A couple thoughts on this expansion.
CQ? Kinda cool for the first few minutes until you've seen every single thing the TV has to cycle through and gotten bored. Lighting on the characters is terrible - looks like dogshit on low settins, and simply looks flat on higher settings. That face I spent a while making and shaping and blahblahblah? I'd find it less jarring to look at a stick figure with a 2d image of my portrait for its head than look at the corpse I see now. I'm also a little annoyed with the new 'load station environment' option. Formerly, when you told it not to, you got a static image of your ship in the hangar. No spinning, but there's your ship. Now you get a door, you can't see what ship you're in unless you open the fittings or hangar windows. Just a little inconvenient.
Turrets? Pretty cool, tbh. Except they're supposed to go in and out and whatnot, and I did not see this when I tested it. Otherwise, pretty. I'm happy-ish, except for what they did to the tempest. Seriously, wtf? They moved one of the six turrets and it just looks strange.
Performance and resource management? I have two gaming machines, an old laptop that used to run eve at max settings and rock and roll, now it overheats, and we're pretty sure it's the memory and not the graphics that's the issue. In Incursion, it had no issues running a single client on minimum settings (Multiple clients --> more memory use --> overheated and crashed laptop). Idling in CQ on minimum settings now crashes it.
My new machine, built specifically for running multiple eve clients, used to experience only mild slowdown with three windowed mode clients on max settings (12 GB ram ftw). It now experiences significant issues with two clients in CQ at the same time. I don't think the graphics are the issue (or, I don't think they're the biggest issue), I think CQ is just a massive memory hog. Reminds me of the old 'bloatware' moniker for microsquash products.
I've noticed some slowdown in space, and while I only skimmed it, the gist from the dev blog on fighting lag was that it would have more stuff happening client-side, less happening server side. Result? Less lag in massive fleet fights, but makes the game harder to play on low-end machines, even if you don't have to deal with CQ.
The noble exchange... yeah, wtf? They said something about not wanting to inflate plex prices, which this was almost certain to do; maybe their way of preventing that was to make the stuff so expensive that no one would buy it, thus avoiding the spike in demand for plex.... and wasting everyone's time, particularly the developers.
