Prize Ships for Alliance Tournament VIII

Details of the prize ships for Alliance Tournament VIII have been revealed - a couple of soon to be super exclusive Tech 2 Gallente ships -

The Utu is almost like a combination of the Iskur and Enyo - it has a huge 75m^3 drone bay, although it only has 25Mbit drone bandwidth so the pilots won't be fielding full wings of medium drones, but it also gets a 10%/Level bonus to drone damage. It gets a 50% reduction in heat damage, a 50% bonus to Hybrid optimal range and tracking, a 10%/Level Bonus to Warp Disruptor/Warp Scrambler Range. And of course to top it all off it gets more Hull, Armour, Shield and Capacitor just to make sure you have the edge over those far more common gallente assault frigates.

The only field in which the Enyo and Ishkur can claim any sort of an edge is the number of Hi-Slots, the Utu only gets 3, but it gets 4 mids and 4 lows so it can fit a Scram and Web. I haven't messed with EFT either but it might even have a viable dual propulsion setup.

Ahh yes EFT... because theorycrafting is all I'm likely to do with this....

Anyway, on to the Adrestia, based on the Thorax hull this is what a blaster boat should be with a 25% bonus to speed out of the box and 20%/level bonus to hybrid damage so this thing can get in range fast and lay a lot of hurt on its target. It also gets 50% bonus to hybrid falloff range and tracking speed to help with the whole 'laying of hurt' functionality, and, like the Utu a 20%/Level bonus to Warp Disruptor/Scrambler range. The drone bay is 100m^3, that's twice the size of the drone bay on the Deimos, so no need to choose between light and medium drones when loading up - and lets face it, if you're loading out this ship it'll be those super fancy Augmented Hobgoblins, Hammerheads and Warriors. It loses the utility hi-slot and gains a mid slot, and again more HP and more capacitor all around.

Of course, very few people are ever going to see these rare ships, if you have tens of billions in cash to spare then you might be able to buy one, at least when the tournament is over and the prizes have been awarded.

And then I hope that someone has the balls to make sure these ships do more than sit in hangars - my hat goes off to Admiral Goberius who flew his Mimir during the providence war.

Sansha Invasion = Great Opportunities for.....

I've been using the Vigil as my main mode of transport around hi-sec, it's relatively cheap
since it has more space, faster unboosted speed (700+m/s) and a trio of warp speed rigs to shave seconds of the time taken to warp across a system. I fill out the highs with salvagers and I've found more than a few wrecks for the taking on my travels, it has no need for guns, but I usually toss a combat drone in the drone bay. In the midslots It fits a MWD - giving a boosted speed of almost 5000m/s, a Capacitor Battery and recently the third midslot is fitted with a target painter. For a while I was fitting a shield extender for more tank, but it didn't really add anything and the vigil does get a bonus for target painting.

But what use is a target painter on this ship?

Well along with the drone it's proven quite effective at getting me onto killmails for those Sansha carriers turning up in hi-sec, being able to move across grid quickly and hitting the target with EWAR from 50km out is a hugely effective way of securing my place on the killmails. On top of this, the salvagers and speed make speedy work of the vast number of Sansha Battleship wrecks that end up being left on the field of battle. I turned up to some previous events in a Hawk, but a combination of the hawk not being hugely fast (would be nice to have had that AB bonus we talked about) and the 'Slave' turning up in a Nightmare meant that the target died before I could get in range, the short lifespan of battleships is why they've switched to carriers. Sure I worked hard and blew up scores of the loyal frigate rats that were webbing and scramming other players, but my hard work was barely recognised.

So, the 'killmail whore' setup is performing exceptionally well in that respect. I'm seriously mulling over the possibility of creating a comic alt who's entire purpose is to get onto other people's kilmails. My strategy would be to fit a frigate with an ECM burst and basicly trigger it in the middle of other people's battles in 0.0, it's possible to do this on an astrometrics frigate with an expanded probe launcher so in theory you could drop scan probes around an engagement and warp right on top of targets, fire the ECM and then try to GTFO - and repeat this until you finally get caught.... One day I shall test this theory.

Anyway, at the Sansha event in Vylade yesterday I also managed to get on scene with an alt in a tackle frigate, for about 5 seconds - warped to zero, landed next to a carrier, locked, fired and got blown up by a smartbomb. At which point it occured to me I had seconds until another smartbomb cycle was going to take out my pod and the UI was running far too slowly to make warping to a celestial in time so fearing for my implants I hit ctrl-q at which point my whole system grinds to a halt and windows decides to spin while closing the app. I get control back on my main character just as autopilot jumps him into Vylade, so I head into the breach and target paint my way onto the killmail before salvaging as many wrecks as possible. I finally log my alt back in and she's still in her pod, so I bookmark her wreck, fly to station and come back in a shiny new noobship.

