me like they're going back towards the old style (old, old style), but in a rather more polished fashion. I like it. The hit icon thing is an amazing idea, and I will love them forever if that goes through. Being able to tell who is hitting you for how much through visual representation = ♥
Third dev blog in 24 hours, this one about bounties: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446
Interesting tidbit right at the bottom:
Modular Work
New modules are much less of a focus this time around for team Super Friends, but there are a few things here we’re doing:
Adjust the ASB to be more reasonable. The ASB is a little on the strong side right now. We want to adjust that while maintaining the overall functionality of the module.
Micro Jump Drive. The classic ‘blink’ ability, allowing ships to maneuver around the battlefield in a new way (with some hefty limitations of course) . We’ll try to get this out on a test server as soon as we can. It’s still some weeks away, but stay tuned.
Salvage Drone. As the name implies, this is a drone. That salvages. Need I say more? Ok, a bit. This is a small drone. It’s a bit worse at salvaging than the modules, but has the advantage of course of having longer range while saving precious slot. Again, we’ll get this out on a test server as soon as it is ready.
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Much love for all of this.
Mucho irony that the damage indicators are going back to a 2003 EVE style. :)
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Maybe we'll get the mighty morphin' Neocom back too.
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I like the targeting UI proposal a LOT. It would also be neat if they included sub-icons for EW. While the current icons above the HP/capacitor HUD is alright, it doesn't immediately let you know who is applying which form of EW. Of course there's always overview, but this system they're proposing looks too shiny not to include EW and the like.
Go CCP! \o/
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A lot of interesting features are coming down the Winter pipe. What I find interesting is that they chose the 'Retribution' theme to encapsulate the expansion. That implies that Crimewatch and the New Bounty System will form the center pieces of the release. Given the amount of back-end coding work needed to get crimewatch in shape, that's not entirely surprising.
I am skeptical that CCP can design a bounty system that makes bounty hunting a viable and rewarding profession, as opposed to a set of half-baked incentives that will be gamed in unintentional and immersion-breaking ways. (See: Inferno FW). But I'll at least give them the benefit of a doubt; I'm looking forward to seeing the dev blog on bounty hunting.
Mind, I'd love to see pirate-hunting blossom as a profession. And that's the opinion of someone who plays a 'privateer' that winds up on Concord's bad side more often than not.
Bring it, pigs.
P.S. - On the off chance that CCP succeeds in this, I hope to see a new 'bounty hunter' community in the RP world. That's a classic character archetype that fits a grimdark setting well.
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Random aside: The Retribution page touts revamped Bounty Hunting, with players "taking justice into their own hands" being part of the new theme. This puts the recent live events, which feature brazen pirate raids, in an entirely new light.
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I just really hope the bounty payouts are based on the ISK cost of the ship/pod destroyed and not a percentage per kill system otherwise people with bounties may as well just use an alt to pop their rookie ships for ISK.
Hopefully the bounty system works more like a contract system against corps/alliances where mercenary organizations can pick them up, see what the payouts and reserves are like and get guaranteed ISK per kill and wardec fees until the reserves dry out and the contract has to be renewed.
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OP Updated.
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The bounty system dev blog is up:
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446 (http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446)
Some initial impressions:
- Kill rights got interesting, but there will be fewer kill rights going around. "Only attacking in hi-sec or podding in low-sec." This means hi-sec gankers and people who bother to pod-kill in low-sec. Since the latter population tends to live in low-sec anyways (where they can be shot regardless of suspect flagging), this will affect hi-sec gankers the most.
- The activation of a suspect flag upon initiating a kill right is awesome. As is the on-demand, click-for-kill-right mechanic. Again, a pity kill rights will be restricted in the new system.
- Bounty pay-offs for structure bashing. I can see someone putting a large bounty on a corporation, then publishing the location of their POS'. Some pies already make a living off of killing POS' and harvesting expensive arrays, so there could be some business there.
- "We’re going to muck out all the advertisers, poker stars and attention seekers currently clogging [the bounty system]" heh.
- "Finally, we want to support bounty hunting as a career choice, preferably in a way that makes it possible for newer players as well as older players to get involved." I like this sentiment, but I'm not sure the ecology will be large enough to truly call this a career choice. This might be a secondary or tertiary isk-maker at best. Still, people continue to pirate for a living for the fun and pew-pew, even though the isk/hour of pirating is nothing to write home about.
- Then again, creating a Bounty Hunter leaderboard may be just the thing for people to focus on this 'career.' Nothing drives EVE PvPers like e-peen. See: all killmails.
- 'Private Bounties' is a great idea. It might finally be the mechanic that revives the PC mercenary industry. Also ties in well for someone who ranks high on the Bounty Hunter leaderboard, who can advertise for private bounties and personal attention to priority contracts.
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The bounty system dev blog is up:
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446 (http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446)
The OP update was to link that blog :D I should probably have made that clearer, sorry.
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The bounty system dev blog is up:
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446 (http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73446)
The OP update was to link that blog :D I should probably have made that clearer, sorry.
Oh, I just saw that. My post was a placeholder as I typed out my impressions anyways!
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Am I crazy to feel like letting you put a bounty on anyone regardless of sec status is likely to lead to griefing?
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Am I crazy to feel like letting you put a bounty on anyone regardless of sec status is likely to lead to griefing?
Not at all. If it can be used, it shall be. >.>
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Am I crazy to feel like letting you put a bounty on anyone regardless of sec status is likely to lead to griefing?
You'd only be crazy if you thought 'griefing potential' was a bad thing in the eyes of CCP game design.
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Am I crazy to feel like letting you put a bounty on anyone regardless of sec status is likely to lead to griefing?
You'd only be crazy if you thought 'griefing potential' was a bad thing in the eyes of CCP game design.
it'd make encouraging people to shoot that dude easier. You know, that dude that The Mittani got into trouble for, for suggesting people should shoot them.
Now, just stick a big bounty on that individual, and depending on the payout formulae, then shooting them might even be profitable, even accounting for the ship loss to CONCORD.
So...
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Sure, but is a 5:1 ratio of crowdsourced griefing really what they're going for? You won't need combat power or even the ability to hire mercenaries to get it done. Just drop a fat stack of isk on someone and watch as every two-bit ganker that wanders by does the work for you.
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Sure, but is a 5:1 ratio of crowdsourced griefing really what they're going for? You won't need combat power or even the ability to hire mercenaries to get it done. Just drop a fat stack of isk on someone and watch as every two-bit ganker that wanders by does the work for you.
Isn't that just hiring mercenaries?
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Does hiring mercenaries usually get you the attention of every single ISK-chasing gun in the cluster, a guaranteed damage payoff at 5x your investment (admittedly, some might occur as incidental damage, but if they're a hapless indy corp, probably not much), and no need to hassle with contracts or wardec fees?
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Does hiring mercenaries usually get you the attention of every single ISK-chasing gun in the cluster, a guaranteed damage payoff at 5x your investment (admittedly, some might occur as incidental damage, but if they're a hapless indy corp, probably not much), and no need to hassle with contracts or wardec fees?
It does now. Though I think "guaranteed payoff" is assuming a fair bit. The new system just makes it easier to hire mercenaries and random guns-for-hire to do the work for you, via an automated system that eliminates the need for negotiations and guarantees against scamming.
If it succeeds, it means it's a lot easier for someone with a lot of isk to make another player a target of PvP. Which is, you know, the point of putting bounties on people. The complacency about pissing people off without consequence has a lot to do with the fact that bounties didn't work up to now.
Keep in mind that CCP only aims to provide a working bounty system. It's not promising to make the issuance of bounties fair or equitable. Many players get their impressions of bounties from miscellaneous single-player RPGs, where bounties are rewards for taking down (laughably deserving) criminal npcs. In an actual system of legal bounties where issuers can be private parties, it comes down to the rich paying to have someone else hurt. And this means that, yes, a fair number of people will be on the receiving end of a bored capsuleer's wealth.
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P.S. Bounty does not equate kill rights. Bounty hunters will still have to issue a wardec or suicide-gank you if you're a hi-sec dweller with a bounty on your head.
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Actual useful bounties based on value of what you are killing is SO MUCH WIN.
You all should be thinking of the RP possibilities. Those of you averse to PVP with cash reserves now have extremely valuable outlets for IC arguments and threats.
Currently placing a bounty on someone is just paying their alt.
This is fantastic.
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Ok, the idea behind it is good. But sorry to say that, CCP, just go back learning about ergonomics for once please.
They changed a squared box to a circular box ? What for ? It's more beautiful like that ? Not even, it's more or less the same and subject to people's tastes.
And on that circular targeting box ? Where the fuck are the shields, the armor, and the hull ? On the bottom ? On the left ? On the right ? I guess it's better for people to try to guess a few times because it's more fun and giggles... :roll:
They are doing the same mistake again they did with their slots in their new fitting pannel, before you had low slots on the bottom, middle slots on the middle row, and high slots on the high row. Then they decided it would probably make more sense to put them all around a circle on the same level. :psyccp:
Otherwise I like what they seem to be doing. Not very sure how this new bounty system will not quickly get exploited to the bone like the current one (but extended to everything) but well...
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I like where the bounty system is headed so far from reading the blog since it may bring along a bit more incidental pvp which is always a good thing, however the degree of anonymity by which bounties can be placed does mean targets have far less means at their disposal to get their own retribution against people who mark them.
Bounties probably won't affect people whose primary play style in Eve is blowing things up and getting blown up aside from maybe getting a bit of extra ISK now and then (Oh no, people want to shoot at me, life is over) but I think it will effect high-sec and introduce new outlets and displays of hilarity and rage.
You all should be thinking of the RP possibilities. Those of you averse to PVP with cash reserves now have extremely valuable outlets for IC arguments and threats.
Providing guaranteed payouts for targeted Kill or Capture operations against High Value Targets working against ones own perceived interests?
I think a big part of what I always viewed as a fundamental in New Eden was grimdark corporate warfare carried out by all sorts of hired guns and private contractors delivering explosions and increasing profit through increased bodycounts.
I've always toyed with the thought of being a proper RP mercenary but the system and potential payouts in the past always turned me off. However, where CCP seems to be headed currently with bounties certainly makes merging RP lines into a functional and professional Caldari PMC that is able to profit from providing services rendered to its clients a very interesting option for me.
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I like where the bounty system is headed so far from reading the blog since it may bring along a bit more incidental pvp which is always a good thing, however the degree of anonymity by which bounties can be placed does mean targets have far less means at their disposal to get their own retribution against people who mark them.
Bounties probably won't affect people whose primary play style in Eve is blowing things up and getting blown up aside from maybe getting a bit of extra ISK now and then (Oh no, people want to shoot at me, life is over) but I think it will effect high-sec and introduce new outlets and displays of hilarity and rage.
You all should be thinking of the RP possibilities. Those of you averse to PVP with cash reserves now have extremely valuable outlets for IC arguments and threats.
Providing guaranteed payouts for targeted Kill or Capture operations against High Value Targets working against ones own perceived interests?
I think a big part of what I always viewed as a fundamental in New Eden was grimdark corporate warfare carried out by all sorts of hired guns and private contractors delivering explosions and increasing profit through increased bodycounts.
I've always toyed with the thought of being a proper RP mercenary but the system and potential payouts in the past always turned me off. However, where CCP seems to be headed currently with bounties certainly makes merging RP lines into a functional and professional Caldari PMC that is able to profit from providing services rendered to its clients a very interesting option for me.
Yes there is some -awesome- RP possibilities here with dedicated corps and players doing the mercenary thing.
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Does hiring mercenaries usually get you the attention of every single ISK-chasing gun in the cluster, a guaranteed damage payoff at 5x your investment (admittedly, some might occur as incidental damage, but if they're a hapless indy corp, probably not much), and no need to hassle with contracts or wardec fees?
It does now. Though I think "guaranteed payoff" is assuming a fair bit. The new system just makes it easier to hire mercenaries and random guns-for-hire to do the work for you, via an automated system that eliminates the need for negotiations and guarantees against scamming.
If it succeeds, it means it's a lot easier for someone with a lot of isk to make another player a target of PvP. Which is, you know, the point of putting bounties on people. The complacency about pissing people off without consequence has a lot to do with the fact that bounties didn't work up to now.
Keep in mind that CCP only aims to provide a working bounty system. It's not promising to make the issuance of bounties fair or equitable. Many players get their impressions of bounties from miscellaneous single-player RPGs, where bounties are rewards for taking down (laughably deserving) criminal npcs. In an actual system of legal bounties where issuers can be private parties, it comes down to the rich paying to have someone else hurt. And this means that, yes, a fair number of people will be on the receiving end of a bored capsuleer's wealth.
I can't speak for "many players," but I get my impressions of what the bounty system in EVE is supposed to be like from...the EVE bounty system, which as it stands involves placing bounties on those who destroy non-agressive ships in CONCORD-regulated space. Whether that should be changed is a normative question that has nothing to do with what you or I believe CCP's intentions to be, and whether their intentions--whatever they may be--are a good idea is just as open to dispute. I contend that the currently-outlined changes, insofar as they make outsourcing griefing trivially easy, would be bad for EVE. Obviously you disagree.
As a separate issue, there's the fact that for CONCORD to allow the placement of bounties on individuals who haven't violated their regulations is profoundly stupid. But then, CONCORD regularly carries the idiot ball in-universe, so that's hardly new. It could be explained as criminals setting up a parallel system, but I doubt CCP will take the steps to do so, which means any such IC claim would be contentious at best.
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I haven't read the devblog properly but it appears we can all get a WANTED sign slapped on us...our beautiful portraits will all be obscured :(
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How many portraits will be changed to look at the 'Wanted' notification? find out!
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All of them. And they will all either look shocked or smug.
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Dev answering questions (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2034665#post2034665) in the bounty hunting thread:
1. When you buy a kill right, you do so in space when you can see the target of the kill right and the suspect flag is activated immediately. Think of it more like a hunting license than a commodity that changes hands. You paid for the opportunity of a kill, not a guarantee.
2. When a corp or alliance is disbanded, all remaining bounties on it are returned to those who placed the bounties.
3. You can collect bounties in any security. Bounties will not help you get kills in high sec, but they will reward you for your efforts if you do manage to get them.
4. The payment scheme will be set up so that a kill will not pay out more ISK in bounties than was lost in the kill.
And another (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2034722#post2034722):
A couple other questions....
1.) Can I have multiple killrights on the same person at the same time??? (assuming they deserve it!)
2.) Can a person have multiple killrights on them simultaneously????
2.a) Assuming you can have multiple killrights on the same person, how do you determine which killrights is used first? The one that is cheapest? The one that expires the soonest? Do they all get used up at once in some type of combined killright???
3.) If I kill a suspect that has the potential for killrights, but the killirghts were never activated, I'd like confirmation that their killrights will not be altered.
4.) If I "redeem" killrights on a person, they go suspect, and get away... the killrights are not "used up". But does the money I spent to activate the killrights get returned to me??
1.) No. You only have 1 kill right for each person who has criminally attacked you. If the same person criminally attacks you again, the expiration date of your kill right will be extended.
2.) Yes.
2.a) If multiple kill rights for the same person are for sale, the cheapest one is sold (activated) first and other kill rights cannot be activated while he has the suspect flag active.
3.) I do not understand this statement.
4.) If they get away, the kill right is not "used up" and the ISK stays with the seller. Buyer beware.
No-one will know who placed a bounty against them, if you have been a bad bad person then I am sure you will have your suspicions.
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I can't speak for "many players," but I get my impressions of what the bounty system in EVE is supposed to be like from...the EVE bounty system, which as it stands involves placing bounties on those who destroy non-agressive ships in CONCORD-regulated space. Whether that should be changed is a normative question that has nothing to do with what you or I believe CCP's intentions to be, and whether their intentions--whatever they may be--are a good idea is just as open to dispute. I contend that the currently-outlined changes, insofar as they make outsourcing griefing trivially easy, would be bad for EVE. Obviously you disagree.
As a separate issue, there's the fact that for CONCORD to allow the placement of bounties on individuals who haven't violated their regulations is profoundly stupid. But then, CONCORD regularly carries the idiot ball in-universe, so that's hardly new. It could be explained as criminals setting up a parallel system, but I doubt CCP will take the steps to do so, which means any such IC claim would be contentious at best.
The act of reducing your security status only makes you susceptible to bounties. The actual placement of bounties is entirely up to the whims of other capsuleers. Most of the time, bounties have nothing to do with outlaw acts. This is because putting a bounty on someone with the intention to punish them is stupid, given current mechanics. As CCP noted in the dev blog, the high-bounty players out there are all adverts, attention-seekers, or inactives.
Also, I'm rather curious what you think "griefing" is. If engaging in an action to the detriment of another random PC is griefing, then the entirety of the game is set up for it. Putting bounties on random people who did you no wrong is no different from pirates attacking random neutral strangers. Are pirates griefing?
As for why CONCORD would do this, why does CONCORD allow capsuleers to wage legal war against each other within Empire space for a modest isk fee? All you need to do is pony up the funds and push a button. No cassus belli required.
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It is not because CONCORD does IC shenanigans that make no sense - like permitting wars - that it becomes an excuse for implementing another stupid shenanigan in the same vein which will obviously make even less sense ICly.
They should create a parallel underworld, indeed. That would also reinforce the pirate factions at the same time.
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I'll play devil's advocate here.
Explaining via parallel underworld creates more problems than it purports to solve. How do 'illegal' wars circumvent CONCORD hi-sec safeguards? Why are there standardized fees, information transparency, and a total lack of fraud in a system maintained by a criminal underworld? How did a 'parallel underworld' come to be when the pirate factions are as diverse and divided as the traditional empire governments? They're not exactly all BFF. You're essentially pulling a criminal Yulai Convention out of a hat.
Here's an alternative pitch: CONCORD provides these services because it's an in-character and pragmatic decision for the organization to make.
Consider the following data points about CONCORD:
- It was founded under joint agreement by five diverse interstellar nation-states, each with fundamentally different value sets and moral outlooks. The organization draws personnel from all of these empires. This implies an organizational moral ambivalence or moral relativism concerning basic ethical concepts such as justice. What unifies the organization is its mission. "The ever-expanding bureaucracy of CONCORD has become a-empirical, swearing fealty to no one race." (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/CONCORD)
- Nowadays, CONCORD's upper echelon isn't even drawn from the five empires but "rise from the ranks of its own employees."
- CONCORD's power was initially limited, but grew over time as the organization's financial independence became established. This financial independence is based on revenues arising from interstellar trade - customs, licenses, contraband confiscation. The SCC is a branch of CONCORD. (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Secure_Commerce_Commission)
- CONCORD maintains a DED branch that targets high-profile criminals and criminal organizations. The definition of criminality is, of course, based on the laws of CONCORD's constituent 5 nations. (Hence, while Sansha's 'Nation' possesses the features of a sovereign entity, it is relegated to a 'pirate faction' by the CONCORD narrative. It's simply not one of CONCORD's constituents). One of the major duties of the DED is assisting customs efforts, using its advanced technology. (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/DED)
- While CONCORD regulates the new capsuleer class with direct violence, it also channels capsuleer energies via incentives. The most basic of these are automated bounties. At the higher levels of refinement, such as the measures taken to counter Sansha strikes, capsuleers are herded into fleets and directed against targets using military-style missions. Even capsuleers that have fallen out of favor with CONCORD can win back their security ratings by directing guns at approved targets. Because of automated CONCORD incentives, the majority of capsuleers are predisposed towards shooting the pirate factions and winning favor with the empire governments.
Starting off these lore points, what I see is an organization that is fundamentally amoral. It takes no stand concerning slavery, except when slaves are being shipped across boundaries an illegal contraband. It professes no opinion on democratic self-rule versus centralized megacorp control, except when the State designates privately-owned small-arms as illegal contraband. What it is concerned with is maintenance of the status quo, which is the dominance of, and the precarious balance between, the five founding nations. CONCORD also has a vested interest in expanding interstellar trade.
The events leading to the Empyrean War threatened the status quo. With peace out of the question, CONCORD opted for the lesser evil of a controlled proxy-war fought largely by capsuleers over stretches of underdeveloped low-sec space. With the conflict clearly bounded into a well-paid ceremonial bloodsport, akin to the limited warfare of feudal samurai or knights, CONCORD avoided the "danger" of a decisive victory by any one nation or alliance of nations. A scenario of a single dominant Empire would have rendered CONCORD obsolete. Low-intensity conflict, however, could perpetuate the balance indefinitely.
The rise of the capsuleer class is another threat to the status quo. Fortunately, capsuleers are an egotistical and garrulous bunch, who are concerned mostly with shooting, romancing, trolling, and politicking each other. They pay scant attention to the baseliner population, dismissing non-capsuleer vessels as "rats" - vermin that aren't even worthy opponents in space. Additionally, capsuleers have been a major boon to interstellar trade and industry, individually contributing on a scale comparable to planetary economies.
How does CONCORD control capsuleers while profiting off of them? The same way they handle interstellar trade: regulations, punishments for breaking regulations, and paid-for licenses to bypass regulations. After all, CONCORD isn't against violence per se. They pay well if a capsuleer pops a few Angel Cartel ships. And if you decimate a Sansha fleet, you may even get a pat on the back. It's unsanctioned violence that's problematic.
A capsuleer launches a suicide attack on another capsuleer in hi-security space, without CONCORD sanction. Punishment is applied swiftly and efficiently. Is the victim compensated or the rationale behind the attack explored at all? No, that's not CONCORD's concern. What is established is that there's a rule, and breaking that rule incurs a penalty.
If you want to bypass that rule, you can pay a modest fee (modest by capsuleer standards) for a license. Renewing this license, also known as a wardec, is made easy by automatic deductions from your account.
What is a bounty but a transaction? And CONCORD profits from all interstellar transactions by means of the SCC. The sheer scale of capsuleer transactions means that processing and brokering fees alone probably account for an entire service economy ecology.
And if these sanctioned modes of violence allow capsuleers to focus on shooting each other rather than threatening the status quo, all the better.
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Explaining via parallel underworld creates more problems than it purports to solve. How do 'illegal' wars circumvent CONCORD hi-sec safeguards? Why are there standardized fees, information transparency, and a total lack of fraud in a system maintained by a criminal underworld? How did a 'parallel underworld' come to be when the pirate factions are as diverse and divided as the traditional empire governments? They're not exactly all BFF. You're essentially pulling a criminal Yulai Convention out of a hat.
What are "illegal" wars ? I do not see any illegal wars, since they are all condoned by CONCORD.
Also, I do not see why there would be any standardized fees, information transparency and total lack of fraud in a criminal system, indeed. It could be, but hardly I think. How does that make CONCORD a criminal underworld ? I am not sure to understand.
Just in case, I never said that the war system should be put under another organization than CONCORD, it would make even less sense since CONCORD is the one enforcing the law in space. I can understand that CONCORD wants to see capsuleers hunting each other (divide and conquer), but even that feels totally stretched to me, considering how capsuleers can be crushed like cockroaches at any time, and taking their technology into account. Capsuleers are dependant lucrative puppets, nothing more.[/quote]
- It was founded under joint agreement by five diverse interstellar nation-states, each with fundamentally different value sets and moral outlooks. The organization draws personnel from all of these empires. This implies an organizational moral ambivalence or moral relativism concerning basic ethical concepts such as justice. What unifies the organization is its mission.
I don't disagree, but I don't agree either. It can perfectly be that moral relativism that leaded them to a new brand of ethics. Somehow, I tend to see them somewhere in the middle, like the big amoral administration that they have become, while retaining a lot of their idealistic elements.
- Nowadays, CONCORD's upper echelon isn't even drawn from the five empires but "rise from the ranks of its own employees."
It can also empahize on what I said above : to the contrary, breeding their own elements with a complete control on their beliefs and purpose can either lead to completely amoral developpement, as well as a very ethical code not restricted/stained by any foreigner biased empire.
- CONCORD's power was initially limited, but grew over time as the organization's financial independence became established. This financial independence is based on revenues arising from interstellar trade - customs, licenses, contraband confiscation. The SCC is a branch of CONCORD. (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Secure_Commerce_Commission)
Same as above. It does not prove anything to me. That's not because they are financially independant that they suddenly became amoral.
Funnily enough, but that's only my personnal interpretation here, I see CONCORD as a pragmatic, quite relativist organization when it was founded by these 5 empires. A kind of compromise between 5 very different mindsets, having to juggle between each of them constantly while still having a lot of ties and dependance towards their 5 creators. However, now that they have become independant and act like an allmighty intergalactic police, mandated by 5 factions at the beginning and so still retaining a full legitimacy, their moral compass can actually have become very rigid and idealistic, which might well be pissing 4 of these factions off. I am pretty sure CONCORD has become a big annoyance for them now.
- CONCORD maintains a DED branch that targets high-profile criminals and criminal organizations. The definition of criminality is, of course, based on the laws of CONCORD's constituent 5 nations. (Hence, while Sansha's 'Nation' possesses the features of a sovereign entity, it is relegated to a 'pirate faction' by the CONCORD narrative. It's simply not one of CONCORD's constituents). One of the major duties of the DED is assisting customs efforts, using its advanced technology. (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/DED)
Yes, for the very reason that CONCORD was founded upon the common principles of every founding nation, so it shares the same basic common principles that mostly embraces their definition of criminality. It is also why slavery is not considered by them as criminal, even if they do not allow it in their space (which is an internal policy, probably pointing again at certain ethics on their behalf).
- While CONCORD regulates the new capsuleer class with direct violence, it also channels capsuleer energies via incentives. The most basic of these are automated bounties. At the higher levels of refinement, such as the measures taken to counter Sansha strikes, capsuleers are herded into fleets and directed against targets using military-style missions. Even capsuleers that have fallen out of favor with CONCORD can win back their security ratings by directing guns at approved targets. Because of automated CONCORD incentives, the majority of capsuleers are predisposed towards shooting the pirate factions and winning favor with the empire governments.
If bounties still concerned criminal elements, I would tend to agree. However with the new system, you can put a bounty on everyone. That is more or less like any bounty hunter underworld organization, not a law enforcement agency. You do not enforce law by allowing some of your citizens to shoot at others for money. Or maybe CONCORD are suddenly thinking like what the Cartel would do.
Starting off these lore points, what I see is an organization that is fundamentally amoral.
It is funny but when I read the CONCORD lore for the first time, I had the complete opposite feeling. Of course, Eve is grim and gritty, so CONCORD must be at least a little (and it is), but my main feeling overall is that they are more bound to ethics than the opposite.
It takes no stand concerning slavery, except when slaves are being shipped across boundaries an illegal contraband. It professes no opinion on democratic self-rule versus centralized megacorp control, except when the State designates privately-owned small-arms as illegal contraband. What it is concerned with is maintenance of the status quo, which is the dominance of, and the precarious balance between, the five founding nations. CONCORD also has a vested interest in expanding interstellar trade.
As I said above, the Amarr bloc was a founding member, prone to slavery. However, CONCORD laws make slavery illegal in their space, which is quite telling imo. Also, the moral side of slavery is yet another debate that has been had a bajillion times already, depending on how it is implemented. CONCORD is not interested in fighting slavery, CONCORD is interested in fighting the enemies of the core civilizations, which are for most of them consituted of criminals or direct threats to them. CONCORD is also supposed to regulate capsuleer activities since nobody else can do it properly.
The events leading to the Empyrean War threatened the status quo. With peace out of the question, CONCORD opted for the lesser evil of a controlled proxy-war fought largely by capsuleers over stretches of underdeveloped low-sec space. With the conflict clearly bounded into a well-paid ceremonial bloodsport, akin to the limited warfare of feudal samurai or knights, CONCORD avoided the "danger" of a decisive victory by any one nation or alliance of nations. A scenario of a single dominant Empire would have rendered CONCORD obsolete. Low-intensity conflict, however, could perpetuate the balance indefinitely.
The event leading to Empyrean Wars are not comparable to me since they involve 4 of CONCORD's founders. Capsuleers, who are under its direct care, were the perfect tool to be offered to the Empires - like feudal warfare indeed, i like that analogy - to prevent that full scale war to happen. So here, they allowed it out of necessity.
I do not see how allowing capsuleers to cause havoc in high security space (or even in low) is done out of necessity. We can still resort to the argument of channeling their energies, divide and conquer, or anything in that vein, but you usually do not allow that right in the middle of a crowded street... And anyway, as I said above, CONCORD seems to be able to shut down instantly any capsule to their whims. They simply do not need that kind of gimmick to my mind, that just feel completely out of place, totally stretched.
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The situation seems to run counter to your impression of CONCORD.
- If CONCORD can shut down capsuleers at its whims, why allow a thriving outlaw capsuleer population to exist? Why allow such large numbers of capsuleers to 'switch sides' and run missions and kill empire ships on behalf of the pirate organizations? How can True Slave capsuleers exist (and operate in hi-sec space) if CONCORD holds such eminent power over capsuleer actions?
- Allowing combat to happen in the middle of a 'crowded street' is not a very good analogy when we're talking about open space lanes measured in kilometers and AU, where the use of area effect weaponry that can affect bystanders are either preemptively disabled or punished immediately. Two capsuleers duking it out in front of a trade hub are as much a threat to neutral parties or station denizens as a holovid broadcast.
- Capsuleers aren't treated as 'citizens' by CONCORD. They're treated as independent actors who can go where they want and do what they want, subject to penalties and payments depending on if their actions match the CONCORD agenda. If CONCORD held such absolute power over capsuleers as you suggest, and consider capsuleers as a 'citizenry' that they held responsibility over, capsuleers wouldn't be permitted to do things like fight for anti-CONCORD organizations, or moving en masse to space outside of CONCORD's jurisdiction to set up their own sovereign entities.
- Talk of developing an independent ethos is fairly unconvincing given the lack of details on what such an ethos would be aside from fulfilling its own mission statement. Legalism without regard to the moral valuation underlying the law (accepting empire law at face value and enforcing it without question) is little more than protection of the status quo.
Let's talk economics.
Capsuleers are major economic actors who have increased industry output and trade well beyond pre-Empyrean levels. However, capsuleers are a miniscule population, especially when compared to a baseline population of untold billions who live on thousands of Earth-like worlds, many terraformed.
Capsuleers consumption of traditional goods is negligible. While I'm sure many enjoy traditional luxuries such as fine foods, clothing, and catering to bodily pleasures, their numbers are just too small to create the aggregate demand needed to support the supply output. Where is the demand coming from?
The new Empyrean economy is based around space ships, space ship components, and in-space infrastructure. Empyreans dabble in planetside industries in order to extract materials necessary either for the repair of space ships or the creation of space stations. Demand is sustained by other Empyreans wishing to buy these products. But again, we run into a demand shortfall problem if we consider only natural decay or obsolescence (which is negligible).
What sustains the capsuleer demand for their own products? Conflict and destruction. Capsuleers are largely responsible for blowing up the assets of other capsuleers, thus maintaining the aggregate demand needed to sustain a booming economy. Permitting legal capsuleer wars within CONCORD's jurisdiction doesn't just allow CONCORD to profit off of fees while keeping the capsuleer population divided, it also benefits the greater interstellar economy. And interstellar trade is something CONCORD has a vested interest in expanding.
We can argue about personal impressions of the lore until the sun goes down. However, the theory on a morally ambiguous and self-interested CONCORD better fits what actually goes on in the gameworld. Accepting a premise of an ethical and just CONCORD contradicts what CONCORD actually permits (nay, encourages!) to happen in its jurisdiction. The less of a divide between RP and actual in-game events, the better.
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The situation seems to run counter to your impression of CONCORD.
- If CONCORD can shut down capsuleers at its whims, why allow a thriving outlaw capsuleer population to exist? Why allow such large numbers of capsuleers to 'switch sides' and run missions and kill empire ships on behalf of the pirate organizations? How can True Slave capsuleers exist (and operate in hi-sec space) if CONCORD holds such eminent power over capsuleer actions?
Why indeed ? Makes no sense. The same way that the opposite point of view possesses a lot of similar inconsistencies. Why cannot we fire at planets, civilian ships, why aren't we able to cause any damages to stations or space objects rendered invulnerable by game mechanisms ? Why are we cut into pieces within a few seconds when facing CONCORD police in high sec while missions against CONCORD makes them appear like standard weak and squishy NPCs ? (and how is that we kill millions of NPC battleships everyday, depleting the whole population, and how is that Newtonian physics are not respected in space, etcetc ?)
