Odyssey: First Impression

Just like a lot of other Eve Bloggers, I took a look at Odyssey on the test server Sisi. Keep in mind these are some first impressions, and things are still in motion, as the upcoming expansion is still in beta, so all is subject to change.

New gate effect

The new animation in itself is nice, the first few times you see it. It does get a bit old after that and it seems longer than the new one (which is probably not true), but as it disables the UI it is more intrusive than the old one. An on / off button would be nice. Browsing the market or taking care of your PI while on autopilot is annoying right now.

Scanning changes

I was a bit disappointed with these changes. I can see how they want to make it a bit easier to get into, but there is a bit too much handholding right now. You can only launch 7 probes and they’re either in pinpoint mode or wide broad scan mode (can’t remember the exact term). I usually only use 5 which works perfectly well, and was even 2 sister probes short on the first character I tried on Sisi ! Also the shift key now has another function and I was dragging the probes out of formation. Probably something you get used to, but I would rather have my old keys back. The pinpointing itself wasn’t much different, but seems to take longer as I was struggling a bit with the new interface and key setup.

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The onboard scanner is now much more powerful and immediately shows all anomolies in the system ! The sites are presented on your regular screen, you can turn that on and off. Which isn’t very handy in my opinion. I don’t use the client full screen, sometimes I have three clients open in windowed mode, and don’t have that much screen estate. The list of sites is currently still there though CCP does plan to remove that, which I think is a very bad idea. Most feedback seems to agree with me here, so I hope they change their mind.

Ice Mining

Ice belts are no more ! You can now use the on board scanner and an ice belt anomoly will appear in the former Ice mining systems. I tried this out in Eygfe as you can see on the screen shot.

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The mining times themselves have been halved, so it takes around 90secs now for a full cycle (with no Orca boost). The ‘belts’ themselves aren’t very big, so I assume the ice miners will spread out more or there will be a race for the new anomoly to appear. I don’t think these can support the almost 200 people in local in Eygfe at peak times, it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, once this goes live !

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Links

Mabrick has made a nice video on the Odyssey changes, you can find it on his blog.

Test server feedback forums

UPDATE: Around the time I posted this, a dev post appeared in the feedback thread that addressed several of the issues mentioned above. Very nice ;).

10 year anniversary

Hooray, Eve is 10 years old ! And I have been a part of it for over seven years now ! Well with a break here and there. Last sunday we broke the record (I helped, my Ice Miner was logged on). There is a nice article on Massively as well.

EVE smashed its previous Peak Concurrent User total during the festivities by a clear margin, replacing 2011’s record of 63,170 with a new figure of 65,303 players logged in simultaneously.

Taking the S out of POS

Last week we got a Dev Blogpost on the upcoming changes to POSes or as CCP calls it Starbase Iterations. It’s not a revamp, but we didn’t expect that at this point, as the CSM minutes revealed earlier. We got this apparently due to the slight uproar after those minutes were released and CCP wanted to accommodate those ‘few players’ that own a POS.

There is nothing wrong with these changes, they’re all very welcome as far as I am concerned. Finally players can get their own little space in the ships hangar and so on. What delight me the most is the ability to finally change T3 modules at the hangar. It’s really dumb you must have 2 or 3 tengus just because you can’t change them on the fly like you’re supposed to.

The starbase code is quite old and complicated; so it is quite possible we will hit road blocks when addressing some of these features, road blocks that in some cases could render one or more of them undeliverable.

Now what is more important is what is missing. What I would really like is a more convenient way to refine minerals. The current modules are probably from  early on in the game when Mining Barges didn’t even exist. A new module or an ‘ iteration’ of those modules would be very welcome. Unless CCP does not want us to be self sufficient in the Wormhole and wants us to ship the minerals to Empire.

Also there is no mention of roles and the corp hangar and ship hangar. Although probably not everything has been fleshed out entirely, but a lot of people would be grateful if this was added. It might be getting a bit too complicated for June however.

Odyssey

Looks like we’ll be going on an Odyssey this summer, as that is the name of the upcoming Eve online expansion. A new re-imagined scanning system ! This will probably have big consequences for wormhole dwellers, and I wonder what kind of things we can discover.

A re-imagined scanning system, intuitive navigation and new exploration modules will aid you as you search the heavens for your next conquest.

This sounds rather intriguing. Another attempt to get people out of hisec ? Or make 0.0 more accessible ?

A rebalance of major areas of space from highsec to nullsec include changes in exploration sites, industrial resources, some types of NPC loot and more

Furthermore a lot of little things, including POS changes, dozens even !

This all sounds promising, I am sure there’ll be more info to come before Odyssey hits Smile.

http://www.eveonline.com/odyssey

The End Of Eon

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The sad news that Eon has come to an end didn’t come as a surprise as printed magazines are dropping left and right. It still is sad to see a part of Eve die.

Browsing through a few older issues, some of the articles get rather outdated, like ship guides and the like. But interviews with devs, the short stories and spotlights on players were always nice. I wrote an article on communication in Issue #21, which was nice to have done. I was supposed to write a guide on the then new P.I., but through some miscommunication (ironically enough) that didn’t happen.

