winter patch: Dominion

[Fordel]

They should totally let the Alliances customize the Agents mission flavor text if they ever get it working.

[Comstar]

I did nothing but encounters for 2 weeks about a month ago. My cash was pretty much exactly 50% per hour compared to belt ratting. I'd say replacing the encounter rats with Belt rats, and having a set 2 to 10 (and remember, you wont GET 10 until 100 days of sov have passed!) would make it worth doing.

Until then, large alliances will STILL spread out.

[Phildo]

Also, what happens if you lose sov for a day or two before getting it back?  All your upgrades are wiped out and you're back to 1-2 anomalies at a time?

[Sir T]

Also, what happens if you lose sov for a day or two before getting it back?  All your upgrades are wiped out and you're back to 1-2 anomalies at a time?

That would be the logical conclusion, yeah.

[eldaec]

Still, one thing that people seem to be ignoring is that the 50-100 person figure isn't meant to be simultaneous, It's meant to be all day long.  So if there are ten anomalies plus various other sites, let's say a system can handle 15 people simultaneously.  Those people all take about 3 hours, and then 15 new people cycle in.  That's much more in line with the figures that CCP are throwing out.

afaik, anomalies only respawn at DT.

Also, a lot of posts on this seem to make the assumption that all alliances have steady timezone coverage, and that members are willing to warp between 15 anomalies to find the only one that is free.

[Sir T]

afaik, anomalies only respawn at DT.

That's what I thought too, but I assume that if they are making changes this radical they would be changing the spawn rate of anomalies to match.

[eldaec]

afaik, anomalies only respawn at DT.

That's what I thought too, but I assume that if they are making changes this radical they would be changing the spawn rate of anomalies to match.

har har.

[Phildo]

It's implied that they'll respawn upon completion somewhere else in the system.  Otherwise you'd use up your 10-15 anomalies in 30 minutes and be done for the day.

[Simond]

The second-funniest thing in that official thread is idiots saying things like "HAR HAR gonies h8 it so it R good". Half our home region is NPC space, and we're close to Empire. We're in a better position to cope than, say, Atlas. Or the Drone Russians. Or large chunks of the NC.

The funniest, natch, being the Unanswerable Question CCP is doing their damnedest to ignore in the hope it will go away.

[eldaec]

I think at this point most people are starting to miss the point behind the revised costs posted in the eve-o thread.

One of the devs indicated the flag is dropping to 1M/day. And that the only thing staying prohibitive is the logistics upgrades.

Impact of all of this...

 - Alliances will pay 1M/day to keep current space, only thing that will change that is if harrassing gangs become a problem.
 - Jammers are going away - they are far too expensive. Expect more widespread cap use.
 - Hubs will generally only be bought for station systems, they will come with free cyno beacons.
 - Moon mining becomes much less of a contributor to alliance income because of the R64 nerf, the removal of fuel bonuses, and no sov advantage from towers.
 - Nothing at all happens to base individual level income, but corp taxes/fees rise.
 - Logistics folk dance a jig.
 - Sov warfare will be based around the remaining high value moons (pos shots), and stop/hub/flag/station shots.

In other words, caps will be able to get around more easily, sub caps slightly less easily, alliance reimbursement will be harder to sustain, and fleet ops will be indistinguishable from the present arrangements.

In the end, a whole load of fuss over no change.

[ajax34i]

In the end, a whole load of fuss over no change.

If it's "no change" and it looks like it sucks, then what we have now and are accepting as the game sucks, no?

[eldaec]

People are complaining that something they have already backed off of sucks.

Unfortunately they hid the u-turn on page 33 of a 60 page threadnaught.

[Pezzle]

If we are forced to pay 25M a day for linked bridges does the fuel go away?

[IainC]

If we are forced to pay 25M a day for linked bridges does the fuel go away?

Yes. None of the infrastructure goes on POSes any more and they have an upkeep cost that's simply a flat Concord fee instead of fuel items from the market. This is a backdoor nerf to ice mining and industrial goods as well.

[Simond]

- Nothing at all happens to base individual level income, but corp taxes/fees rise.

Ah, this must be the voodoo economics I've been hearing about. 

[Endie]

The new dev blog is up with a refined version of how to take sov.

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=709

It will all come down to the breadth of the random element in the reinforcement timers.  Too wide and nobody can defend space consistently against an attacker from a different TZ.  Too narrow, and nobody can take any but small amounts of space in the same situation.

Along with the vulnerability of the onlining SBUs i think that taking space will be tricky.  That's good so long as they make holding small amounts of space profitable and large amounts less so (as opposed to holding any space bankrupting like the initial prices in the last devblog, or holding large amounts easy like the second revision).

[eldaec]

I never really understood the problem with the current reinforcement mechanic.

It did basically the same thing as this but added an element of having to outhink the other guy and rewarded you for controlling more timezones than your opponent.