I am trying to conciliate the two, to the risk of actually combining both flaws... But meh. :psyccp:
Also, I consider that True Slave Capsuleers do not exist inside the law of CONCORD. True Slave Capsuleers are out of the CONCORD registry and owned specifically by Sansha's Nation. The same way, but in more extreme, I believe, that state capsuleers belong to their faction which is responsible for them (see what happens when Noir decides to crash into a station... could we do the same ?). Player capsuleers voluntarily left their national academies to go freelances, so they are put under CONCORD jurisdiction. The game limits are obvious.
- Allowing combat to happen in the middle of a 'crowded street' is not a very good analogy when we're talking about open space lanes measured in kilometers and AU, where the use of area effect weaponry that can affect bystanders are either preemptively disabled or punished immediately. Two capsuleers duking it out in front of a trade hub are as much a threat to neutral parties or station denizens as a holovid broadcast.
Oh, pragmatically, yes, definitly. Would you however allow military unfaillible selective devices shoot at each other in the middle of a street, large or narrow, whatever, with the justification that they will obviously never harm anyone since they aim accurately at their targets ? What would all the mortal non-capsuleers flying around think of that, however ? I know that I wouldnt like myself to see weapons of the apocalypse firing huge beams of destructive power near me, even if they are supposed to never cause any harm to me.
PR wise, it's difficult to believe, I think, even in a gritty universe (especially where politics are ubber important here). But well, I think your point is valid anyway.
- Capsuleers aren't treated as 'citizens' by CONCORD. They're treated as independent actors who can go where they want and do what they want, subject to penalties and payments depending on if their actions match the CONCORD agenda. If CONCORD held such absolute power over capsuleers as you suggest, and consider capsuleers as a 'citizenry' that they held responsibility over, capsuleers wouldn't be permitted to do things like fight for anti-CONCORD organizations, or moving en masse to space outside of CONCORD's jurisdiction to set up their own sovereign entities.
Citizens was a bad choice of word on my behalf, since I wanted to put the emphasis on my analogy. But I can admit that it was a little stretched.
Let's talk economics.
Capsuleers are major economic actors who have increased industry output and trade well beyond pre-Empyrean levels. However, capsuleers are a miniscule population, especially when compared to a baseline population of untold billions who live on thousands of Earth-like worlds, many terraformed.
Capsuleers consumption of traditional goods is negligible. While I'm sure many enjoy traditional luxuries such as fine foods, clothing, and catering to bodily pleasures, their numbers are just too small to create the aggregate demand needed to support the supply output. Where is the demand coming from?
The new Empyrean economy is based around space ships, space ship components, and in-space infrastructure. Empyreans dabble in planetside industries in order to extract materials necessary either for the repair of space ships or the creation of space stations. Demand is sustained by other Empyreans wishing to buy these products. But again, we run into a demand shortfall problem if we consider only natural decay or obsolescence (which is negligible).
What sustains the capsuleer demand for their own products? Conflict and destruction. Capsuleers are largely responsible for blowing up the assets of other capsuleers, thus maintaining the aggregate demand needed to sustain a booming economy. Permitting legal capsuleer wars within CONCORD's jurisdiction doesn't just allow CONCORD to profit off of fees while keeping the capsuleer population divided, it also benefits the greater interstellar economy. And interstellar trade is something CONCORD has a vested interest in expanding.
We can argue about personal impressions of the lore until the sun goes down. However, the theory on a morally ambiguous and self-interested CONCORD better fits what actually goes on in the gameworld. Accepting a premise of an ethical and just CONCORD contradicts what CONCORD actually permits (nay, encourages!) to happen in its jurisdiction. The less of a divide between RP and actual in-game events, the better.
That's true. I am not debating the fact that CONCORD condones capsuleer wars (just that it seemed a bit stretched), but your pov based on economics makes sense to me, even if that's a little far from their actual mandate. The only thing that it can point out actually, is a strong ethos and morale on their behalf if they are so much interested in the well being of baseliner economy, which is not quite the field they are supposed to bolster in the first place. Why would they help baseliner planetside economies considering what is their mandate in the first place, if not for ethics and ideals ?
However, I disagree with your statement that your pov is what better fits to the gameworld. To your opinion, maybe. To my opinion, neither yours or mine really does, since both are full of inconsistencies due to gameplay limits (and/or devs not caring enough about rational RP reasons).
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That's true. I am not debating the fact that CONCORD condones capsuleer wars (just that it seemed a bit stretched), but your pov based on economics makes sense to me, even if that's a little far from their actual mandate. The only thing that it can point out actually, is a strong ethos and morale on their behalf if they are so much interested in the well being of baseliner economy, which is not quite the field they are supposed to bolster in the first place. Why would they help baseliner planetside economies considering what is their mandate in the first place, if not for ethics and ideals ?
A strong ethos and sense of morality is not necessary because they have a pragmatic and self-interested reason to expand interstellar trade. See CONCORD's history (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/CONCORD):
For the first few decades of its existence CONCORD wielded very limited power, but in recent years their authority has grown alongside that of inter-stellar trade, ... The root for this development lies in the evolution of CONCORD itself. It’s no longer simply a neutral ground for the empires to hammer out diplomatic agreements - it has become an independent institution setting its own rules and regulations and, more importantly, is both willing and able to uphold them. .... The only hold the empires have had on CONCORD, that of financial support, is waning day by day as the revenues garnered through customs, confiscation of illegal goods, selling licenses, and more, are steadily increasing.
Emphasis mine.
In other words, CONCORD's power and independence as an organization is dependent on revenues earned through its control of interstellar trade. Expanding interstellar trade expands its revenue base and solidifies its autonomy vis-a-vis the empire governments.
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The only problem I have with the new bounty-system, *as I understood it* is this;
Player A is a high-sec hauler. He hauls from a to b all day every day and is happy and content to do this. It's what he pay his sub for and what he does.
As he is part of a player corp he face two dangers - war-decs and random suicide-attacks. The former could happen but grants warning, the latter is so rare that he can neglect the danger by never traveling with cargo to valuable to NOT gank him. As a consequence, his Iteron 5 goes unmolested for years.
Player B is a ganker. He get's his fun and pays his sub to go suicide-gank random people that it's worth it to gank. After all, there are many haulers out there, and most seem to haul cargo to inexpensive to warrant his lost ship(s). As such he has ignored player A because it's not profitable to gank him.
Player C is a bored rich guy with dozens of billions of isk and little to do. The new bounty-system goes live and he goes out randomly setting hundreds of million on random people. He throws a 100 mill bounty or somesuch on Player A for the hell of it.
Suddenly Player B has a financial reason to gank Player A - now the cargo+bounty for the ship is worth his expenses and then some. Player A's life is now ruined - his corp got perma-decced to the point that he was entierly stuck in station. Leaving for NPC corp did nothing as people looking to pop him would keep suiciding anything that was worth killing.
And that's not even accounting for the people who suicide gank just for lulz, with no care to what it is or who it is or what they lose. Before they would do it for the hell of it, now they do it for the hell of it and to cash in the bounties and make it even simpler to replace their lost hardware.
In short, the bounty-system would not 'punish' 'criminals' with low sec-rating, it would be used as a griefer's tool to target anyone and everyone for harassment.
There is always a danger of being attacked in high-sec or decced or whatever, but if anyone can set a bounty on you for no reason at all and with no checks to who can become wanted, anyone else now have an extra excuse to gank/dec you. This system can easily be miss-used.
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Why indeed ? Makes no sense. The same way that the opposite point of view possesses a lot of similar inconsistencies. Why cannot we fire at planets, civilian ships, why aren't we able to cause any damages to stations or space objects rendered invulnerable by game mechanisms ? Why are we cut into pieces within a few seconds when facing CONCORD police in high sec while missions against CONCORD makes them appear like standard weak and squishy NPCs ? (and how is that we kill millions of NPC battleships everyday, depleting the whole population, and how is that Newtonian physics are not respected in space, etcetc ?)
I am trying to conciliate the two, to the risk of actually combining both flaws... But meh. :psyccp:
Technically, Dust will allow podders to fire at planets. The circumstances that allow this are still vague.
We can fire at civilian ships. Try shooting up the grey crosses traveling from station to station for loot. You can do this in both hi-sec and low-sec, and you can even get away with it with your ship intact in hi-sec.
The disparity between police CONCORD and squishy NPC CONCORD is the big one, and probably the one that you can attribute the most to game mechanic demands. A handwavy explanation involves CONCORD supported by its full infrastructure in hi-sec space, and CONCORD forces caught out in low-sec where they're operating in unfriendly territory.
Population issues concerning crews and battleship losses are an interesting subject, but unrelated to the issue of CONCORD's motives.
The same way, but in more extreme, I believe, that state capsuleers belong to their faction which is responsible for them (see what happens when Noir decides to crash into a station... could we do the same ?)
The Broker did the actual crashing. That character operates under so few restrictions that it's more accurately termed a plot device.
Oh, pragmatically, yes, definitly. Would you however allow military unfaillible selective devices shoot at each other in the middle of a street, large or narrow, whatever, with the justification that they will obviously never harm anyone since they aim accurately at their targets ? What would all the mortal non-capsuleers flying around think of that, however ? I know that I wouldnt like myself to see weapons of the apocalypse firing huge beams of destructive power near me, even if they are supposed to never cause any harm to me.
The opinions of potentially offended mortal non-capsuleer bystanders don't really amount to too much.
No, seriously. Capsuleers shooting each other in hi-sec space is constitutes a minority of the violence there. The majority of apocalyptic huge beam firing in hi-sec space is done by capsuleers directed at non-capsuleer targets by empire authorities.
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What I'm interpreting Shaalira to be saying is the common "Capsuleers in their own bubble" thing, but not in an immersion-breaking sense. More like how, during medieval times, knights and nobles were up in their ivory towers and took it so damned seriously even if 99% of the world didn't care or weren't affected by their high class nonsense. Shaalira already used that example.
I think what CONCORD may be trying to do here is limit the collateral damage of capsuleers by codifying their rules of engagement properly, so that they do not waste CONCORD resources (ie. CONCORD spawns) in their petty nonsense. That way, the empires can reap the economic and military benefit of the capsuleers without being too damaged by their continuing existence. Sure, people die to capsuleer-on-capsuleer combat, but it might be rationalized as "Well reduced crew numbers" and "Hey, those guys signed up for it, let's not worry about them".
Maybe Shaalira can confirm that approach.
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Bloodbird: If guy 'A' is flying around in a Iteron 5 the additional gain opportunistic people would get for doing a suicide run against him would be 20% (afaik) the value of a Iteron 5 + fittings... As so, not much more than any regular gank under the current rules.
Besides, I might be pessimistic, but I believe there are tons of gank-bears hanging around high sec, and with the new risk it brings to initiate unprovoked aggression in high sec, these bears will be a lot less trigger happy. (Not implying that I want suicide ganking out of high sec, but if you are 'hardcore' you better start acting like it).
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TPlayer C is a bored rich guy with dozens of billions of isk and little to do. The new bounty-system goes live and he goes out randomly setting hundreds of million on random people. He throws a 100 mill bounty or somesuch on Player A for the hell of it.
The bored rich guy with dozens of billions might have ganked Player A for the hell of it before the new bounty system. Or he might hire a merc corp to declare war on random high-sec industrialist corps for the hell of it. No change here.
All game checks and balances are broken by bored players with billions of isk and nothing to do. That doesn't indicate any inherent flaw in the system.
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Maybe Shaalira can confirm that approach.
More-or-less. People are a renewable resource. Particularly in a setting where terraforming is common and 'terran' worlds are in abundance.
However, I think I'll leave this debate track before it completely sidetracks a thread about expansion reactions. The nature of CONCORD's in-character thinking is something best discussed in another forum/topic.
As to BloodBird's concern, let's run the math on the proposed scenario.
An Iteron V is an inexpensive 1.5-2m ship, modules can bring the cost up to 10m, or more if rigs are used. With 5 mid slots, it can tank itself well enough to withstand dessie gankers, requiring either a coordinated effort by several dessies or a larger gank ship.
This places the cost of ganking the ship at roughly 15-20m+. More if a BC is used. Insurance no longer covers ships blown up by CONCORD.
With cargo having a 50% drop rate, this means it's barely worth suicide-ganking the ship if it has at least 40-50m in cargo. Ideally, suicide gankers will go for more valuable hauls as each suicide gank incurs sec status loss and requires replacement ships. Both involve an investment of time above and beyond the base value of gank ships. And if you're involving several suicide gankers, that means a time investment made by more than one person.
How does a bounty affect things? Each kill only claims a 20% portion of the lost ship. This means a 50m Iteron V (10m ship + 40m cargo) will yield a 10m isk bounty.
This has a marginal effect on suicide-ganking calculations, and theoretically the pilot merely has to adapt to the bounty by carrying 10m isk less in cargo each run.
Will a hi-sec griefer corp pony up a 50m wardec for a return that low? Not too likely. Will they expend the effort in perma-camping a hauler that only flies Itty Vs? Highly improbable.
Will the 100m bounty 'ruin' that character's life, in Bloodbird's words? Doubtful. What about a 1bn isk bounty? Well, since the payout per kill is dependent on what the hauler flies, a larger bounty only means that more kills will be paid out. It'll still be a marginal return if the pilot in question is using such a cheap hauler and sticking to low-value cargo.
And if the hauler switches to station-trading during the duration of the (improbable) wardec and never undocks, then he's utterly invincible.
In other words, a random bounty just adds a minor incentive. Whether a pilot is a juicy target or not still depends mostly on their own actions.
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The example with the Itty 5 and the 100 million was just that.
Bored rich gankers or 'cause max damage' type-players was lambasted as griefers yesterday, they will tomorrow. However tomorrow they can also add bounties on others for no reason other than to inconvenience them and get other non-'griefers' to help out.
In short the concern is that it will become a fad to serve out bounties so that it will become lucrative to declare war on everyone in high-sec for the sake of deccing everyone in high-sec. Or ganking them, or anything that goes towards "ruining their lives", as it was.
The people whose interest is described as griefing are not going to stop, as mentioned. But now it could be more easy to do so as you can, among the other tools available to you, set bounties on people and their corporations and alliances so as to negatively impact them. When you no longer have time or desire to dec that alliance you have kept in station for a month but want them inconvenienced, drop bounty money on them. Others can and will pick up where you left off.
In the end ofc, this is just assuming a 'worst-case' type of event in response to the new mechanics. It is a concern of mine, but won't have to be nearly as wide-spread as feared. On the other hand, the system is universally an improvement and will benefit all players, far more than the old and broken one ever did.
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I tend to agree with Shaalira here. For CONCORD it's far better to isolate and contain capsuleers by having them focused on killing and destroying each other rather than potentially having them upset the established order of things with their signatories. By providing outlets for violence and the use of nominal incentives they create system where capsuleers are more or less contained in their own little bubble and the interstellar framework is more or less maintained.
It's a pragmatic policy that allows CONCORD to focus on other threats to the peace and strengthens their own position because they don't have to respond to each and every dubious and questionable act capsuleers may commit in the course of their careers.
I'm not sure why CONCORD should be the 100% perfect UN/Space Police when it seems New Eden is a dog eat dog world for a capsuleer and I don't think one will get much sympathy or outrage when another capsuleer attempts to "grief" them from the average joe if one considers the prevalent sterotype of the class is one of supposedly powerful technological ubermensch.
"Oh no, someone put a multi-million ISK bounty on you so they could destroy your multi-million ISK spacecraft? Yeah, first world problems for you I guess, it would take a couple of lifetimes for me to make that sort of cash."
In short, since I think the number one concern the average citizen has is not getting shafted by capsuleers there's really very little pressure for CONCORD to change how it manages the capsuleer class and in particular how they conduct acts of violence against each other.
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the difference in game mechanical behaviour between CONCORD ships that punish people for aggression, and the mission CONCORD ships is not confined to pirate faction missions.
There is a mission, given out in highsec by gallente agents, a level 1 mission, "For the greater good", and one part involves you shooting a CONCORD frigate. With no consequence to you.
This single mission, imo, bursts the argument about "highsec infrastructure" making the CONCORD ships so omnipotent, and the mission CONCORD/DED ships in pirate missions so puny.
:game mechanics: :ugh:
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The off-hand mention to 'logistics' was a handwavy, unserious explanation. The disparity in power between CONCORD ships depending on the way they spawn is a minor detail you can pave over with suspension of disbelief. It's a minor nitpick along the lines of avatars not having to go to the bathroom.
CONCORD supports war declarations and bounties between capsuleers, irrespective of justification, motive, or merit. That's a major and conscious policy choice, that you can't ignore or handwave away.
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war declarations and stuff, there is a thing. I've seen people from the pirate factions argue it along the following lines:
The factions that CONCORD consider outlaw, have tendencies towards random violence (e.g. guristas), and trading things that won't fall under SCC rules. (serpentis boosters and the like).
Random violence, cannot be factored into financial things easily, so CONCORD takes a dim view of things.
Predictable violence, such as wars, are condoned, as long as the participants don't commit any random violence, that would inconvenience interstellar trade.
So groups that reject trade as being the most important thing, and persons doing random violence, are Outlawed.
The isk must flow, etc.
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That's true. I am not debating the fact that CONCORD condones capsuleer wars (just that it seemed a bit stretched), but your pov based on economics makes sense to me, even if that's a little far from their actual mandate. The only thing that it can point out actually, is a strong ethos and morale on their behalf if they are so much interested in the well being of baseliner economy, which is not quite the field they are supposed to bolster in the first place. Why would they help baseliner planetside economies considering what is their mandate in the first place, if not for ethics and ideals ?
A strong ethos and sense of morality is not necessary because they have a pragmatic and self-interested reason to expand interstellar trade. See CONCORD's history (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/CONCORD):
For the first few decades of its existence CONCORD wielded very limited power, but in recent years their authority has grown alongside that of inter-stellar trade, ... The root for this development lies in the evolution of CONCORD itself. It’s no longer simply a neutral ground for the empires to hammer out diplomatic agreements - it has become an independent institution setting its own rules and regulations and, more importantly, is both willing and able to uphold them. .... The only hold the empires have had on CONCORD, that of financial support, is waning day by day as the revenues garnered through customs, confiscation of illegal goods, selling licenses, and more, are steadily increasing.
Emphasis mine.
In other words, CONCORD's power and independence as an organization is dependent on revenues earned through its control of interstellar trade. Expanding interstellar trade expands its revenue base and solidifies its autonomy vis-a-vis the empire governments.
Okay, sounds fair. Makes sense interpreted that way.
In any case, again, I am not debating the fact that CONCORD has amoral sides, just pointing out that I hardly believe something can be completely black in eve. I am just lazy to re read all the concord lore again but I was pretty sure to have read here and there a certain emphasis on ethics and also on an administration almost free of corruption and underground dealings.
What makes me itch in your analysis is that you seem to portray them more or less completely in black, and that's just not true in my view. I like your arguments on the justification for making capsuleer wars legal, and why not for bounties too with that in mind, yes. I guess I would have liked a little more to see the bounty system to be founded by someone else than CONCORD, like a pirate underground. Firstly it was easier to explain, and secondly, more importantly, it would give some love to the pirate side of the lore. It would also have set the bounties system as a direct underground challenger/threat to the legal conventionnal war system regulated by CONCORD. It makes even more sense when you think that the bounty system is more or less independant of any CONCORD space regulation (you can't shoot your bounty in high sec, have to endure sec penalties, etc... note that I am not speaking about killrights, that truly belong to CONCORD though).
Why indeed ? Makes no sense. The same way that the opposite point of view possesses a lot of similar inconsistencies. Why cannot we fire at planets, civilian ships, why aren't we able to cause any damages to stations or space objects rendered invulnerable by game mechanisms ? Why are we cut into pieces within a few seconds when facing CONCORD police in high sec while missions against CONCORD makes them appear like standard weak and squishy NPCs ? (and how is that we kill millions of NPC battleships everyday, depleting the whole population, and how is that Newtonian physics are not respected in space, etcetc ?)
I am trying to conciliate the two, to the risk of actually combining both flaws... But meh. :psyccp:
Technically, Dust will allow podders to fire at planets. The circumstances that allow this are still vague.
We can fire at civilian ships. Try shooting up the grey crosses traveling from station to station for loot. You can do this in both hi-sec and low-sec, and you can even get away with it with your ship intact in hi-sec.
The disparity between police CONCORD and squishy NPC CONCORD is the big one, and probably the one that you can attribute the most to game mechanic demands. A handwavy explanation involves CONCORD supported by its full infrastructure in hi-sec space, and CONCORD forces caught out in low-sec where they're operating in unfriendly territory.
Population issues concerning crews and battleship losses are an interesting subject, but unrelated to the issue of CONCORD's motives.
Dust will allow podders to fire at a specific point on a planet. I still can't shoot at Crystal Boulevard if I want to. I can't nuke half of Pator surface if I want to (to explain why everything is under the water derp).
I did not say that we can't shoot the few NPC transports that fly here and there (there are so few... that's unrealistic as hell by the way). We can't do a single damage to a lot of space objects. Why ? Because if no interference is coming from somewhere, I want to know what kind of materials they use in their hulls, that could be handy at times.
That's precisely why I prefered my first point of view. Wars, bounties, whatever, could be handled another way in the lore. It can be changed. Targeting stations, planets, drastic differences between concord NPCs, everything like this tied to game mechanics, hardly can.
The same way, but in more extreme, I believe, that state capsuleers belong to their faction which is responsible for them (see what happens when Noir decides to crash into a station... could we do the same ?)
The Broker did the actual crashing. That character operates under so few restrictions that it's more accurately termed a plot device.
Does not make any sense to me. :bash:
TonyG I guess.
Oh, pragmatically, yes, definitly. Would you however allow military unfaillible selective devices shoot at each other in the middle of a street, large or narrow, whatever, with the justification that they will obviously never harm anyone since they aim accurately at their targets ? What would all the mortal non-capsuleers flying around think of that, however ? I know that I wouldnt like myself to see weapons of the apocalypse firing huge beams of destructive power near me, even if they are supposed to never cause any harm to me.
The opinions of potentially offended mortal non-capsuleer bystanders don't really amount to too much.
No, seriously. Capsuleers shooting each other in hi-sec space is constitutes a minority of the violence there. The majority of apocalyptic huge beam firing in hi-sec space is done by capsuleers directed at non-capsuleer targets by empire authorities.
Those last ones are criminals, not the average citizen. The ones that are part of the economic basis that makes CONCORD live according to you ?
I tend to agree with Shaalira here. For CONCORD it's far better to isolate and contain capsuleers by having them focused on killing and destroying each other rather than potentially having them upset the established order of things with their signatories. By providing outlets for violence and the use of nominal incentives they create system where capsuleers are more or less contained in their own little bubble and the interstellar framework is more or less maintained.
It's a pragmatic policy that allows CONCORD to focus on other threats to the peace and strengthens their own position because they don't have to respond to each and every dubious and questionable act capsuleers may commit in the course of their careers.
I am not denying that, duh. Again, I am pointing out the flaws of two different interpretations of CONCORD powers and mandate.
I'm not sure why CONCORD should be the 100% perfect UN/Space Police when it seems New Eden is a dog eat dog world for a capsuleer and I don't think one will get much sympathy or outrage when another capsuleer attempts to "grief" them from the average joe if one considers the prevalent sterotype of the class is one of supposedly powerful technological ubermensch.
I am not sure why CONCORD should be the 100% pragmatic amoral bloated UN/Space Police either, when it seems New Eden is a grey world, not a dark for the sake of being dark, one.
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I am not sure why CONCORD should be the 100% pragmatic amoral bloated UN/Space Police either, when it seems New Eden is a grey world, not a dark for the sake of being dark, one.
Well I don't think it's essentially black or amoral when looking at the options available to CONORD and the signatories in regards to capsuleers:
a) Undertake a long and costly campaign against freelance capsuleers by seeking to restrict cloning access and attempt to terminate them all one by one.
b) Contain them and set them lose upon each other by facilitating and condoning capsuleer conflict with the added benefit of taxing them all and profiting from the artificial war economy it creates where demand is created through perpetual destruction of capsuleer assets so that they never unify or get too strong to upset the status quo.
The bounty system to me is just a natural extension of option b for CONCORD and it makes sense if they don't exist to protect capsuleers but rather seek to control them in accordance with their mandate. Certainly, for certain capsuleers who find themselves at the receiving end of others abuse of the CONCORD system may think they should do more but in the end the majority of people in the cluster aren't capsuleers and from the Assembly's perspective they may believe they're fulfilling a moral obligation in ensuring that all those capsuleers remain fragmented and killing each other for the benefit of everyone else.
For myself at times the opinion CONCORD has in regards to capsuleers is both as a class that is dangerous and needs to be controlled through a variety of methods as well as a class that can be exploited to facilitate interstellar trade and investment. They exist solely to maintain the status quo and what they may consider to be right or wrong, moral or immoral is guided by ensuring that it's upheld.
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The act of reducing your security status only makes you susceptible to bounties. The actual placement of bounties is entirely up to the whims of other capsuleers. Most of the time, bounties have nothing to do with outlaw acts. This is because putting a bounty on someone with the intention to punish them is stupid, given current mechanics. As CCP noted in the dev blog, the high-bounty players out there are all adverts, attention-seekers, or inactives.
You're right, the system doesn't work. That's a reason to fix the system, not to change the intentions behind the system. Analogy: You buy a car because you need to get around. One day, your car breaks down. Do you suddenly no longer need to get around?
Also, I'm rather curious what you think "griefing" is. If engaging in an action to the detriment of another random PC is griefing, then the entirety of the game is set up for it. Putting bounties on random people who did you no wrong is no different from pirates attacking random neutral strangers. Are pirates griefing?
I doubt we're going to reach a unified theory of griefing here, so I'll answer that narrow question with a "no" and point out that putting bounties on random people who did you no wrong is different from pirates attacking random neutral strangers: It requires no effort (beyond that of acquiring the ISK) and, being anonymous, does not entail any risk of retaliation. It gives the victim no recourse but to face increased risk of attack in space until they lose a minimum of 5x the value of the bounty. If you think those are good things, or at least outweighed by the positive results of this change (though you haven't mentioned any such outcomes so far), then please say so and we can argue on that basis.
As for why CONCORD would do this, why does CONCORD allow capsuleers to wage legal war against each other within Empire space for a modest isk fee? All you need to do is pony up the funds and push a button. No cassus belli required.
CONCORD sanctions certain wars because it actually does further their goals of controlling and containing capsuleer violence. It allows them to set the terms of engagement and extract monetary concessions that could be used for their own purposes.
Allowing bounties to be placed on anyone does the opposite by removing the disincentive effect: Violating CONCORD engagement regulations no longer leads to the risk having a bounty placed on your head, which then leads to the risk of bringing down bounty hunters on your head. (Never mind that that's a feature rather than a bug in some minds.) You're not punishing breaking the rules anymore, you're punishing...having a capsuleer license. Which, of course, will piss off those capsuleers who hold prior inclination to support CONCORD's regulation, eroding political support for the organization.
Your other argument, that that's just the status quo, is simply false:
CONCORD supports...bounties between capsuleers, irrespective of justification, motive, or merit. That's a major and conscious policy choice, that you can't ignore or handwave away.
CONCORD does not, at present, support that. It supports bounties on those who've violated its engagement regulations and failed to "atone" by shooting enough sanctioned targets. It will support that, if the changes go through as written, but the entire point of my arguments is that those changes make no sense for CONCORD to support.
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You're right, the system doesn't work. That's a reason to fix the system, not to change the intentions behind the system. Analogy: You buy a car because you need to get around. One day, your car breaks down. Do you suddenly no longer need to get around?
That analogy would be sound if we agreed on the intentions behind the bounty system. I don't think we do.
I doubt we're going to reach a unified theory of griefing here, so I'll answer that narrow question with a "no" and point out that putting bounties on random people who did you no wrong is different from pirates attacking random neutral strangers: It requires no effort (beyond that of acquiring the ISK) and, being anonymous, does not entail any risk of retaliation. It gives the victim no recourse but to face increased risk of attack in space until they lose a minimum of 5x the value of the bounty. If you think those are good things, or at least outweighed by the positive results of this change (though you haven't mentioned any such outcomes so far), then please say so and we can argue on that basis.
So you're fine with gameplay that results in harm to random neutrals as long as effort is involved? That's a wholly different argument than a griefing condemnation.
A bounty is just an automated market transaction. It's hiring mercenaries made easy, the transformation of an under-used aspect of EVE to a streamlined interface.
What the change means as that it's easier for a capsuleer to expend isk to hurt or make a target of another capsuleer. Potentially any kind of behavior in the game can be punished, as long as the price is right. This is an expansion of the sandbox, and permits a new ecology of careers and consequences.
Does it make the game more cut-throat and cruel while inspiring paranoia in the average player? Yes. Does that fit EVE? Yes.
As for why CONCORD would do this, why does CONCORD allow capsuleers to wage legal war against each other within Empire space for a modest isk fee? All you need to do is pony up the funds and push a button. No cassus belli required.
CONCORD sanctions certain wars because it actually does further their goals of controlling and containing capsuleer violence. It allows them to set the terms of engagement and extract monetary concessions that could be used for their own purposes.
Allowing bounties to be placed on anyone does the opposite by removing the disincentive effect: Violating CONCORD engagement regulations no longer leads to the risk having a bounty placed on your head, which then leads to the risk of bringing down bounty hunters on your head. (Never mind that that's a feature rather than a bug in some minds.) You're not punishing breaking the rules anymore, you're punishing...having a capsuleer license. Which, of course, will piss off those capsuleers who hold prior inclination to support CONCORD's regulation, eroding political support for the organization.
Your other argument, that that's just the status quo, is simply false:
CONCORD supports...bounties between capsuleers, irrespective of justification, motive, or merit. That's a major and conscious policy choice, that you can't ignore or handwave away.
CONCORD does not, at present, support that. It supports bounties on those who've violated its engagement regulations and failed to "atone" by shooting enough sanctioned targets. It will support that, if the changes go through as written, but the entire point of my arguments is that those changes make no sense for CONCORD to support.
But that's incorrect. Bounties are not placed on capsuleers based on their outlaw actions. Other capsuleers put bounties on each other and themselves for lols, attention-seeking and advertisements. No matter how many outlaw acts you commit, the only reflection on your record is your security status. CONCORD never sets bounties on capsuleers for criminal acts. No capsuleer places bounties on other capsuleers in order to punish them for criminal acts because that would be dumb, given the way things presently work.
You're arguing that the bounty system should continue to perform a role that it never performed.
Edit P.S.: Part of CONCORD's mandate is regulating independent capsuleers and keeping them on a leash. Gaining their "political support" seems superfluous. CONCORD only answers to its signatories, and even then it's growing more independent as per the lore.
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I like the idea of automatic CONCORD bounties for criminal actions, but I can't think of a way to accomplish this that doesn't end up with people farming alts for free bounties.
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I like the idea of automatic CONCORD bounties for criminal actions, but I can't think of a way to accomplish this that doesn't end up with people farming alts for free bounties.
The same way the new bounty system works. They could basically have kept the same system as it currently is, with their new restrictions : as long as the bounty paid is 20% of the destroyed assets value, I don't see a lot of ways to exploit that into alt farming. Maybe there is a way I haven't seen though.
Honestly, I like both, either a bounty system done to streamline the already existing mercenary system, or either a bounty system done to chase down bad guys like in the old western movies. I would be fine with both somehow, the first one ruled by a criminal/mercenary entity, and the second one by CONCORD. The second one would have the advantage to get a free pass from CONCORD to engage the target, even in high sec, as long as you have a license (like for a killright). And CONCORD would earn money.
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Some Inferno 1.3 patchnotes. Mainly Dust/Eve linking stuff. Little bit of general fixing for FW and Character creation as well.
http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?newpatchlogID=73456
Patch notes for EVE Online: Inferno 1.3
To be release on Tuesday, October 16, 2012
CHANGES
Market
The market has been seeded with infantry equipment however current trade restrictions prohibit the sale of such items to capsuleers.
