So Much For Excellence....

And things had been going so well.... but then, Incursion 1.1 arrived.

First there was the last minute announcement that they would have to deprecate support for older CPU's due to compatibility issues with third party libraries, CCP promised an update on this right after last weekend, but we've gone an entire week without CCP divulging any new information.

Most evidence points to the new PhysX libraries that have arrived with the new character creator, specifically the simulation of cloth and hair as seen in this tech video:



Now, I can see why CCP might have reneged on their promise of more details when they realised that it would be a little bit embarrassing to admit that they cut off support for thousands of players over this 'feature'. The cloth and hair simulation only happens during character creation, and even then the feature can be disabled so it has essentially zero impact on the gameplay. There are foolish people on the forums saying that CCP needs to discontinue support for this older hardware so that the rest of the players can experience the features that would otherwise be impossible, I wonder if they would be so sure if they knew what the feature was.

Regardless, this was merely the first and most public problem with the latest release, since Tuesday the list of hilarious gameplay bugs has been quite extensive:

1. Covert Cynos became usable by regular capital ships, thus rendering cynojammers useless
2. Ganglinks stopped working
3. The new super easy weapon grouping (which, I had been asking for) was exploitable to allow firing guns out of sequence and therefor delivering almost 4 times the regular dps
4. If you could kill a target in a single volley then concord would not show up, look at the number of podkills in Jita on wednesday.
5. A buggy mission was introduced that was delivering *billions* in tech 2 salvage components.
6. The new fancy portrait selector, didn't actually pic the portrait, instead the last image taken was used.

The actual incursions start in a couple of days and I predict there will be many more new bugs, and I also predict there will be lots of tears as people exploit the remote rep aggression mechanic to bring concord down on hastily organised fleets accepting any random player who X's up.

Meanwhile, they've annnounced the timetable for CSM6 and Mynxee has made it clear that she's not interested in fighting CCP any longer and will not be running. That more than anything discourages me from running again.