For what it's worth I grab the remains of my ship, and figuring I have nothing to lose if I aggro someone I look in the wrecks around me. First wreck is the remains of the carrier.... containing a Capital Shield Booster!!! Nice, now I have to figure out how to get it back to station before someone else does, a 40million isk module is fair payment for the trauma of losing my frigate.

hmm there are a lot of people sitting nearby, I wonder if they've noticed? So I jettison the shield booster from my old ship and flip the Capital booster into the same can, I hope that Slave dude doesn't come back anytime soon because now he's within his rights to shoot me. Meanwhile with my main I'm looking around for a hauler, I've got one 4 jumps away, probably too far, and on the market some enterprising individual has bought up all the haulers in system and relisted then at 1000 times their regular price. No I do not want to pay 500million for an industrial. So I head next door to Dodixie and get myself a Mammoth.

Back at the wreck site, I can see people coming and looking in cans around me, every 3 minutes I add another jetcan to the collection of stuff around me and I keep the cap shield booster switching from one can to another in an approximation of the shell game. At one point a pilot in a Cyclone comes by and steals my old non capital shield booster, just as I switch out the cap booster to another can. But either he doesn't notice the real prize, or he doesn't think to flip it into his own can, and after a tense few minutes I arrive in my brand new mammoth to secure the prize. Sometimes the most exciting things in Eve are nothing to do with shooting at anything.

That shield booster will pay for the Research Project Management skillbook my alt was about to buy.

Ore Rebalacing For Tyrannis

One of the Dev's plans for rebalancing the mineral market was to increase the amount of low end minerals refined from mid range ores, the types of ore found in low sec and garden variety 0.0 systems*.

A quick examination of the test server shows the current changes as

Jaspet now refines to 439 Pyerite, was previously only 259

Hemorphite triples the amount of Tritanium from 212 up to 650, and gains 260 Pyerite and 60 Mexallon

Hedbergite added 290 Pyerite to the refinery output.

Spodumain more than quadruples its tritanium output up to 3190 from 700, and almost triples its pyerite content to 400 from 140.

So, if you're mining any of these ores I'd sit on them until the new release to maximise your profits.


* Many miners who've never left empire labour under the delusion that Arkonor is found throughout 0.0, anyone who's been there will attest otherwise, most 0.0 systems are in fact crap for mining.

Planetary Interaction In The Slightly More Distant Future

So, deployment of Tyrannis is being pushed back by a week, and CCP has bought even more time to fix bugs with planetary interaction by pushing back the seeding of the planetary command centres until the 8th of June. That'll give everyone time to train the skills, and figure out which planets they want to use before there's the mad land rush on the 8th.

I'm actually quite happy to hear this, it's better to do things right the first time rather than rushing out something with a whole bunch of known problems.

Revitalizing Low Sec - Pirate Software Edition

So last Saturday I participated in a round table organized by Mynxee regarding Low-sec and throwing around ideas on how to revitalize it and make it more distinct from Hi-Sec and 0.0. Generally the main thrust is that it needs new and unique resources and rewards and the ability to harvest those without putting players at so much risk that the risk/reward gets devalued below that of empire. People were very fond of cops & robbers themed concepts such as 'Corruption' which build an underground economy in low-sec around criminal products.

Boosters are a great example because they have a direct correspondence with the real world drug trade, and because boosters have an actual in game use in 'enhancing' your abilities to fly internet spaceships. For this reason boosters got a lot of attention with suggestions for changes that encouraged pilots to keep taking more and more to keep themselves under the influence and stay ahead of the crash. Other 'questionable products' like prostitutes, banned holoreels and plain old non-booster drugs can certainly be produced in low-sec and moved around to planets that need them, indeed if PI ever gets some decent population management features these might be great additions. Beyond these we kinda stalled in looking for 'stuff' that would be unique to low-sec, but useful to players everywhere, something that would pull people into lowsec to produce and fight over.

After the discussion a further idea occured to me - Pirate Software, Black Codes that let you break into other systems and do things you're not supposed to. Things like...

