Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[kalaratiri]

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.



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.

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.



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.



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.



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.



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.

[kalaratiri]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

Afterburner nerf ?

[kalaratiri]

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.

[hellgremlin]

Oh man I like that.

[kalaratiri]

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

[Lyn Farel]

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 ? >.>

[Morwen Lagann]

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. 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

[Desiderya]

Also, I think your math is derp on there, Kala. 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.

[Jev North]

I may actually need to train Afterburner V now.

[Morwen Lagann]

Also, I think your math is derp on there, Kala. 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

[kalaratiri]

My maths isn't actually mine 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 

[Lyn Farel]

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 ?

[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[kalaratiri]

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)