Planetary Districts
New locations called "Districts" have been added to temperate planets in high security and factional warfare systems and are visible from space.
Districts can be warped to via the planet context menu.
A district satellite is visible while in orbit above a district in space.
District satellites will appear globally on the overview while there is a ship on grid with it, including cloaked ships.
A new group is available in the overview settings called Satellites, which can be used to show / hide them from your overview.
Factional Warfare
Planetary districts are future DUST514 battle zones, and impact Factional Warfare System Capture Status in a solar system.
Each district owned by a particular Factional Warfare faction affects the number of Victory Points needed to move a Factional Warfare system into a vulnerable state.
If a district owner is the same faction than the one controlling the Factional Warfare system, the number of Victory Points needed to put the solar system into vulnerable mode is increased
If a district owner is the opposing faction than the one controlling the Factional Warfare system, the number of Victory Points needed to put the solar system into vulnerable mode is decreased
Each temperate planet in Factional Warfare space contributes by 12.5% to the System Capture Status Victory Point pool, for a maximum of 50% Victory Points in Factional Warfare solar systems with four temperate planets.
Until DUST514 is fully implemented on Tranquility, planetary districts have been set to belong to the NPC faction that traditionally owned the Factional Warfare solar system before players interference.
An icon has been added below the System Capture Status bar to represent this new information.
Example
Raa is a 0.3 solar system located in Factional Warfare space.
Raa has 3 temperate planets, each having a certain number of districts. Each planet affects the System Capture Status by 12.5%, for a total of 37.5%.
Districts have been set to the NPC faction that historically and traditionally owned the solar system before player interference, in this case the Amarr Empire.
With such changes, it means the system will require 37.5% more Victory Points to capture if owned by the Amarr Empire FW militia, or 37.5% less Victory Points to capture if owned by the Minmatar Republic militia.
This change may move a FW solar system in or out of a vulnerable state after the patch depending on how many temperate planets are present during deployment time.
FIXES
Character Creation and New Player Experience
An issue with the Caldari Achura females bra straps always being visible has now been fixed.
A texture issue with female coats has been fixed.
A colouring issue with the male vest jacket has been fixed.
A tucking issue with the male Sterling shirts has been fixed.
An issue with missing sections on characters in stations has been fixed.
Player Owned Structures, Outposts and Stations
Calendars will now show the correct fuel values remaining for POS towers in empire space.
Miscellaneous
Fixed an issue where an enemy ships lock on your faction Infrastructure Hub in Factional Warfare would not be broken when defending the system.
Graphics General
Renai tailors have renovated their esquire line of jackets ensuring that the shoulders are firmly stuck to the sleeve and their owner. The female esquire jacket should no longer display a gap between the upper arm and the jacket.
Mesh clipping on the womens Acquire ´Structure´ Skirt has been reduced.
Occasional white flashes on cargo jettison with some graphics cards were fixed.
Enabling anti aliasing in the game menus has now an effect in the Character creator.
Fixed an issue with graphical corruption of the Caldari station wreck asset.
The planet wide 'oil spill' effect has been cleaned up on Dantbeinn II - the local environment is in a much better state now!
Resolved an issue where the medium ship LOD was not released from memory.
GENERAL
Uncategorized
Removed visible gaps from some clothing items were removed.
A selection of small geometry holes in Captains Quarters character clothing got fixed.
Sleeper drones now have more than one missile damage area.
Bombs detonation visual effect matches now server side hit information.
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Does anyone else see any potential issues arising from pinning Dust gameplay mechanics to a broken facwar system in space?
Also: facwar planets only?
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Does anyone else see any potential issues arising from pinning Dust gameplay mechanics to a broken facwar system in space?
Also: facwar planets only?
Speaking of that: http://jestertrek.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/sundown.html
However, I thought I'd start today by highlighting an announcement which CCP has made, but which most of you may have missed because they've gone to great lengths to hide the announcement:
Starting in 20 hours as I write this, tier 5 faction warfare pushes will almost certainly be impossible until after the release of DUST 514. If you intend to cash out of faction warfare, better do it now.
How do I know this? The details are in the patch notes they've released this morning. On their face, they're minor preparatory changes intended to ready Tranquility for the release of DUST 514 which looks increasingly like it's going to be out at the same time as Retribution or so. You certainly won't see any overt announcement that tier 5 will be impossible tomorrow.
But this is :CCP: we're talking about. They don't exactly always announce this sort of nerf, do they?
By all means, go read the patch notes, because they discuss a major change to EVE Online Faction Warfare. Still, the tl;dr version of the patch notes is that DUST 514 is going to affect FW capture status of any system with one or more temperate planets in it. For each temperate planet to a maximum of four, 12.5% of the system's capture status will be controlled by DUST 514. So if a system has two temperate planets, 75% of the system's capture will be governed by traditional EVE Online means and 25% will be controlled by DUSTies.
But until DUST 514 is implemented, those systems that have temperate planets in them will have those planets set to the faction that "traditionally" owns them. And while that's going to make some systems between 12.5% and 50% easier to capture, it's also going to make other systems ("traditionally" Amarr systems, for instance) between 12.5% and 50% harder. If a system traditionally controlled by Amarr has four temperate planets in it, 50% of the capture status of that system will be controlled by DUST 514 and EVE players in the Minmatar faction won't be able to change it. Tomorrow.
Here's the two key lines straight from the patch notes:
Each temperate planet in Factional Warfare space contributes by 12.5% to the System Capture Status Victory Point pool, for a maximum of 50% Victory Points in Factional Warfare solar systems with four temperate planets.
Until DUST514 is fully implemented on Tranquility, planetary districts have been set to belong to the NPC faction that traditionally owned the Factional Warfare solar system before players interference.
Now I haven't done the math here but it seems quite likely to me that there are enough temperate planets in the FW systems to make pushing some of those systems to tier 5 impossible... and if that's true, then it seems equally likely to me that tier 5 overall is also going to be equally impossible.
Until DUST 514 starts being capable of helping with those tier 5 pushes, that is. When that will be, CCP has not announced. What changes CCP will have made to the mechanic for even getting to tier 5 have also not been announced. But CCP Soundwave has stated that he does want to change those mechanics to make FW less about pushes to tier 5 every two weeks and more about the tiers reflecting the real status of the faction wars at any given time.
Anyway, I could be reading all of this wrong. But I thought I'd read between the lines for those of you who might have missed it. One more time: if you intend to cash out of FW, I'd do it today.
And if that sounds a little tinfoil hat-y: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2048369#post2048369
Hey everyone. I've got a few updates to our plan to share, including one change happening in Inferno 1.3 tomorrow and some tweaks to the earlier described plan taking into account all your excellent feedback and our conversations with the CSM. This stuff affects both this thread and the other one, but I'm just going to post it here because splitting it up doesn't make much sense to me. I'll just link to this post from there, and we can keep the combined feedback here.
Firstly, we have the Inferno 1.3 patch releasing tomorrow which will represent the beginning of the Empires' preparation for the storm of new immortal infantry they see on the horizon. Most of the changes will be invisible to capsuleers, with the significant exception of Empire influence being increasingly exerted on the temperate planets of their contested zones. The four Empires have all begun to construct installations on the surface of temperate planets within factional warfare space that allow them to affect the system control to a limited but noticeable degree.
At this point the installations are being set up by local militias allied with their ancestral nations, so the planet control is being exerted by the original owners of the system, from before any FW sovereignty changes. This means that until the new mercenaries of DUST 514 begin deployment, the planet control will belong to the historical owners based on region (or another way of putting it, the builders of the stargates in each system). For instance, all temperate planets in Black Rise will exert influence for the Caldari, and all temperate planets in The Bleak Lands will exert influence for the Amarrians.
This influence will take the form of an increase or decrease in the number of Victory Points required to make a system vulnerable. If the same Empire controls both the planet and the Infrastructure Hub, the system will become harder to conquer through a higher VP threshold. If one Empire holds the Ihub and the other holds the planets, the system will become easier to conquer through a lower VP threshold. The influence exerted by each temperate planet is 12.5% of the standard VP threshold in either direction. Most FW systems have either one or zero temperate planets, and the maximum number in any FW system is four, giving a maximum possible VP threshold influence of 50% (12.5*4).
This planet influence will be adjustable once the DUST 514 Mercs are unleashed, but in the meantime it will present a static adjustment of the landscape that may influence which systems each Militia chooses to reinforce and base from. This change will take effect with Inferno 1.3 tomorrow.
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Does anyone else see any potential issues arising from pinning Dust gameplay mechanics to a broken facwar system in space?
Putting aside the temporary fix CCP has decided to use until DUST's release - yes, I very much do.
Also: facwar planets only?
IIRC, they're deploying DUST to facwar planets at first to iron out any serious issues before they expand it to sov-related stuff.
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. :|
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. :|
And recently, get hilariously rich.
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. :|
And recently, get hilariously rich.
Or poor. Let's not forget the space poor who refuse to run alts for the enemy.
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They are upcoming FW changes for Winter that are gonna cut the farming, right? Make it harder to capture a system, no more 90 systems at a time that are vuln that flip between Gallente/Caldari endlessly.
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With the planetary districts and DUST it seems all things being equal it's going to favour a degree of status quo or at the very least make seizing and holding enemy territory far more difficult unless one has a high degree of co-ordination with DUST units or have DUST players integrated into a current corp or alliance.
This is of course discounting the possibility of having a large amount of DUST players choosing one side over another and effectively just steamrolling the opposition. It would be even worse if rewards are tied into how many planets a faction owns which would cause defections to the winning side since you get higher rewards (They're mercenaries, duh).
If that's the case then it seems whichever side manages to score the quickest victory through numbers or whatever else in DUST will in all likelihood maintain that position.
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. :|
That was /sarcasm. Ive been there since the beginning too, so, bittervet oblige.
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Yeah of course, FW is more disposable than sov related stuff if something goes wrong.
Actually Lyn, it is. Then again, people who've been active in Factional Warfare since it's start and/or in the old live events that had some pewpew in them have also learned to roll with the punches. :|
That was /sarcasm. Ive been there since the beginning too, so, bittervet oblige.
In factional warfare, perhaps :p It's been like this forever, I'm sure people like Graelyn can say the same.
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New Dev Blog based on the linking of the Dust chat to Eve's: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73468
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Or poor. Let's not forget the space poor who refuse to run alts for the enemy.
THIS. My FW toon is piss-poor, and will likely remain so, partially because I've no time/interest to farm the system like some parasite, and partially because if I did have time/interest to play I'd generate my money in a different manner that don't artificially inflate the Free Welfare system's capture mechanics.
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So you're fine with gameplay that results in harm to random neutrals as long as effort is involved? That's a wholly different argument than a griefing condemnation.
A bounty is just an automated market transaction. It's hiring mercenaries made easy, the transformation of an under-used aspect of EVE to a streamlined interface.
What the change means as that it's easier for a capsuleer to expend isk to hurt or make a target of another capsuleer. Potentially any kind of behavior in the game can be punished, as long as the price is right. This is an expansion of the sandbox, and permits a new ecology of careers and consequences.
The necessary conditions are effort and risk. There's no risk in dropping a bounty on someone, because it's anonymous, and all the effort it takes is scraping up some ISK and pressing a button. It's as if they put in a module that let you teleport to optimal range and shoot from cloak. So my argument is that it's making it too easy. You're not adding any new consequences, because you could always kill someone or hire someone to do it on your behalf for anything. And hired gun is hardly a new part of the ecology of careers in EVE.
Bounties are not placed on capsuleers based on their outlaw actions. Other capsuleers put bounties on each other and themselves for lols, attention-seeking and advertisements. No matter how many outlaw acts you commit, the only reflection on your record is your security status. CONCORD never sets bounties on capsuleers for criminal acts. No capsuleer places bounties on other capsuleers in order to punish them for criminal acts because that would be dumb, given the way things presently work.
You're arguing that the bounty system should continue to perform a role that it never performed.
And you're arguing that the bounty system should perform a new role that it never performed. There's no logical high ground there. Yes, CONCORD doesn't set bounties based on criminal acts. What it does is permit them based on them. What chain of in-universe logic should lead them to change that, given that it makes criminal acts more likely and therefore hinders their mission?
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It's not CONCORD's mission to make the world safe for capsuleers. It's CONCORD's mission to keep the world safe from capsuleers.
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https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=164501
Team Gridlock has been working in the last months mostly on improving server-side parts of the inventory system (and related systems). Many of the changes won't be visible to the player (except that a few old bugs should be gone), but there are a few important changes, which are now on Duality for testing:
Fleet hangars:
Corporation hangars on capital ships and Orcas have been converted into fleet hangars. These fleet hangars have no divisions and corp roles are irrelevant. The size of the fleet hangar is the same as the old corp hangar and all items are moved from the corp hangar to the fleet hangar at deployment of the patch.
The access rules to the ship maintenance bay (SMB) and fleet hangar have also changed:
It is always possible to use the fitting service of the SMB of a corp member and a fleet member
Corp members can access both the SMB and the fleet hangar with the setting "Allow corp member usage"
Fleet members can access both the SMB and the fleet hangar with the setting "Allow fleet member usage"
We discussed these changes with the CSM and we hope that they improve the usability of the fleet hangar and the new access rules should make it much clearer on what is possible when.
Known issue in the build on Duality: The right-click option to open containers in fleet hangars is not doing anything.
Storing the settings for SMB and fleet hangars on the server:
The above mentioned settings for SMB and fleet hangars are now stored on the server and they stay always on the ship (as long as it is not repackaged). It is no longer necessary to re-configure the ship after a jump or after a relog. Be careful when boarding a ship from your corp mate or similar - it will be using the settings, which he set.
Storing the forcefield password of ships on the server
Forcefield passwords are now stored on the server. But: We are currently working on another iteration of this to improve the consistency. Please do not send bugreports about this yet. ;)
Storing the "lock items" setting for audit log containers on the server
The "lock items" setting on audit log containers is no longer a personal setting, but it is stored on the server and applying to all users. The new default setting is "unlocked". In corporation hangars the role "Config Equipment" is needed to change the setting (assuming no password is set).
Please reply here, if you find any bugs or other problems, which we might have missed. The changes should also be covered in a DevBlog later, but I have no idea yet on when it will be ready.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2069493#post2069493
Sorry for the late reply - I was not in the office this afternoon.
Trying to cover the most asked questions / complaints:
Divisions: I am afraid that it would be very difficult to bring them back. I will discuss on Monday with the team, if we could find any good alternatives.
"too many people" issue/feature - I will investigate this in the following days, but I don't think there has been any changes made to this.
Scanning: Items in the fleet hangar can not be scanned by cargo scanners - this has not changed. Customs officials on the other hand will find items in the fleet hangar - this has also not changed compared with the corp hangar on TQ.
Forcefield password: They are not being transferred to other pilots. We are currently changing the way of how this is being enforced (Probably by storing the password on the character and not on the ship).
Separate access options for SMB and Fleet hangar: I will discuss this on Monday with the team.
"Will we be able to drop items *into* a fleet hangar if the box isn't checked?" - No, you will be unable to open the fleet hangar.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2066837#post2066837
Quick update on these guys, got a few tweaks to polish them a bit and help differentiate them from the Combat Cruisers:
Omen
-100 Structure
+10 Velocity
-10 Sig Radius
Caracal
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
-1,000,000 mass
+0.035 Agility
-10 Sig Radius
Thorax
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
-10 Sig Radius
Stabber
-100 Structure
+5 Velocity
Removed the dronebay and bandwidth
-5 Sig Radius
(Later post)
There are changes to the Combat cruisers coming through the pipeline atm that will be the more significant part of ensuring each ship has its own flavour.
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I take it that the mass on the Omen, Thorax and Rupture are sufficiently low as to warrent the - 1 million mass on the Caracal, and that it's not there to make is so much simpler to make a nano super-kite Caracal with cap-less weapons?
Because where I'm looking from it seems to be a blatant act of favoritism, though I've not checked the ship stats in a while. I'm wrong, I hope?
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I take it that the mass on the Omen, Thorax and Rupture are sufficiently low as to warrent the - 1 million mass on the Caracal, and that it's not there to make is so much simpler to make a nano super-kite Caracal with cap-less weapons?
Because where I'm looking from it seems to be a blatant act of favoritism, though I've not checked the ship stats in a while. I'm wrong, I hope?
Previous mass values:
Omen
11650000
Caracal
12910000
Thorax
11280000
Stabber
11400000
The Caracal will in fact remain the heaviest, followed by the Thorax, then the Omen, then the Stabber. The difference will just be considerably less between the Caracal and the others.
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It's not CONCORD's mission to make the world safe for capsuleers. It's CONCORD's mission to keep the world safe from capsuleers.
Nice.
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Even if you don't 'farm' the Inferno FW system, you can make lots of isk by playing "legitimately."
I don't use alts - a personal preference. By and large, I've plexed contested systems instead of farming vulnerable systems. Often, I fight in plexes. Even with this non-optimal, inefficient playstyle, my returns have easily been 9-10 digits each tier 5 push.
I admit, though, that it did help that I was fighting for the Minnies for a while there. Being part of a side that can hit tier 5 at will really benefited my wallet. What FW design lacks (and will lack) is an explicit counter to the "rich get richer" issue of multiplayer games. That is, to keep matches interesting over their length, games will often offer advantages to the losing side.
Aside from built-in market mechanics that reduce the price of a faction's wares if there's a glut of them, there's no such mechanic in EVE FW. Factions that gain an early advantage have it good. Factions that are losing are hard-pressed to make up the difference.
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http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73491
Fast Forward
Hello everyone. CCP Fozzie here writing on behalf of my teammates in Game of Drones. We’ve got some updates for you all regarding our plans for Factional Warfare.
TL:DR Is that we’re accelerating some of our Factional Warfare feature changes that had been planned for Retribution and releasing those features that are ready for prime time starting with a patch on October 23.
The Story so Far
Team Game of Drones has been working on Factional Warfare (FW) iterations for quite a few months now, releasing the changes for the Inferno expansion that revitalized FW and brought in masses of players including those new to PVP and experienced players looking for a change from the status quo. As part of CCP’s continued focus on iteration and polishing our features we have also been working on a second set of iterations to Factional Warfare for the Retribution expansion.
The Factional Warfare iteration process has been a very successful example of close interaction between CCP and our amazing community. Starting from a series of FW proposals collected from the community and brought to CCP through CSM 6 and continuing through the current CSM 7 term we have been working hard to learn from the FW community and channel those lessons into a better FW system. The announcement of the overall plan for the Retribution FW iterations made in two threads on the Features and Ideas forum was the culmination of our dialogue with the FW community up to that point.
Warzone Control and System Upgrades
Rebalancing FW NPCs and Plexes
These roadmaps have received generally positive feedback and we’ve been working since then to tweak the proposal internally and with the CSM, adding new changes that the community has brought forward and removing aspects that the community has pointed out to us are flawed.
The goals of the Retribution FW revamp have been:
Encouraging fun PVP gameplay and removing areas where the incentives discourage conflict
Balancing the Factional Warfare benefit system that has become universally acknowledged as too lucrative considering the risk and effort involved with certain activities
Providing new ways for players to become invested in and excited about taking territory for the glory of their chosen empire
You can see the threads linked above for details of the original Retribution plan and I’ll have some updates to it at the end of the dev blog but for now I want to fast forward to the recent weeks.
Fast Forward
Like I said above, the plan was to introduce these much needed community-sourced changes in the Retribution expansion alongside our upcoming changes to Bounty Hunting, Crimewatch and our unprecedented wave of ship balance changes. However more recently we have seen signs that waiting until December 4th for all of these changes would not be in the best interest of the warzones and the game.
Since we announced the Retribution changes many players involved with Factional Warfare have let us know that the excitement and action in their warzones is trailing off quickly. The annoyance with non-combat evasion plexing alts that do not contribute anything to the fun of FW has been building, and with the inevitable decrease in income on the horizon many players have understandably focused their efforts on farming and cashing out LP instead of combat and interacting with the rest of the community. These are the problems that our Retribution changes were designed to alleviate, but players have been telling us that the situation is degrading faster than we had expected.
At the same time we have begun to see the more significant effects of the newly wealthy FW players flexing their economic muscles. Although FW is not an isk faucet and does not generate any additional isk in the economy, the influx of cheap LP store items has caused a crash in the income of some mission runners and the concentration of wealth has contributed to the rising price of PLEX on the open market. Players stockpiling PLEX have simply been responding to the economic incentives at the time in good faith, but the price rise has affected the gameplay experience for those who rely on PLEX every month for their subscription. CCP is working via a variety of methods to bring the price of PLEX down, and FW has been identified as an area that can help the process along.
Faced with the dual problems of FW stagnation and PLEX inflation we saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Team Game of Drones is still in the process of completing the FW changes for Retribution, but the specific features we already have completed internally are ones we believe will have a significant positive impact on Factional Warfare right here and now.
The New Hotness
Here are the feature changes we have ready to go that will be releasing with Inferno 1.3.2 tomorrow:
Replace the LP store price reduction from War Zone Control Tiers with a LP gain bonus. This is intended to encourage the various factions to keep their systems upgraded instead of “spiking” tiers to cash out their LP on one day. You will gain the best benefits for taking, holding and upgrading territory over the long term instead of spiking up for one weekend at a time.
The actual multiplier numbers for the LP gain bonuses have been adjusted since we posted the original plan to increase the benefit at Tier 5 somewhat. All FW LP store prices will become static at the values formerly received at Tier 3 (pre-Inferno values).
Old system was:
Tier1: LP store offers 4 times more expensive, LP gains unchanged
Tier2: LP store offers 2 times more expensive, LP gains increased by 5%
Tier3: LP store offers unchanged next to pre-Inferno levels, LP gains increased by 10%
Tier4: LP store offers 2 times less expensive, LP gains increased by 15%
Tier5: LP store offers 4 times less expensive, LP gains increased by 20%
New system is:
Tier1: LP gains reduced by 50%
Tier2: LP gains staying the same
Tier3: LP gains increased by 75%
Tier4: LP gains increased by 150%
Tier5: LP gains increased by 225%
Remove all LP rewards for completing offensive complexes in a hostile system that is fully vulnerable. Currently the optimal path for each militia is to keep most systems under hostile control so they can farm complexes. Militias even use alts in the opposite side to flip systems since holding system when you are not spiking is not optimal. This change should return some sanity to the incentive structure and help get people fighting over space instead of fighting to get rid of space.
Add new LP rewards for defensive plexing at a reduced and variable rate. The formula here has also changed since the F&I post, and now is:
LP Gain = Base value of plex * (Contested percentage of the system/100) * 0.75
So if a system is 100% contested and you run a defensive plex you would gain 75% of the base payout for that plex type. If the system is 50% contested you would gain (0.5*0.75=0.375) 37.5% of the base payout.
Add new LP donation tax based on each faction’s warzone control. The higher your warzone control level the more of your donations are consumed by the tax. This is in place to provide diminishing returns and to compensate for the increased LP gain from the new tier system. When reaching Tier 5 the tax would be as high as 70%.
Increase the cost of upgrading systems and decrease the bleed-out when those systems are attacked. Currently 50% of the LP gained by offensive plexers is removed from the upgrade level of the system they plex in. We are reducing that to 10% and increasing the total LP pool for upgrading systems. This will result in systems taking twice as much LP to upgrade but also make degrading those upgrade levels take 10 times as long.
Old upgrade costs were:
Level1: 10,000 LPs
Level2: 25,000 LPs
Level3: 45,000 LPs
Level4: 70,000 LPs
Level5: 100,000 LPs
Buffer: 150,000 LPs
New upgrade costs are:
Level1: 40,000 LPs
Level2: 60,000 LPs
Level3: 90,000 LPs
Level4: 140,000 LPs
Level5: 200,000 LPs
Buffer: 300,000 LPs
To combat the proliferation of non-combat evasion alts in plexing we will be requiring the defending NPCs to be destroyed during the course of offensive plexing. This will be implemented at this time with the current NPCs, as the new ones are not ready yet. We acknowledge that it would have been better to release the new NPCs in this patch as well but we have decided that AFK plexing was doing so much damage to the fun of the warzone and the economic impact of FW that we are best off to make the incremental change to the current system while we work hard to finish the new improved NPCs.
The Rest of the Plan
There are some other changes to the rest of our original roadmap that we are making after consultation with the community:
We will be implementing a cap on the number of missions one character can have open at once. This cap will affect all Security, Distribution and Mining missions, not just FW missions. The exceptions to the limit will be Storyline, Cosmos and Epic Arc missions. The current plan is for the cap to be 5 simultaneous missions.
We will be attempting to release two new features to the FW complexes that have been suggested many times by the FW community to increase PVP opportunities in complexes:
Have plex capture timers count backwards to the default state when no players are contesting them
Have plex capture timers visible to everyone in system so you can easily tell which plexes are close to being captured.
We cannot commit 100% to getting these changes in quite yet since they were added a bit later to the plan, but we have added them to our backlog and want to get all your feedback on them.
There is a change in the original Winter FW plan that many players have pointed out to us is flawed. This is the proposed change to make any defending player anywhere in the complex grid contest capture. We have decided that you all are correct and this change would cause more problems than it solves, so it has been removed from the plan. Thanks to everyone who took the time to help us come to that conclusion.
The rest of the plan as described in the F&I threads linked above and below is still in our backlog, and we will be working with the goal of getting as many of those changes as possible delivered to you by Dec 4th. Expect another devblog discussing them as we get closer to release, and as always you can keep up with the latest in our changes through the official Features and Ideas forum.
That Was a Lot of Words
On behalf of team Game of Drones, thanks for sticking with us through this blog. We welcome your feedback on these changes in the comments thread for this blog and the two F&I threads on Tiers/Upgrades, and NPCs/Plexes. We’re committed to dialogue with the FW community as we continue the iterative process of improving Factional Warfare so don’t hesitate to get involved in the process.
We believe getting these changes out early will go a long way towards shaking up and reviving the FW warzones while also reducing pressure on the economy (most notably the price of PLEX). We will keep observing the impact from all of these changes and will keep tweaking as needed to get the best results possible.
All my ♥s
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I look forward to watching FW space tonight and laughing.
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That sounds good, but how do they plan to fight against the deep lack of balance between factions themselves ? Losing sides need more incentives to fight, winning sides still earn full benefits of their efforts, but do not actually require a lot more effort to keep their systems under control.
I still say that the more systems you control, the more it has to be profitable, but also the more it should be hard to keep.
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FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU TOMMORROW?!
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Good luck! <3
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Indeed. Perfect way to generate vast amounts of rage from all the minmatar and caldari farmer alts who didn't have time to cash out massively.
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Who the fuck are these guys, and what have they done to CCP!? :eek:
I'll be reading the forums tomorrow to enjoy the fallout from the farmers bitching about this. If there is any, that is.
Having said that, I agree with Lyn. Holding all your space when you own about all of it should be harder than it is, but I'm thinking about this now, and likely it's rather hard to implement such a system that won't be inherently flawed.
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We already got "First Tears" out of Damar.
Tomorrow is promising to be quite hilarious.
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If you're late to the game, you're going to lose out!
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Random predictions:
Mass flipping tonight. Caldari have started, but the short notice has them at a disadvantage. They'll still likely flip a large number of systems over the coming days, perhaps enough to swing the warzone heavily into their favor. Things are more dire for the Amarr.
After the mass flips, system occupancy will become a lot more stable, perhaps stagnant. Defense is absurdly easy. Offense will be a pain. The NPC imbalance will still favor the Minmatar and the Caldari, but having to actually destroy NPCs makes taking medium and large plexes a non-trivial task. Newbie plexing alts will still exist and have utility - for the defenders.
The jury's out on the quantity of farmers that will remain. It's hard to say how many of the farming players were rational actors who saw an opportunity, or part of the herd that jumped in after word-of-mouth made the ridiculous Inferno LP returns public knowledge.
FW will still be lucrative, but at a pre-Inferno level of lucrative. That is to say, not out of line with other low-sec and nullsec sources of income. It'll still likely have a loyal following, especially among the low-sec PvP die-hards who like their free wardec.
The eve-o forums will be filled with rage, tears, trolling and chestbeating. But that's like predicting the sun will rise tomorrow.
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The eve-o forums will be filled with rage, tears, trolling and chestbeating. But that's like predicting the sun will rise tomorrow.
So, it could not happen... :twisted:
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TBH a lot of the vitriol stems from those who have over invested in one activity - a dire mistake in almost any past time or hobby subject to change. See war games rules iterations, tabletop roleplay or even the latest remake of a graphic novel film franchise adaptation for analogous examples of the 'over committed' being unable to reconcile with the fact that, sometimes, things are going to have to change.
Personally, I am looking forwards to FW, whether it be better or worse for income, simply because it is something new. A new challenge to FC in and a new way of waging war against those damned Feds! For all the fire and bluster, epic poasts and ****poasts alike, we're changing the colours of dots - it is the actions leading up to that moment of blue-to-pink-to-blue or any other combination that define our experience.
So as a 'screwed by the system' (tongue in cheek while I say that) Caldari - bring it on. Hot drops us, kill FW income, let the null and high sec players wonder why the hell we play in this glorious ***storm pointless conflict. The people who know why they are here will still be here, plugging away and forming the lasting bonds that any good communal activity forms. Hopefully they'll also already know, or come to realise, they're no better or worse than the highest income alliance executor or lowest income veld miner. They're playing THEIR game, changed as it is, and if they don't like it, there are plenty of 'games' they can call their own in many other areas of EVE.
IMO, the minute you start playing as if your game play is set in stone, or as a means to 'stand above those other plebs' you've lost EVE. Win EVE. Play EVE. Enjoy the content available to you, or find some that does justice to the time you spend on it. Few of us will be missed if we just explode in apoplectic, unfounded rage, none of us will be missed by any other those who we founded those so important bonds with in game. I, for one, look forwards to either adapting to the new conditions, or moving to a new niche if it just isn't my thing anymore - and I hope that either way I will be playing with the guys I have come to know as true 'spacebros' - that's the lasting 'income' any of us can get out of this game that will last.
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Last night was a scramble. We demoralized the Minmatar with sheer numbers, they logged, and we dropped caps to reclaim as much as we could. According to our spies, the only thing that filled Minmatar militia chat were whines from farmers.
Death to the Minmatard farmer!
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Fight the good fight Aldrith, but remember this is a war on all farmers. Hopefully now we can see the warriors and soldiers on both sides making their mark, instead of margin-pinching sponges.
The age of Minmatards, Calderpi, Frog-Farms and Am-aaah-whats-the-use will be over if we follow through on what CCP has started here.
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IMO, the minute you start playing as if your game play is set in stone, or as a means to 'stand above those other plebs' you've lost EVE.
I am curious as to your thoughts on this particular strain of thought in regards to my unmoving play style around Sansha's Nation. For context, the entirety of my career is based on advancing the Nation, and certain 'e-bushido' principles are in application, such as my refusal to sell any Sansha tech I acquire to non-Sansha people.
The game certainly feels 'unnecessarily difficult' because of my play style, but I am not certain if my play style is fitting in with the context of your thought.
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I think that Ael is referring more to locking oneself into a single method of ISK generation, or locking one's play focus on a specific mechanic or pew pew style.
Locking yourself into only ever flying one kind of ship, or only partaking in one or two particular element(s) of EVE's gameplay, are among the most effective ways to cause burnout and frustration with the game as it evolves over time. Conversely, spreading out, having experience in, and being open to trying different things in EVE is the easiest way to be "nerf-proof".
If you refuse to fly anything but X ship type or do Y activity ingame in Z kind of fleet, you open yourself to becoming obsolete (for lack of a better word, really) when CCP changes things that affect X Y or Z. If you branch out and are not as restricted, then any given change done by CCP is less likely to affect you negatively. I can fly any subcap in the game, and have played around with most of the different parts of the game aside from things like sovwar, FW, market shenanigans and w-space residency. The odds of CCP doing something that effectively nerfs me are consequently very low - if they break or nerf something, I just switch to something else without any effort.
Of course that's also a 'perk' of having characters that are 80m+ SP, but the principle is the same. If you're not willing to try new things and insist on only doing one thing at all in the game, you increase the odds that any given tweak to the game by CCP can (or will) utterly destroy the entire game for you.