• Temporarily disabling sentry guns at gates and stations, so you fleet can operate unmolested, at least until the other side notice the glitch in the network and send a squad to investigate.
• Messing around with local intel, not appearing in local is one thing, but if you combine this with some of the intel redesign suggestions it could also be used to read local intel when you'd otherwise be blocked out.
• When you're tackling a pilot in a belt, use our 'leet hacking skills to make it hard to call for help, CCP can't stop pilots calling for help over third party teamspeak, but they can make the 'warp to member' fail, or perhaps drop the cavalry 200km off target.
• See all those offline towers? Instead of shooting them for hours just roll up and inject a software virus into it's now vulnerable processor, over the next 24 hours it'll slowly subvert the locking systems unless the owners can get on the scene and load fresh firmware (and fuel).
  
• How about sneaking a look at things that would normally be off limit to you - wallets and hangars, some in game sactioned espionage?

Ok you get the idea, there are a whole bunch of things that people have asked for with hacking and I don't need to rewrite those proposals here, or spend weeks balancing them all. e.g. Being able to hack into an opponents ship and make shut off their enignes, disable weapons, make them jettison cargo or self destruct might sound 'interesting' but it could mean a pretty radical change to PVP. One person suggested a hacking mini game where attackers and defenders move firewalls, IPS, ICE and other widgets around a data core, but it ended up sounding like something out of Puzzle Pirates. So, full on infowar PVP isn't going to happen and really isn't necessary to get this kind of content into the game.

In the PVE context Pirate Software might be used to disable defences, open back doors, or simply give pilots credentials to allow them past something that would otherwise shoot them. Now I want to dwell on this for a moment, mission runners in low-sec fear getting scanned down and ganked, one of the big problems with NPC AI is that if you're running a mission and a pirate warps in with the intention of ganking you you've now got to deal with DPS from both the rats and the players which hardly seems fair. Now, if you're running a mission for your local shady underworld type he might give you special codes to make you invisible to the defenses, but people not in your fleet will have no such protection and will find themselves under attack. If you listen to the Low-Sec round table some people are suggesting limiting uninvited incursions through the use of gate keys, so this is a variant on this, where hostiles are used to interfere with an attack rather than simply deny it. Although, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that gates might also be hackable with the right pirate software to bypass need for a key.

As an aside - on the subject of missioning in lowsec...

I alluded to the fact that running level 4 missions in battleships makes it really easy to scan you down, and it makes travel in low-sec a matter of time before you get caught at a gate, so level 4's in lowsec can never be as profitable as those in hi-sec. If I were designing an expansion built around low-sec I'd take cues from the pirate speedboat missions and design around small mobile ships as being the intended vessels of choice. Missions might even be designed with some of the specialist ship classes - the covert ops, the stealth bomber, the assault frigate in mind.

Furthermore, pirates tend to operate in gangs, and mission runners tend to be solo - low-sec mission content might be an appropriate place to introduce multiplayer missions with goals that require multiple pilots (e.g. a gate needs a lock 'disabled', but the lock is far from the gate and respawns before a single ship could fly the distance). There was a lot of people angry at the Gallente storyline missions, they were not happy with the prospect of taking a battleship several jumps into lowsec where they'd be easy meat. However, I flew these missions, and instead of the large slow ship I took a couple of rifters along instead, 2 pilots working as a team, the first created a diversion and drew aggro on the combat ships, pulling them away from the transports they were protecting. While the second swooped in and took out the now undefended haulers, I don't believe the original mission design was built around this tactic, but you could see how a PVE encounter could be designed with this in mind. The most painful part of the whole process was travelling 25 jumps to the site and the same distance back, for a crappy reward, all the time grumbling that none of the other factions are forcing their pilots to run these 'special' missions.

All this is of course designed to provide content which isn't simply cookie cutter repeats of experiences you'll get in the safety of hi-sec, and to provide it in a manner where the risk-reward equation favours the bold both by increasing the reward and reducing the risk. Plenty of wormhole dwellers were empire only mission grinders until they were tempted by the rewards of t3 and the promise of better PVE, the same equation applied to low-sec has a successful precedent. Plenty of people want to play as 'the bad guys' without necessarily PVP'ing as pirates, but with 'Corruption' suggestion an integrated avenue for PVP leading to rewards it's not too much of a stretch to see pilots participation naturally progressing in that direction.

Anyway, all of this is a significant amount of work, CCP would have to dedicate a release to low-sec, and while I'm one of those shouting 'slow down and fix the bugs' I'm also saying that low-sec represents a significant part of New Eden that's being squandered, so it is indeed worthy of a dedicated expansion.

