Tyrannis - Summer Update 2010

[Sir T]

The Mittani from Goons writes a review of Tyrannis from his Tentonhammer slot

How does the Tyrannis expansion stack up?
It's been a few weeks since the release of Tyrannis, and I find myself continually finding excuses to delay writing a review of it. First I put it off because the entire focus of Tyrannis - its headline feature, Planetary Interaction (PI) - wasn't actually available until a week after the patch went live. Then I put it off because I was hoping to see what impact PI would have on the markets, but CCP hasn't removed the NPC-seeded goods from the pre-Tyrannis economy, and it's not clear that they'll do so anytime soon. Finally I realized that I was delaying the review simply because I did not want to admit, in print, the truth: Tyrannis is basically Facebook for EVE, complete with it's own space-Farmville equivalent.

It's an ugly realization, because you then inevitably imagine some CCP devs goofing off at the office and messing about on Facebook and playing Farmville. Then one of them has an Eureka moment and blurts out, "Hey! Let's do this, but IN SPACE!" Six months later and an awful lot of hype we have Tyrannis, which brings us Eve Gate (ie: Spacebook) and Planetary Interaction (Planetville?). And a new Scorpion model.  I had written a column several months ago warning against this development direction, and sadly here we are. With gritted teeth, it's time to get it over with and examine the micro-level impact of this patch, and see if it has any interesting implications for nullsec dwellers.

Spacebook: Eve Gate! It's Facebook. In space. It looks like Facebook, it has contacts like Facebook. The good thing is that I can finally check my evemail via the web. All the same, it's hard to get folks excited about a reskinned Facebook. Next!

Planetary Interaction: Obligatory Planetville joke aside, PI deserves a more serious review than Eve Gate.

First of all, I respect one of the intentions of PI greatly; it was designed to allow people to have something to fiddle with while in fleets or on ops. You can now move your little planet-harvesters around while chilling on a gate or listening to your FC freak out about something; EVE has always lacked for minigames to give pilots something to do during the 'boring bits', and PI is our first Bejeweled or Farmville timewaster that's actually inside the game client.

The problem is that PI could have been so much more. Perhaps it will develop into something greater in time, but as it stands right now it's frighteningly similar to the aforementioned farming browser game. You mine some stuff; you build a little network of extractors which go into factories which spits out, well, POS mods, mostly. If we were going to have a timewaster minigame, couldn't it have had more game and less timewaster? There are many other browser games that CCP could have cribbed design notes from (city-level Civilization clones seem particularly popular at the moment); these at least provide a challenge greater than 'scan mineral source, adjust extractor location'.

That said, PI has several implications for the entire game. It shows CCP's intent to have a completely player-created economy, removing many of the NPC-seeded items. This is, broadly, a good thing; it means there is more chaos and involvement and opportunity for things to Go Hellishly Wrong, which is what makes EVE interesting. Logistically PI provides nullsec alliances the ability to locally produce outposts, control towers and cumbersome mods such as Capital Assembly Arrays; this allows alliances with organized PI setups to completely skip freighter ops through chokepoints. Alliances won't even need to do the PI themselves; they can ship PI-produced modules to nullsec in a jump freighter from empire, then assemble the bulky components which would ordinarily be manually freightered on site. This makes nullsec logistics even easier and safer - and thus possibly more stagnant, depending on how you view the optimum risk/reward spectrum.

The implementation of the PI system has been - to put it charitably - rocky. When first patched, tower modules could be refined, which allowed players to reprocess certain mods to create mass numbers of PI modules; this essentially allowed many alliances to create outpost eggs out of thin air. Right now you can set up a PI network to produce items, but every item produced by PI can presently be purchased from NPCs at a fixed rate; until the seeded items are removed, the entire PI economy is a sham. This means that we can't judge what that economy will be like, and the seeds also allow speculators to stockpile an endless number of seeded mods at a vastly discounted rate.

Empire Mission Stealth Nerf: This is one of my favorite features of Tyrannis, and is probably better for the health of the game than anything else. The loot tables for empire missions have been nerfed broadly - by expanding the drop rates for named modules and removing mineral-heavy 'meta 0' drops. This means that the isk value of named mods have plummeted, and the risk-free iskmaking of the average empire dweller has taken a huge hit. As a nullsec dweller it's always rubbed me the wrong way that Raven pilots in the Forge can hoover up isk without putting anything on the line, while in nullsec we live in relative poverty; slowly the balance seems to be shifting.