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Morwen has the meat of it. Doing something difficult is not inherently noble, nor is it stupid, if it is a game and you are enjoying yourself. It is when you are wailing and gnashing teeth, cursing Hilmar's ginger short and curlies for ever having forsaken your soul on the altar of this MMO that my diatribe really starts to apply.
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Locking yourself into only ever flying one kind of ship... <bad stuff>
If you refuse to fly anything but X ship type.... <bad stuff>
Unless it's Amarrian ship types ;-)
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With PIE, you always know what kind of ECM to fit.
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Radar jamming artillery thrashers. I hate them so very much.
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Mass flipping tonight. Caldari have started, but the short notice has them at a disadvantage. They'll still likely flip a large number of systems over the coming days, perhaps enough to swing the warzone heavily into their favor. Things are more dire for the Amarr.
Color me surprised. The situation actually turned out in reverse.
The Amarr rallied rather well, especially given their outnumbered state. They flipped every system they could get their hands on. Battle lines are setting and, while the Minnies are making a major Kourm push, I can see this war front settling into a stable parity with the PvP focal point being the usual three or four systems. Amarr militia went from 2% on the FW bar to tier 2 and rising. That's impressive, given the odds arrayed against them.
The Caldari, on the other hand, are doing much worse than I expected. I thought they'd secure the majority of systems, or even dominate the war front except for a handful of Gallente systems. This is why I thought they'd accomplish this:
1) The Caldari remain the largest militia, numerically. This isn't just a matter of farmers flooding their ranks (the Minnies have the same issue). They've got some rather sizeable and active pvp blocs that are spread out throughout the war zone.
2) The Gallente / Caldari warzone is the larger one, and 50-60 of all Gallente systems were Vulnerable when this change was announced. That is a lot of deplexing - it takes quite a few more man hours to secure the Gallente/Caldari warzone as compared to the Minmatar/Amarr one.
3) The Caldari have demonstrated the capacity to deploy many dreadnaughts in bunker-busting. The Happy Endings alliance did this during their last tier 5 push, popping bunkers at a rate of one every ten minutes.
Privately in the Gallente militia, we were discussing the worst-case scenario of being pushed back to just our staging systems and having to mount a concerted campaign on neighboring systems to get the bare minimum to push into tier 2.
This scenario didn't happen. During the last three days since the announcement, the Caldari flipped a dozen systems on the first, three systems on the second, and just two systems on the third. Their lethargy as we brought more and more systems out of vulnerable was hard to understand, and we were often asking each other "What are they doing?"
At the moment, the Gallente hold a rather strong majority of systems. There is still room for the Caldari to flip the 6 or so remaining systems that are vulnerable, and make a push to seize many of the systems still above 90% vulnerability. We'll see what the next 48 hours bring.
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CalMil are doing just fine. The slow speed is likely caused by Nasranite Watch acting like kids and demoralising people, but the actual skilled FCs are pulling out all the stops. Once we get people weaned off this Damar/Bad Messenger 'farmers were the heart of FW' nonsense, all will be well.
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Basically what Ael said, this isn't the apocalypse. But, imho, a couple of things:
1) About 1 day worth of deplexing* to bring the systems into 99ish%
2) AFK offensive plexing isn't possible anymore, every (Gal) farmer just can run defensive plexes instead.
3) no LP for offensive plexing beyond the 100% isn't really motivating - and you can't compete with (de)farmers and real enemies, *making the one day of plexing more or less without any reasonable competition.
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Oh, I'm sure it's not the apocalypse or the collapse of the Caldari militia. And I'm also under the impression that the Nasranite Watch is running around like headless chickens, doing more harm than good. I'm just explaining why I thought the Caldari militia would be doing better at this point than they are.
It's still not a total sweep. With no more vulnerable systems as of this writing, Gallente control 65 out of 101 or so systems in the theater. Things may swing further in the Caldari direction before everything stabilizes.
I actually do hope things end up 'even' between both sides in both war zones. Once a more-or-less balanced system is implemented, it's more fun to have two sides with rough parity duking it out. One side dominating is no fun.
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I completely agree Shaalira, and I hink that a more even playing field is what is going to be required for both the continued health of factino warfare (or improvement of the poor health it was in). Additionally, DUST will be joining the facwar family soon, so we really need to have a stable system in which ground and space actions matter, instead of a one sided cluster****.
I guess the main benefit of this change isn't so much that farmers will be discouraged, but that farmers will have a useful role in 'holding the line' while the driving pvp forces attempt to act offensively. I think this is the crucial element to this change, as it allows event the systemic sponges that farmers are, to contribute meaningfully to the war effort without putting in artificial, stupid rules like 'no capturing system X until some guy you don't know or care for says so'.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aZCn6x1-j_8
Video dev blog on general Retribution stuff. Shows some nice art, and rendered dessies.
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...waitwaitwait.
The Gallente Destroyer flies backwards.
Waaaaaaat.
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But it has launch hangars! (http://imageshack.us/a/img259/8791/dessielaunchpads.png)
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Oh geeze, are those for drones? ...Don't tell me they're bringing fighters to hisec.
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Just for drones, which makes you hope other drone-based vessels are updated to look that cool.
It might be for DUST dropships too...didn't they mention dessies will tie in with DUST somehow?
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Just for drones, which makes you hope other drone-based vessels are updated to look that cool.
It might be for DUST dropships too...didn't they mention dessies will tie in with DUST somehow?
Agreed!
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Days after the change, Damar (Not Dramar, because apparently that's 'insulting', while telling me nothing I post is worth reading is not.) and others still deliver their complaining. Great entertainment.
I'm getting some inconsistent messages here though - who exactly between Fed/Cal have the 'upper hand' in systems right now? As in, who is more likely to hold on to the most of them once the initial post-patch dust settles? It's claimed that Caldari has so far taken about 12-14 systems or so, while the Fed militia has 'secured' the remaining 40+ systems that was vulnerable in the war-zone. The map is not to helpful on intel and I'm not much around anymore, so I would not know.
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Fed has the upper hand, but it is looking to stabilise into 'just shy of equal' footing in the next two weeks. Damar I havent seen hide nor hair of, and Bad Messenger is still trying to sap morale with his 'what's the use, we cant get rich easily' speeches - kinda missing that many of us are here to pvp AND flip systems, not just circle buttons all day long.
basically put, Caldari 'gave it a go' to flip the warzone, but Shadows/Tundragon had titans out (no complaining, good tactic for area denial), so we were forced to take circuitous routes, face off against several well organised Fed fleets, and deal with the majority of our 'part time pvp' farmers crying into their pillows over not getting free isk any more. I think all of the warzones are suffering a bit of the latter, so it is a good sign that the anti-farmer element of this patch has worked, at least for now.
I expect a little bit of stagnation while all sides reconfigure to make the most of the new system, especially when one side holds enough systems to tier 3 or 4 and make defensive plexing even more worthwhile.
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Just a few ship edits ;)
(http://i1052.photobucket.com/albums/s453/shanehurley/new%20Hulls/20121026155722.jpg)
(http://i1052.photobucket.com/albums/s453/shanehurley/new%20Hulls/20121026191709.jpg)
(http://i1052.photobucket.com/albums/s453/shanehurley/new%20Hulls/20121026191804.jpg)
(http://i1052.photobucket.com/albums/s453/shanehurley/new%20Hulls/20121026191726.jpg)
(http://i1052.photobucket.com/albums/s453/shanehurley/new%20Hulls/20121026155914.jpg)
The new Vargur is the greatest thing ever, all hail our Art Department Overlords.
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Wow that SFI is beautiful.
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I now remember why the Megathron was the first battleship I made a decided effort to get in to.
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I now remember why the Megathron was the first battleship I made a decided effort to get in to.
+1
Shame it's borderline obsolete today.
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It seems like the grittiness of the Minmatar ship design is slowly vaporating.
Same goes for the organic feel of the Gallente.
Boxiness of the Caldari.
Soon they will start churning out Amarrian ships without the round metallic armor plating.
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It seems like the grittiness of the Minmatar ship design is slowly vaporating.
Same goes for the organic feel of the Gallente.
Boxiness of the Caldari.
Soon they will start churning out Amarrian ships without the round metallic armor plating.
And I think of myself as a bitter veteran.
Shame on me.
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You missed the fact the Megathron has a lovely drone hangar with a glowing forcefield...(I don't think the texturing is fully completed btw)
(http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2160/megahangar.png)
The new Gallente dessie (http://imageshack.us/a/img259/8791/dessielaunchpads.png)has them as well, and mysteriously the new Caldari one as well (though it has no drone bay). Wonder if they're somehow connected to DUST?
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If they do have anything to do with DUST, I haven't a clue what it might be. It would be interesting to have some option for 'black ops' insertion of troops to the surface of a planet, maybe a lightly equipped detachment lacking the armour (and the fanfare) a Warbarge comes with?
Lots of things to speculate about at the moment, though I feel that these may merely be cosmetic for now, due to the 'soft land' that CCP appears to have planned for cross-integration.
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When you 'dock' in a station, ships do not physically land anywhere, they HOVER IN ONE PLACE.
Convenient, as most ships have designs that don't lend well to landing on anything, and having specialized docking-clamps for every single space-faring design out there can get... complicated.
So, how do your crews get in and out of your ship, then?
Docking bay and a small passenger shuttle. That's how. All ships should have a small port like that, TBH.
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Adjustable loading bridge would also be an option.
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When you 'dock' in a station, ships do not physically land anywhere, they HOVER IN ONE PLACE.
Convenient, as most ships have designs that don't lend well to landing on anything, and having specialized docking-clamps for every single space-faring design out there can get... complicated.
So, how do your crews get in and out of your ship, then?
Docking bay and a small passenger shuttle. That's how. All ships should have a small port like that, TBH.
I have just been rereading the Eisenhorn novels, specifically the second book, and I must say, I am ashamed I totally overlooked this. +1 Bloodbird, the old 'ships too big need to be tended by lighters/shuttles' mentality is one that is oft overlooked, to the detrmiment of exploring the richness of even the most mundane of places in our game experience - the docking hangar.
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I'm actually inclined to agree with Lallara.
One of the reasons I cannot like the new Caldari destroyer.
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When you 'dock' in a station, ships do not physically land anywhere, they HOVER IN ONE PLACE.
Convenient, as most ships have designs that don't lend well to landing on anything, and having specialized docking-clamps for every single space-faring design out there can get... complicated.
So, how do your crews get in and out of your ship, then?
Docking bay and a small passenger shuttle. That's how. All ships should have a small port like that, TBH.
I have just been rereading the Eisenhorn novels, specifically the second book, and I must say, I am ashamed I totally overlooked this. +1 Bloodbird, the old 'ships too big need to be tended by lighters/shuttles' mentality is one that is oft overlooked, to the detrmiment of exploring the richness of even the most mundane of places in our game experience - the docking hangar.
It's something I've always made sure to take into account with any channels or RP involving Morwen's ships or hangar, especially given the rather large selection of big ships she's got. Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks of it. /o\
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I'm kind of jealous at the stabbers cool new look - now if they'd just update the omen a little to make it look even more badass :P
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http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73451
half-time overview of eve online: retribution
reported by CCP Ripley | 2012.10.30 16:29:03 | NEW | Comments
Greetings citizens of New Eden,
I'm CCP Ripley. You may have known me previously under the name CCP Nerfherder, which I used when I was manager of game design and content. Unfortunately, Nerfherder came to a fiery end after a suspicious in-game scandal (no doubt some lucky pilot out there in New Eden still has his frozen corpse). Officially I blame it all on CCP Tuxford, of course, because blame just looks so good on him.
Anyway, a little bit more about me. I am now the Senior Producer for Release Development. This means I'm producing the next release as well as preparing for the release after that. I run around the development floor all day trying to solve problems or trying to bring in the right people to solve the problems. I basically try to align all the things we want to do with the things we are able to do. In the words of Winston Wolfe: “I solve problems.” So with that out of the way, let's have a look at what the teams are working on for this expansion, Retribution.
Team Pony Express is all about the player experience and they know that it's usually more fun and beneficial to gang up with other pilots. Therefore the Ponies are improving the corporation recruiting interface, making it easier to search for a corporation. They're also improving the UI for corporation advertising, in addition to which they're going to give us some improvements to the whole recruitment process. Team Pony Express is also working on making the inflight UI a little nicer for all of us.
Team Five-0 are working on law and order. After reworking the backend system for Crimewatch in the last release they are set to focus on changes to game play including simplification of our flagging mechanics and making all timers visible in the client. Team Five-0 are also taking a look at the rogue drone regions so you will see new and improved content there. The NPCs are also getting some love with the team working on a new NPC AI.
Team Super Friends wanted to shake things up a little bit. For one, they want offensive actions to have consequences, regardless of whether they are player-to-player or corporation-to-corporation aggression. To this end, they are working on a new bounty hunting system. In Retribution, players will be able to sell kill rights as well as place bounties on characters, corporations and alliances; and that's just scratching the surface of the changes made in the new system. The team has been working with the CSM taking their input into account.
Team Game of Drones is working on the Inventory and Factional Warfare. Since launching the inventory changes in the last release they've closely followed your feedback on it, and based on that feedback you will see a lot of Inventory improvements and iteration when Retribution rolls around. Team GoD has also iterated on Factional Warfare by adding some really cool stuff in the process. In addition to that they are also working on rebalancing frigates, destroyers and cruisers.
Team Gridlock has been working on missile acceleration fixes so the projected range of missiles will now be more accurate. They have also been improving inventory operations, both optimizing the movement of large number of items between locations and introducing fleet hangars in ships. Another thing they’ve tackled so far is a new backend configuration system allowing e.g. access configuration and forcefield passwords on ships to persist indefinitely over jumps and over downtimes.
Team Klang is responsible for the sound in the game. They are working on new turret sounds designed to better capture the scale of battle and sound good at different distances. They are also making different music playlists play in hisec, lowsec and zero sec to capture the mood of each region and connect better with the visuals of each security band.
Team TriLambda are specialists in visuals. They work on almost everything graphics releated in EVE including spaceships, turrets ,explosions, graphic engine features, tools, pipelines plus a whole host of other good stuff. Amongst the items they are working on for the Retribution release are 4 new destroyers, added to that you will see upgraded graphics for the Tempest and it's factional variants like the Vargur. The Stabber and it's factional variants will also get the same treatment. This release they are working on the visuals for new ships, such as the new destroyers and the Ore mining frigate. Added to that you will see improvements to the Tempest, the Vargur, the Stabber and the Vagabond. Finally, Team TriLambda is also working on the Planetary Visualizations for the EVE part of DUST 514.
Well, that's it for me this time around. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more juicy tidbits from the teams, as we ramp up our efforts to bring you the best expansion we possibly can. In the meantime, fly safe, enjoy the game… and if anybody knows the whereabouts of that Nerfherder corpse, I might want a word with you…
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Ever since EVE was launched, the game has improved, in general. Some things are changed, some are added, some removed, but the game keeps improving.
I still hold that the major down-turns with EVE is the player-base and their ever-changing meta-game.
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Team Klang is responsible for the sound in the game. They are working on new turret sounds designed to better capture the scale of battle and sound good at different distances. They are also making different music playlists play in hisec, lowsec and zero sec to capture the mood of each region and connect better with the visuals of each security band.
At last.
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And, the latest shiny to hit Duality http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VWorZl-70f4
This is going to be hilarious in fleet combat.
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It also made the blaster boat usable solo. Just get to 100 KM, and bam, you're right on top of him. Web, scram, unleash hot burning plasma.
Of course I'm not thinking about doing the above in a Hyperion with triple plates and the biggest blasters I can fit. Why do you ask?
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Depends on the cap usage.
It does not seem to drain it in the video, but for balancing reasons it might.
Which would make the blasterboat unviable...
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Don't forget the 'anti' proposed module that will stop the micro-jumpers at a set range.
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Jury is out for me on this. Depends entirely how much this nerfs your BS fittings.
Probably just as easy to perch at a warp distance and pounce to a fleet mate, rather than gimping your fit, using cap, and relying on spool-up time.
Hmm!
Fine-tuning the balance might make all the difference.
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~1,300PG
77 CPU
Disabled by points and scrams, 12s spool up.
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Training the related skill to 5 brings that down to (I think) 5s.
I must admit, I feel like this would have a much more organic place in combat if the on-grid probing issue were resolved. Given the prevalence of having eyes on the enemy, seeing that obvious spool-up animation should give people plenty of warning.
However, I have to wonder at the applications of this when combined with grid-fu - stretch a grid out until you're in MJD range of an enemy fleet, but not visible to them; then suddenly - whoosh.
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Effing Grid-fu jerkoffs.
Most, most lame. So hate this 'tactic.'
Shorter spool up times will help, though.
Gonna really have to think about how useful this will be with blaster boats blapping people, as opposed to short range warp perches with blaster boats blapping people.
The spool up time is still going to make it too hard to catch fast things, but might be good to add dps if tackle is still doing most of the catching work..
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Best defence against these will be linked faction point arazus. When you can point out to 90km and prevent them jumping towards you or warping off, your skirmish fleet is probably fine ;)
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On grid probing needs to get slapped, grids need to get locked into a set and unmoving shape (kills grid-fu), and the 250km locking range limitation needs to get deleted.
You have now made sniping viable and distances matter in fleet combat. MJD battleship wolf packs would be awesome in a multi-hundred KM war zone.
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Would be more fun if the MJD permitted a jump to a target -within- 100km instead of just a direct 100km leap in a straight line.
Could be balanced out by not permitting a MJD/MWD dual prop setup. One or the other.
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Best defence against these will be linked faction point arazus. When you can point out to 90km and prevent them jumping towards you or warping off, your skirmish fleet is probably fine ;)
A single module shouldn't drive the necessity for a particular ship to fill a role.
Does a bubble stop the microjump?
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Best defence against these will be linked faction point arazus. When you can point out to 90km and prevent them jumping towards you or warping off, your skirmish fleet is probably fine ;)
A single module shouldn't drive the necessity for a particular ship to fill a role.
Does a bubble stop the microjump?
Unsure, but I would expect so. I've asked on the feedback thread, so I'll let you know as soon as I do :)
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There we go: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2126859#post2126859
Kalaratiri wrote:
Out of curiosity, is the MJD stopped by scrams and long points, or just scrams? And do bubbles have any effect on it?
CCP SoniClover wrote:
The current version on Duality is not affected by any warp canceling effects, but there is another version on the way that is affected by scramblers (will work similar to MWD). This means for instance that existing bubbles and interdictors won´t affect MJD as things stand (nor will disruptors ofc).
So, bubbles and long points don't kill it, making the arazu idea less viable. Oh well, I actually think this is better : :P
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Doesnt make no sense, since interdiction bubbles are supposed to disable the ability to jumpdrive and warp...
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Doesnt make no sense, since interdiction bubbles are supposed to disable the ability to jumpdrive and warp...
But it would also gimp what might be useful role for fitting an MJD: The ability to jump into a bubble camp and rapidly hit a 100km position with Sniper BS.
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To be honest the spool up time means that any half way decent camp is going to cut you to ribbons before you get out of that bubble, plus there is the aforementioned 'MJD jamming module' that is being hinted at.
So long as this remains on Battleships, I am fine with people being able to blip out of poorly/unmanned bubble camps - If a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear it, does anyone give a ****? With only BS able to use it, with their pretty bad alignment times (except for you, Machariel and Phoon!), the aforementioned 'halfway competent' camp should be able to explode it nicely. Failing that, have an MJD bro 'interdiction' Battleship point in the same direction and spool up - You'll still likely get point before they warp out and let the games begin.
More tools, more tactics. Rock, paper scissors was getting a bit old hat after all ;).
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with their pretty bad alignment times (except for you, Machariel and Phoon!)
Vindi aligns faster !
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Not flown a vindi :(
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Ewar changes: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=168820
Hello everyone. Another set of changes to get feedback on for Retri.
Since we're adjusting so many ewar ships between the disruption frigates and disruption cruisers, we saw the need to make some moderate adjustments to the modules as well as to other ewar ships to keep them competitive.
The reason these are being revealed near the end of our feature announcements is that we were investigating options for a more comprehensive ECM rebalance, however that will not be able to make it into Retribution. These changes are not the final solution for ewar by a long shot, they are incremental changes that will build towards the more complete changes we would like to make to the mechanics.
Here's what we currently have on our plate for Retribution:
ECM
*Reduce Optimal Range and Falloff of all ECM modules by 10%
*Add to the Optimal Range and Falloff bonus on ECM range bonused ships by 2.5% for the Blackbird and Tengu Obfuscation Manifold (bringing it to 12.5%) and 5% for the Scorpion (bringing it to 25%)
*Add four new racial sensor compensation skills that increase each type of Sensor Strength by 5% per level (Requires Electronics 4, rank 3 skills in the Electronics category)
Damps
*Increase Optimal Range of all Remote Sensor Dampeners by 20%
*Set the Damp strength bonus on Damp bonused ships to 7.5% per level
Tracking Disruptors
*Reduce TD base module effectiveness by 5%
*Set the TD strength bonus on all TD bonused ships to 7.5% per level
Target Painter
*Set the TP strength bonus on TP bonused ships to 7.5% per level for T1 and 10% per level for T2
We are aware of the effect the new skills will have on probing, and we're going to be keeping our eyes on it and have a few tricks up our sleeve in that regard.
We also want to reiterate that we are not looking at these ecm changes as a complete solution to the problems with that mechanic. It's a moderate change that we can make with the resources available for this expansion and that won't get in the way of our more comprehensive changes down the road.
Fascinating.
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Probably be better if it was just one skill. It isn't like you have to train different racial skills to increase your velocity or the number of targets you can shoot at.
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Probably be better if it was just one skill. It isn't like you have to train different racial skills to increase your velocity or the number of targets you can shoot at.
Include the fact they're rank 4 skills, and we're looking at several of training to get them all to 5. Which is a little silly :l
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Probably be better if it was just one skill. It isn't like you have to train different racial skills to increase your velocity or the number of targets you can shoot at.
Include the fact they're rank 4 skills, and we're looking at several of training to get them all to 5. Which is a little silly :l
It would be nice if instead of just increasing the raw effectiveness of sensor strength, it improved the impact of a module - the two ECCM module types.
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Probably be better if it was just one skill. It isn't like you have to train different racial skills to increase your velocity or the number of targets you can shoot at.
Include the fact they're rank 4 skills, and we're looking at several of training to get them all to 5. Which is a little silly :l
It would be nice if instead of just increasing the raw effectiveness of sensor strength, it improved the impact of a module - the two ECCM module types.
My account has finally lapsed, so I can't comment, but by all means go onto the thread and provide feedback. It's exactly what CCP are after :)
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I believe this is in line with their leaning toward more mono-racial skilling, instead of universal. See destroyers / battlecruisers eventually getting split into each race, unique.
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I posted to the thread - big question was "What's the vision" followed by previously discussed.
I believe this is in line with their leaning toward more mono-racial skilling, instead of universal. See destroyers / battlecruisers eventually getting split into each race, unique.
That would be great, if they made all the races balanced and someone could just skill the entire Gallente line and be useful to their FCs.
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I posted to the thread - big question was "What's the vision" followed by previously discussed.
I believe this is in line with their leaning toward more mono-racial skilling, instead of universal. See destroyers / battlecruisers eventually getting split into each race, unique.
That would be great, if they made all the races balanced and someone could just skill the entire Gallente line and be useful to their FCs.
Yes. I want to say by doing so they would be more inclined to fixing 'weaker' races, but that is probably not the case. Universal training I personally feel makes it too easy to ignore sub-optimal specialization because players can 'easily switch over'.
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Nice ECM nerf.
They should just remove the current ECM system altogether and rework it from scratch.
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I dig the music for the Retribution login screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuP-4gKU0A&feature=youtu.be).
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They should have just reduced the ECM cycle time to something shorter like 5-10s and remove the ability for it break locks only 'jam' the ability for you to actually fire/use offensive mods.
I'm not sure what the point is of dropping ECM range - they're not exactly used as much as TD outside of Caldari ECM boats.
Although now with the damp boost I'm wondering how hilarious the new Gal Dessie will be with a flight of ECM drones and a dampener.
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I dig the music for the Retribution login screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuP-4gKU0A&feature=youtu.be).
That's everything I've wanted to see in a login screen since they changed the classic Revelations II one.
Also actually liking the music for a change. The last good track RealX produced for CCP was the Apocrypha login screen, nice to see he still has his stuff.
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I dig the music for the Retribution login screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuP-4gKU0A&feature=youtu.be).
that music has a "tron-ish" tune....
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I dig the music for the Retribution login screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuP-4gKU0A&feature=youtu.be).
that music has a "tron-ish" tune....
I am thinking Jean Michel Jarre.
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Hans Zimmer influences, definitely.
Also, someone seems to've cut the cheese somewhere near 0:29.
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They should have just reduced the ECM cycle time to something shorter like 5-10s and remove the ability for it break locks only 'jam' the ability for you to actually fire/use offensive mods.
I'm not sure what the point is of dropping ECM range - they're not exactly used as much as TD outside of Caldari ECM boats.
In FW currently, one of the most regular sights is an armour tanked thrasher with a multispec jammer. Also very common in 0.0 is for a zealot based AHAC gang to have prop/sebo/ecm in it's mids.
It's bloody annoying xD
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http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73530
Back to the balancing future
reported by CCP Ytterbium | 2012.11.06 14:49:54 | NEW | Comments
The tiericide locomotive is well on track so far. Retribution ship changes are already packed and ready to be delivered to your personal fireplace on December, the 4th.
With the bulk of our work out of the way though, this begs the question, what are we going to do now with all that precious free time? Eat marshmallows on the CCP office balcony? Impossible, it’s snowing outside. Break CCP Fozzie’s fingers with the Nerfbat™? Already done. Fondly trim CCP Unifex’s hairs while singing dirty French limericks? No can do, he is desperately and irrevocably bald.
Well, guess that leaves us no choice but to move forward with future balancing plan then. Let’s assume 2012 is not the end of the world, the universe and all things we hold dear, and let’s take a peek into what we want to start tweaking next year.
Battlecruiser operational
Yes comrades, battlecruisers are indeed next to get through the tiericide revolution. Let’s face it, they had it coming, as current tier 2 variations perform too well while tier1s are found wanting. With this in mind, the plan is to adjust total slot layout to 17 on all of them and split them into two categories depending on their expected role.
First, the attack version; they favor speed and damage over resilience, which fits the current tier 3 battlecruisers extremely well.
Oracle, Naga, Talos and Tornado: are mostly fine, except for the mobility which is a little too high, and signature radius, which could be increased a bit. Apart from this, little needs to change.
Second, the combat flavor, which follows in the footsteps of the frigate and cruiser variants – made for front line duty, they have a good balance of firepower and resilience.
Prophecy: expected to be changed to a drone boat. This is a role revamp that will radically modify its slot and fitting layout. It will most likely have less bandwidth but more drone bay than the Myrmidon.
Ferox: we would like to reinforce the sniping nature of this ship, most likely by replacing the shield resistance bonus with a hybrid damage bonus. Nothing is set in stone yet, as we need to find ways to ensure it doesn’t compete with the Naga.
Brutix: this ship role conflicts a bit with the Talos, mainly because the latter is more mobile and packs more punch. We want to explore options on how to turn the Brutix into a more reliable close-range brawler, while the Talos keeps a kiting advantage.
Cyclone: ancillary shield boosters have significantly improved this ship performance; however, it won’t hurt to make sure it’s in a good shape before moving on.
Harbinger: assuming direct control. Problems on this ship are tied with the shield versus armor tanking issues, which need to be looked at.
Drake: once again, blame the modules, not the hull – while missiles are being looked into by CCP Fozzie, shield tanking is the root of the problem here.
Myrmidon: this vessel is mainly fine, but it couldn’t hurt giving it a bit more drone bandwidth and bay to make it more of an improvement when compared to the Vexor.
Hurricane: counting CCP Fozzie’s adjustment to its fitting, the cruiser boost should reduce its over-the-top versatility, especially if battlecruisers slot layout is altered to 17 as mentioned above.
That’s the big lines for battlecruisers. As usual, your voice will be heard through feedback threads posted on the proper forum sub-section when the time is right. It is also worth noting that we will adjust ship mineral requirements as we continue with the rebalancing.
You sunk my battleship
Next on the ship rebalancing queue, battleships suffer the least from the current “tier” system, and most of them are fairly well balanced. However, some still require a little face lift, since we are one year into the future and we have the technology.
As usual, we would like to keep up with the ship line classification we have been using for frigate, destroyer and cruisers so far. This is not designed to arbitrarily pigeon-hole vessels into narrow roles, but to provide a basic line of operation for anyone to understand and follow through. The ship role and purpose on the battlefield will still greatly be influenced by the choice of modules, rigs and ammunitions you make.
First, let’s have a look at the disruption line, which only has one ship so far:
Scorpion: fine at the moment, it dies fast in fleet of course, but that’s what the ECM role brings to the hull anyway.
Then, we have attack battleships, where most of the changes will be:
Armageddon: this ship is performing well at the time being, and thus we have little reason to alter it.
Megathron: just like the Thorax on the cruiser level, the Megathron role will be changed slightly to make it less resilient, but more mobile so to make proper use of blasters. Think of it as a ship closer to the Typhoon in terms of speed and agility. Next to a Talos, it will be more durable, more flexible, but still cumbersome to have in small gangs.
Typhoon: this vessel is very good when you possess all skills on earth and beyond trained to 5 – for being a jack of all trades, it has nothing really going for it. That is why we would like to change its role to a missile platform. Next to the Raven, it would have less range, but more mobility for more close range in your face damage.
And finally, combat vessels. They share the same functions as explained for battlecruisers above, so without further delay:
Apocalypse: is behaving well at the moment, so there is little point in changing it.
Raven: the king of the hill lost its throne a while back. That’s mainly due to cruise missiles being terrible in most situations, and torpedoes not always being usable with a slow, cumbersome hull.
Dominix: still remains a popular ship. It is fairly good, except for the drone mechanics themselves, which are terribly outdated. While we are not certain when this can be tackled, it definitely has high priority on our to-do list.
Tempest: we are mostly fine with it at the moment, no major change planned.
Abbadon: a nice ship with fine purpose in fleets and large gangs.
Rokh: is also all good, very competitive with the Abbadon
Hyperion: the hull could be improved, but again most of the issues come from passive versus active tanking problems
Maelstorm: has a good role as well, no need for major changes
Again, mineral requirements are most likely to be tweaked as we go through the balancing process. Below you can see how all tech1 ships come together with the new tiericide overhaul.
(http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63522/1/2013shipbalancing.jpg)
(sorry about this, couldn't get a smaller version :s Open in new tab to see it properly - Kala)
I love it when a plan comes together
As announced at the beginning of the year, skill requirements will be modified when we are done overhauling tech1 battlecruisers and battleships. This consists of:
Breaking Destroyers and Battlecruisers skills into four racial versions with an identical training multiplier (thus making it four times harder to get all races trained)
Changing skill requirements for Racial Cruisers from Racial Frigates 4 to Racial Destroyers 4
Changing skill requirements for Racial Battleships from Racial Cruisers 4 to Racial Battlecruisers 4
Changing skill requirements for capital ships from Racial Battleships 5 to 4, but introducing or increasing other skills to keep the same overall training time requirements
We are doing this for two reasons:
Make ship progression more consistent over all sizes, instead of having a mix of racial and generic skills
Allowing for faster tech2 specialization, and slower multi-racial diversification. In EVE Online, while you as a new player will never catch up with the total amount of skill points a veteran has, you can still be on the same level by specializing. This is precisely what we want to promote here. For instance, currently one needs Amarr Cruiser and Battlecruisers 5 to fly an Absolution, after the change the same pilot will only need Amarr Battlecruisers 5 (on top of the other skill requirements).
Reimbursement details:
Let us repeat again: if you could fly it before, you will be able to do so after the change.
Technically it means if you are able to fly an Oracle by having Amarr Cruisers 3 and Battlecruisers 3, we will remove the Battlecruisers skill from your character and give you Amarr Battlecruisers at 3. If you had Battlecruisers at 3 and Caldari Cruisers 3 instead, you would not receive Amarr Battlecruisers but the Caldari Battlecruisers skill at 3 instead. The same principle work with the Destroyers skill.
