Incursion 1.5

Incursion will be deployed on May 19th, which is tomorrow as I write this. A couple of big things in this one, which quite surprised me as I wasn’t even aware they were coming !

Blueprints

  • Unique icons have been created for Blueprint originals and Blueprint copies so you can visibly differentiate between them.

Wow, just wow. A change all industrialists have all been waiting for ! And for years CCP said that it couldn’t be done, because they couldn’t distinguish a copy from an original if I remember correctly. Finally that nonsense comes to an end and finally you can see if you’re dealing with a copy by just glancing at the icon instead of having to click on it and go to the appropriate tab etc..

Blue-Prints_2

Ships

  • The capabilities of the onboard scanner have been substantially increased. The range is now 64 AU and the delay to return results is only 10 seconds.
  • Ships with jumpdrives are now unable to use jump bridges with the exception of ships belonging to the Black Ops ship category.

Mixed response to this one. I don’t dwell in 0.0, nor do I use jump drives so it doesn’t effect me personally. I guess CCP thought traveling around was getting a bit too easy and toned it down. The onboard ship scanner will be improved as well. Nothing wrong with that I guess.

Agents & Missions

  • Agent Quality has been removed meaning that all Agents are now +20 in terms of payout and -20 in terms of access. Go forth, Capsuleers, and explore the world outside of Motsu and Dodixie.
  • Agent Divisions have been simplified from 20 down to just 3. The new Security, Distribution and Mining divisions now provide uniform types of missions instead of a mission type that was percentage based.

Ah another big one ! The very confusing Agent Divisions will be simplified and you actually know for sure you’ll get a combat, courier or mining mission. Very welcome change in my opinion. Also the quality system is basically removed. I guess putting them all to +20 was easier than just removing it. This will bring in somewhat more cash into the economy I guess, but will spread people out more, which can only be a positive thing. Although I am sure people will still sort of stick together as it’s easier to buy and sell your goods. But still, people will probably spread out. It will be interesting to see what will happen.

Furthermore the various connections skills will be removed as a consequence of the above. Only a few remain from what I read in the patch notes. The skill points for those that have already gotten the skills will be reimbursed.

Players who have the old skills already trained will have those skills removed and receive replacement skillbooks in the hangar of their home station and have the skillpoints reimbursed.

There are some more fixes and changes, but these are the really big ones. Some very welcome changes I think !

Links:

Apocrypha 1.5 Downtime

Enough of all the DUST discussions, let’s focus on the upcoming patch (which is taking a little longer to deploy due to database issues). We’ll see what DUST will bring and what kind of impact it will have on the game.

Looking forward to:

– Small and med rigs. Sniper trashers, speedier rifters / better falloff. The list goes on ;). Also it will be cheaper to rig BCs, which is nice. Ships like a Myrm, Drake and the Cane are so much nicer when they’re equiped with rigs.

– Extra 5ok m3 Ore hold for the Orca

– Factional Warfare lp store. Though it seems the lp rewards for pvp kills are mediocre at best. I assume this is ‘prenerfed’. But running FW missions with the corp might give a lot more lps for goodies from the store.

– FW lag fixes. The ksequencer fix already worked very well for me, but not for all, and not for new players that didn’t know about it. Now that it will be built into the client, I hope it works even better, also considering they extensively tested it on the testserver.

– Mission Story Epic Arc – more content is always nice ! I’ll be starting the caldari arc this weekend I think, will keep an eye on the bug reports though. Hope it works right out of the gate.

Well that’s my summary of patch 1.5 :). Let’s hope the servers will be up soon !