winter patch: Dominion

[Brolan]

Well, it's now less than an hour until they bring the servers down for the patch.  Any predictions on how the sov thing will work out?  Will patches of 0.0  space now go unclaimed?

[Comstar]

The 0.0 alliances wined enough that no space will go "fallow" for others to take.  The changes to 0.0 space don't allow corp or allience taxes to increase  much above what they are, most 0.0 players still will want to belt rat to make money and the logistics problems haven't changed- you still can't live in Period Basis without having allies in Delve, huge swaths of space are still useless and jump bridges still work too well.

If you check dotlan as of today, 60% of Catch is empty every single day. This will not change.

[Gets]

So basically a whole lot of sperging, threadnaughting and skies falling without any of that actually happening?

Expansions are weird.

[Phildo]

I think there's more outrage about things that were promised and later yanked from the expansion than the actual outcome of the expansion, aside from the technetium thing.

Edit: Advanced Weapon Upgrades V

[Quinton]

Not enough swearing to be genuine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAH1TRy9jhc

I aim to please.

Oh god that kills me.  Much better.

[Setanta]

The only thing that annoys me about the expansion is the RF Tempest change. I liked the option to shield or armor tank it - forcing it to go to armor is meh especially as there are two other races that armor tank specifically.

[Amarr HM]

Not enough swearing to be genuine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAH1TRy9jhc

I aim to please.

Oh god that kills me.  Much better.

That's class.

So what are people's opinions so far? Fleet finder is the thing I'm most impressed by at the moment, the planets look cool but on medium GFX setting seem to lag out my framerate. I found a nice habitable planet in a nearby system.

[Darkin Ranova]

25%, after 10hrs, of the patch to go.  Tether mode.... awayish.   Then I can putts around and site see as I don't get the sense of speed and low latency I did when I had a cellular modem.

Any screenshots of the planets?  Fleet finder does sound nice.

[eldaec]

My interwebs are broken.

Downloading the patch over dialup would be suicide.

So the best thing about the patch for me is I get to go outside.


Covert Ops V

Jump Drive Operation V

[Darkin Ranova]

The patched finished then it didn't like my client.  I'm about to force my fiance fuck French wife to go get her laptop from work with the full client download.  She had to leave it there to finish a DB backup :(

edit: struck down. I can't share my tethered Blackberry.   HAHAHAH

[Gets]

Did you try the repair tool?

[Sir T]

The patch that took and hour to download corrupted my cliant. So I have to download the full cliant. Go go 6 and a half hour download. Go go having to redo all my overview and channel settings! 

[lac]

You can save those. They are somewhere in the CCP folder in your user profile. I can't tell you exactly where but there should be a post around here somewhere from when Bhodi made his overview settings script that tells you where those settings are kept.

[Sir T]

I clicked save settings when I uninstalled the other client and it transferred everything over automatically when I loaded the new client

[lac]

Or you could do it the normal way...

[Slayerik]

Saw like 47,000 people online tonight. Game is still growing, thats for sure.

[tazelbain]

Saw like 47,000 people online tonight. Game is still growing, thats for sure.

What percentage are Endie?

[Quinton]

We can't reveal exact numbers there as it may compromise Endie's many alts in the field.

[tgr]

As long as it isn't >1000. If it is, then damn I want to see how he's solved the heat, power and internet connectivity problems.

[Simond]

Saw like 47,000 people online tonight. Game is still growing, thats for sure.

Right up until the point the server fell down, went boom. 

[tgr]

I think the number I saw when logging in after the first disconnect of the evening, was 49777 users in total. So it's definitely growing.

[ajax34i]

As long as it isn't >1000. If it is, then damn I want to see how he's solved the heat, power and internet connectivity problems.

That's what botnets are for.  You could be an Endie right now and not even know it.

[Falwell]

I just picked up a second account and looked at the online number as I went in, 52,717. This was at about 2:00 EST.

EDIT: The latest PCU I could find was 53,850, so they'll probably break that tonight.

[tgr]

54149 now. Getting a bit more impressive now.

[Trouble]

http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

New record of 54,181.

[slog]

So what's the verdict on the new patch?  Did it fix 0.0 warfare?

[eldaec]

So what's the verdict on the new patch?  Did it fix 0.0 warfare?

Nobody knows.

Everyone is currently too busy hauling enormous quantities of space-flag into position so that the existing sov infrastructure keeps working after the grace period is up.

Plus during the grace period noone can break sov.

[Sir T]

Theres some discussion that it has made o.o worthless without upgrading it though. Some people have reported that signitures as opposed to anomalies have vanished. Havent done any scanning myself so I dunno.

[tgr]

I did do a tiny bit of scanning in 2 systems yesterday with some core scanning probes, and I found squat. I was going to check this out some more later today just to see if it was something I should bust out the expanded probe launcher for, or if there was really just nothing to find in those two systems.

[eldaec]

Theres some discussion that it has made o.o worthless without upgrading it though. Some people have reported that signitures as opposed to anomalies have vanished. Havent done any scanning myself so I dunno.

0.0 is exactly as worthless as it was before the patch.

Holding sov is slightly cheaper, and if you don't upgrade the space, it provides the same income to everyone bar moon miners, for whom r64 wealth got spread around a little.