With the way nested skill requirements work in EVE, it also means that you will still be able to fly an Apocalypse even if you don’t have the Amarr Battlecruiser skill trained at 4 after the change. It won’t matter as long as you have the Amarr Battleship skill at the proper level.
With this in mind, it becomes quite obvious to focus on training the Destroyers and Battlecruisers skills before the change to get the maximum return effect. We highly recommend you start doing so now.
Command and conquer
When we're finished with tech 1 hulls we are going to start looking into more advanced roles, starting with Command ships. They are seriously lacking at the moment for two reasons: first, regular tier 2 battlecruisers mostly fill the same combat role for less expensive operational costs, and second, tech 3 hulls are just plain better at gang link boosting.
Our goal is to make them appealing to fly as a whole, not something you keep inside a POS forcefield while watching your favorite TV show. For this reason, we want:
Tech 3 ships to be able to carry more gang links at once than Command Ships, but with less effect
Tech 3 ships to be able to carry some gang links while still maintaining some combat capability
Command Ships to carry fewer types of gang links than Tech 3, but with stronger effects (specialization over generalization) - if fitted with gang links, they have less combat capability than Tech3 hulls.
All Command Ships to have a combat role on the field on top of having the possibility to be fit for a pure fleet commanding platform.
What does that mean in practice? We are removing the distinction between “fleet” and “field” Command Ships. All of them will now have 3% bonuses to two Warfare Link fields and be able to fit three warfare link modules simultaneously (instead of 3 for fleet versions only). That also means that the previous fleet Command Ships will be rebalanced to fit combat roles. Want to use an Eos as a truly effective drone ship? You can. Or the Damnation as a sexy Khanid missile platform beast? Be our guest. All that matters is the specialization choices you make before undocking by deciding to fit gang links or not, not something forced to you from the arbitrary "field" versus "fleet" hull.
Tech 3 treatment will focus on making them more generalized. Their Warfare Link bonuses will be reduced from 5% to 2% effectiveness; however they will have bonuses to three racial Warfare Link fields while being able to fit three Warfare Link modules simultaneously.
As a side note, as we announced a while ago, we are not pleased by having Warfare Links work outside the battlefield zone, and will be investigating options to move them on grid. Command and Tech3 ships providing that much of an advantage should commit to an engagement instead of being safely parked inside a POS bubble.
Here is a picture summarizing the text below as a tl;dr version:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63522/1/Commandshipchanges2.jpg)
Well that’s pretty much it for now, remember this is just a vision for the beginning of 2013 and as such, not final. We have more balancing changes to be planned and released, so keep your eyes peeled for updates.
Hope that helped and many thanks for your time!
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Interesting... Still doesn't remove the redundancy of HACs vs BCs and Command Ships vs BSes (no clear role difference, except if gang linked), but looks more coherent.
Also, an attack ship is supposed to pack a lot more firepower with a papertank compared to a combat ship, correct ? Is this really the case with the current frigates and cruisers, just out of curiosity since I do not play anymore ?
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Interesting... Still doesn't remove the redundancy of HACs vs BCs and Command Ships vs BSes (no clear role difference, except if gang linked), but looks more coherent.
My thought is to lower the offensive capability of Warfare Link ships to be roughly equal to the Combat Cruisers/AHACs, but with more staying power (higher shields/armor).
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It'd have to be a serious bonus to HP, I think, to compensate for the sig radius difference.
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It'd have to be a serious bonus to HP, I think, to compensate for the sig radius difference.
In general, I would tie HP & sig radius together.
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Some more FW stuff here, and CCP are changing the minmatar/amarr warzone's geography: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2153966#post2153966
Hey everyone. I've got another FW update to our plan.
We've been getting a lot of feedback about problems with the geographical layout in the Amarr/Minmatar warzone. We spent some time discussing the options with players from both factions a few months ago, but we had not announced anything because we were not sure if we could fit it into our plan for the release.
While doing some triaging of the FW work to fit as much as possible into Retribution we realized that getting these geography changes in would have a good benefit to time ratio so we're putting it into the plan.
Our plan for the moment is to add three new jump gates to the warzone:
Kurniainen (Bleak Lands) to Isbrabata (Metropolis)
Siseide (Heimatar) to Eszur (Metropolis)
Gulmorogod (Heimatar) to Egmar (Metropolis)
Let us know what you think!
:Edit: Cearain and Marcel below had the excellent idea of posting the link to Dotlan's map of the warzone. I really should have included that with the post so I'm going to shamelessly steal the idea from them just in case people don't read down two posts.
(http://i.imgur.com/dfAq9.jpg) (Image courtesy of Dotlan and two minutes with MS Paint ;) )
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The new destroyers have also received their names:
Minmatar: Talwar
Amarr: Dragoon
Gallente: Algos
Caldari: Corax
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Hmm... I wonder what the "Retribution" bit signifies as far as storyline... Jamyl coming to give back the favor to the Minmies?
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I dunno, the whole design scheme of the expansion (art, fonts, colors) looks to me to be Gallente-centric.
Perhaps Caldari Prime is a bad place to spend vacation this winter.
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Dragoon?
There is horses on Amarr?
There is warhorses on Amarr?
o.O
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Why wouldn't there be?
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I see they have no plans to un-break Defensive farming in FW?
Guess I'd better find some NPC null to explore and pvp in till they fix that system when inevitably the Caldari and Amarr get pushed back to tier 1 by the farming community... No offence to the genuine players in MinMil and FedMil; but the current system means that at tier 4, your mission running farmers and afk plexers make so much LP there is no reason to do anything but - rendering any efforts to offensive plex (at greatly extended risk) useless.
I'm not usually one to bitter, but this is typical CCP 'something is broken, let's fix it without analysing the problem' thinking.
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Dragoon?
There is horses on Amarr?
There is warhorses on Amarr?
o.O
Do not forget the concept about the 'universal translator'. Essentially, everybody in New Eden does not speak English but everything gets translated into such so we (the players) can understand what is going on. The various ships real names are not 'Talwar', 'Dragoon', etc., but we see that name because it is the closest approximation the translator could make.
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^ Considering dragoons were derived from the French Army (obligatory LOLGALLENTE comment), it's likely it is just the Amarr equivalent of 'mounted cavalry'.
I dunno, the whole design scheme of the expansion (art, fonts, colors) looks to me to be Gallente-centric.
Perhaps Caldari Prime is a bad place to spend vacation this winter.
I hope so. Seeing that storyline develop would be great.
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I'm pretty sure that earth animals exist on some planets - after all, you can have in-game corp logos that feature lions, hawks and other recognizable animals. Cattle also exist, as does wheat. Whatever the original settlers could have conceivably imported from Earth to New Eden would probably have.
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Might just be me, but Dragoon seems out of synch with the religious naming conventions of the Amarr line.
Isn't Corax latin for Raven?
I also have this sinking feeling Retribution might also be a prelude to introduce incursions for the other outlaw factions. Farm all the pirates.
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I see they have no plans to un-break Defensive farming in FW?
Guess I'd better find some NPC null to explore and pvp in till they fix that system when inevitably the Caldari and Amarr get pushed back to tier 1 by the farming community... No offence to the genuine players in MinMil and FedMil; but the current system means that at tier 4, your mission running farmers and afk plexers make so much LP there is no reason to do anything but - rendering any efforts to offensive plex (at greatly extended risk) useless.
I'm not usually one to bitter, but this is typical CCP 'something is broken, let's fix it without analysing the problem' thinking.
Admittedly, this was exactly why GalMil fought so hard to cling onto a 60 system goal. There was a lot of plexing and plex fighting just after the surprise early patch, and a lot of interference with bunker-busting operations. Most people in GalMil realized how critical that week would be in shaping the warzone for months ahead.
And it was close. I think GalMil was pushed down to 61 systems - the very border of tier 4 - before things stabilized. But once they did, the incentive system shifted things in our favor and now GalMil is pushing 66 again.
(This includes Intaki, incidentally, despite the weaponized force of all of Damar's anger)
I took a break from EVE after that highly critical week, attending to miscellaneous RL stuff. While I wasn't surprised to see that the pendulum had started to swing in GalMil's favor upon my return, I was surprised at how much progress had been made. We'll see if the December 4 adjustments to NPC balance change things - but given how the current NPCs heavily favor the Caldari, I doubt that'll change the dynamic.
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A very excitable commentator shows off the new HUD changes as well as the vagabond's awesome new skin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kbFrKWHUehk
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And it was close. I think GalMil was pushed down to 61 systems - the very border of tier 4 - before things stabilized. But once they did, the incentive system shifted things in our favor and now GalMil is pushing 66 again.
The incentive system was always in the favor of the defensive side since that patch. Get LP for defensive plexing above 100%, no LP for offensive plexing above 100%. VP's were reduced down to a bit above 100% on all the systems. I know the amount of farmers and farming that has been done in our part of the warzone despite our efforts to keep them out and take them down.
But that's not to say that GalMil hasn't put a lot of effort into the last weeks, but that explains why the systems went from vulnerable to <100% within what, two days?
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A very excitable commentator shows off the new HUD changes as well as the vagabond's awesome new skin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kbFrKWHUehk
Nice.
They changed the hull/armor/shield layout since their early draft , which makes more sense now.
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But that's not to say that GalMil hasn't put a lot of effort into the last weeks, but that explains why the systems went from vulnerable to <100% within what, two days?
Under the new system, it actually doesn't take long at all to bring a system out of vulnerable state. Even though those systems had been farmed for weeks, the surprise patch also reduced the VP total of all vulnerable systems. In short, they weren't heavily vulnerable after the surprise patch and could be brought into 'contested' territory with just a couple hours effort by one pilot. Faster with multiple.
That's why you saw a mad dash to bring a lot of systems out of vulnerable state, while others worked to stymie bunker-busting efforts.
It actually took a few days for the farmers to mobilize. Farmers tend to be bandwagonners, not pioneers. I'm sure a fair number were waiting to see which side would be the most profitable. (Which isn't to say that the legacy of offensive plex farming didn't leave a lot of GalMil players with 'farmer alts' that they could put to the task right away.)
It also took us a fair amount of time for us to really mobilize organized defensive plexing efforts and get to that point. There was truly a window in which CalMil could have swept most of the war front if they had pushed harder on the bunker busting.
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Sound Check :)
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73569
Introducing Team Klang
Hey there, we are team Klang, the sound team for EVE. We‘d like to tell you about what developments are happening on the sound front. Sound, is currently being worked on by three people, CCP Baldur, CCP WhiteNoiseTrash and CCP RealX who alongside his composing and sound engineering skillz is developing some l33t c0ding skillz and putting them to use. Being able to do audio programming within the team has allowed us to do more than before, much faster, and is opening up a number of possibilities down the road.
In this release we are working on a few things:
Completely revamped turret sounds
Last year we upgraded the turret graphics and as part of our effort to continually iterate and improve on the audiovisual experience, this release we are revamping all of the turret sounds. Not only are we changing the individual sounds, but we are also authoring them differently, so they sound better when far away. Previously, there was just one sound file representing a turret being discharged that was filtered depending on your distance. This time we have authored the close up sound and far away sound separately, crafting the sound signature of a faraway sound much better than previously with simple filters. When revamping the sounds, we strived to better capture the scale of these enormous machines of destruction and take the EVE soundscape more like naval combat and less like dogfighting or light weapon engagements.
Placing all of the 69 songs currently in EVE on Soundcloud
We have taken all of the current songs in EVE and placed them on Soundcloud, for you to listen to at your leasure, whether you are playing the game or not:
http://soundcloud.com/ccpgames/sets/eve-online-in-game-tracks/
Most music is available in one way or another online today, and we feel that the music of EVE deserves to be heard! What this means as well, is that you will still be able to create your own playlists and order music in the sequence you want it to be heard, because the ingame jukebox is going away...
Removing the jukebox and playing music based on where you are
This is probably the most controversial thing we are planning for this release. As part of building a cohesive experience, marrying graphics, design and sound, we want the music to play in context of where you are and what you are doing. This means separate playlists for hisec, losec and zerosec. Hisec will contain the more bright and jovial tracks for the eve soundtrack, while losec will contain the more darker tracks from the existing playlist. Zerosec and W-space will be darker and more ominous. We‘ve created new, highly atmospheric musical soundscapes (for this we invented a whole new paradigm – the so called „muscape“ J) for zerosec, that‘s partially procedurally done, with 20 base tracks that have around 500 permutations to them. Those new tracks will change and become even darker and more moody in systems that have seen a number of players ships destroyed in the last 24 hours.
Remember that this is just the first step in an ongoing development of this system. Further iterations may include radical changes – we just want to do this one step at a time.
„If thy jukebox offends thee, hack it off“
For this to work, we will be removing the current jukebox, which allows you to re-order your playlist and import mp3 files to play. To put things in perspective, the jukebox was put into the game early in development back in 2001 when mp3 players were considered very hip and all the cool kids had a slickly custom-skinned Winamp installed to play the latest Nickelback songs downloaded from Napster or hax0r ftp sites. Those days are gone, all proper PCs have media players as part of their base OS install, and the trend is moving towards listening to streaming music on the internet rather than locally stored mp3 files. Plus Nickelback have less of a mainstream following.
Maintaining an mp3 player inside EVE, while there are much better media players out there doesn‘t make much sense to us. Keep in mind that all code in EVE needs to be maintained. UIs are upgraded, codecs need upgrading, code is refactored, defects need to be resolved. By removing redundant pieces of code from our codebase, we free up engineering time to maintain, iterate and develop other features which are more important and core to the spaceship game EVE. As we move forward with EVE development, iterating and adding features, we have to be ready to cut off dead branches and prune our garden so to speak.
By placing the music on Soundcloud, we are providing those that still want to customize their own playlists with the existing EVE soundtrack the ability to do so. We opted for that route rather than maintaining two systems, both the new system and the jukebox, as that is an extra development effort, again, taking away resources from more important things. Like always, your feedback is important to us. Let us know if you agree or disagree with this move. Remember though, by removing extraneous functionality, we have more time to work on other things.
Soft soundscape when entering the ingame map
A small change we added is a mild „infographic“ soundscape that you hear when entering the ingame map. It‘s a minor change, subliminally made to improve your experience.
Sound when you finish a skill or a mission
Who doesn‘t like hearing a gratifying sound after having done something really hard. Like training a skill or finishing a mission. Ok perhaps not that hard, but still, it‘s an event worthy of a signal to get that sense of accomplishment. Now a short sound will play after your skill training completed notification, and a new sound will also play when you finish a mission.
Ship sounds when ship is idle
Sometimes when music is off, and you are not really close to anything, stopping your ship results in an akward silence. We‘ve added new ship sounds, based on ship class and race, that can be heard humming gently in the background when your ship is perfectly stationary. It‘s thought of kind of like when you are completely silent in the darkest night and you hear the blood rushing through your veins and noises from your brain signals. Perhaps you don‘t. We just hear voices that whisper terrible things. Anyway, your ship now makes a sound when idle and we think it‘s pretty cool.
Stargate sounds
One of the things that came out of the roundtable sound had at the last EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik, was that stargate sounds become quite monotonous when you do a lot of travel. We went and created X variations, so that when you do that 70 jump route, there are mild differences in the sound and flavor of each jump, making those hauler runs a little more bearable.
Capacitor warning
Very often people forget to turn off the shield repairer or something else that really sucks up precious capacitor power, and when it reaches 0% it may be too late to do whatever is needed to survive. Now, when the capacitor reaches 30% you will hear a UI warning sound, allowing you to take the necessary precautions before it‘s too late.
Planet sounds
We felt that the planets should really be heard when warping up to them and so made the planet sounds that can be experienced in Planetary Interaction mode audible just by warping up to them.
The playing experience
We realize that we now have much more sound going on at all times and the main reason is to try and make the whole experience of playing Eve a greater one. To sum it up we have added or remade a number of things for the atmo of the game:
New music system
New ship atmo sounds
New turret sounds resulting in a much greater naval battle experience
Made the planet sounds more audible
We also realize that some may feel this is too much - that having complete silence is a good thing and all that: needless to say, we welcome any comments.
That‘s it for now
We hope you like the new improvements to sound coming in Retribution, and that you will enjoy listening to your weapons discharge plasma into your enemies under the sinister new soundtrack as you collect bounties of people that simply deserve to have their ships blown up.
CCP t0rfifrans
I love that they're all on soundcloud. Listening to Below the Asteroids and Nouvelle Rouvenor Hero are some of my best memories of my very early days in eve.
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They left out the techno/rock stuff from deadspace combat/missions. :|
All my rage. (Not really, but still, those are some of the best songs in the game imo.)
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Morwen, you must soundcloud your boom-bassing of the old tunes for deadspace until they are re-implemented, for our auditory pleasure.
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I have some of those stored locally (and I imagine a great many others will as well), so they'll probably show up on the interwebz again as well. If not, I'll be happy to pass off my copies to community members.
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Ah, contextual music and sounds, at last. Jukeboxes are anti immersive. And as they say, you can still shut down the ingame music and use your own player in the background.
The new attention around the sound is very, very nice to hear.
Also now I remember it, I find it a little too bad they did not add a way for logi pilots to see the capacitor level of their buddies in their new interface, because it could really remove us what is usually a pain in the ass.
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Morwen, you must soundcloud your boom-bassing of the old tunes for deadspace until they are re-implemented, for our auditory pleasure.
I think they're already on soundcloud, but they're definitely on youtube (some links below) and many are available through Grooveshark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKjxOX0SEKY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLFpRJsCti4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6rxWVvYT7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_wzR8qEWp8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3zohj9NKXE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyGHOop8ut0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_95zdLlBSE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xY8ygvV6Z4
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My favorite EVE track is still the Red Glowing Dust Remix (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtgjQ5Aj5Yc) that was part of an EVE soundtrack package I pulled off eve-files.
Number two is most certainly Gallente 4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad-EaT-3nDk), so I too hope one day all tracks will be on Sound Cloud.
Anyhow, expanding the sound in EVE is a great move. Still, I need some new gameplay to draw me back.
EDIT: Now I mentioned number one and two, I guess I should say, that number three is Seven Clans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw9JYas_ukA). You can hear the Rifters roam.
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Double post
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Personally, I like to listen to Homeworld 2 music when roaming. Tasty mix of what could be Minmatar/Amarr fusion folk music. You can tell by the heart-wrenching sorrow in the vocals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6JZhaNWA9s&feature=relmfu (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6JZhaNWA9s&feature=relmfu)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btXnl7AGFg0&feature=relmfu (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btXnl7AGFg0&feature=relmfu)
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Few more dev blogs for you lovely folks: WARNING = Loooooong post
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73535
stay on target - ui features set for retribution
reported by CCp Sisyphus | 2012.11.14 13:34:07 | NEW | Comments
*For optimal results read the following message in an Australian accent*
The following Australian glossary may be required: http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html
G’day mates, I'm CCP Sisyphus from Team Pony Express, here to give an update on what you should expect from this team in Retribution.
Our goal this year has been to give you a better understanding of the battlefield so you spend more time doing your thing and less time trying to work out what the bloody hell is happening. We’ve made a lot of progress on this front, however that progress accompanied the realization that we had Kangaroos loose in the top paddock not every new feature was meeting our goals.
Your feedback has helped us come to this conclusion and we’ve been scrambling to sort it all out. This means we've made a few changes; The new design for targets which we showed on Duality solved some problems but introduced others. For this reason targets and brackets are now getting a familiar layered look, just like your own HUD.
This is also tied in with the damage indicators that we've been working on. We tested a version on Duality which roughly indicated the severity of hits but your feedback indicated this was as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike of nominal usefulness. Since then we have changed the design so that a HUD indication shows "who has the highest DPS on me". It makes determining who is really hurting you much easier, however it stood out like a dog’s balls looks very different from other UI elements so we’re still working to ensure that this has a true look and feel of EVE. So you dont need to fossick through the forums, I'll have a skite on tell you about what we're releasing in Retribution:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63528/1/retri.jpg)
New Camera Mode that will keep both you and your selected item on screen. Don’t like manually panning around space trying to locate where your dastardly foe is? Want to quickly work out what’s the nearest point out there to align your sluggish freighter to? Then this mode is for you.
Restyled Targets and Brackets that contain more detail but are recognizable because now they look like your HUD
In-Space DPS indicator so you can see which bastard is giving you a bloody nose
New Damage Notification stream. Now you can see multiple damage notifications simultaneously and move the messages around to wherever you feel they look best. Warning and General notification messages (white text on TQ today) are now displayed in a separate area and they are movable as well!
When you mouse over an active module you see a hairline link to it's target, and the weapon on the target lights up. Bonzer!
Corporation Finder UI upgrades to make searching for corporations easier, as well as matching Corporation advertising upgrades to help you better communicate to potential recruits what your corporation is all about.
Corporation application management improvements to help you keep track of which corps you have applied to, and who has applied to your corporation and who has let them in.
Heaps more Info on Module Tooltips!
Resistance types on hardeners. Once you get your mitts on these goodies we’re sure you’ll be grinning like a shot fox!
Hooroo for now!
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73572
There are a large number of links in this dev blog, so for the easiest reading you may want to click the original link. Either way:
fifty-nine down...
reported by CCP Fozzie | 2012.11.14 15:35:21 | NEW | Comments
Hello gentleplayers. CCP Fozzie here with a new Dev Blog for your personal enjoyment.
We’re getting close to the December 4th release of Retribution, our 18th free expansion to EVE Online. Retribution includes big changes to our Bounty Hunting system, Crimewatch, Factional Warfare and much more, but the area I’m most excited about is the massive collection of balance changes we’re preparing for you all.
This expansion is where you’re seeing the balance team here at CCP really hitting our stride, and I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished in the past couple months. We’re releasing 40 new or rebalanced ships in Retribution as well as bringing adjustments to many modules including missile launchers, electronic warfare, and the infamous ancillary shield boosters. Every time EVE’s balance changes it creates new opportunities for clever players to demonstrate their creativity and separate themselves from the pack. We know that our customers are amazingly creative with ship fittings and tactics and that if we give them a new set of tools they’ll do things better than we could have imagined with them.
Our plan for the Tiericide Initiative has always been to remove the old tiers systems that enforced inferiority for a huge portion of the ships in EVE, and replace it with a series of ship lines that stretch through multiple hull sizes. These lines are intended to just be a guideline for pilots so they can get a basic idea of what to expect from each ship as they advance and so that they can identify other ships to try once they have identified an aspect of the game they enjoy. The beauty of EVE is that once players get their hands on a ship they can use the infinite combinations of modules and tactics to stake out their own individual playstyle. CCP Ytterbium has covered the idea behind Tiericide in some of his previous blogs, and I’ll borrow this (now finally complete) image from him showing how the lines interact with the ships that will be rebalanced by Retribution:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63563/1/Wintershipbalancing.jpg)
(yes, it's massive. Open in new tab for a better view) - Kala
We have also received many questions about whether this or that ship will get rebalanced. I can promise you that Retribution is only the beginning of our balancing work and you can expect more and more changes as we go forward. CCP Ytterbium recently posted a blog providing a taste of what we’re working on directly after Retribution, and for anyone wondering if we’re going to fix your favorite ship I have produced a simple flow chart that covers the issue comprehensively:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63563/1/Flowchart.jpg)
This dev blog is going to summarize the changes we have ready for Retribution in one place, so if you’ve been keeping up with each and every sticky in the Features and Ideas forum there won’t be much here to surprise you. For those people who have been journeying with us every step of the way so far I want to say thank you for your dedication and for all the great feedback you’ve given us. For everyone who hasn’t been watching dev posts every day, this blog will serve as your one stop shop for every major ship and module balance change in Retribution. Each section includes a link to the forum threads going over the changes in more detail.
Frigates
Combat Frigates
Disruption Frigates
Support Frigates
Exploration Frigates
Mining Frigate
Destroyers
Existing Destroyers
New Destroyers
Cruisers
Combat Cruisers
Attack Cruisers
Disruption Cruisers
Support Cruisers
Weapons
Missiles
Turrets
Modules
Remote Reps
Inferno Modules
Drone Modules
Frigates
We started the Frigate rebalancing back in Inferno with some of the Combat Frigates, and continued the work in Inferno 1.2 with the Attack Frigates and Rookie Frigates. These changes have been very well received and are providing affordable and fun tools for both new and old players. In Retribution we are completing the Tiericide of the Frigate class, rebalancing the remaining 15 frigates and adding one new ship in the ‘Venture’ Mining Frigate.
Combat Frigates
The Combat Frigates are the frontline brawlers of the frigate world. Capable of both taking and dishing out beatings, they are versatile and powerful in the hands of a skilled pilot. Combat Frigates are some of the most cost-effective solo PVP ships in the game, and are especially well suited to take advantage of the frigate-only complexes in Factional Warfare contested space.
The Kestrel will continue to be the premiere missile platform at the T1 Frigate level. With the old kinetic damage bonus replaced by a bonus to missile damage of all four types, and a missile velocity bonus added as well, the Kestrel will be capable of surprising its enemies with rapid long range missile fire. Tactically minded pilots can pick the correct damage type to exploit their target’s weaknesses.
The Tristan is receiving a new role as a dedicated frigate level drone boat. The first ever T1 frigate to be able to field a full flight of 5 light drones, and enjoying bonuses to Tracking Speed of both drones and Hybrid Turrets, the Tristan should be perfect for both new pilots interested in starting to use drones as well as older pilots looking for an alternative to the Ishkur.
The Breacher will be taking the Minmatar shield boost bonus that has been so popular on the Cyclone and Maelstrom and fitting it onto a small and mobile package. Combining a missile damage bonus with a respectable dronebay for offense and taking advantage of the strong active shield tanking bonus for defense, the Breacher should be a very exciting ship to fly.
Disruption Frigates
The Disruption Frigates are built to support their allies and weaken their enemies through electronic warfare. These ships are most ideally suited to group play and offer an excellent way for new players to contribute to their corporation in PVP.
The Crucifier is the entry level Tracking Disruption ship, designed to reduce the effectiveness of enemy turret weapons in order to protect itself and its allies. It is getting an upgrade to its Tracking Disruptor bonuses in Retribution, receiving a larger effectiveness boost and a big range boost in order to enable disrupting from extreme distances. It is also getting an extra midslot and a significantly larger dronebay so that it can deal its share of damage as well.
The Griffin is the classic affordable electronic warfare ship, capable of breaking the target locks of enemy ships through bonused ECM. Since it is working so well already we are not changing the bonuses of this ship in Retribution, although it is getting an upgrade in the form of a much stronger slot layout.
The Maulus is being tweaked to better take advantage of Remote Sensor Dampeners through a better slot layout, big upgrades to speed and agility and a bonus to RSD cap use for longer fights. It also benefits from the general buffs that the Damp modules are receiving in Retribution as well as a conversion from Hybrid to Drone damage dealing.
The Vigil is being refocused on its core role of Target Painting (TP) support by building the old speed bonus into the hull and giving it a bonus to TP optimal range, making it the longest range Target Painting platform in the game, and a key part of large fleets that need help tracking their targets.
Support Frigates
The Support Frigate class is all-new in Retribution. Remote repairing is a huge part of EVE’s fleet combat, but until now there has not been an effective repping ship that was cheaper or easier to skill into than the extremely powerful Logistics Ships. To help with this problem we are introducing a new line of Support ships at the T1 frigate and T1 cruiser levels to provide new options for people wanting to keep their allies alive. The Support Frigates are easy to train for and agile enough to keep up with a frigate roam. They can also enter even the smallest Factional Warfare complexes. To work alongside the ship hulls we have also rebalanced the fitting requirements of the small remote armor and shield repairer modules. We’re very excited to see how all of you take advantage of these new roles.
The Inquisitor and Navitas are armor repairing Support Frigates. The Inquisitor is a little more durable while the Navitas is a little faster, but both make excellent additions to any armor tanking frigate fleet.
The Bantam and Burst are the shield tanking equivalents, gaining bonuses to range and cap use of Shield Transporters. Like their larger racial counterparts, the Bantam is slower and tougher while the Burst is ideal for tasks where speed and agility are key.
Exploration Frigates
The Exploration Frigates are getting an expansion of their role beyond their aptitude for scan probing. They are still the ideal ship for the budding prober with improved bonuses to scan probe strength, but now they also have bonuses to the core mini-professions of Hacking, Archeology and Salvaging as well as boasting stronger combat ability through ample dronebays.
The Magnate, Heron, Imicus and Probe are all excellent exploration ships taking advantage of their probe strength and mini-profession bonuses. They are built to be able to embark on long expeditions of discovery using large cargo holds and ammoless drones to reduce the need for resupply. All four ships have similar bonuses, allowing each explorer to choose the ships based on their unique slot layouts or nationalistic preferences instead of being forced to pigeonhole themselves into a different ship for each task.
Mining Frigate
With the conversion of the old mining frigates into Support Frigates there was an opening for a completely new Mining Frigate from the ORE corporation, to provide both an effective ninja-mining platform and a stepping stone into ORE’s selection of Mining Barges (rebalanced in Inferno 1.2).
The Venture is the first dedicated Mining Frigate released by the ORE corporation. It boasts strong capabilities for mining both asteroids and stellar gas clouds, and can enter and leave hostile territory effectively thanks to exceptional agility and a class leading +2 warp core strength bonus that allows it to escape some forms of tackle.
Destroyers
Existing Destroyers
Our current crop of Destroyers were in a fairly good place after their last rebalance in the Crucible expansion, so we gave them a less invasive set of tweaks than most other classes. Fitting within the Attack role, Destroyers are intended to be deadly hunters of Frigates that hit harder than their opponents would expect, and the changes made to these ships reflect the desire to make them all useful for that purpose.
The Coercer is a supremely effective laser platform with both tracking and optimal range bonuses, but it was afflicted with only one mid. We’re moving a low to a mid, so you can choose to fit a point or keep the dedicated DPS role by fitting a tracking computer. The Coercer also benefits significantly from a reduction in small laser fitting requirements.
The Cormorant is another destroyer limited by slot layouts, in this case a single low. So we’ve moved a mid to a low in order to give more damage options, while giving Caldari another 4 midslot destroyer for all those people who loved the specialized options 4 mids provided.
The Catalyst has extreme DPS but had trouble applying that damage. We’ve helped it along by significantly reducing mass for close range blaster fits and trading the one drone for extra powergrid that can be used for a more effective railgun option.
The Thrasher has been the gold standard for Destroyers and was fitting its role very well, so we left it largely untouched.
New Destroyers
In Retribution we saw an opportunity to release some new ships into the previously very small Destroyer class. Destroyers are extremely popular ships that players of many stripes have been enjoying but with only one Destroyer per race the options were very limited. Retribution brings four completely new Destroyers that use the other main weapon system for each race.
The Dragoon is a drone-based Destroyer for the Amarr empire. Splitting bonuses between drones and a range bonus to energy vampires and neutralizers makes the Dragoon an exceptionally deadly opponent to frigates that stray within 12km.
The Corax is the long-awaited Caldari missile Destroyer. With bonuses to kinetic missile damage and missile explosion velocity plus a role bonus to missile velocity the Corax can hit at long range while also fielding a stronger tank than most Destroyers.
The Algos is the new drone Destroyer for the Gallente. Combining a class-leading 35mbit of drone bandwidth with bonuses to drone damage/hitpoints and drone speed makes the Algos deadly at flexible ranges. A hybrid weapon tracking bonus fits perfectly with small railguns to add extra ranged damage to the Algos’ column.
The Talwar is a high speed missile Destroyer for the Minmatar Republic. It combines a missile explosive damage bonus, missile velocity role bonus, and a MWD signature radius bonus to create a ship that is relatively survivable while zipping around the battlefield.
Cruisers
Combat Cruisers
Like their frigate counterparts, the Combat Cruisers have a solid balance of offense and defense. They are slower and heavier than the Attack Cruisers but are able to field a much stronger tank at respectable speeds.
The Maller is being redeemed from its previous life as a bait ship. Swapping its old Laser cap use bonus for a Laser damage bonus and keeping the iconic armor resistance bonus means that it fills the role of a smaller Abaddon. With increased fittings and the reduction in medium energy weapon powergrid use, the Maller can now fit a solid tank alongside powerful lasers for a ship that especially excels in group warfare.