Oops I Accidently The Whole Server

So, due to a process that generates Item ID's going offline it looks like the system lost over 100,000 items which were 'manipulated' during the hour or so leading up to todays shutdown.

http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=3873&tid=1

Time to go and petition that Titan blueprint I lost. :)

7 Years Of Eve Patches (Part 5)

Quantime Rise, frequently referred to Quantum Nerf for its rebalancing of speed and to a lesser extent missiles - Released on 11th November 2008. One major update that's not mentioned in the patch notes, because technically it's a server side change, was the disabling of Ghost Training which created one of the longest running discussion threads in the history of the Eve forums.

69477 - Quantum Rise
- Outer Ring excavations (ORE) and Deep Core Mining (DCM) have completed a joint venture by creating The Orca.
- One of my favourite ships, partly for its looks, but mainly for the sheer utility it offers.

- Speed rebalance has been introduced, affecting a great many different ships and modules.
- Another forums threadnaught resulted from the Nano-Nerf which was intended to put 'ludicrous speed' out of reach.

- Certificates are a powerful tool to reinforce your bragging rights
- The only certificate I see people bragging about is 'Hull Tanking - Elite'

- The Crane, Prorator, Prowler and Viator can now equip a covert ops cloak
- I love my Crane and Viator, I just wish that CCP had given them all an extra hi-slot for that cloak.

- All missile types have been balanced
- They removed the 'Easy' button and replaced it with a 'Not Hard' button, except in the case of rockets where the button says 'LoL'

- The 30-day renewable license pioneered by CONCORD is an alternative to its pod pilot contract license.
- now market traders in could manipulate the costs of game time with much greater ease.

- players can now create some of the rarer moon minerals like dysprosium and promethium through reactions.
- After careful analysis of the market prices of moon minerals CCP introduce Alchemy, a method to increase supply of the rarer ones. A month later it was discovered that a number of people were using a duplication exploit to increase the supply of high end minerals and everyone realises that the analysis was based on completely false data.

70393 - The shield recharge time on the Orca has been changed to 2100 seconds
- They made it longer so people would realise that the Orca is the ultimate in hi-sec hull tanking.

71655 - We have made various performance improvements to UI rendering in the graphics engine.
- In QR they'd managed to introduce a whole lot of client side performance issues, and while fixing them they also added new options to disable bits of eye candy like drone models and explosions.

83913 - Apocrypha, released 10 March 2009
- Our Classic client has been retired to make way for Premium Lite
- Which meant you couldn't play Eve on graphics hardware made prior to 2002 any more.

- Wormholes will bring a whole new level of adventure and exploration for every pilot who dares to probe out an entrance to the unknown.
- And since we had a lot of hi-sec carebears jumping into them the 'adventure' frequently was provided by other players.

- New technology found in Wormhole Space allows players to research, manufacture and fly the next generation of cruisers.
- That was a year ago, and I'm still too much of a wimp to PVP with my 'new' shiney.

- Character attribute distribution can now be rearranged in order to diversify or specialize skill training.
- Action finally being taken on the Achura overpopulation problem.

- Scanning in New Eden has been completely revamped
- And it became truly awesome, requiring real, honest to god skill to scan down sites and targets.

- As part of our ongoing effort to bring cutting edge graphics to EVE’s players, almost every effect in game has been redone.
- Can I have the old Cyno effect back?

85476 - Going through a jump bridge or using a cynosural field will no longer cause ammunition that is being reloaded from being lost.
- Seriously, I don't care about the ammo, even the fancy faction stuff, I just want the electrified awesome that was the old Cyno.

86756 - Stealth Bombers have had their role refocused to be anti-battleship role.
- They got covert ops cloaks, epic torpedo damage and bombs that didn't make you poor, everyone bought them instead of T3.

88517 - The default overview setting for war, militia, and global criminal targets has been changed.
- triggering hundreds of friendly fire incidents until people figured out how to fix their overview.

88974 -Modules will no longer be subject to an activation delay when a ship has de-cloaked after jumping through a stargate.
- All of a sudden gatecamping had got a lot easier as pilots failed to cloak fast enough.

89883 - Jumping through a gate will no longer cause the client to lock up.
- This bug pretty much killed fleets roaming through 0.0, if you jumped in just as someone was decloaking your client locked up, frequently followed by reds killing your helpless ship as you restarted your client.

93706 - The drop rates for faction drone blueprints have been increased substantially.
- And still those augmented drones are as rare as hens teeth.

99186 - Carriers, Dreadnoughts, Motherships, Titans, Jump Freighters and the Rorqual now have special fuel bays.
- CCP deals a blow to the Honor Tank.

101786 - It is now possible to shoot objects that are 0 meters away with turrets.
- it was always frustrating to have to fly away from something so you could hit it at point blank range.

And so, we've reached Dominion, so now this series has come up to date there's nothing more for me to say - see you out there.