I did take the opportunity to buy the poster bundle at the EON store for cheap though.

In years to come, may you pull an issue from the shelf, blow away the cobwebs and remember what EVE was once like. Until then, fly safe.

Links:

Gameskinny – nice article

Official announcement

ps. Bit odd to come out with this somewhat old news at the moment the Battle of Caldari Prime is going on, but this one had been sitting in my Live Writer for a while, just realised I hadn’t send it out yet.

Retribution 1.1

This totally caught me off guard, as I haven’t been following things very closely lately, but a quite significant patch has been deployed today ! Just looking at the patchnotes there are quite a few interesting things there: Battlecruiser updates and the new armor repair module ! Furtermore UI changes and a Crimewatch / Duel flag.

Patchnotes are at http://community.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp.

Thoughts on the POS revamp

Realising I am coming a bit late to the party, as this all started about three weeks ago when the CSM minutes were released, I still want to throw in my two cents on the subject ! Let me recap the situation first.

In August last year a POS revamp was on the table, or at least thought about. This revamp was going a lot further than just fixes to the current system. There used to be this old thread on the forums called Flogging a dead horse which points out exactly what the shortcomings are. The POS code is old though and I assume no one at CCP dares to touch it so they unsurprisingly came up with the idea to redo that segment of the codebase and decided to make it a bit like player housing in other MMOs and design a modular POS revamp.

Apparently someone had been looking into how to handle this and how many time it would take and soon CCP realised they bit off more than they could chew with this idea and deemed it ‘not beneficial for a lot of players’ as we can read in the Minutes from january 2012. This then let to CSM member two step’s campaign to try and change CCP’s plans for this year. He posted a blogpost and started a forum thread which as of now is 132 pages long.

Luckily there was light at the end of the tunnel, CCP Gargant responded in the above mentioned thread stating that the OVERHAIL CANNOT HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. I didn’t even know people were expecting that to be honest. They came up with the modualr thing themselves AFAIK. Then realised it would be rather complicated, also graphically wise. Which I totally understand, but would anyone care if they’d fix the most important issues first and expand later ? Most important are imho the rights management and the lack thereof for the ships maintenance array.

Especially for Wormhole corporation that pretty much live out of a POS it’s very hard to recruit people. You give them either access or you don’t. Since most people in a wormhole will have a nice array of shiny ships at their disposal, you can see how it is a problem to give access to all of that to a new player who’s strapped for cash ;).

Making POSes better is in the benefit of all players. Most people when they come to Eve would love to have a space station of their own some day, it’s a nice goal to have. Also POSes are the backbone of a lot of activities in Eve. Make that better and you have a much better game. But I assume I am preaching for the choir here, we all know how much better it could be, I am glad CCP realises that as well (albeit with a little nudging in the right direction). I hope it’s not just words but that it will result in a better POS system sooner rather than later !

BB 43–Some Random Awards

It’s once again Blog Banter time !

For Blog Banter 43 I would like to invite every participant to nominate their peers for whatever awards you think they deserve. Let’s start the year with some EVE-flavoured altruism and celebrate the best and the worst of us, the funniest or the most bizarre, the most heroic of the most tragic of the past year. They could be corpmates, adversaries, bloggers, podcasters, developers, journalists or inanimate objects. Go nuts.

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I had some time to think about this one and a came up with quite a few awards. I have decided that the five mentioned here will be my definite list !

Without further ado, here we go

Award #1 – Module of the year: The Ancillary Shield booster. This module really changed gameplay, especially PVP. I can’t quite remember what other newly introduced module actually changed things and had some people up in arms about it being OP. I am sure there have been, but none come to mind that were introduced in recent history. Ninveah did a nice write-up on them when they were introduced in may.

phantom_akelyAward #2 – Wormhole menace of the year – Akely and his family of alts ! This was an easy one. You simply don’t want to have this guy hidden in your wormhole. No mining op or site running is safe, once the Akelies have infested your hole. And once he’s in, it’s very hard to kick him out.

 

strazdasAward #3 – Commentator on this blog of the year : Strazdas

I have known Strazdas since my days in Hidden Agenda, and he kept on reading this blog since then. Always has a nice word, or a funny comment. Very much appreciated so this one is for him, Congratz !

 

ccp_punkturisAward #4 – Most interesting / funny / nice ccp employee to follow on Twitter : @CCP_Punkturis

Actually the name of the award already gave away why she received this much coveted award for CCP employees, she not only tweets about the game but about other (personal) things as well, which makes her more of a real person than most of the other CCP twitter accounts. Follow her at @ccp_punkturis.

And then finally the 5th award (tension building up, *drumroll*)

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Award #5 – Eve related website of the year – evebloggers.com

Actually I pulled a bit of a Rixx Javix here, who gave the eve blogging community an award. It’s very hard to single out one particular website. I frequently visit tigersears, mabrick’s mumbling, eveoganda, freebooted, Ninveah’s blog and some others. But the one site that I refresh a few times a day is still the one, that links them all together evebloggers.com.

So that’s it, the Morphisat 2012 Eve Awards, all winners can claim a Steam Dota2 key in the comments Open-mouthed smile.

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