The Moa has never really worked as a sniping ship so it is getting the same treatment we gave the Merlin in its much celebrated Inferno revamp. We are replacing the hybrid weapon optimal range bonus with a hybrid weapon damage bonus, which combined with the existing shield resistance bonus and the movement of a highslot to a midslot will make for a powerful brawler.
The Vexor is being updated to better take advantage of its existing bonuses to hybrid weapon damage and drone damage/hitpoints via an extra midslot and improved speed. Combined with the relatively low mass of the Vexor hull this makes a ship that can deal incredible damage very effectively.
The Rupture has been on top of the cruiser heap for quite some time, and is receiving milder changes than most others. Moving a highslot to a mid provides more opportunity for either shield tanking or extra electronic warfare, and the reduction in artillery powergrid requirements should allow more long range options
Attack Cruisers
The Attack Cruisers are the fastest and most aggressive of the fighting cruisers. They are all built to take advantage of their speed, either by keeping range from their opponent and peppering it with long range damage or by charging into battle to deal excellent damage at close range.
The Omen has been a poster child for bad Cruisers until Retribution. It’s being rebuilt as an effective fast attack ship with the speed and fittings to take advantage of its laser bonuses and a significantly increased drone bay for added damage. The Omen also benefits greatly from the fitting reductions to medium lasers.
The Caracal also suffered from weak fittings and low speed, and has been given the speed needed to take advantage of the missile velocity bonus that gives it such excellent range. Switching the damage bonus from Kinetic-only to a damage type independent rate of fire bonus also gives Caracal pilots more options when choosing how to exploit the weaknesses of their enemies.
The Thorax is the classic blasterboat, built for ultra-closerange brawling with ample drone support. It is being improved with a sizable speed increase, an extra midslot and the addition of a hybrid weapon tracking bonus. The Thorax can close range faster than ever before and once it gets within its optimal few comparable ships can stand against it.
The Stabber is the quintessential Attack Cruiser with a huge speed advantage over other Cruisers. We are keeping its speed intact and adding a projectile weapon falloff bonus to extend its skirmish range.
Disruption Cruisers
The Disruption Cruisers are built for electronic warfare support and are split roughly into two categories, the hybrid disruption/combat Arbitrator and Bellicose, and the range-bonused fleet ewar ships in the Blackbird and Celestis.
The Arbitrator already had an effective role as a hybrid of a Tracking Disruptor bonused electronic warfare cruiser and drone combat cruiser. We improved it via an extra low slot, stronger TD bonus and the ability to choose between turrets or launchers for added damage.
The Blackbird was already extremely effective in its force multiplier role so we left it mostly intact an extra lowslot adds flexibility and an increased ECM range bonus helps counteract the ECM range nerf also released in Retribution.
The Celestis suffered from both a lack of focus and the weakness of Sensor Dampeners. We’ve replaced the former hybrid damage bonus with Damp range bonus and extra drone damage and the Celestis also benefits greatly from the Damp buff in Retribution.
The Bellicose is getting the most significant changes of the Disruption Cruisers. It will receive a new bonus to missile rate of fire which combined with the significant dronebay and increased target painting bonus make the Bellicose an excellent ship for any roaming gang.
Support Cruisers
Another very exciting set of Retribution changes can be found in the Support Cruisers. These ships are currently attempting to straddle the roles of mining cruiser and support ship and generally failing at both. We’re refocusing these ships as pure support vessels that can work alongside their more expensive Logistics Ship brothers. A guiding principle in the design of the Support Cruisers is that they should be able to fit into a fleet that has a mix of T1 and T2 support vessels. When a newer player shows up to a fleet in one of these ships we expect that the FC will welcome their help rather than scorning their youth. All of these ships also benefit from the reductions in fitting requirements for medium remote reps.
The Augoror and Osprey mirror the Guardian and Basilisk in splitting their bonuses between remote repair and energy transfers so that they can set up stable cap chains amongst themselves.
The Exequror and Scythe mirror the Oneiros and Scimitar as pure repping platforms that combine excellent mobility with decent dronebays.
Weapons
Turrets
There are a number of changes to turret weapon fittings we are making in Retribution to go alongside the ship changes.
All Small Focused Pulse and Beam Lasers (formerly known as Medium Pulse and Medium Beam lasers): -1 PWG and -1 CPU required
All Focused Medium Pulse Lasers: -5% PWG required
All Heavy Pulse Lasers: -10% PWG required
All Cruiser Sized Beam Lasers: -10% PWG required
All Cruiser Sized Artillery Cannons: -10% PWG required
Alongside the change to Artillery Cannons we are removing 225 PWG from the Hurricane Battlecruiser
Missiles
Missiles are getting sizable rebalance in Retribution, bringing Heavy Missiles in line with other weapons while also removing the ship penalties from all T2 missile ammo, buffing Torpedoes, Heavy Assault Missiles, Rockets and Light Missiles, and increasing Heavy Missile velocity so that more of your missiles hit.
All missile skills, rigs and implants will now affect all subcapital missiles across the board.
Modules
Remote Repair Modules
In conjunction with the newly created Support Frigate and Support Cruiser roles, we are reducing the fitting requirements on all small and medium remote reps, as well as speeding up the cycle time of small remote reps so that Support Frigates can apply their reps more quickly in the fast paced world of frigate combat.
Inferno Modules
CCP Soniclover and Team Superfriends are doing another balance pass on the special modules they introduced in Inferno, as well as adding a new module and new drone: the Micro Jump Drive and Salvage Drone!
The Salvage Drone is a 5m3 small drone that can be set to automatically salvage legal wrecks in the vicinity so you can go about your business undisturbed. The classy drone for the distinguished mission runner.
The Micro Jump Drive is a new propulsion module that allows a ship to teleport forward 100km. This module can be used in bubbles or while disrupted but not while warp scrambled, basically following the same rules as the existing Microwarpdrive. The MJD also has a spool up time and cooldown that must be waited between uses.
The powerful Ancillary Shield Booster revolutionized small gang combat when it was released with Inferno, and dominated the 10th Alliance Tournament. It is receiving a slight reduction on effectiveness with Retribution, consisting of a smaller capacity to hold fewer cap boosters, increased cap need when running without boosters, and an increase in duration for the X-large variant.
The Reactive Armor Hardener will now react twice as quickly to incoming damage as well as costing less cap to activate as the Armor Resistance Phasing skill is trained higher.
Finally the Target Spectrum Breaker is receiving an overhaul with reduced duration and a less severe scan resolution penalty.
Drone Modules
The Drone Damage Amplifier that was released in Inferno is being improved to give a larger bonus to drone damage and to use less CPU for the T2 version.
Team Five-0 is also introducing a new series of officer drone modules that can be stolen from elusive Rogue Drone Officer Units.
Thanks for sticking with us through this giant list of balance changes for the Retribution expansion. I’m very excited to see how these newly balanced ships and modules get used by all of you.
If you want to try out all these changes right now, they are live on our Buckingham public test server for your enjoyment. To help get you in the mood for new awesome Cruisers we will also be holding a special Devs vs Players brawl on Buckingham this Thursday the 15th of November (my birthday!) starting at 16:00 EVE time. Our last Devs vs. Players event focused on frigates and was a smashing success and we expect this will be no different.
Thanks again and look for the biggest ever set of EVE balance changes coming to your computers on December 4th with the free Retribution expansion!
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So much Amarr love.
SO MUCH *explodes*
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Just in time for 2v2 Cruiser tournament!
Swoon!
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Hmm, so I imagine it will become a case of every fleet ever having logi now, instead of just moderate sized gangs that ran the T2 cruisers.
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Hmm, so I imagine it will become a case of every fleet ever having logi now, instead of just moderate sized gangs that ran the T2 cruisers.
That's crap. While Logi's improve the skill element of PvP, they a tool that enhances risk-aversion. I'm willing to trade my ship for a kill in a 2vs1. 2 vs 1 with one logi on the other side: forget it.
We want more ships to pop, not less...
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Hmm, so I imagine it will become a case of every fleet ever having logi now, instead of just moderate sized gangs that ran the T2 cruisers.
That's crap. While Logi's improve the skill element of PvP, they a tool that enhances risk-aversion. I'm willing to trade my ship for a kill in a 2vs1. 2 vs 1 with one logi on the other side: forget it.
We want more ships to pop, not less...
Is that a disagreement with my assumption or a statement of discontent that it may turn out that way?
The more I look at it the more I see new players being extremely valuable in cheap disposable logi and tacklers, with ewar and actual combat next...
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Hmm, so I imagine it will become a case of every fleet ever having logi now, instead of just moderate sized gangs that ran the T2 cruisers.
Pretty much. The EVE metagame changes all the time. The current FOTM with high-speed low-risk fleets running around with no regard for melee brawl options annoy and frustrate me, not for a lack of being able to take part in/counter them myself, but rather a favor towards lower-speed, in-your-face all-in melee combat ala Blasters, assault missiles, pulse lasers, drones, as opposed to run-around sniping/kiting in long-range weapons with tackle thrown into the mix.
Having said that the new meta might not be worse, it it might not be much better.
Also, we finally arrived at the holy trinity of tank/gank/support all other games see with regards to always bringing a healer with you to mitigate damage. The newer, cheaper logi support means mid to large sized gang are effectively forced to bring along a few logi cruisers to compensate.
The irony is that I always told myself that if I returned to EVE to FC fleets, my T1 cruiser/BC fleets was to have cheap and disposable 'junk cruisers' like Exequrors and the like using T1 remote-repair. Now it seems the whole new meta revolves around that by the time I get back, if I ever do - except this time it will be a bonused, intended setup from CCP's design, and EVERYONE will do it, as opposed to it being any kind of original idea from my side. (using T1 disposable RR as opposed to T2 logis.)
Beyond that, I am more than happy to see all these overall positive changes. Maybe I'll get to fly more Vexors and Thoraxes now and be dangerous as opposed to using an underwhelming ship and fighting up-hill :D
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Primary the repper!
But in all seriousness, just how much RR capabilities will one of the T1 frigates or cruisers have? Will they cap out easiliy? Will they be able to fit tank along with their RR? These details might balance them.
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Right now I can field Ospreys that produce 25% the Shield Transfer capability of a "fleet Scimitar," sporting all T1 modules (no T2). It cost ~5% that of the fleet Scimitar.
How many Ospreys do you see being put in space today?
Merdaneth's concern may be true, the Support ship has to stay close its wingman, stay under its friend's guns so that it does not find itself isolated and dead. Same is true for a Disruption ship.
Those designing squadrons, wings, and fleets, should will continue to need to concern themselves with DPS and EHP, but how Support and Disruption ships impact DPS and EHP will be learned sooner and cheaper, increasing the number of FCs.
In BloodBird's vision (which I and others share to some degree), will hopefully come to pass.
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The more I look at it the more I see new players being extremely valuable in cheap disposable logi and tacklers, with ewar and actual combat next...
Actually, thats the way i see it, and given context, it means FCs will have a harder time to assess a combat scenario and decide to commit or not, with the outcome as wild and unexepected as it can be....
you could say that such a combination translates into more stuff being blown up....but at lower costs to everyone.
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Is that a disagreement with my assumption or a statement of discontent that it may turn out that way?
The more I look at it the more I see new players being extremely valuable in cheap disposable logi and tacklers, with ewar and actual combat next...
A statement of discontent.
Let's engage anyway, and see how many hostiles we can take down with us, is a practical and reasonable way to engage when undergunned vs. the opposition. If the opposition is flying logi's (in small gang warfare) then this is simply not an option. If you engage undergunned you normally won't stand a chance.
I have frequently seen small gangs (<10 pilots) flying with 4 logi's. Such gangs are generally un-engagable. Meaning, that to have a shot at destroying any of them, you need a fleet of such size or specific setup that the hostiles simply won't engage.
Logi's and remote repairs break small gang warfare. That is why CCP has draconic restrictions on such with the tournaments. If people were allowed to bring multiple logi's or RR on multiple ships, you either wouldn't see a lot of ships pop, or you would see battles where one side loses all and the other side none.
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And this is the general problem with EVE Online.
It's not the game itself - it keeps improving, month by month, year by year. It's the players. Risk-aversion is a sickness and everyone is affected in some way.
Keeping this in mind and finding new tactics for dealing with this and moving forwards is the only way to advance, until eventually you can advance no more.
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If it was up to me logistics would onbly serve after a fight, where you quietly go repair your ship in flames behind your lines, engaging docking clamps with the logis of your fleets or whatever, much like a trooper goes behind the frontlines when wounded to find a medic to heal its wounds, or just like a medics runs under enemy fire to go grab the uncapacitated soldier to get him back behind the lines and try to heal him. You don't usually see medics running all around, jizzing some magic goo at his friends to make them regenerate from bullets.
Of course, in the current state of eve, maybe only the biggest fleet battles (of hundred ships) could benefit from such mechanics, not small gang warfare, especially when you can repair in the station nearby.
Hmm, so I imagine it will become a case of every fleet ever having logi now, instead of just moderate sized gangs that ran the T2 cruisers.
Pretty much. The EVE metagame changes all the time. The current FOTM with high-speed low-risk fleets running around with no regard for melee brawl options annoy and frustrate me, not for a lack of being able to take part in/counter them myself, but rather a favor towards lower-speed, in-your-face all-in melee combat ala Blasters, assault missiles, pulse lasers, drones, as opposed to run-around sniping/kiting in long-range weapons with tackle thrown into the mix.
Yeah, I too have been annoyed by that state of things since I basically started playing eve. It has always been that since 2006 (or maybe before). Before the nanonerf it was lol nanotyphoons and nanovaga going above 5-10 km/s. After it has always been more or less about kiting ships (maybe less in big fleets yeah, but still).
I will be happy if this is going to get balanced a little. I don't want to see kiting dying either since it is a valuable part of pvp tactics as well as any, and that a lot of people probably enjoy it very much. But I want to see other tactics getting a little more value than currently.
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I have frequently seen small gangs (<10 pilots) flying with 4 logi's. Such gangs are generally un-engagable. Meaning, that to have a shot at destroying any of them, you need a fleet of such size or specific setup that the hostiles simply won't engage.
The worst part is probably the time it takes for such a gang to actually kill a target, especially if it has any Disruption ships along.
I keep thinking of your 2 vs 1 example, and it leads me to a simple question, would you engage a Blackbird-Osprey pair today?
They are unlikely to actually kill you and may not even pin you down, but your chances of actually killing them are close to nil.
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New Dev Blog :D Inventory things.
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73574
Inventory Improvements
reported by CCP Arrow | 2012.11.20 14:19:35 | NEW | Comments
Fellow capsuleers!
Team Game of Drones has been working hard on improvements to the Inventory system and we want to share with you the work we are delivering on December 4th when we release Retribution, the 18th expansion of EVE Online.
In the past few weeks we have taken all the improvements and changes to the Inventory which we have been working on and facilitated numerous User Testing sessions where both veteran and casual players tried them out on internal test servers. We focused on areas that players have directed us towards like POS management, Orca piloting, looting wrecks, corporate hangar management and day-to-day Inventory management.
These sessions have resulted in countless tweaks and iterations to our designs and implementations to the inventory that would have been hard to take on later in our development process. Seeing with our own eyes how players use the Inventory allows us to make better decisions than our assumptions and best intentions ever could. We believe these User Testing sessions are the way to go with future development work and would like to open them up to an even broader audience and do sessions at an even earlier prototype stage in the future. But we don't want to rush into anything and are carefully taking one step at a time in order to do things properly as we get more and more experience in hosting these sessions and using their results effectively.
Alright then, here are the things we have been working on and are going live on December 4th:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Persistence.jpg)
Persistence
We have put a great deal of effort into making Inventory windows persist when you expect them to. What this means is that now all different types of Inventory windows will have a unique state and retain that state independently from each other. This also applies to the states of all tabs within the Inventory window itself, such as the filter tab, index tree and content view modes. Item hangar and ship hangar will persist the way you left them when you undock from a station. This will apply to all stations globally.
Corporate hangars will persist the way you leave them per office. This means that if you use one office to manage a huge collection of blueprints, and set it up in a certain way, that setup will persist in that station only, and not in other offices where you keep things that don't need the same setup. Since your active ship stays with you between sessions (docking and undocking) it will stay open until you decide to close it.
We will not be displaying what inventory you are looking at in the header itself anymore. We moved that information to a breadcrumb, located above the content area which you can still see when collapsing the Index Tree. This ensures you always know what type of inventory window you originally opened, no matter what you ended up viewing later because the header will always stay the same.
The breadcrumb trail in the inventory window will also support navigating back to parent locations by clicking the breadcrumbs. This can be handy when you have the index tree collapsed. It will however not work in all cases when you have opened certain locations in new windows where the index tree has been isolated.
Persisting the text filter
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_FilterInputField.png)
For those that want to be able to type in a search word in the filter input and have it persist when navigating from one tab in the index tree to another, you now have a settings option ‘Keep filter value between inventories’. This will not be turned on by default, so the input field will clear itself when navigating between inventories, as it currently does, unless you change the setting.
Performance
Performance has been a thorn in both your and our sides since the Unified Inventory shipped with Inferno. As a result of the impact this has had, we have made a concerted effort to tackle and address as many of the performance issues as possible. We reached out on Twitter, on the EVE Forums and spoke to players both in the CCP office and in-game. This gave us some great starting points, and we managed to identify a number of high pain areas which we are proud to announce we have either fixed already or are going to fix for the Retribution release.
Issues we have found and fixed to date:
High chance of a severe performance hit when assembling a number of ships or containers in quick succession.
Index tree refreshing across multiple clients was causing both slowdown and in severe cases lockups. This was affecting both players at POS and in busy stations, as we were refreshing the index tree across clients when people were updating a shared or potentially shared inventory location (such as a Corporate Hangar Array or Corporate Hangars in station).
With a high number of folders in the index tree the Inventory was taking a long time to load (in some cases a minute or more), we have addressed this by only loading the contents of those folders you are actually looking at, which makes sense!
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_PerformanceChart3.png)
Things that were identified and we are going to fix:
Bookmarks! We have some old legacy throttling on locations which was causing each bookmark to cause a delay of 1 second. If you consider a case with more than 100 bookmarks in a container you can figure out that this was not good. We are looking to get this resolved in a much less painful manner without killing the server.
Plastic wraps were also one of the culprits for the Inventory taking a very long time to load when opening. This was due to the way they were constructed in the tree, loading their contents before you even looked inside. Again, we have top men working on this. TOP MEN!
Finally, the expanding and collapsing of the index tree itself, which for large inventory locations was causing performance spikes. We will aim to get this resolved for Retribution too.
In addition to the above, we have worked hard on just making the Inventory snappier and happier to work with, especially how the client handles communication with the Server. We’d like to thank all the people who took the time to make YouTube videos, describe in detail their problem or otherwise help us track down these issues, and we hope you can forgive us for this taking as long as it did. We will continue to address performance post-release as we discover more issues and hope to keep making the Inventory as slick and quick as it can possibly be.
Multiple ways to access and use inventories
As we observed in many of our user testing sessions, there are multiple ways to access and use inventories that some players might not know about. We feel you should know about all of them and then you can choose to use the ones that best fits your needs.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_Neocom.png)
The EVE Menu, at the top of the Neocom now has a new category called 'Inventory'. There you can access directly: Inventory, Active Ship, Item hangar, Ship hangar, Corporate hangar, Market deliveries and Assets. If you want to be able to access them directly from the Neocom root you can drag them there from the EVE Menu. The Unified Inventory icon will still remain in the Neocom root by default.
If you want to open inventories in a new window using the index tree you have three ways to do it:
- Drag the tab out of the window.
This is already possible but we found that some of our players in the user testing sessions didn't think it worked because there was no feedback to indicate it did.
Now, as soon as you start dragging you will get the icon of the tab you are dragging out. Once you move it outside of the inventory window you are dragging it from, the icon will change into the inventory you wanted to open.
If you want to stack the window you are dragging out, you can do that instantly without releasing the mouse. Just drag the icon out of the window to change it to the inventory you are dragging and then position it in the header of the window you want to stack it to and release.
- Right-click on the tab and select 'Open in new window'
- Hold the SHIFT key and single-click the left mouse button
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_Tabs_Dragging.png)
Many players want to be able to open some inventories as separate windows but simply use the Unified Inventory for other purposes. For those players the three methods above are suitable in order to mix the two methods together. If you always want to open inventories in a new window the settings option 'Always open in separate window' accessed via the settings icon should cater to your needs. This will allow you to double-click the left mouse button on any tab in the index tree to open it as a separate window.
All these options will of course apply to inventories which you can access from the inventory content area as well, such as containers.
Shortcuts can also be a good way to open and close inventories. Alt-C will open the main Inventory window. Alt-N is for Ship hangar and alt-G is for Item hangar.
Ease of use over consistency
Being able to drag ships to the Item hangar and items to the Ship hangar was always possible in the old system. This was useful because then you could have a collection of both ships and items in one motion and move it to one or the other and it would just sort itself automatically.
When we implemented the new index tree we had a problem because we wanted there to be feedback telling the player that what he had moved somewhere actually went there. So with this feature, moving a ship to the Item hangar could not make the Item hangar blink, it had to make the Ship hangar blink in order to be accurate. It was a technical hurdle that couldn’t be solved easily last release, but we decided to attack it with full force this time around so now you will again be able to drag things to one or the other and they sort themselves to where they belong.
This applies to dragging to the Ship hangar or Item hangar in the Neocom, any Inventory index tree they reside in or simply dragging directly into the windows themselves.
Index Tree Improvements
We focused on improving usability of the index tree so that it would work for those that have to use large trees. When moving items between locations you don't change focus anymore but you can expand the tree while dragging items. You will also be able to navigate up and down the tree while dragging items by either moving towards the edges with the mouse or using the mouse scroll wheel.
Index Tree Isolation
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_IndexTree_Isolation.png)
The Inventory window will still show the full index tree but we have changed the default behavior of the index tree in such a way that now when you open any inventory in a separate window you isolate the tree of that inventory. So if you want to open Ship hangar as a separate window, you only get the content of your Ship hangar in the index tree. This will apply to all inventory locations which you open in new windows.
The isolation feature has improved workflow for POS managers a great deal in our user testing sessions. Additionally we added distance information to POS structures, as well as greying out those that are out of range.
You can now make the width of the index tree much greater than before, as well as minimize the inventory content area all the way down if you just want to use the window to view the index tree of a certain tab.
We also added a gradient highlight for parent tabs when a child tab is selected. This ensures that you know that there is something selected inside a tab if you have collapsed that parent tab.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_ParentHighlight.png)
Want all the things all the time?
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_Settings_FullTree.png)
If you prefer the Index Tree to show all tabs like before we added the settings option 'Always show full tree'. It will be turned off by default. As you can see in the mockup, we moved the settings icon down so that it isn't displayed in the header anymore. This will ensure you don't get multiple instances of the same settings option when stacking inventory windows together.
Loot all the wrecks
We have been focusing on improving looting wrecks by iterating on various feedback indicators in the UI to give you better information about what is happening and where things are being moved.
We noticed in our user testing sessions that there are two ways players prefer to manage wrecks. One is to use the index tree to have them stack up in a list and then just use the ‘Loot all’ button on one at a time until they are all gone. The other method is to have wrecks always open up in a new window and once that window is emptied, it simply closes itself and goes away forever.
In order to cater to these two ways of interacting with wrecks we created a mechanic that checks if the player has the index tree expanded or not. If it is expanded, we add the wreck to the index tree and do not open up a separate wreck cargo window. If the index tree is collapsed, however, we open it in a new window. The same applies if you are using the Compact view mode. Any time you don’t have a way to see the wreck get added to the index tree, we have it open in a new window.
If you don’t want the wreck window to open up in a random spot one of the neat things you can do is stack it once to your active ship’s cargo window and from then on it will always open stacked there. Then simply clicking on ‘Loot all’ in the same spot will always close it again and show you the content of your active ship's cargo hold again. If you use the settings option ‘Always open in new window’ none of these rules apply and you always open wrecks in a new window, no matter what.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_Wrecks.png)
We have updated how wrecks are displayed in the Index Tree. They now show the wreck bracket with all its useful information and the ship name and the distance. If a wreck moves out of range, it greys out but stays visible so that you can use the Index Tree to approach it.
Compact View Mode
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_CompactViewMode.png)
The Compact View is a nice new feature we are introducing as a window mode. It will only be available for the Inventory windows for now though. It will simply make the window itself as compact as possible making room for the content itself as large as it can possibly be within the window frame.
We listened to feedback on the forums and decided that seeing cargo capacity was still vital in the compact view because most players will prefer using it while in space, where having an overview of cargo capacity matters. The compact capacity meter will show the same info as the regular one but will extend the length of the window, since the compact window does not have a filter input. It will give you all the same capacity indicator feedback when you hover over it with items. The numerical info can still be seen by hovering over the capacity meter itself.
Tools for Power Users
For those that use the Inventory for heavy duty work, we have some nice tools.
First off, if you haven’t tried the Cut & Paste feature, it’s quite handy:
Select the items you want to move or simply use Ctrl-A to select everything
Hit Ctrl-X to cut the items
Open the destination inventory
Hit Ctrl-V to move the items
There is no Ctrl-C (Copy) option though, sorry :-)
You will also notice a set of ‘<<’ and ‘>>’ icons to the left of the View mode icons in the Inventory window. These are the Back and Forward buttons to move between the inventories in the order you selected them within the same window. You will also be able to use the mouse to go back and forward, if you have a mouse with such buttons.
Better feedback
We have improved feedback on various inventory related actions. We looked to our beloved audio guys in Team Klang and asked them to help us add specific UI audio feedback for some key interactions. This includes feedback audio when opening up a wreck as well as when you empty a wreck using the ‘Loot all’ button.
You will also get a feedback blink when loot gets added to your cargo hold which is the same feedback blink we use to indicate that moving items between tabs was successful. For consistency we added the same feedback blink when dragging items into containers or other inventory locations from the content area itself.
Access Restriction Feedback
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Inventory_AccessRestriction.png)
Knowing what division or containers you have access to is not always clear and some trial and error might be needed to be sure. That’s why we added new restrictions icons on all divisions and containers that you have no or limited access to.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Restriction_Yellow.png)- Limited access will be displayed with a yellow restriction icon
Limited access means you can view it’s content but not move anything out of it
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63565/1/Restriction_Red.png)- No access will be displayed with a red restriction icon
No access means you can’t view it’s content nor move anything from it
The reason we still show inventory locations with no access is so that you can still donate items into it.
We also updated how locked items are displayed. Now they will have a slight greyed out state as well as a lock icon in the top right corner of the thumbnail for better visibility.
The reason greying it out was not enough is because we use that for the nice Cut & Paste feature I covered in the Tools for Power Users part of the blog.
We also wanted to make stacking of items better. Currently when you want to stack items together, you don’t really know if it works until you try, and then you might get a rude error message saying you can’t. We also noticed that sometimes when players just want to move an item into an inventory they will accidentally move it over an item that will give them an error message saying they can’t stack those items.
We have now changed this behavior so that every time you drag an item to an inventory it will always assume you want to move the item there and just do so without any warning. If you do want to stack the item to another you will know you can do it because you will get a highlight feedback on the item you are stacking as well as getting an audio feedback that the stacking was successful.
Better scroll bars
We gave our scroll bar an overhaul both functionally and visually. Now whenever there is a scroll bar available inside a window or a tab section of a window, you just need to hover over it to make the scroll bar active, no more clicking the area you want to interact with. We also added a highlight on the scroll bar that becomes active both when you drag it and when you use the mouse scroll wheel. We feel this is a much cleaner and simpler scroll bar and we hope you agree so we added them to the whole EVE UI.
That’s it for now. We have set ourselves a goal to deliver these features in a polished and complete state. We would very much like to hear your thoughts on these changes. Your encouragement helps our team tremendously in our efforts to deliver the best possible work we can.
Fly safe!
Looks promising!
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Does anyone have a location for the new T1 cruiser stats? Fitting, grid, cpu, etc? I know the devblog listed the new bonuses but I'd like to start playing with fits. I don't suppose evemon has the new stats?
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This thread -> http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?8303-EFT-data-files-for-Retribution (http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?8303-EFT-data-files-for-Retribution) might have what you crave. Not 100% sure it's up-to-date with the very latest, but might be a good starting point even if it's not.
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EFT test files work very well, sadly i've been trying to play with the new destroyers and can't find a good fit for the gallente one :s i'm trying to come up with a cheapish FW plexing fit
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[Omen, Retribution-Nano]
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Tracking Enhancer II
Tracking Enhancer II
Damage Control II
Warp Disruptor II
Large F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Heavy Pulse Laser II, Scorch M
Heavy Pulse Laser II, Scorch M
Heavy Pulse Laser II, Scorch M
Heavy Pulse Laser II, Scorch M
Heavy Pulse Laser II, Scorch M
Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Warrior II x5
Hornet EC-300 x3
This is my new favorite thing.
2131m/s unheated, 29+8.km and405 dps with scorch, unheated. Close range (IN multi) gives 488 dps @ 9.7+8.2 range. Unheated.
40m3 DRONE BAY :D
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EFT test files work very well, sadly i've been trying to play with the new destroyers and can't find a good fit for the gallente one :s i'm trying to come up with a cheapish FW plexing fit
[NEW Algos, cheapish plexing]
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Damage Control II
X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Limited 1MN MicroWarpdrive I
75mm Gatling Rail II, Spike S
75mm Gatling Rail II, Spike S
75mm Gatling Rail II, Spike S
75mm Gatling Rail II, Spike S
75mm Gatling Rail II, Spike S
[empty high slot]
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Hammerhead II x2
Hobgoblin II x3
Warrior II x5
Something like this? I was never any good at plexing, so it's probably not exactly optimal
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thanks that gave me some ideas
[NEW Algos, Drone Plexer]
Damage Control II
Tracking Enhancer II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Upgraded 1MN MicroWarpdrive I
Limited 1MN Afterburner I
'Langour' Drive Disruptor I
125mm Railgun II, Antimatter Charge S
125mm Railgun II, Antimatter Charge S
125mm Railgun II, Antimatter Charge S
125mm Railgun II, Antimatter Charge S
125mm Railgun II, Antimatter Charge S
[empty high slot]
Small Hybrid Locus Coordinator I
Small Processor Overclocking Unit I
[empty rig slot]
Vespa II x2
Hornet II x3
Warrior II x5
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Two more new Dev Blogs. Market fixes and a collection of improvements for bounties, war, killrights and even some new modules. Another looong post.
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73992
MUST.. CLEAN UP.. MARKET..: Retribution market improvements
reported by CCP FoxFour | 2012.11.21 15:06:00 | NEW | Comments
Just to be clear and up front: This is about changes to the market window organization, not how it is used or any features I am adding to it. I just happen to have a certain desire to clean the market up a bit. With that said... SO MANY MARKET CHANGES! Where to start....
Blueprints Section:
Lots and lots of changes here. I am not going to go over all of them in detail, but rather tell you my goal with them and hopefully that is all I need to explain for them to make sense. My primary objective was to make this area of the market match the rest of the market. Therefore if you know how to find a specific module in the Ship Equipment section of the market you should know where to find it under Blueprints. This goes for everything. One major example of this is there used to be a category called Subsystems in blueprints that had nothing to do with Tech 3 subsystems. It was awesome.
In most cases this meant changing the Blueprints section to be a mirror of the rest of the market. However, in some smaller cases I adjusted other areas of the market to match the blueprints area.
The bulk of the changes here are contained within Blueprints/Ship Equipment, but you will also notice that Blueprints/Manufacturing & Research along with Blueprints/Starbase & Sovereignty Structures received some love.
Ship Modifications/Subsystems:
How often do you go to the market to buy a subsystem and think: "Well, I am looking for defensive subsystems on all tech 3 ships"? Logic would dictate that it is more common to say: "I have a Legion and I want subsystems for that." Everyone we talked to seemed to agree with the latter; the most common course of action is looking for subsystems relating to a specific Tech 3 ship. So we have updated the market to go from Ship Modifications/Subsystems/Subsystem Type/Race to Ship Modifications/Subsystems/Race/Subsystem Type.