Insurance Adjustment: My eyes glaze over at the mention of insurance rates, but this is actually a significant change. For a long time, 'insurance fraud' has artificially inflated the costs of highend minerals; by increasing T2 insurance payouts and reducing T1 insurance, the bottom has fallen out of the highend mineral market. Similarly, certain ships which were previously only used at great cost are now worth using in mass fleets; expect a lot more HAC ops called, because they now cost about as much to lose as a battleship.

The Scorpion: There's a CCP dev whose name is sadly unknown to me. He sketched out the Scorpion, as well as designed for the Alliance Tournament prize ships. The new Scorpion is hands-down the best looking ship in EVE, and whoever this dev is, he needs to be immediately re-tasked to updating the older ship designs. There's an obvious talent there, a gift, and that talent needs to fix the Raven. And the Bellicose hulls. And the Dominix. You get the idea. I've never seen so many Scorpions on ops before, and it's the closest thing to an unmitigated crowd-pleaser that Tyrannis has to offer.

So, the verdict? Tyrannis could have been so much more. Perhaps it will be eventually, one of those 'organic growth' patches which we are presently underwhelmed with, but eventually some 'really cool stuff' comes out of it. The shift to having the economy being entirely player-based is good; the nerfing of risk-free empire missions is good, and the Scorpion owns. But it's hard to say that this is an expansion in the sense that Dominion was, where the game was radically altered and major new features were added that affected everyone; Tyrannis feels more like a bugfix with Spacebook and Planetville tacked on. 

[Stabs]

He sounds so bitter these days.

[tgr]

At least he's seeing how good things might come of various things. I haven't tried PI myself, but a friend of mine did, and he claims that it's silly amounts of clicking and waiting, in true CCP style. I've tried reacting in a POS, and the UI is enough to make me go on a stabby rage. And even PVPing in large fleet fights is a bit of a toss-up on whether or not you even load, let alone manage to fight. And when the servers aren't able to keep up, or they just plain fuck up, good luck getting your shit back.

He never mentioned those things, and yet that's starting to become what I think of the most when I get home and contemplate logging in. I'm not in quitting mode yet, but I dearly hope that CCP will start fixing these things soon, because christ is it making EVE a game you have to work at liking.

[Sir T]

He sounds so bitter these days.

I think you are reading what you want to see into that, dude.

[Stabs]

Edit: sorry Himo, was being snotty.

[Endie]

Yeah mittens is pretty much having the time of his life these days, from what his jabber posting strongly suggests, and seems to like eve itself quite a lot, too.

[kildorn]

They finally fixed insurance fraud? Really?

[ajax34i]

Insurance pays you the average (calculated across all regions) value of the minerals, so if the minerals tank, the insurance will too.   In theory, the traders could manipulate the minerals market (they'd have to do it across all regions) to inflate prices, and then we all have until downtime to happily suicide ships until the average is re-calculated.

[Murgos]

Insurance pays you the average (calculated across all regions) value of the minerals, so if the minerals tank, the insurance will too.   In theory, the traders could manipulate the minerals market (they'd have to do it across all regions) to inflate prices, and then we all have until downtime to happily suicide ships until the average is re-calculated.

An average?  So, uh, if you put one trit on the market in each region for 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 isk then you suicided T1 Frigs for an hour you would be rich beyond belief?

[ajax34i]

No.  First they eliminate the outlying orders (1.01 ISK and your 9999999999.99 ISK), and then they calculate the average for the stuff that actually sells.

Anyway, it's been discussed in detail in the eveonline.com market discussions (or was it ships and modules) forum, so I'd say go there for details.

In other news, they're upgrading server hardware in order to try to deal with the lag, next Wednesday.  

And, the dev replies to that thread indicate that CCP is working on something called "Remapping EVE" which may involve reconfiguring the starmap (high-sec empires in the corners, nullsec in the middle?).  There's no information, though, so I may be creating false rumors with this post, shrug.

[Murgos]

No.  First they eliminate the outlying orders (1.01 ISK and your 9999999999.99 ISK), and then they calculate the average for the stuff that actually sells.

Anyway, it's been discussed in detail in the eveonline.com market discussions (or was it ships and modules) forum, so I'd say go there for details.

It's more fun to bug you about it.

So, what if Endie just took all his alts, put a couple in each market and then sold trit back and forth between them in chunks of say, 1,000,000 units for 10,000 isk each for an hour or so and then began mass insurance fraud?

[Phildo]

He'd still take a loss on the market fees if he did that.

[tgr]

And, the dev replies to that thread indicate that CCP is working on something called "Remapping EVE" which may involve reconfiguring the starmap (high-sec empires in the corners, nullsec in the middle?).  There's no information, though, so I may be creating false rumors with this post, shrug.

