Author: Morphisat

Navy Scorpion vs Navy Raven

No it’s not a pvp encounter ! Just a little post in which we compare the two for the purpose of mission running.

Slot layout and bonuses :

Seven launcher slots vs. Six launchers (both have an empty one to fit a tractor beam or salvager or something else)

Six mid slots vs. eight mid slots.

Five low slots vs. four.

Scorpion Bonus:

Caldari Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to Cruise and Siege Launcher Rate Of Fire and 5% shield resistance per level

Raven Bonus:

Caldari Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to Siege and Cruise Missile Launcher Rate Of Fire and 10% bonus to Torpedo and Cruise Missile Velocity per level of skill.

The scorpion has a bit more cpu and powergrid making it very easy to fit however you like it. The Scorpion seems to be a bit more expensive at the moment. But it’s not that much of a difference (about 550mil vs. 600mil or so ?).

Navy Scorpion

Basically if you want a beefier tank, which is very easy to fit, and want to have an afterburner to burn between those mission gates a bit faster, the scorpion is a very fine choice as a mission runner.  Also with eight midslots there is plenty of room for either extra tank or a target painter.

If you’re already tanking missions with ease in a vanilla raven, and just want some extra firepower, the Navy Raven is a good choice.

What you can also do if you have an alt that helps you out mission running, is get the scorpion and give the navy raven to your alt :).

Of course the rattlesnake or nightmare are in a class of their own, but it depends for what faction agents you run mission for in case of the nightmare, but pirate faction ships are in another price range I would say ! And I don’t have any experience flying them to compare them against the above mentioned ships.

The age of Dominion

And the Age of Dominion is upon us ! A surprisingly smooth patch I must say ! The #tweetfleet buzz was very active. People reporting how far their download was etc. And even an hour early, we were able to log on.

I checked my invention blueprints and it seems that we indeed need less highlevel moon goo related components and way more mid/low lvl (armor plates). I am going to hold off production for a while and see how it pans out.

I could see the alliance wormhole fleet in the fleetfinder, sent out a few emails to check the new client, browsed my blog to see if the ingame browser worked, and yes it all seem to work smoothly. The ui with all the squareness needs a bit of growing into, I guess, after all these years of roundiness.

Tengu flyby

Then undocking… WOW stars, nice planets. People just warping from planet to planet, very fun experience. I almost forgot, but people in corp chat started linking contracts to the new Navy ships. I couldn’t resist and got me a Navy Scorpion. People have been saving up LP and started dumping them, plus the FW nerf (of sorts) will not make these any cheaper in the future I hope, so I think it’s a good investment. Haven’t had quite enough time to fully deck it out, but I think it’s a lot easier to fit than the CNR. Plus a lot of tankage with 8 med slots and the resistance bonus !

Navy Scorp

All in all the first impressions are VERY good ! Smooth patchday, smooth graphics, every as advertised. And the positive tweets keep coming in. Gratz to CCP !

Dominion just around the corner

With Dominion less than a week away, I was planning on doing a dominion in a nutshell post, but Kirith Kodachi beat me to it. But I decided to go ahead anyway and sort of give it my own spin.

Changes / improvements that don’t affect gameplay:

  1. New email client (mails also available through API)
  2. New ingame browser
  3. New planetary graphics

These will make the game more enjoyable, but won’t have much impact on gameplay. The new email client was long overdue, the ingame browser will be very helpful.

Changes that might affect my gameplay :

  1. Project gun changes – more alpha, less rate of fire
  2. New Navy ships factional warfare store
  3. Assault frig afterburner boost
  4. New fleet finder interface.

My factional warfare character flies minmatar so he’ll have to test no. 1. I am not sure about no. 3, I cannot find much of it anymore in the patch notes. Did it get scratched or is it still in ? No. 2 might bring more people (at least temporarily) to FW, though I am not too sure about it. The fleet finder is a fine addition !

Update: The AF changes were scratched :(. Was looking forward to that…

Other changes:

  1. ‘Epic’ pirate missions
  2. Boost to pirate ships etc.

I don’t fly these ships as they’re a bit too expensive to my taste, but who knows I might one day ;). The epic pirate missions don’t interest me at all. I tried the Caldari epic mission line, and someone at CCP thought it would be epic to have people courier documents 28jumps… But some people might like it, more content never hurts !