We also got some nice new fancy icons for each race to use on the market. Not sure where else to use them yet, but they sure are pretty.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63569/1/Subsystems.png)
Ship Equipment:
Oh man, so many changes. I am not going to go into great detail on most of these as they should be pretty obvious and straight forward, but here is a list that I think covers all the changes:
- Drone Upgrades have been moved to Ship Equipment/Drone Upgrades as they are a ship module, not a drone.
- Fleet Assistance Modules has been broken down into sub categories for easier browsing.
- We have continued the march of putting all the things on the market. This includes things like Outpost Construction Platforms which can be found under Manufacturing & Research/Components/Outpost Construction Platforms.
- Ship Equipment/Deployable Containers/Cargo Containers has been broken down into sub categories for easier browsing.
- Ship Equipment/Hull & Armor/Resistance Plating has been broken down into sub categories, one for each damage type.
- Layered Platings have been moved to their own group Ship Equipment/Hull & Armor/Layered Plating as they do not affect resistances.
- Ship Equipment/Hull & Armor/Armor Plates has been broken down into sub categories for each size.
- Ship Equipment/Hull & Armor/Energized Plating has been broken down into sub categories for damage type.
- Ship Equipment/Hull & Armor/Armor Hardeners has been broken down into sub categories for each damage type. While at first glance this category didn't seem to need it, as soon as you opened the Deadspace or Officer sub category, it got way too big.
- Ship Equipment/Shield/Shield Hardeners has been broken down into sub categories for damage type.
- Ship Equipment/Shield/Shield Resistance Amplifiers has been broken down into sub categories.
Starbase & Sovereignty Structures:
Just a couple of small tweaks here:
- All weapon batteries have been moved under Starbase Structures/Weapon Batteries. This used to be called Turret Batteries and did not include things such as Electronic Warfare, Energy Neuts, or Missile Batteries.
- Faction versions of all POS modules and towers are now on the market and have the same fancy filtering that you see with Ship Equipment.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63569/1/Starbase.png)
Nothing ground breaking here, just a lot of cleanup and making better. Hopefully you guys enjoy this as much as I will when it hits TQ.
CCP FoxFour
Next!
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73578
Bounties, Kill Rights, New Modules and War in Retribution
reported by CCP SoniClover | 2012.11.21 17:08:44 | NEW | Comments
Hello Capsuleers. I’m CCP SoniClover from Team Super Friends here to tell you some more about what the team’s been working on for Retribution. This blog is a follow up on the first one I did, which covered our work on a high level. I recommend you skim over that one if you haven’t already, as this blog assumes the reader has at least rudimentary knowledge of what’s going on. But I’ll quickly summarize what the team has been working on – we’ve been re-doing the broken bounty system so that now bounty is paid out proportionally based on the loss inflicted in a kill. We’ve refactored the kill right system so that players can now get others to help in exacting revenge on their former assailants. We’re also continuing to iterate on the war system and adding and adjusting a few modules.
The team has used the time since the last dev blog to implement, refine and polish the features, taking into account feedback from various sources – the CSM, the forums, test servers and so on. This feedback has resulted in us making some adjustments to our work and priorities and will be discussed in more details below.
On the whole, we’re on track to deliver what we set out to deliver. A few items have fallen of the to-do-list, but there are a few new ones on it instead. We aim to continue working on these features post-Retribution, so expect further iteration down the road. We’ll keep you posted on the details here as the time comes.
So without further ado, let’s look at some of the stuff we’ve been doing.
It’s Full of Bounties!
In addition to the Most Wanted List, we’ve added a Bounty Hunter List to the Bounty Office. This lists the characters with the highest total bounties claimed in ISK, as well as the number of kill reports they’ve been on where a bounty was claimed. There is separate list for corporations and alliances, though those do not list number of kills.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63958/1/bounty_hunters.png)
There is also a tab where you can track all bounties you’ve placed (My Bounties).
When you have a bounty placed on you, the notification you get sent now also includes the name of the character that placed the bounty on you.
We’ve reduced the minimum amounts for placing a bounty on corporations and alliances, from 50 million and 500 million to 20 million and 100 million respectively.
It will not be possible to place bounties on NPC characters (like agents) or corporations (but you can place a bounty on a player character in a NPC corporation), nor on CCP developers or ISD people.
A final note on bounties, there have been a few misconceptions floating around regarding them that we want to clear up/restate:
- Having a bounty on you will never by itself make you a legal target anywhere.
- The 20% payout is based on the loss value of the kill report, not on the bounty pool itself. Example: If you have a 150 million bounty on you and the loss value of the kill report is 100 million, then 20 million will be paid out, leaving your remaining bounty at 130 million. If the bounty pool had been 15 million instead, then the entire 15 million would have been paid out on the kill.
- The total loss value includes both ship and lost modules.
- If you’re fighting a character that has bounty on him and he self-destructs or is killed by CONCORD, you still get the bounty. The bounty then goes to the player with the highest damage contribution.
License to Kill
As before, the kill right section under your character sheet is the place to go to view your kill rights. But now this is also the place where you manage the kill rights you have.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63958/1/Make_kill_right_available_UI.png)
In the kill rights view, you can now make your kill rights (the kill rights you have on other characters) available to others. You do this through the utility menu at the right of the kill right entry.
We’ve added an option for people to limit who the kill right is available to. Now when you make a kill right available, you can choose to restrict access the kill right to a specific corporation, alliance or even character. You can still make it open to anyone if you wish. When you make a kill right available, a notification is sent to the target of the kill right informing him that the kill right has been made available (and to whom if that is specified).
You can also revert your choices here and cancel the availability of your kill rights, using the same menu. Currently there are no restrictions on how fast or frequently you can cancel kill right availability or make them available again.
To be able to spot better those you have kill rights available on, we’ve added a new icon to the overview and the chat channel. You can set these to show those in your vicinity (overview) or system (local chat channel) that you can activate kill rights on. Note that there is also a bounty icon already in existence that is now more viable to show than before.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63958/1/killright_bracket.png)
To use a kill right (your own or one that another player has made available to you), you select the target’s ship in space. In the select window you can activate the kill right (for kill rights available to you from other players this might cost you ISK to activate). This makes the target a suspect for 15 minutes. If you have more than one kill right available on the target (for instance if two characters have made it available to you), the one costing less is always chosen as default.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63958/1/activate_killright.png)
The Suspect flag means that anyone in the vicinity can now attack the flagged player. Running through the scenarios of what this entails make this less of an issue than at first glance.
* If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a low price, the targeted player can simply use an alt or a friend to get rid of the kill right. This is then just an extra hoop to jump through for those players frequently causing others to get kill rights on them.
* If the kill right is made available to everyone, but at a high price, then there is much less of a chance of it being activated constantly and thus less of a hassle. This is especially true when considering that players will likely be wary of kill right scams and thus not keen on paying to activate a kill right with a considerable cost.
* If the kill right is made available to a specific entity, then this is little different than being at war – you just need to remember whom to look out for as it is not as clearly shown as for war.
If a kill report is generated where a kill right was removed (i.e. the kill was a consequence of a kill right being activated on the victim), then the kill report shows this by stating that the victim was killed on behalf of the owner of the kill right.
The Rules of War
We’ve done two iteration stories on the war system from the Inferno expansion. These are the stories we got to this time around, but there is more work to be done here.
The aggressor now has the option to retract a war that has been made mutual by the defender. This ends the war in 24 hours. The other option here was to give the aggressor a chance to accept or refuse making the war mutual, but we felt the retraction was a cleaner and simpler solution.
The other story is a bit of refactoring of the war declaration cost. We’ve removed the cost multiplier based on number of wars you’re in, as this was causing issues when wars are being copied around, plus it’s much more severe to be multiplying the base cost now compared to before (50 million and 2 million respectively).
Also, we’ve changed a little bit how the cost scales depending on number of characters in defender corp/alliance. The cost now starts ramping up faster than before and thus hits the ceiling of 500 million sooner. Before the cost started scaling up around the 128 character mark and hit the ceiling at ca. 7200. After the change, the cost starts ramping up with the 51st character and hits the ceiling at the 2000 character mark.
Tools of the Trade
Here’s some more information on the two new modules we’re making for Retribution.
For the Micro Jump Drive, we will start by just doing a large version of this module (Large Micro Jump Drive), which only battleship size ships can fit (Battleships, Marauders and Black Ops). Here are a few pertinent points:
- The spool up time is 12 seconds; this is reduced by 5% per level of the Micro Jump Drive Operation skill (which you need at level 1 to fit the module).
- The Capacitor Need is 786 and the reactivation delay time is 180 seconds.
- The jump distance is 100 kilometers, the ship will maintain direction and velocity.
- The module is affected by warp scrambling effects, but not warp disruption effects (including bubbles and interdictor effects).
- The fitting requirements are: Mid slot, 77 CPU, 1375 PG.
- On activation, the ship’s sig radius is increased 150%.
For the salvage drone, we will start with only a tech I version.
- Small, 5 drone bandwidth use.
- Speed 900 m/s.
- Base salvage chance is 3%. This is increase by 2% per level for the Salvage Drone Operation skill.
- Cycle time is 10 seconds; same as for the salvaging modules.
- When you deploy the drones, they go to idle mode, but you can activate them to start to automatically salvage wrecks. In this automated mode, they will only salvage your own and neutral wrecks, not wrecks belonging to other characters. You can manually order the drones to salvage wrecks belonging to other players, though.
- Salvage drones never loot, they only salvage. Also, there is no difference in the quality of the loot received – salvage drones can salvage the same items as the salvage modules, the only difference being that because of lower chance they are much worse at salvaging difficult wrecks (and are incapable of salvaging the most difficult Sleeper wrecks).
One final note is that we’re also making a small adjustment to the Noctis. We’re giving it a drone bay of 25m³. Initially, this was limited to salvage drones only, but we decided to remove that restriction, so you can now put any drone type in there.
Finally, we’re also tweaking a few of the Inferno modules. Notably:
- Ancillary Shield Boosters – we’re reducing the capacity by 30%, increasing the capacitor need by 40% and increased the duration of the X-Large ASB to 5 seconds from 4. We’ve tested several other changes, but feel this is enough at this stage. We want to be cautious in not nerfing them too much, but if further changes are needed we have another batch ready (this would make the ASBs use a small amount of cap even when fueled by a cap booster). But we don’t want to do that unless it is obviously needed.
- Reactive Armor Hardener – this module is basically doing what it’s supposed to do, but we wanted to give it a bit more oomph, so we’ve increased how much the resistances shift every cycle. It is now 6% instead of 3%. Also, the skill Armor Resistance Phasing now also reduces capacitor need of using a RAH.
- Target Spectrum Breaker – We’ve reduced the activation time to 8 seconds and reduced the scan resolution penalty to 25%.
Quick note, the drone damage amplifiers are also being adjusted (their damage bonus is increased), but this is the work of Team Game of Drones, so I’ll only mention it in passing here. Also, Team Five-0 is also adding meta-variations of the drone damage amplifiers (and other drone modules). Check out the Game of Drones dev blog here ( http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73572 ) and here ( Think they missed this one, there's no link ;) - Kala ) for more info.
That’s it for Team Super Friends. We hope you enjoy what is coming and have a happy Retribution.
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Possible changes to the Afterburner skill as well, which if confirmed will reduce the duration of Afterburners to half their current time, with no increase or decrease in cap use.
(http://i.imgur.com/6EhfU.jpg)
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Afterburner nerf ?
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Afterburner nerf ?
Buff. Considerable buff, especially for oversized AB fits. Due to the ridiculous mass increase a 100mn AB gives a T3 cruiser, a common tactic is to shut it off before turning. A much shorter cycle time will help this tactic.
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Oh man I like that.
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Also, they've updated the Retribution feature website. Now complete with in-browser, fully 3d, rotatable ship views. It's absolutely gorgeous.
http://www.eveonline.com/retribution
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By the way, where is the dronebay on that dragoon ? I can't find it, not like for the gallente one... :/
Afterburner nerf ?
Buff. Considerable buff, especially for oversized AB fits. Due to the ridiculous mass increase a 100mn AB gives a T3 cruiser, a common tactic is to shut it off before turning. A much shorter cycle time will help this tactic.
Well that it is a buff for special tidbits of gameplay - oversized ABs - but what of the 95% other more conventionnal uses we have for ABs ?
They are encouraging oversized setups while at the same time hurting a module that is already not really in good shape compared to MWDs.
Unless people do not even use ABs anymor except when oversized ? >.>
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It is also a MASSIVE buff to dualprop fits.
AB skill currently increases cycle duration, which is counterproductive for dualprop fits - untrained, your AB has a 10 second cycle just like any MWD. At level 5, that cycle is 15 seconds long. Not helpful in the slightest when you're trying to switch mid-combat!
Also, I think your math is derp on there, Kala. :P Given both of the bonuses listed, you're looking at a 25% shorter cycle time and 50% cap use per cycle, which adds up to a 33% reduction in cap usage overall at level 5. :3
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Also, I think your math is derp on there, Kala. :P Given both of the bonuses listed, you're looking at a 25% shorter cycle time and 50% cap use per cycle, which adds up to a 33% reduction in cap usage overall at level 5. :3
The skill goes from a duration bonus of +10%/level to -5% per level, which means 7.5s vs 15s at L5 which translates into twice the cap cost per second. The -10% cap use per level alleviates that disparity. So afterburners are more flexible now without a change in cost.
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I may actually need to train Afterburner V now.
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Also, I think your math is derp on there, Kala. :P Given both of the bonuses listed, you're looking at a 25% shorter cycle time and 50% cap use per cycle, which adds up to a 33% reduction in cap usage overall at level 5. :3
The skill goes from a duration bonus of +10%/level to -5% per level, which means 7.5s vs 15s at L5 which translates into twice the cap cost per second. The -10% cap use per level alleviates that disparity. So afterburners are more flexible now without a change in cost.
When I said Kala's math was derp, I was referring to his claim of "no increase or decrease in cap use". I was also comparing the module itself from skill level 0 and skill level 5 with the new skill, not to the current one, because the people who will get the most benefit from this were deliberately not training the skill to 5 so that they would get shorter cycle times out of their modules, and were therefore not actually dealing with full 15-second cycles. (Yes, oversized AB pilots will get a huge buff, but CCP is also looking at "addressing" oversized ABs.)
Also, keep in mind that those numbers are before we throw the Fuel Conservation skill into the mix - it adds a 50% reduction to afterburner activation cost on its own at level 5. I didn't take that into account. :p
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My maths isn't actually mine :D It's almost a direct copy pasta from the COA boards, and as maths is not my strong point, I just assumed the gu knew what he was taking about. By all means correct me :P
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Ah ok, so we will have ABs that consume more due to their shortened duration, but with a base cap consumption reduced to compensate and make it even ?
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Lyn: if we assume CCP applies a stacking penalty of sorts to the AB and Fuel Conservation skills where one skill uses the modified value of the module as its base rather than just adding one bonus to the other and then applying that to the module's base value, then yes. If they don't, we're going to end up with afterburners that use zero cap per cycle, because Fuel Conservation already gives a 50% reduction in AB cap use per cycle at level 5.
Assuming both skills at level 4, and an AB with a 10 second base cycle duration and 10GJ/cycle cap use:
- Current skills: (10GJ * 60%) / (10s * 140%) = 6GJ/14s = 3/7 GJ/s.
- Supposed changes: ((10GJ * 60%) * 60%) / (10s * 80%) = 3.6/8s = .45 GJ/s
Both skills at 5:
- Current: (10GJ * 50%) / (10s * 150%) = 5GJ/15s = 1/3 GJ/s
- Supposed: ((10GJ * 50%) * 50%) / (10s * 75%) = 2.5GJ/7.5s = 1/3 GJ/s
So it'll be no effective change in cap use over time if both skills are at 5 and they use that kind of math, but only if they use that specific bonus stacking method. I don't think it'll be the same for any other combination of the skills after a change to that set of bonuses.
Knowing CCP, however, it will probably not be that simple.
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Some slight fitting changes to the new Destroyers: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2212422#post2212422
New update:
We've taken another polish pass on these ships based partially on feedback we've been getting from the Buckingham test server, and decided to free up a bit of fittings for these little guys. The fittings were extremely tight which was especially painful for newer players without perfect fitting skills, and anyone who chooses to use lasers on the Dragoon (not that we think lasers will be the most popular option, but it really should be possible to fit gatling pulses with a light tank).
Changes are:
Corax
48 PWG (+3)
Talwar
51 PWG (+3)
Dragoon
58 PWG (+3)
Algos
160 CPU (+10)
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Nice bunch of changes all in all. And the adjustments to roles for tech 1 frigates and cruisers, as well as the new drone bay on the Noctis, really inspired me to try out an old dream of living out of salvage. But... I need some acknowledgment from CCP that there is/should be more to Eve than ship pew-pew, before my flame is really reignited.
Btw. Anybody remember that "circle of Eve" Torfi presented at fanfest with Harvesting->Manufacturing->Destruction? The only thing that bugs me after all these years is why they continue to present these kind of roadmaps when they never actually commit to them.
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Some icon changes to make things a bit clearer:
(http://i.imgur.com/fVGLH.jpg)
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Neat, gone are the days of accidentally slapping on the wrong hardener.
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Some icon changes to make things a bit clearer:
(http://i.imgur.com/fVGLH.jpg)
Good idea, but again, CCP, why not going further with the idea and make it clearer by actually showing the new exp/therm/kin/em icons above the already existing icon... :psyccp:
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If they got rid of the lens flare on the module portrait it would make the colors a lot more distinguishable.
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Update on the AB: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2213556#post2213556
CCP Fozzie wrote:
Sparkus Volundar wrote:
Michael Harari wrote:
CCP Fozzie wrote:
Good point about the afterburner skill, although take a look at it on Buckingham you'll be pleasantly surprised.
You cant trick me into logging in that easily.
lol
Skill is changing to offer -5% to Afterburner Duration per level and -10% Activcation Cost per level.
Dear CCP Fozzie,
In relation to the above Afterburner skill change, will the Fuel Conservation skill remain unchanged (leading to Afterburners having the same Cap use as now)?
Regards,
Sparks
Yeah we're not touching Fuel Conservation atm.
And a slight change to the new Sensor Compensation skills: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2212353#post2212353
CCP Fozzie wrote:
Michael Harari wrote:
Oh, im not complaining they are imbalanced, I just think the skill point multiplier should be knocked down by 1.
Well this is an excellent post to go right before my next announcement.
We agree that the rank of the new Sensor Comp skills is a bit excessive and have decided to lower it down. However 5% per level at a rank 2 was a bit too powerful in this case so we're also reducing the effect to 4% per level.
The end result is a better bang for your hour spent training, but a slightly lower potential end result.
So the skills are now Rank 2 Int/Mem, providing 4% increased sensor strength in their chosen sensor type per level.
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You're going to love this one: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73996
Happy Safe Fun Time
reported by CCP Greyscale | 2012.11.27 15:50:57 | NEW | Comments
Hi everybody,
Today I'm going to talk about how to fly safely in Retribution! We are adding a couple of new features to ensure that, when you inevitably lose your ship in a very silly way, it is very definitely 100% your fault.
SAFE LOGOFF
This system is pretty straightforward: if you are not doing anything dangerous, you can now opt to "Log Off Safely". This will give you a big on-screen timer showing you how long until you log out. When the timer runs out, your ship is immediately removed from space and you're informed that you successfully logged out.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63978/1/12-11-23_safety_blog_safe_logoff_fixed.png)
You will also notice here that there is a button marked "Abort". If, while you're in the process of logging off, you see some dastardly pirate slash noble upholder of justice delete as appropriate flying over to end your ship's meagre existence, you can abort the process and defend yourself. This should ensure that you'll never (again) die because you logged out a minute too soon and got podded while the client was closed.
You cannot be safely logging off while:
- You have active modules
- You're ejecting from a ship
- You have aggression from players or NPCs
- Your ship is exploding or self-destructing
- You're issuing movement commands
- You're launching or jettisoning objects
- You're joining a fleet
- You're deploying or reconnecting with drones
- You have a target lock or are targeted
- You're warping
- You're decloaking or under gate cloak
You can't initiate a safe logoff while any of these things are happening, and if they happen once the countdown is running, it'll be aborted.
SAFETY SYSTEM
The Safety System is sliiightly more complex. Masterplan explained in an earlier blog that, in Retribution, there will be two levels of illegal behavior: "suspect" and "criminal". The safety system ensures that you cannot commit illegal behavior without deliberately switching off your safeties first.
Your new safety system has three states: enabled, partially disabled and disabled.
- While ENABLED, you cannot commit any kind of illegal act
- While PARTIALLY DISABLED, you can commit acts that will get you a suspect flag, but not those that would get you a criminal flag
- While DISABLED, you can do anything you like, up to and including criminal acts
Your safety settings can be adjusted using this cunning new button on your HUD:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63978/1/12-11-23_safety_blog_safety_button_disable.png)
Clicking the little round button brings up the safety settings options, where you can select your desired state. Going UP the list (ie, moving to a less-safe setting) requires confirmation; going DOWN the list does not.
Changing your safety setting happens instantly, but moving to a safer setting will not clear flags that you've already incurred.
If you try to attempt an action that's prevented by your safety level, you will simply not be allowed to do it (this is enforced both on the client and on the server). These commands are all highlighted in the UI - in red or yellow, depending on their severity - and if you try to click one of them, the safety button will blink to remind you where you need to change your settings.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63978/1/12-11-23_safety_blog_disallow_weapons.png)
The upshot of all this is that you can never just do something illegal by accident: you always have to deliberately go and disable your safety settings first. On the other hand, if you're out to cause trouble, you'll never be bothered by last-minute pop-ups again: if you're on a lowsec roam and you turn your safeties off, you're in full free-fire mode from that point forward. And, pilot beware, if you fully disable your safeties in hisec then you're just one button-press away from a visit from CONCORD. Use at your own discretion :)
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Out of curiosity can someone remind me what is a criminal act in lowsec already ? Iirc shooting at someone only gives you a suspect flag, correct ?
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Shooting someone on a gate gives you criminal.
Shooting someone elsewhere gets you suspect.
It doesn't really matter, so far as I can see, until you jump into highsec.
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Ok thanks.
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Even gate guns don't fire on you when you have a criminal offense unless they see you committing the criminal offense \o/
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Out of curiosity can someone remind me what is a criminal act in lowsec already ? Iirc shooting at someone only gives you a suspect flag, correct ?
Podding someone in lowsec is a criminal act. I think Kala linked the chart of things earlier in the thread w/ an earlier crimewatch devblog.
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Out of curiosity can someone remind me what is a criminal act in lowsec already ? Iirc shooting at someone only gives you a suspect flag, correct ?
Podding someone in lowsec is a criminal act. I think Kala linked the chart of things earlier in the thread w/ an earlier crimewatch devblog.
Consolidation time :)
(http://tagn.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/logo2_actions2flags.png)
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Shooting someone on a gate gives you criminal.
Shooting someone elsewhere gets you suspect.
It doesn't really matter, so far as I can see, until you jump into highsec.
ehhh i think you are just a suspect unless you fire on the pod, afaik attacking in gates with scrambler and guns does not trigger sentry guns reaction in this case
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Really? I've heard differently. If you fire on someone on a gate, the gate guns will engage you. If you then warp off and come back, they will stop.
I don't think gate guns are only going to react to pod-killing though, or else low-sec is really going to become null-sec without bubbles.
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Shooting a ship in lowsec only gives you the suspect flag and a sec status hit.
Gate guns attack players only after they've incurred a sec status penalty in sight of the guns.
edit:
(http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63443/1/logo2_flags2consequences.png)
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Ok!
I am totally okay with that. :twisted:
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Rogue Drone and Drone Regions update:
Drone Region Changes in Retribution
reported by CCP FoxFour | 2012.11.28 12:15:14 | NEW | Comments
Pilots of New Eden, changes are coming to the Drone Regions with Retribution. Changes you may want to know about. The changes listed below are designed to bring the Drone Regions in line with the rest of the New Eden cluster.
First up, Officer Spawns:
The Drone Regions have been missing officer spawns (the highest end NPCs, usually carrying high bounties and rare loot) for a long time so with Retribution this winter we are adding them. Exactly where and how often they spawn is up to you guys to figure out. Here are the four new officers you can expect to find:
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63570/1/OfficerSpawns.png)
Second and along with Officer Spawns comes Officer Modules:
Since we were creating new officers we decided it would be a great time to introduce not just new officers. We also decided it would be a great time to add officer drone modules. You high sec care bears, erm mission runners, now have more ways to spend insane amounts of ISK pimping your ship. I am not going to list exact stats and would like to remind those that go running off to a test server, to find the stats of the following item: Magic Crystal Ball
- Drone Damage Amplifier
- Drone Link Augmentor
- Omnidirectional Tracking Link
- Drone Navigation Computer
- Drone Control Unit
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63570/1/OfficerModules.png)
Adding new spawns so we must add hauler spawns:
Along with new officer spawns we have added new hauler spawns to the drone regions. You will find them spread across all of the drone regions and with names matching and drops matching those of hauler spawns from other regions.
Rogue Drone Salvage:
After having done some research we found that the salvage offered by NPCs in the drone regions was below that of what we would expect from NPCs in all other regions. We are therefore buffing the salvage from the NPCs in the drone regions by 2% across the board.
We hope you find these changes enjoyable and worthwhile. If you have any feedback please make your way to the comments section of this post where we will be answering your questions. :)
Oh, also, Rogue Drones now give a sec status gain when you kill them. Just a little something we also added. :D
CCP FoxFour
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Where are the other drone officers!
I love these updates. It would be so cool to hear John say "Safeties off.... Safeties off...... FLEET JUMP JUMP JUMP" or something.
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Where are the other drone officers!
I love these updates. It would be so cool to hear John say "Safeties off.... Safeties off...... FLEET JUMP JUMP JUMP" or something.
There's always that one guy. And he's usually the tackle. :lol:
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I'm a bit worried about Retribution.
It looks like they finally decided to fix all the shit that's been broken for years, which is good I suppose. :psyccp:
But they're doing it all at once, rather than bit by bit. That gives greater opportunities for things to break horribly. popcorn time?
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Yes, Steckers. Standard patchday procedures apply. :P
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Suggestions of factionalism, and even a sense of morality among the drone hive?
Huuuuuh.
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Seems cool.
If I understand correctly then, sentries will fire at you if :
- You have a criminal flag
- You incur a security hit on grid, until you leave grid.
_________________________________________
Funny also, can't eject from ship if the weapon flag is active. I perfectly understand why they do that in terms of game mechanisms, but to justify that ICly is going to be hardcore, unless we go again in the line of "CONCORD controls every bit of your capsule systems".
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Suggestions of factionalism, and even a sense of morality among the drone hive?
Huuuuuh.
My own understanding may be clouding what little, if any, PF regarding this subject I know of... but essentially the Drone Hives do compete with each other occasionally, and tend to prefer to be within their own Hive. As for the morality bit, well, I have to wonder what machines find so objectionable that they have 'unorthodox methods'.
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Seems cool.
If I understand correctly then, sentries will fire at you if :
- You have a criminal flag
- You incur a security hit on grid, until you leave grid.
_________________________________________
Funny also, can't eject from ship if the weapon flag is active. I perfectly understand why they do that in terms of game mechanisms, but to justify that ICly is going to be hardcore, unless we go again in the line of "CONCORD controls every bit of your capsule systems".
First part: correct.
Second: when did we stop going in that line? It's always been well-established that capsuleer-owned vessels are infested with CONCORD monitoring equipment, and that CONCORD determines what is and is not visible to the capsuleer through his or her camera drones.
I mean, we have magic voodoo that prevents us from jumping through wormholes with GCC, and they can prevent us from warping if we're GCC'd in highsec even before the spawn appears...
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We had a long discussions with Shaliraa around page 3 of this thread on CONCORD powers on capsuleers and ethics and yes, that line seems not to be systematic for all players indeed. I have always tried to take a cautious approach on the matter, no leaning too much on either side tbh.
Ofc here, I can only think of that "line", which is probably what I will choose in the end by default until someone comes with something else that also makes sense. I would really like to have CCP explain a little more what exactly are CONCORDs true powers on capsules.
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Seems cool.
If I understand correctly then, sentries will fire at you if :
- You have a criminal flag
- You incur a security hit on grid, until you leave grid.
_________________________________________
Funny also, can't eject from ship if the weapon flag is active. I perfectly understand why they do that in terms of game mechanisms, but to justify that ICly is going to be hardcore, unless we go again in the line of "CONCORD controls every bit of your capsule systems".
First part: correct.
Second: when did we stop going in that line? It's always been well-established that capsuleer-owned vessels are infested with CONCORD monitoring equipment, and that CONCORD determines what is and is not visible to the capsuleer through his or her camera drones.
I mean, we have magic voodoo that prevents us from jumping through wormholes with GCC, and they can prevent us from warping if we're GCC'd in highsec even before the spawn appears...
and we almost NEVER see civilian traffic. Those we do see probably opt out of CONCORD protection, maybe to save money on the 'protection tax'.
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and we almost NEVER see civilian traffic. Those we do see probably opt out of CONCORD protection, maybe to save money on the 'protection tax'.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And those are the ones that tend to get blown up by opportunistic capsuleers! Holy shit!
Concord turns a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters loose and then extorts protection money! Fucking brilliant!
Counterpoint: Smartbombs.
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Seems cool.
If I understand correctly then, sentries will fire at you if :
- You have a criminal flag
- You incur a security hit on grid, until you leave grid.
_________________________________________
Funny also, can't eject from ship if the weapon flag is active. I perfectly understand why they do that in terms of game mechanisms, but to justify that ICly is going to be hardcore, unless we go again in the line of "CONCORD controls every bit of your capsule systems".
The neurological stress of being linked to active weapon systems that require precise control mandates a 60 second desensitization process so the pilot isn't inadvertently overstressed/harmed when ejecting.
This leaves the question of how traumatic it is to lose a starship, but well...
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Where are the other drone officers!
I love these updates. It would be so cool to hear John say "Safeties off.... Safeties off...... FLEET JUMP JUMP JUMP" or something.
Or even better: "Safeties off, safeties off.... Cold-warping Fleet... Weapons hot! Weapons hot! Grab what you can when landing!"
(Seriously, I'm looking forward to not having to deal with the pop-ups anymore).
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Suggestions of factionalism, and even a sense of morality among the drone hive?
Huuuuuh.
My own understanding may be clouding what little, if any, PF regarding this subject I know of... but essentially the Drone Hives do compete with each other occasionally, and tend to prefer to be within their own Hive. As for the morality bit, well, I have to wonder what machines find so objectionable that they have 'unorthodox methods'.
Instead of relying on classic machine approaches, like system scan and digital analysis, it utilizes more "organic" methods like individual component dissection!
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Patchnotes and several new devblogs are live.
Patchnotes - http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?newpatchlogID=74000
Devblog: Corp hangars on ships and you - http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73995
Devblog: U and I – Our little improvements together v3 - http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74038
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long patch notes are long :eek:
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long patch notes are long :eek:
https://twitter.com/erlendur/status/274536087836315648 : "Retribution patchnotes: 15,152 words; 34 pages. Coming 4 Dec to YOUR computer! #tweetfleet #eveonline"
That's what, half a novel? :lol:
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Due to Morwen's laziness, here are the devblogs done properly :lol:
I'm not doing the patchnotes, you can read that yourself :l My patience for formatting just isn't that long.
First: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74038
U and I – Our Little Improvements Together v3
reported by CCP karkur | 2012.11.30 13:53:25 | NEW | Comments
Hi all
As some of you active forum warriors might know, CCP Soundwave posted a forum thread about a year ago where he asked you to suggest "Little Things" changes. That is, very small changes to the game that would make your life as an EVE pilot just a little bit better. Since then you guys have really stepped up to the plate and posted thousands of ideas. I think it's kind of nice to read through it now and see we have actually implemented many of your suggestions. Recently we felt, however, it was time for a fresh start so we adopted this thread as the "Little Things" thread; so if you have good suggestions, please post them there :) While we have a new thread, the old thread is of course not forgotten.
I have spent a whole lot of time reading through your many, many posts in these two threads and noted down the stuff that interests me, and my list is pretty long and still growing.
