f13.net

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=722

You have to do two terrible things before 6th Jan to secure this gift.

1) Log in
2) Dock in an NPC station

Ooh butterflies!  :oh_i_see:

It's also apparently flagged as a pod for NPC's, so should be a perfect Exploration ship in general.

--Dave

It's perfect ship for a starflower........ :why_so_serious:

ROFL!

Is it flagged "Don't shoot me!" for PC's?

Only Sleeper's don't shoot it. You can have Sleeper congas.

... and this is better than flying a covops because?

could you put 20 of them together and gank people?

They should do the same thing but put a tiny gun on it and have concord ignore them. 

More like a ploy to get more people looking at what must be massively underused W-Space.

Inactive accounts get it to if people make use of the 5 day free re-activation mails they send out.

Well its not - it only flies at 375m/s and can't cloak (nevermind warp cloaked), and it will get primaried on sight by player pirates.


But it will encourage empire people to take a look at wormholes, I'm guessing they found that empire carebears were viewing w space in the same way as 0.0 or low sec, when actually 'security through obscurity' probably makes it safer. This is just a bone to encourage people into wormholes.

Anyone who likes w-space will switch to covops pretty quick, because sleepers don't attack cloaked ships either.

Also, they aren't visible on overviews by default so most people will forget to enable them.

Not Me. Enabled the second I logged in when they came out  :grin:

It won't encourage anyone to do anything; it's a one-time-per-account gift that may be free but can be worth a lot as a collector's item, and will get shot on sight by any PVP player looking for sweet tears.  No carebear in his right mind will take his out of the station.

Since so many are distributed it will take them a good while to become valuable. How much is the Apotheosis worth these days?

With the difficulties of just getting there and back with the loot, I expect that PvP in W-space is pretty rare.  Better to keep looking than to kill another prospector to take his stuff, never mind just on general "My Yard" terroritorialism in a place where the map is constantly shifting.

--Dave

Offer to buy them at 100,000  ISK per.  Once you have 300,000 (300 billion ISK) you'll have all of them and then can sell them for 100 million ea.

It seems that it might be duck season on shuttles:

http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=home&scl_id=43

People are being proactive and making them rare, is what I'm saying.

Mine's docked in 0.0.  :awesome_for_real:

Sadly, as soon as I saw how vulnerable they were, I knew they would become targets for griefers.

They have good sensor strength and a tiny sig.  Are they probe-able?

Target size is sig radius/sensor strength (which for a Zephyr is 25/6=4.17) and the perfect prober above comes to 4.63, so no the Zephyr isn't probe-able.

So that means it a super-cheap afk cloaker too?

Not entirely. A really persistent scanner could find you indirectly even without a 100% warpin by trying to predict the grid you were on and triangulating bookmarks to land on you. It would be tricky as hell to do but possible given enough time and effort.

Only if you are already in system, I'd like to see you run a blockade in this with no cloak, no mwd, and top speed of 375m/s.

In fact considering the opportunity cost (you could sell the zepyher), a rifter with a protocloak, probe launcher and mwd would be cheaper and better at absolutely everything.

Its just CCP bieng about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the jaw about doing wormholes. "free gift to show our appreciation" indeed. They could have given out a cruiser at least.

I'm happy enough with it being a better backdrop than an ibis for my market alt.
 

No, actually, it was a test of their new microtransaction system.  It's very similar to NCSoft's actually; you buy or get items via the website and then you claim them in-game.  They've been saying they're changing the EVE website to a "social network site" for a while now, and I guess microtransactions are part of that vision.  Why be limited to buying ISK with cash, when we could buy ships and modules too?  If they implement the ability to give gifts, the system could ultimately allow a rich alliance leader to outfit his entire warfront fleet with combat ships at the drop of a credit-card.

Anyway, as a test of the system, of course they wanted to "give" a gift that's worthless pretty.

The time card system is very different from a game point of view because it is inherently self limiting and non-inflationary.


But I agree that the idea probably comes from RMT, Dust is all RMT all the time, so I imagine the interface idea came from there (and from complaints where the auto-distribution didn't work last time they did this). As for testing, it is not as if the system they've implemented here is anything other than the trivial part of RMT or in need of any kind of test run.


:tinfoil:

Umm, this isn't the first time they've done something like this, and I don't think it has anything to do with an RMT test.  I still have a snowball launcher and ammo from 2005.  Worked the exact same way, whichever character you first logged into or docked to an NPC station got it.

--Dave

The RMT test angle is an interesting view though. Hadn't thought of that angle.

The mechanic is a bit different, though, in that it's at the account level, and is actively claimed through a new interface on whichever character you choose to do so on.  I'd not thought of it from the RM point of view buit it makes a certain sense.

The whole 'npc' station bit irritated me. 

I just really want them to start selling skillpoint cards, a man can dream damnit.

one of the things i found miildly amusing about this ship is that if you package it, and then assemble it again, it automaticaly generates a free probe launcher :P

Can you put it on another ship?

The shuttle comes with a pre-fitted probe launcher, is the 'free one' you get from repackaging it that one* or is it actually a duplicate?

*i.e. If you assemble it again is the launcher still there?

It's still there. You don't have to worry about keeping the original probe launcher.

Cala

You can even reprocess them into 1 trit. :awesome_for_real:

:popcorn:

Cue unexplained database overloads and depression of the price of tritanium in 3...2...1....

--Dave

Yep, what i meant was that when you pack it up, it drops the probe launcher into your items hanger.  When you assemble it, it magically generates a new probe generator already fitted in the available slot.  Just keep packing and assembling it and you will have an endless supply of the probe launchers :P