What I got out of that was that they're talking about the internal mapping of systems to application nodes (i.e. physical servers), not the starmap itself.

[ajax34i]

Not sure if it would work, since the 10,000 isk price could be eliminated as outlying.  He may have to trade, say, 50 units at 999999999999.99 in each region first, in order to protect his 10,000 ISK orders from elimination.

And then, he's spending 1 million units x 10,000 ISK x say 10 regions = 100 billion ISK on 10 million units of tritanium (a value of 23 million ISK).  So he's losing 99 billion ISK to affect the market.  So, let's see, that would bump up the calculated average for tritanium from 2.30 to 3.26 ISK, which raises the price of a Rokh by 8 mil ISK, so he would have to self-destruct 12497 battleships in one day to come even with that 99 billion ISK loss.

I don't think there are that many Rokhs in-game.

[Pezzle]

There are that many ravens though.

[Murgos]

And then, he's spending 1 million units x 10,000 ISK x say 10 regions = 100 billion ISK on 10 million units of tritanium (a value of 23 million ISK).  So he's losing 99 billion ISK to affect the market. 

You missed the key phrase where I said the selling was from one alt to another (unless some dumbass decides to buy 1 million trit from your sell order at a value of 100 billion ISK - in which case, A WINNAR IS YOU!).

The only money he loses is to the order placement; the cash and trit movement is a balance column shift from account A to Account B.  Also, you make the trade hundreds or even thousands of times (I.e. you are trading billions of units of trit in million chunk blocks with a total a ISK value of trillions) before attempting the insurance fraud so that the average price of real sales is approaching 10,000 ISK per trit (or whatever arbitrary value you set).

A single Rokh suicide would net you ~8 billion.

They (CCP) would have to be fairly sophisticated to prevent this sort of attack (if the rates are truly based on moving average), particularly if the alts are all seemingly unrelated (different IP, CC info, no in game contact, etc...).

[kildorn]

So we've replaced insurance fraud with conspiracy to commit insurance fraud 

[Slayerik]

And you can make the comparison with WOW raids all you want but in WOW raids other bigger clowns can't raid your raids, potentially destroying your ability to do those raids ever again.

Although in Vanilla WoW it was incredibly enjoyable having your raid camping the entrances to MC and BWL on Blackrock PvP server, thereby denying others entrance and ruining their night. :D

The best was my main was a priest. Mind control....... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh h h h  h h    h      h      h *lava splash*

[horz]

And you can make the comparison with WOW raids all you want but in WOW raids other bigger clowns can't raid your raids, potentially destroying your ability to do those raids ever again.

Although in Vanilla WoW it was incredibly enjoyable having your raid camping the entrances to MC and BWL on Blackrock PvP server, thereby denying others entrance and ruining their night. :D

The best was my main was a priest. Mind control....... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh h h h  h h    h      h      h *lava splash*

OH man it was so fun

[eldaec]

They (CCP) would have to be fairly sophisticated to prevent this sort of attack (if the rates are truly based on moving average), particularly if the alts are all seemingly unrelated (different IP, CC info, no in game contact, etc...).

Not really.

They could use a median instead of a mean for the average.

Or put a hard limit on the average price when it recalculates each day.

Or simply wait for some goon to spot you doing this on the market information screens then fuck over the automated bot you have doing this (which would be the only way to get enough transactions through in the daily calculation period) by buying trit at 2/unit from another system and feeding it to your bot at 10k (you don't get to choose which sell order you accept, any deal always goes to the best offer).

[Sir T]

The Mittani again. This time you could more legitimately say "bitter much?" Buy aside from that I have to agree with every word he said.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/47

The Mittani tackles CCP's development issues

There's something recursively Orwellian about corporate slogans; even the most innocuous of them will, in time, become emblems of shame and hypocrisy. We've seen this recently with BP's long-standing green marketing campaign collapsing in the face of the Gulf Oil Spill, and in the much more innocent world of internet spaceships as CCP's 'Excellence' slogans - so proudly trumpeted at the previous Fanfest - turning into an ugly reminder of the state of Tranquility today. While no one can deny that the number of players in EVE has continued to increase steadily, the state of the game itself has begun to crack under the strain of rushed development cycles, partial feature implementation, and crushing, inescapable lag. As players, we expect the odd explosion or botched patch from CCP or other developers; we MMO players are a masochistic lot, and despite a lot of forum noise to the contrary we are quite forgiving of developers. Yet now we have had two patches in a row from our Icelandic darlings, and neither has gone kindly for the game we love. It's time to be blunt.