Last but not least:

  1. 0.0 sovereignty changes
  2. upgrades to 0.0 space
  3. capital ship changes
  4. Moon goo income changes / T2 bpo changes

And here it is, the meat of this expansion. The thing is that CCP boasted these changes on fanfest and during the alliance tournament, but what actually will be deployed on dec. 1st is quite meager. The upgrades are nothing to write home about. The sovereign system was still subject to change two weeks before the whole thing is going live, and I have already given my thoughts on the mothership changes.

Best thing to do would be to go live with the first set of things I mentioned. Nothing controversial there, every one will have a better game. Give the 0.0 overhaul some more thoughts and testing !

But we all know that this is what will be going live next week. And for those that claim that 0.0 doesn’t effect them, think again ! The whole game is affected by T2 prices, demand of trit due to capitals being blown up etc etc.

There also seems to be  misunderstanding that the only people that complain the mothership / 0.0 sovereignty thread are those from the big alliances like Goons and Atlas etc.. I see plenty of empire / lowsec people complain as well. Not only on CCP’s attitude, heavily censoring, but also about a dev blog that was simply factually incorrect. How such a blog can slip through is quite beyond me.

Let’s hope things will work out for the better, it will certainly be very interesting to see what will happen, the coming weeks. And how the market will respond. To be honest I have no idea, but will watch it with excitement.

Update: CCP just put their features page online.

Uproar over Capital Changes

And yet again a dev blog has caused a lot of uproar on the forums again. This time CCP Nozh is the villain in the continued forum soap opera ! First of all let me make it clear I know nothing about capitals and cap warfare, so I cannot really comment on the proposed changes by CCP Nozh.

But from what I understand from the thread the following happened: for weeks players and team of devs (CCP Arbithar is mentioned a lot) have been testing and changing caps on the test server. The changes had the approval of the players base and the dev team alike.

Then someone else steps in (CCP Nozh), voids all these changes and implements something totally different, and also showing that he doesn’t have much experience in 0.0 cap warfare (according to the players). So the big question here is “What happened ?”.

pitchforks

Was someone somewhere higher up not happy with the proposed changes and assigned the project to someone else ? Some sort of explanation is in order because this doesn’t sit well with the people that helped work out the first set of changes. They offered their spare time to help and think with the devs, and then just to scrape it all ? Is CCP getting more arrogant ?

Another trend that is noticeable is that the player base (especially the 0.0 one in the last two forum events) is getting more personal and vocal. It’s scary to see all these 0.0 alliances band together !

Update: Apparently posts are being deleted from the above thread ! Where have I seen that before ?

Update II : Eve Tribune has posted an excellent summary !

The fail that is Dominion ?

The bomb has dropped on a friday afternoon in the form of a dev blog on the eve online community. You can read the responses here on the forum, lots of references to the SWG NGE.

What’s the problem with the changes posted in the dev blog ? It costs 2bil to fully upgrade a system (yes a single system) in 0.0 and claim sovereignty. How are you ever going to make that system cost effective ? How can a small alliance afford to do this ? Even bigger ones, will be in trouble. They’ll probably just develop a few key systems and lock off the rest of a constellation for the rest of the people. CVA with their NRDS policy is especially screwed. They don’t make anything from their visitors.

CCP claimed that the goal of Dominion was to attract more people to 0.0. As I see it now, this will do the exact opposite. And if you think ‘I don’t do 0.0, this won’t effect me’, please think again. A lot of materials for T2 etc come from 0.0.

If people don’t / can’t bother with those anymore, markets will plummet and it will effect everybody in the game.

UPDATE : CCP Soundwave is now trolling posting in the above mentioned thread and says (amongst some other nonsense) As I said, if the costs become an issue, they can always be looked at.

It’ll be too late. People will have giving up and moved on. Anyone with some common sense can see that these changes are ridiculous.

Update II: CCP Chronotis posted in the feedback thread and it seems CCP is starting to backpaddle already. Which makes you wonder where they pulled the original numbers from in the first place… Post nr. 1000 btw raises some excellent questions.