So today I'll be telling you about a few of these small things that are coming your way in Retribution:
I want to start by telling you a short story about a feature you asked for that is actually already on TQ but which is fairly new and we haven't really mentioned yet. So, about two months ago I found this awesome feature on my local server, a feature I have wanted for quite some time and had even started to implement. I was a bit surprised, checked Tranquility and sure enough it was there, but not on older reference servers. I went around the office asking people if they knew where it came from but no one I asked knew anything about it. I even checked my devblogs and there was nothing about this feature there. Then finally I checked the code history, and felt super silly when I found out that it was in fact me who had implemented it (how can one be expected to remember what happened before summer vacation?).
Anyways (cool story bro), this neat (and easily forgettable) feature is to be able to drag the icons in the Show Info window and drop them in chat or other similar text fields. This works for items, characters, corporations, certificates, etc.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64005/1/infodrag.png)
Have you ever been in a fleet and tried to find yourself in the hierarchical view? Well, it can be kind of tricky. After Retribution it should be pretty easy to see what groups you belong to and find your place in the list because your wing and squad will be marked with green arrows. You will also be highlighted with a green background.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64005/1/fleetHighlight2.png)
And how freaking annoying is it that whenever you go to repair something, you get a long list of pretty much all the stuff you have ever owned in your entire EVE career as well as in your real life*, whether it's damaged or not? Pretty annoying I would say. In Retribution we are changing it so only the items that are actually damaged will be listed. So no more "I'll just repair all because I can't be bothered to find what I need to fix right now" for me (and probably you too) :)
* this might be a slight exaggeration
One of the things you've asked for is for the Character Sheet to remember the page it was on last time it was open. I've recently started to get some actual kill reports (yay, so much fun blowing up ships!), and this little thing has been driving me a little bit crazy when I've wanted to see the newest kill report. So I was more than happy to make this change :)
Another pet peeve of mine that I fixed... the fitting management window will now open on the category I was using the last time, so now I don't always have to switch from my crappy personal fittings to my corporation's ones to access all the quality fittings.
And for my marketeers: your right hand will not much longer have to travel to the backspace button every time you want to buy more than 1 of some item. After Retribution the default quantity "1" will be highlighted, so all you have to do it punch in the quantity you need and hit Enter.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64005/1/marketOrder.png)
Another thing that you've suggested is the ability to browse back and forth between the items you have been viewing on the market. This is something my forgetful brain has wanted in the game for quite some time, so I thought it would be perfect to just add it :)
When I've been out roaming with my corporation and have had to tell my corpsies what I see on the directional scanner I've thought to myself "If only I knew someone who could make it so I could just drag this stuff to chat." Guess what? I don't only know someone but actually I am someone who can do just that. So, because I can't pronounce ship names and am a slow typer (and because it's just convenient), we will all be able to drag the interesting stuff from the d-scanner to chat and create show-info links there. We decided to list the items only by their type names to save space in the chat, but each link will link to a unique item. That means that if the ship linked is on your grid, you will be able to see who is flying it.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64005/1/dscan.png)
Earlier this year I added color coded security status to a few places where solarsystems were listed. Some of you wanted the same in the Show Info window on stations, and that just made sense so I made it so.
In addition to all of this we kept some of your targeting wishes in mind when my team, Team Pony Express, was working on the new targeting changes:
First thing I want to mention is that now when you hover over a module on your HUD, you will see what target that module is active on. A really faint hairline is drawn from the module on the HUD to the bracket in space and to the corresponding module below the target (and the module there will also be highlighted).
Another thing I hope you will appreciate is that you will be able to have multiple rows of targets. That means that you logistics pilots can keep your friends in one row and your enemies in another row.
Previously, as you probably know, the targeted ships where in the order they were targeted, and a new row was only added when there were too many targets to fit in one row. In Crucible we changed it so you could actually change the order of your targets. Now we are taking a step further and allowing you to move your targets to new rows, even if you only have two targets.
The targets will still be aligned to left/right/top/bottom depending on your settings, and they will always be added in the first available slot (top row in the default settings). Once a target is put in a row, that row will be their home unless you change it. That means that targets should not be jumping from the second row to the first row just because some targets in the first row were lost or destroyed.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/64005/1/rearrangedTargets.png)
I hope you like these changes, and believe me, we have a long list of changes we want to make for you guys :)
Until next time, fly safe,
- CCP karkur
Loving the targeting options.
Next: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73995
Corp Hangars on Ships and You
reported by CCP Greyscale | 2012.11.30 11:12:00 | NEW | Comments
So, we're changing Corp Hangars on ships in Retribution.
Why?
The short version is that the current technical implementation is an unnecessary maintenance burden; and we don't feel that the complexity of the design is justified by the value it delivers.
On the technical side, the same code is handling corp hangars in stations, starbases and ships. Given that ships in particular are clearly not the same thing as stations, it should not be surprising that there is a lot of horrible special-casing in the code to make this work. The end result, in this case, is a chunk of code that's broken in lots of different interesting ways; the fixes for which are generally mutually exclusive; many of which are effectively unfixable; and for which any potential changes are a QA nightmare to validate.
On the design side, the specific functionality that corp hangars are providing - allowing you to control ship access using corp roles - is overkill for the large majority of use cases; doesn't work consistently (the role checks are only applied to players from your corp); has serious issues with NPC corps; places hidden design tripwires everywhere (who owns the contents of a corp hangar - the pilot or the corporation?); and are in aggregate increasing the complexity of the game in a manner that we do not feel is justified in this case.
What's changing?
Corp hangars on ships will be transformed into fleet hangars:
- The total volume will stay the same
- Divisions and all reliance on corp roles is gone
- Only the pilot will be able to open or remove containers in fleet hangars, although any pilot can drop items onto them to place them in the container
- You will now be able to set "allow fleet usage" and "allow corp usage" independently for both fleet hangar and the ship maintenance bays (on
- ships only, not on starbases at this time)
- These settings will now be stored per-ship on the server, so a given ship will always keep its last settings
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63977/1/Inventory_FleetHangar.jpg)
In this image you can see the "fleet" and "corp" buttons next to the Ship Maintenance Bay and Fleet Hangar, which are used to set access permissions on each
Additional changes related to this:
- We're adding a range of new non-compressive containers to the "freight container" line (volumes in m3 are 1k, 5k, 10k, 50k, 250k)
- All special bays on ships that are not your main cargo will now behave like your main cargo when it comes to ship scanners and loot drop chances; this includes fleet hangars, ore holds, fuel holds and so on. Specifically, they will all allow their contents to show up on scanners, and they will all have a chance to drop their contents as loot. Ship maintenance bays are somewhat special: they will be scannable (ie, ships but not their modules or cargo can show up in results), but they won't be dropping assembled ships as loot
- Ship and cargo scanners will no longer randomize the stack size/number of modules they return: for any stack or module that they successfully detect, they will report the correct size/count
- Blockade Runners are being updated to be immune to cargo scanners, and as such will always show up as empty on scans
- Freighters will have most of their special-case restrictions removed: they will now be able to perform cargo operations in space, including moving items into and out of containers, moving things to and from containers in space, and jettisoning items
- We're removing the restriction on simultaneous users for *all* ship fitting arrays, both on ships and on starbases: an unlimited number of pilots will be able to refit at a single ship or structure
Additional changes that are largely unrelated but seemed like a good idea given that we were looking at the code anyway:
- Starbase forcefield passwords are now stored per-character on the server, so you'll always have the most recent password you entered set until you enter a new one
- The "lock/unlock" setting on audit log containers is now stored per-container on the server, rather than per-character on the client
Why are you removing divisions? They're useful!
Yes, they are. However, we're currently of the opinion that they're not *necessary*, we don't feel that they're adding a lot of value in the most common use cases, and as such we're treating them as a case of unnecessary complexity.
The changes to container behavior in fleet hangars, the new containers, and existing inventory features such as filters, should allow most (but not all) of the current functionality to be replicable in the new system. There will, though, be some cases in which the new system is less useful than the old system. We acknowledge this, and we understand that the changeover will be frustrating for some people, but we need to get the complexity of EVE under control and doing so is going to require functionality downgrades in certain areas. This is annoying but unavoidable.
My Orca-hauling backbone!
Yup. The immunity of corp hangars (and other special bays) to scans and their inability to drop loot was a neat workaround, but it was also essentially unfinished functionality, rather than an intentional feature. We recognize the need for secure hauling in the current environment, hence the scan immunity on blockade runners, but feel that the way it's being provided currently is unintuitive and clunky,
and that the "safe hauling" capacity on Orcas is unnecessarily large. Blockade runners should pick up the slack on high-value, low-volume items, while for higher-volume shipments, we're leaving it up to players to figure out how to handle the new situation.
(We're not making any changes to plastic wrap right now, but it has significant technical issues which will likely see it being reworked at some point down the line.)
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I missed this one, whups: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74036
In Development: Eve Onlines: Retribution
reported by CCP Guard | 2012.11.29 18:53:00 | NEW | Comments
On December 4th we will publish our 18th free expansion EVE Online: Retribution and we have another In Development video available for you!
Watch how CCP Guard and his good friend Senior GM Nova interact live with the new Crimewatch system for Retribution, weapon safety and the new timer indicators. We also present further insight to Unified Inventory improvements, the new ORE frigate, salvaging drone and UI changes.
Watch the video and see how the saga continues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XPRSUVaKIwY
Enjoy!
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and also this one... : http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=74031
War. War Never Changes..Until It Does
reported by CCP Affinity | 2012.11.29 13:05:00 | NEW | Comments
Hi everyone.
CCP Affinity here with a sneak peek into what Game of Drones has in store for all you FW pilots in EVE Online: Retribution.
After an early launch of Factional Warfare features in October as can be seen here we have continued to work on more changes for Retribution.
Bulk Purchasing:
Let’s start with my favorite Retribution change... bulk purchasing from the LP Store. Never again will your datacore habit go hand in hand with a bad dose of Repetitive Strain Injury… it’s now as simple as clicking on the buy button, a number field appears below and you type in the amount you wish to purchase.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63997/1/LP_Store_MultiBuy_01.png)
After this you will get a pop-up that confirms your order. If you try to buy more than you can afford, it will automatically tell you the maximum number affordable in the pop-up.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63997/1/LP_Store_MultiBuy_02.png)
FW UI Changes:
This isn’t the only FW UI change in Retribution. We wanted to make it easier for you to see when you are enlisted in a militia so we have now added this information to the following places:
- The login screen
- Character sheet
We also wanted you to be able to proudly display the militia you have enlisted in, making it easier for other pilots in New Eden to see who your loyalty is with and also to allow you to show info on other pilots and find potential war targets.
(http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/63997/1/fw3.png)
This will now appear in:
- Character info tab (Show info)
- Corp and Alliance info tab (show info)
- Corporation management and recruitment windows
FW complexes and NPCs:
Another change for Retribution is the complexes. We have renamed the complexes as follows:
- "Small” complexes are now called “Novice”
- “Standard” complexes are now called “Small”
- “Major” complexes (with the exception of Compound and Stronghold) are now called “Medium”
- “Major complexes (Compound and Stronghold only) are now called “Large”
We felt the complexes had swayed too far towards a PvE activity and this is not what we wanted at all. We want to move towards a more PvP like environment while still ensuring the complexes cannot be quickly farmed. To achieve this we have made the following changes:
- Designed new NPCs for FW complexes with low damage output, high defenses and good mobility with no EWAR
- Reduced spawns from 10-16 NPCs to 1-2 NPCs
After Retribution, upon entering a FW complex, one NPCs will spawn and if you manage to kill the NPC within 5 minutes for Novice and Small complexes and within 10 minutes for Medium and Large, no further NPCs will spawn during the capture time. The main purpose of the NPC is now to avoid quick complex farming and to encourage you to bring enough DPS.
The NPCs in each complex have been carefully balanced to match the ship restrictions for each complex size:
- Novice complexes now only accept tech1 frigates (including Navy and Pirate, rookie ships will be excluded) and the NPC spawned will be a frigate
- Small complexes now accept all frigates (including tech 1, tech 2, all pirate/navy variants) plus all destroyers (including tech 1, tech 2) and the NPC spawned will be a destroyer
- Medium complexes will accept all frigate and destroyer variations, plus cruisers (including tech 1 and tech 2, pirate and navy variations but NOT tech3 cruisers) and they will spawn a cruiser NPC
- Large complexes will have no ship restrictions to enter and will spawn a Battlecruiser NPC
A lot of players told us how much they disliked having to travel more than 80KM to the capture point and we also felt this discouraged PvP within sites. To counter this we have also made the followed adjustments to the complexes:
All capture beacons have been moved much closer to the warp-in point – they are now 10KM off warp-in
Capture range has been adjusted to 30KM for all complexes
Geography Changes:
As a result of player feedback, we have added a few stargates to open up the warzones and make roaming easier:
- A jump connection between Kurniainen (Bleak Lands) and Isbrabata (Metropolis) has been added
- A jump connection between Siseide (Heimatar) to Eszur (Metropolis) has been added
- A jump connection between Gulmorogod (Heimatar) to Egmar (Metropolis) has been added
That’s it for Team Game of Drones FW changes for Retribution, now it’s over to you. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these changes in the comments thread for this blog.
Thanks,
CCP Affinity
Team Game of Drones
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FW complexes and NPCs...
Meh. :psyccp:
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They really should have excluded pirate faction frigs from the novice plexes since well fit drams/DD are going to chew through any t1/navy frig. Other than that, I do like the capture point being within 10km of the warp-in now since it makes catching those no fit defensive plexing frigs far easier.
Potentially having more fights inside plexes due to less npc interference is a good thing though.
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They really should have excluded pirate faction frigs from the novice plexes since well fit drams/DD are going to chew through any t1/navy frig. Other than that, I do like the capture point being within 10km of the warp-in now since it makes catching those no fit defensive plexing frigs far easier.
Potentially having more fights inside plexes due to less npc interference is a good thing though.
Drams are pretty bad now tbqh, A blapping Daredevil is more of a worry.
I have high hopes for this expansion, CCP seem to have done a good job \o/
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I am speculative if the new capture point ranges will make much of a difference. The requirements for plexers are now to pulse d-scan at the gate entrance vector. As soon as anything shows up, warp off.
Presumably career plexers were already doing this, but...
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You were even doing it if you looked for a fight, as you'd want to know what and how many you're up against.
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I am speculative if the new capture point ranges will make much of a difference. The requirements for plexers are now to pulse d-scan at the gate entrance vector. As soon as anything shows up, warp off.
Presumably career plexers were already doing this, but...
360 short scanning the accel gate into a plex is pretty much SOP. What the changes mean is that you will always need at least one person on the timer within scram range and prevents what at times happens now in which people won't engage because they have to consider burning 80km under npc fire before they can even get a point on a target.
It might not change much in tactics because people will probably do the same as now and just have tacklers on the warp-in/timer and have long range ships setup off it to blap anything that comes inside.
Also, def. plexing alts are mostly brain dead and the only thing that saves them currently is the fact they have time when alt-tabbed out on a timer to warp off due to the distance involved. With the changes, it means even if they're stabbed they can at least get caught with a double scram ship on the warp-in/timer if they're not spamming their d-scan.
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They really should have excluded pirate faction frigs from the novice plexes since well fit drams/DD are going to chew through any t1/navy frig. Other than that, I do like the capture point being within 10km of the warp-in now since it makes catching those no fit defensive plexing frigs far easier.
Potentially having more fights inside plexes due to less npc interference is a good thing though.
Drams are pretty bad now tbqh, A blapping Daredevil is more of a worry.
I have high hopes for this expansion, CCP seem to have done a good job \o/
I expressed this concern when I saw the devblog (though I lumped navy frigs in with the faction ones, sorry); one of the devs said they'd be keeping an eye on things. So go out in gangs of faction frigs and blap all the things that come your way to show them that they don't belong, if you want them to fix it. :P
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What it needs:
Pirate frigs seem excessive in the smallest complexes. Destroyers were the cheap and especially "novice" choice to gain some leverage against the best frigates. Best way would really be to exclude the pirate frigates from these complexes as destroyers seem to fit well within the next step of plexes.
Allowing everyone his falcon alt in the cruiser playground might be lame, but then, falcons are usually not much fun to fight against. Benefit of the doubt for the t1/t2 mixup.
As far as plex layout goes we'll have to see. Technically nothing should change. Warp-in camps are as powerful as they were and long-range fits can always pull range once something appears on scan. The time lost on the counter by doing that (Although if I'm aware, cap radius should now be a unified 30 km?) may be gained by less rats in comparison to now.
Whelp, we'll see.
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Instead of the many small|medium|large complexes of different types and rules you will now have only 4 types;
Novice, Small, medium and large.
Notice that first word; NOVICE. I think novice, I think few days/months old toons getting into the game and FW and hitting the smallest complexes in their small frigates, hoping for some fun and fights.
Some 5+ year old 60 billion ISK rich player with a Daredevil at 70+ million cost, implants, rigs and T2+Faction fitting utterly massacering them all is not conductive for your fun at this stage, and I suspect in a few months after the 4th when a few hundred players have raged out of EVE they will realize how utterly dumb it is to let navy/faction frigates into the smallest complexes, and fix it.
They wanted to balance out the frigates because they never got any action. This is the perfect chance to do so, and I'm hoping they will kick faction frigs out of novice complexes within days, rather than anything else...
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As for everything else, I'm glad to see the changes. Yes, everything. The act of putting the control points withing 10km of the warp-in only changes one thing; giving brawler ships fit for tank and close range combat a field of use over always-speed-fitted-kiters-Online. If you want to pull range, you had to mind that there might be people on the entry-point ready to tackle you - this has not changed. However for a brawler entering a comple first was pointless because the kiter was 80+ km off when he arrived and could run up to you at range and either kill you or force you out at his own terms.
So you needed two people at least to stop one kiter; one at the control point and one at the entrance. Now it's perfectly viable to do it solo - and if your the first to enter and want range, simply put yourself in the 30km range area behind the control point and you will be 40km off entry. Nothing new there.
Then again I've always - always - favored close-range brawling over the range and speed game, so this just makes me very happy.
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(http://images5.fanpop.com/image/user_images/3791000/Applejack14-3791628_50_50.png)Well, y'all do realise that a full crystal+tengu+strong blue pill asb merlin / full snake+legion punisher would make them rage just as much, don'cha? That is though, ah do see yer point. Y'd have ta be mighty much o' a bully t' pull that off!
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Pro tip:
You missed the core of the criticism about the novice plexes.
Pro tip²:
Anything that can defeat them will not be engaged.
Pro tip³:
If you use fancy implants, drugs and offgrid-booster they can use them too.
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Trailer, courtesy of Tibs
http://uk.ign.com/videos/2012/12/03/eve-online-retribution-consequences-trailer
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Trailer, courtesy of Tibs
http://uk.ign.com/videos/2012/12/03/eve-online-retribution-consequences-trailer
Not one of the better trailers, honestly. Too short, anticlimactic, lacking any relation to the rest of EVE story. It's a story about a ganker who gets ganked. Wooo.
Nice visuals though, as usual.
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That was ... pretty anticlimatic, yeah.
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Pfft, I enjoyed it.
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I also enjoyed it.
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Generic dubstep in the background made me grind my teeth.
Fucking dubstep is everywhere.
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Looks like they abandonned the old lore/cinematic oriented trailers for basic and vapid (but well made) advertisement, in the vein of the butterfly effect, how eve changed my life, the dominion trailer, etc etc.
And yes, dubstep because the target is probably fond of it usually, but that's not really new in Eve.
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1. That was not dubstep.
2. That was a great trailer, sure to draw in people who think that EVE is that game where 'the goons fuck you repeatedly' and know nothing else.
3. It told a story. It played out very much like the 'this could be you' trailers ("Butterfly Effect" and "You decide to take it") that folks usually love.
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Enjoyable.
It isn't aimed at EVE players, folks. It tries to get people interested in the game. And as such it delivers.
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It tells a story which allows a prospective player to imagine taking various roles. It's pacier than the usual space porn, which can feel somewhat self-indulgent. It has the inbuilt mini-game for veterans of "spot the new features", but they don't get in the way of the narrative. The idea that the world does have consequences is one of the unique features and selling points of EVE, with its single shard and ongoing story made up of the interactions of many players.
It doesn't steal my heart or make me gasp with wonder, but I suspect it does the job it needs to do.
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It's well-done, but as has been pointed out we aren't the intended audience.
Here I was hoping for some Caldari and Gallente "Retribution" space opera, but *sigh*
CCP needs to just release their stand-alone game engine so we can up with our own machinima :/
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CCP needs to just release their stand-alone game engine so we can up with our own machinima :/
Hells yes.
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CCP needs to just release their stand-alone game engine so we can up with our own machinima :/
Hells yes.
I would pay quite a bit of real money for a copy. They could sell the damn thing for all I care.
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Balancing :twisted: :https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2262775#post2262775
Yup the implications of the change were not spelled out very clearly, we should have put a lot more explanation into the note. What it means is that no modules or skills will affect the capital remote assistance mods unless they are explicitly programmed to. So that applies to gang mods, rigs, implants, and skills.
So, as gang links were previously affecting capital remote armour reps, but not capital remote shield reps, CCP have of course done the only sensible thing and stopped links affecting either of them. Which brings armour triage in line with shield triage, and will make many an archon pilot absolutely furious.
Yay :3
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Balancing :twisted: :https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2262775#post2262775
Yup the implications of the change were not spelled out very clearly, we should have put a lot more explanation into the note. What it means is that no modules or skills will affect the capital remote assistance mods unless they are explicitly programmed to. So that applies to gang mods, rigs, implants, and skills.
So, as gang links were previously affecting capital remote armour reps, but not capital remote shield reps, CCP have of course done the only sensible thing and stopped links affecting either of them. Which brings armour triage in line with shield triage, and will make many an archon pilot absolutely furious.
Yay :3
No that much since you can already barely fit a single capital shield transporter with its absurd cpu cost anyway...
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Balancing :twisted: :https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2262775#post2262775
Yup the implications of the change were not spelled out very clearly, we should have put a lot more explanation into the note. What it means is that no modules or skills will affect the capital remote assistance mods unless they are explicitly programmed to. So that applies to gang mods, rigs, implants, and skills.
So, as gang links were previously affecting capital remote armour reps, but not capital remote shield reps, CCP have of course done the only sensible thing and stopped links affecting either of them. Which brings armour triage in line with shield triage, and will make many an archon pilot absolutely furious.
Yay :3
No that much since you can already barely fit a single capital shield transporter with its absurd cpu cost anyway...
And they've pulled it back anyway, so ignore this >.>
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Nobody touches my Archon.
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Nobody touches my Archon.
Can I touch your...Apoc?
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They could make the shield transporters better, but that probably upset POS mechanics/balance (if such a thing exist).
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Ran across an interesting item - Sukuuvestaa Heron. Does not appear to be particularly different than a Heron other than the paint job.
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Want. Now. Immediately. Give me the Sukuuvesta ship.
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There's one for each race, with a Sarum Family Magnate and Vherokior Probe. I can't recall off hand what the Imicus one is, nor do I know where they came from.
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Sarum Family Magnate. For the frontlines or so the fluff says. /o\
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Patch notes:
To be released on Monday, December 10, 2012
Fixes
Bounties
Any bounties placed on inactive characters will be refunded up to 50% of the bounty placed on that character. This also happens if a character becomes inactive after receiving the bounty and stays inactive for a long time.
Wars
Wars that are now made mutual will always be able to be retracted by the aggressor, even if the war is made non-mutual.
User Interface
Fixed the right click Location menu for Science & Industry jobs.
Fixed an issue that sometimes caused typing to stop working and shortcut keys to be applied instead.
Custom groups on the Neocom will no longer be removed on log in.
Fixed an issue where single corporation divisions would not persist after loading into the game.
Inventory window will no longer expand when stacked and collapsed with another window after a jump.
Fixed the order in which the back and forward functionality works with the Inventory.
Inventory
It is no longer possible to teleport items into containers, which are too far away.
The limit of items in corporate hangar arrays has been increased to 1500 item-stacks per division.
Production jobs from corporation hangars are now using the correct limit of items per division (1500).
Dropping items into divisions of corporate hangar arrays without roles is no longer causing wrong error messages.
Market
The Shield Resistance Amplifier sub groups on the market now have correct names. No more pesky spelling mistakes.
Kill Rights
We identified some issues that would cause expired kill rights to always appear in the activate kill rights UI. This should no longer show old and expired kill rights.
Localization
The search backend will now properly match when doing a “Partial terms” search for solar system names that have hyphens in them (i.e. “1-3H” will correctly match 1-3HWZ).
Graphics
A texture bug with the 125mm and 150mm Railguns has been fixed.
A hard edge texture bug has been resolved in the mission "The Blockade".
A hardline geometry gap has been resolved on the Armageddon and all of its variants.
Fixed an issue where Tengu Launcher was facing the wrong direction.
Fixed an issue where Tengu Launcher had an unusual rotation.
Small geometry gaps have been fixed on the Proteus.
Client
Image files in JPEG format that contain a corrupt jpg_header block could crash the client. Some players with such corrupt files would experience a crash to desktop during startup or the login process. This particular vulnerability has now been addressed.
Starmap
Cynos are now being displayed correctly on the world map.
World Shaping
Jump bridges can be linked without problems.
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There's one for each race, with a Sarum Family Magnate and Vherokior Probe. I can't recall off hand what the Imicus one is, nor do I know where they came from.
It's Inner Zone Shipping. Same as one of the Catalyst variants.
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All the new beeps and boops are distracting, but I'm sure they'll be useful once you get used to them.
I like the circle-based interface.
The new ships are going to provide for many, many hours of experimentation and metagaming and pew pew.
Haven't had much experience with the bounty system yet.
Crimewatch is nice. User-friendly displays and timers? This isn't the CCP I'm used to.
The safety button is a neat feature the first time. But it'd be nice if turning it off persisted between sessions.
And there's so many explosions in FW. So many.
All in all, not too shabby.
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The safety button is a neat feature the first time. But it'd be nice if turning it off persisted between sessions.
CCP Fozzie has confirmed they know about this, and are working on it. Should be fixed in the next patch or two.
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Having done a few null roams with the new t1 cruisers I have to say they have been ridiculously buffed beyond expectations, I might go ahead and say too much buff.
Cost / Benefit for gangs of these things is incredibly attractive.
Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
Regarding the safeties, they certainly need to remember your settings.
We've had lot of embarrassing /hilarious ridicule on comms this last week for fleet members wondering out loud why their drones wont attack, or why they are missing points on fleeing targets, etc. :)
"My drones won't shoot! Something is wrong!"
silence
"Oh, I uh, fixed it"
Me: "....Did you leave the safety on"
....."yes."
20 people: "bwahahahahha"
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Proud to say that the safety thing only caught us out on the first day. After that, FC's always go "safeties off" before we head out.
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The safety button is a neat feature the first time. But it'd be nice if turning it off persisted between sessions.
CCP Fozzie has confirmed they know about this, and are working on it. Should be fixed in the next patch or two.
CCP also stated the reason they didn't include persistence between logins is because they didn't have the time to implement and properly test it; rather than release something that could be utterly, completely broken and cause a petition-flood, they elected to release a working safety without persistence and then add it in a subsequent patch when they didn't have a huge deadline looming. So it wasn't an "oops we forgot", the ability for it to remember between logins was an intended feature they just didn't have the time to implement and run past QA.
All in all, having to reset it every time you log in is a minor annoyance in comparison to what could have resulted from not having enough time to properly test it. :p
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Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
I've found the T1 logis are nothing short of amazing. Over the next couple of weeks, my money is either no one using them because no one will engage a cruiser gang with logi support, or a lot of e-war being flown trying to counter them.
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Having done a few null roams with the new t1 cruisers I have to say they have been ridiculously buffed beyond expectations, I might go ahead and say too much buff.
Cost / Benefit for gangs of these things is incredibly attractive.
Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
Welcome in CCP usual dichotomy with their tech system. Soon they might buff T2 ships to compensate...
Back to the beginning. /o\
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I don't think they have the staying power for any larger engagements or lowsec camping, but for skirmish 0.0 they really seem to be a -lot- of fun right now.
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FATE has run into a bit of an issue with the crimewatch status timers recently. Imagine 2 players - player A1 and player B1. Player B1 has a suspect tag, and is engaged by player A1; player B1 shoots back. Both player A1 and B1 both have limited engagement tags on each other.
Now, if player A1's friend player A2 comes alone and remote-repairs player A1, then A2 will also gain a suspect tag because he aided someone in a limited engagement that A2 was not part of, even though B1's suspect status means that A2 could have shot him without penalty.
Someone pointed out a very real issue with this: If someone a corp under wardec is attacked by war targets, and starts to shoot back making a limited engagement, then anyone from that person's corp - even though they are under wardec as well - will recieve a suspect tag for repairing their corpmate being attacked.
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If the system makes Limited Engagements between entities that can already freely shoot at eachother due to war dec, there is something wrong with the system. :|
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Having done a few null roams with the new t1 cruisers I have to say they have been ridiculously buffed beyond expectations, I might go ahead and say too much buff.
Cost / Benefit for gangs of these things is incredibly attractive.
Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
Welcome in CCP usual dichotomy with their tech system. Soon they might buff T2 ships to compensate...
Back to the beginning. /o\
I read on FHC that apparently CCPs intent on T2 ships is not to give them roles that replaces T1, but that increases the role specialization and resistances, IE: t2 may not be the target of huge PG/CPU/hitpoints increases, but be centered around ship bonuses and resistances.
That is a logical way to make t2 more interesting without making t1 obsolete
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Having done a few null roams with the new t1 cruisers I have to say they have been ridiculously buffed beyond expectations, I might go ahead and say too much buff.
Cost / Benefit for gangs of these things is incredibly attractive.
Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
Welcome in CCP usual dichotomy with their tech system. Soon they might buff T2 ships to compensate...
Back to the beginning. /o\
I read on FHC that apparently CCPs intent on T2 ships is not to give them roles that replaces T1, but that increases the role specialization and resistances, IE: t2 may not be the target of huge PG/CPU/hitpoints increases, but be centered around ship bonuses and resistances.
That is a logical way to make t2 more interesting without making t1 obsolete
Hasn't it always been the case ? Well then, I am interested to see what they can do on the matter then, because for now, it's not very glorious.
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Usually T2 stuff had massive fitting improvements and more slots....
The aim, if i understand correctly, its not going on that route, but adjust better the ship bonuses and minor stats to just enhance one particular role of the many its former t1 hull might had.
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Well yeah, T2 was already supposed to be specialized, and a certain amount of them are really specialized, but not enough imho.
We have the sniping ships like half of the AFs and most of the HACs, that have clear bonuses to range. We have the reconships specialized on a second layer of EW compared to their T1 counterparts, we have fleet commandships, logis, interceptors, bombers, covops, etc.
And we also have a lot of other T2 ships that are, as you say, just buffed versions of their T1 hull, like the other half of the AFs, field commandships, etc. And when we think about it, the reconships are just buffed versions of their T1 hull with another specific EW, so eventually, specialized in the sense that the strenghts of their T1 hull is magnified but nothing else specific, making them still good at what their T1 hulls do, and a lot better (specialized) at their bonuses.
So yes, I hope they will do as you say.
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Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
I've found the T1 logis are nothing short of amazing. Over the next couple of weeks, my money is either no one using them because no one will engage a cruiser gang with logi support, or a lot of e-war being flown trying to counter them.
Confirming this. We've actually been in several fights where both sides have logis, and neither can quite break the other. The whole situation is fun, but can be rather frustrating.
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Will be experimenting with the t1 logi but it seems to be the same case.
I've found the T1 logis are nothing short of amazing. Over the next couple of weeks, my money is either no one using them because no one will engage a cruiser gang with logi support, or a lot of e-war being flown trying to counter them.
Confirming this. We've actually been in several fights where both sides have logis, and neither can quite break the other. The whole situation is fun, but can be rather frustrating.
You mean we can't just all press F1 and hope for the best?
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If anyone's still confused as to Post-Retribution FW, I've posted the draft of a guide aimed at genuinely new players. (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2364930#post2364930) It's not quite done - I'm looking at adding screencaps and additional information.
Time permitting, I'll update the EVE wiki, as its resources on FW are horribly, horribly outdated.