CCP's Bad Habit

CCP has a bad habit, and that habit is partial development. Their continued pattern over the past several years has been to announce features for a future patch, develop half of them, put the remaining half on 'development backburner' - the dreaded backlog - and then forget about them as soon as a shiny toy distracts them. These features put on the backburner are not random odds and ends, but crucial functions without which the features that did get implemented cannot perform effectively. The dev cycle does not behave like a well-prioritized system designed to triage the more critical functions of the game, but rather the erratic high velocity trajectory of a kitten jacked up on methamphetamine.

The most obvious example, and one which is presently messing up Nullsec life something fierce, is the half-implementation of the Dominion Sov system. Some of you may recall the 'treaty' feature; this was the other face of the shift away from POS war and towards upgrading and nurturing smaller sectors of space. Nullsec was increased in value with the buffing of anomalies and iHub upgrades; space was explicitly intended to be rented out to lesser entities. Yet the hard fact is that administering renters is a tremendous pain in the ass and generally not worth the effort unless you have an entire team of directors with spreadsheets dealing with the payments, the standings issues, the inevitable diplomatic scuffles. The vision of Dominion was to increase the value and the population of Nullsec both by adding to its profitability and aiding in the creation of vassal entities - to incentivize the 0.0 empires to extend a hand to non-nullsec players and invite them to experience the 'real' game.

Conquest has stalled and territories have balkanized

The Treaty system was to automate the rental agreements which had become common, allowing space-holding alliances to have a coded standing system based on geography. You would be able to create a contract between an alliance and a renting corporation, change standings to be functional only within a certain system, and automate tax collection. This cuts out almost all of the misery of administering renters; they can be kept blue only when in one area and shot when they stray outside their designated territory, collection is handled much like corporate taxes are, and everyone involved can tell exactly what the nature of the agreement between entities is. But near the release of Dominion, the treaty system was cut and sent to the 'feature backlog'. A massive crunch to produce Planetville - er, Planetary Interaction - ensued, and somewhere along the line the meth-kitten decided that it would be a good idea to mash together a hair dryer and a hand blender and introduce a new ship, the Primae.

In practice, conquest has stalled and territories have balkanized; even the massive campaign between the NC and SC resulted in no real territorial changes. Part of this is because there is no real impetus to hold more territory. Wars between blocs still occur out of habit or old grudges, but because of the partial implementation of Dominion without the treaty system, there's no need for more territory for its own sake as in the pre-Dominion era. An alliance can upgrade a modest amount of space to be reasonably profitable to sustain itself, but taking more space beyond that limit is costly and would require installing renters - which are, sans Treaties, a huge hassle. So rather than the exodus of new inhabitants joining the excitement of nullsec, we see mass stagnation across the powerblocs, even as the old Great Powers begin shedding territory to cut costs or simply abandoning it entirely.

This is but one example of the costs of a runaway backlog of promised yet never implemented features. Most of the playerbase would agree that new features should be delayed until 'ready'; buggy and half-baked features wreak havoc with the game universe, and since there's only one shard in EVE it is all the more important to not push bad code onto Tranquility. A perfect example of this is the two great super capital massacres of recent memory. Dominion was designed to raise the stakes of combat, yet has only brought us ever more crippling levels of lag; rather than Titans and Supercarriers engaging in epic slugfests, in both Y-2ANO in Fountain and now at 6NJ8-V in Venal these ships are dying to black-hole levels of lag. A battle where 10 Titans die should be something that CCP can point to proudly as an example of the high stakes of pvp in EVE, yet in 6NJ we saw again the spectre of blackscreens, 'ghost' ships, and hundreds of players being unable to function at all for many hours.

Apparently CCP is of the view at the moment that the playerbase is unhappy because of 'petition support' issues; they have decided to reach out, asking to interview a random sample of players on MSN or Skype about their experiences. Yet the voices of the representatives of the playerbase are quite clear. One of the most popular threads in the Assembly Hall, by CSM rep Dierdra Vaal, calls CCP to account for the ever-expanding development backlog. I urge everyone selected for these interviews to focus on the problems created by the schizophrenic development cycle: the backlog, the lack of focus on core systems (ie: lag) and premature patches. Until these problems are dealt with, EVE will remain in a crisis of faux excellence.

[Stabs]

A fun new bug was introduced this week - afk autopiloting in high sec will now quite often route you via low sec. It seems prefer safer is working like prefer shorter.

Still it's an ill wind that blows no one some good - afk freighter full of goodies arriving at a system near you:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=home&m=06&y=2010&view=kills&scl_id=20

Edit: oh sorry, this was discussed already in the TMA: Moving a server thread. Allegedly fixed now.