Plus having people rush in to do stront timing under fire was pretty cool.

[Amarr HM]

They made station systems harder to attack that's a good idea. Also alliance logo on TCU unit is a nice touch but I get the impression they will placed somewhere that isn't immediately visible, so a bit pointless really.

[ajax34i]

You will then have seven days, until December 8th, to set up your Infrastructure Hubs and install the upgrades you wish to have.

That week right there is where they hope that all alliances dump a massive amount of cash out of their wallets.  Cause after that, everyone will feel first-hand just how prohibitive the costs are.  But for one week, CCP is hoping we'll all try to keep everything we had pre-patch.

[Simond]

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1210267&page=109#3268

I'm very concerned about how dificult it is to get the military index up, especialy in systems with low belt counts.
I had 6+ pilots running my 5 belt system and anomolies in it for most of the day yesterday after patch.
killed almost 1000 rats (1000, not a typo) and got 12% toward lvl 1.

came back today and it was back at 0%, killed another 200 rats and no movement at all, still red down arrow.
something must be wrong here.

[eldaec]

Upkeep update:

TCU: 6m ISK / day
Hub: 0 ISK / day
Jump bridge: 10m ISK / day
Cyno gen: 2m ISK / day
Cyno jammer: 20m ISK / day
CSAA: 1m ISK / day

[Goumindong]

I never really understood the problem with the current reinforcement mechanic.

It did basically the same thing as this but added an element of having to outhink the other guy and rewarded you for controlling more timezones than your opponent.

Plus having people rush in to do stront timing under fire was pretty cool.

Well you see, it was tied to POS warfare and since people didn't like POS warfare, that meant that everything about POS warfare was bad and not just some aspects of it making it bad.

That being said, a "shoot the station" mechanic really isn't that bad if sov is entirely descriptive[which is to say it has no real effect at all]. However, if SOV is descriptive then there is no reason to have a separate system for it, since you could then just tie it to who owned the station.

Knowing this, CCP seem to have fucked it all up, not understanding the density problems that were associated with 0.0 grinding[0.0 operation for most people will STILL be less profitable than lvl 4 missions, and 10 systems won't have the density that a single l4 hub does, this is especially true with required corp taxes], not understanding that if you have to destroy infrastructure then the entire fucking point of taking space is gone... except for r64 moons... which were nerfed, and not understanding that simple mechanics of "shoot the thing until it dies, make sure you have to do it at least twice" are much better than insane mechanics like "defend multiple points of attack for hours"

[Gets]

Dominion trailer has been released.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc

I won't lie, my face was when watching this.

[IainC]

Dominion trailer has been released.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc

I won't lie, my face was when watching this.

I see they captured the smooth flow of large fleet battles well.

Also 'Primary is that supercarrier' then about a second and a half later 'Primary target is down'. Way to twist the knife CCP....

[Fordel]

I thought the target was the Cyno Gen ship?


-edit- I did really enjoy the support fleet breaking off to chase Kill Mails though 

[IainC]

At about 1:06 the FC says 'All ships focus fire on that supercarrier'

[Fordel]

The missiles were already in flight towards the Cyno ship though.


Were both sides using mixed fleets? That confused me a bit, since CCP usually splits them up via faction for videos.

[Nerf]

I appreciated the russians not bothering to call a primary, although these days thats more fitting of our friendly HVAC repair alliance.

[DLRiley]

Where is the EVE subscription form at  . Man I wonder how many people going to sign up for EVE solely based on that vid?

[Fordel]

They should record a before and after as totally new players actually try EVE for the first time.

[Pezzle]

Not enough swearing to be genuine.  Also, who the hell actually plays EVE fleet battles and sees that?  I see different sized hostile boxes.  That is the real lie of EVE videos.

[Comstar]

I was laughing at the end of it, they played the scary Russian card very well.  I thought it was pretty accurate myself.

[Gets]

Not enough swearing to be genuine.

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

I aim to please.

[Thrawn]

Wow, well done video.  One of the coolest parts of watching it is that fights in game really do go down like that.   Just sad that fights that good are few and far between. 

[Simond]

New minor piece of comedy for the patch: Someone pretty much had to make a thread on scrapheap in the last day or so spelling out that technetium was going to spike post-patch (it's the biggest of the new T2 bottlenecks) because nobody else there had figured it out yet. Well, nobody else who was sharing, anyway. :)

Mind you, I don't think CCP has figured it out either - technetium moons are rarity32 (one step down from the old oilwells of r64 moons)...and r32 moons are regionally distributed. So tech moons only exist in the northern end of 0.0 space. Which means that Razor/MM/et al could potentially hold the entirety of T2 production to ransom if they were organised and felt like it.

NB: This also means that the whole IT/AAA/Stainwagon/Atlas battleplan?
Junk. They've got TRI as the "spearhead" on what is now the most valuable space in the game.