Signatures haven't vanished, and even if they had, it would hardly effect anyone since so few people run them.


0.0 didn't exactly provide endless gin and whores in every belt before the patch; but in the end the change didn't make it any worse.

[Gets]

Patch Notes for Dominion 1.0.2

I shall hurf and I shall blurf until I blow the house down. At least enough to kill some extended downtime.

Dominion, even though theorized in good intentions and promised to bring good changes, such as more small gang warfare and more carebearing oriented opportunities in 0.0, doesn't appear to be significant enough to hit the mark with its mission plan. What I feel is that we now have a sovereignty system that is more complicated to understand than the assemply instructions for a Rube Goldberg machine, written in Mandarin. The only way spaceless groups will use it to take over systems is if they could inject the directions into their brain like a skillbook. Sov warfare will still be very much a war of attrition, except this time only for the attacker. Kiting is not a necessity anymore thanks to all the variable timers.

Outposts are just broken. You can claim a system but you still have to take the outpost. You have to reinforce it and somehow stop them from using carriers to rep it while playing undock games. Also you have to do this three times in a row in a four day period. If you have outposts and carriers, you're not going to have to pack up and leave ever. Unless they get one-shotted by the new titans.

I do believe that if the infrastructure upgrades can encourage more people to live in the same solar system or constellation this could work. Personally I would be looking forward to more splintering on the political map, but more interactivity inside those cells. When we were playing Fallout Online, a one man modification that turned the original Fallout games into a basic MMO (think early UO with guns), we were granted our own channel in the Darkfall Goons ventrilo. That voice channel really was the game, as it was impossible to imagine playing the game without it once you've been accustomed to hanging out with a league of extraordinary gentlegoons.

Even though someone was hunting alone, some group was raiding a town and someone else was in the guild hideout crafting ammo, we were all in the small wasteland together and could call upon each other. Not to mention that the lack of tags in the game required everyone to be familiar with each other to coordinate parties and avoid friendly fire. Some more than others failed at that magnificently. This was a great thing that encouraged awareness and cooperation. Sadly the game lived through a short golden age, following its own Trammel and got turned to shit by its own devs and the official community forum. The great time I had playing it I attributed to the very basic RPG game mechanics of Black Isle and a group of Sandfucks that loved doing what they did well. The Sandfucks was the actual faction name we had to pick for ourselves from an available list. Before a server wipe we were The Terrible Shitheads.

EvE has all the capabilities on its own to be a similarly engaged and less idle online experience, with built in Voice and a sense of ownership and presence in the game. Sadly this takes a kicking in the nuts because internet submarines in space and ship manufacturing tycoon pirate hunter doesn't want to be based on simple concepts. It likes to iterate on iterations, tweak the already inadequate and keep things confused and convoluted. What happened to "Just burn everything." that the Russian commander felt so relaxed about? Why can't taking over the world at least resemble something from a 4X game?

EvE's gameplay problem is losing all form of sense and immersion from focusing on nuances that players find irritating. If Dominion does bring an improved style to nullsec, then I'll be happy. However I will miss the idea that inhabited and prospering solarsystems can be places of wonder and swathes of galactic wasteland could be grounds for non D-Day type skirmishes and dangerous hunts for Holy Space Grails and misadventure. That's mostly what I find upsetting about the upgrading mechanic. If an area is developed and defended it's true security level shold drop as the activity index goes up and stay scaled, as pirates find it hard to stay there, and vise versa. NPC regions should keep their exceptions, but something could be done about them as well. I want the big picture of CCP's "emergent gameplay" to just make some real world sense.

[Endie]

I dunno, I think that they're really close to something, here.

I think that they could tweak the variable to produce worthwhile upgrades that support far more people.  They could change the random element to make it a broader window and to give some hope of out-of-TZ conquest.

What's more, I think that these changes are inevitable as they loosen up after a (quite correct) conservative launch.

They need two new systems: one to show which CAs in an upgraded system are empty.  To avoid ganking, you might make this involve fleet membership.

The second is that the cost of holding space should increase geometrically, not arithmetically, beyond a certain level (I'd be aggressive and make that as low as  three or four constellations).  But I wanted a system in which it was hard to lose your last space and that is quite plainly possible. 

Finally, i would make the random variation in the window increase according to how many systems or stations an alliance holds relative to its number of members.  The last outpost should time perfectly, while the 400-man alliance with ten towers should be playing a lottery with a twelve-hour window.

[eldaec]

Under geometric costs, why would everyone not split up into half a dozen fake alliances?

Finally, i would make the random variation in the window increase according to how many systems or stations an alliance holds relative to its number of members.  The last outpost should time perfectly, while the 400-man alliance with ten towers should be playing a lottery with a twelve-hour window.

I agree it should vary, but you make it vary by activity in systems, not number of members.

Has a similar effect, but it is harder to exploit by reorganising corporations.

[MahrinSkel]

Under geometric costs, why would everyone not split up into half a dozen fake alliances?

Because politics and natural social drift would set in, and they wouldn't stay fake for long.  There's also the issue of JB networks.

--Dave

[IainC]

I made a suggestion in my CSM platform that sov costs should scale not only with distance from the nominal alliance capital but also with proximity to other alliance's space. That would make dividing your alliance into several fake ones more difficult as they'd need to maintain a buffer against each other.