[IainC]

A fun new bug was introduced this week - afk autopiloting in high sec will now quite often route you via low sec. It seems prefer safer is working like prefer shorter.

Still it's an ill wind that blows no one some good - afk freighter full of goodies arriving at a system near you:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=home&m=06&y=2010&view=kills&scl_id=20

Edit: oh sorry, this was discussed already in the TMA: Moving a server thread. Allegedly fixed now.

Nope, it's fixed tomorrow in the post-patch patch

[Stabs]

Ah, thanks Iain.

[slog]

I think the Mittani hit it right on the head, but at the same time missed the point entirely.  The Eve playerbase is still growing, so CCP is doing it right.

[lac]

I don't think Eve is CCP's biggest development focus and hasn't been for a while. They probably still have a lot of love for Eve (and it's revenue) but their resources seem to be tied up elsewhere, hence the meagre content of the last two expansions.

[Reg]

Is the Eve playerbase really still growing? It's felt fairly stagnant to me for quite a while now but that may just be perception...

[lac]

In the last graphs I've seen, the total number of subscribers was steadily growing. They also managed to break their concurrent players record recently which is quite extraordinary for a 7 year old MMO.
There also doesn't seem to be too much competition...

[tgr]

I honestly don't care all that much for the content of the last two expansions. All I know is that what I learned to like about 0.0 when I joined goons, i.e. massive fleet battles where I even had a chance of surviving even if I'm a complete scrub/asshat/newbie, is now effectively dead. I was in a small roam yesterday, and we got traffic control jumping 22 into a system with 50-60 or so.

I'm sure it'd look slightly less stagnant if you weren't looking at 0.0, since empire's probably humming along just fine, but 0.0 is definitely feeling extremely stagnant right now. Is there even anything other than roaming gangs lately?

As for competition, true. There really isn't any at the moment. I wish there was, even if only to give CCP an incentive to put more effort into making quality expansions, instead of the last two half-assed expansions (...well, let's be fair, it's half-assed mostly for the 0.0 contingent, if I'd been a cute newbie faffing about in empire I'd probably still be happy as can be).

[lac]

we got traffic control jumping 22 into a system

Didn't they remove traffic control in Tyrannis? I think I saw it in the patchnotes.
I was pretty happy with that change because I died a few times after successfully navigating a gatecamp in a covops only to be greeted with the traffic control message when I decloacked and tried to jump.

[tgr]

I just checked, for shits'n'giggles. I can't see any 0.0 system that's got more than 100 kills the last 24 hours. All I see is a few 0.9's having 200+ kills. No system outside of empire has (that I can see) more than 19 pilots in system (but then again, it's 0822 evetime). Ratting seems to be healthy all over EVE.

0.0 has indeed stagnated horribly.

Didn't they remove traffic control in Tyrannis? I think I saw it in the patchnotes.

I haven't heard that, but I might've used the wrong term. It might be "traffic advisory", whatever the countdown that makes tactical maneuvering between systems hard.

[Comstar]

They got rid of the messages everyone in the galaxy would see after downtime about every gate in the galaxy that was still traffic controller after downtime.

[Falwell]

Oh it's no mystery here gents, CCP Eve is suffering from too many irons in the fire.

Eve and it's expansions, Dust 514, Incarna, the new PI team, and WoD. That's just what we KNOW about.

Apocrypha was easily their best expansion to date. Why? Because the entire company focused on it. Both expansions since have been half baked, rushed out the door dogshit.

In the long term I think it will, without question, make the Eve universe the greatest online game world there is. But for the next.. let's call it 2 years, I see Eve suffering.

[Kageru]

I just checked, for shits'n'giggles. I can't see any 0.0 system that's got more than 100 kills the last 24 hours. All I see is a few 0.9's having 200+ kills. No system outside of empire has (that I can see) more than 19 pilots in system (but then again, it's 0822 evetime). Ratting seems to be healthy all over EVE.

0.0 has indeed stagnated horribly.

I was actually in one of the busiest PvP zones according to the star-map. A bunch of people in cruisers and a couple of cargo containers labeled as being "Free stuff!". 229 ships destroyed in the last 24 hours.

[Gets]

reported by CCP Navigator | 2010.08.04 11:42:19 | NEW
We are now ready to deploy the removal of deep space spots during downtime on Tuesday, August 10. The removal was announced in a Dev  Blog by CCP Greyscale. It is important to note that items and ships at deep safe locations will not be deleted but will be moved to the 20AU boundary of the system.

derp