Winter Expansion - Desperate times

[MahrinSkel]

Only those of your alliance, or all of them?  Active, or even unconnected?

--Dave

[tgr]

Seems to be just active ones in my own alliance.

[Gets]

What's the problem? You can either spin your ship, or you can switch it off to save resources in case your machine isn't exactly very powerful, or you want to run lots of clients.

I mistakenly thought the picture of the door was coming back but it's still the old ship I can right-click on so it's all good my apologizes. Although eve-o forums have people claiming the CPU use is still 20% higher than it was pre-Crucible.

[Stabs]

Seems to be just active ones in my own alliance.

That's actually a hugely noob-friendly change. Putzing about lost because you know there's a JB here somewhere but you don't understand your own bookmark system is really annoying.

I'm assuming it doesn't show enemy JBs in which case it would also be a hugely attacker-friendly change.

[MahrinSkel]

Well, it's still attacker-friendly (no more secret JB routes unless you keep them inactive) because it's a poor alliance that has *zero* spies in their neighbors.  But it's still a useful change.

--Dave

[Sir T]

It's a good business strategy: build something niche, get someone else to pay, but it out when you can see how to fix it and the publisher just sees the unplayable nightmare you've had to go to launch with :V

I'm being ferocious

I suspect you mean facetious.

Works either way!   

[Sir T]

Another month, another mail from CCP

EVE Online: Crucible has arrived, introducing over fifty new features and hundreds of enhancements based on player requests and feedback from the EVE community.

NEW TIER 3 BATTLECRUISERS

"Pure awesome :)" – Metis Laxon, Zero Point Group

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MASSIVE GRAPHICS UPDATE

"The nebulae and star field are rendered beautifully, and the new paint jobs look good. UI is definitely a lot easier on the eye :)" – Freya Chang, The Crabbit    Crucible trailer
Some of the great features you'll be enjoying when you reactivate EVE Online.

IN-GAME LIVE EVENTS

"After the last CCP pilot was blasted full of holes and sent on his merry way via the clone express, players kept fighting in the system for almost four hours." –Live Event Recap

OVER 100 FEATURES AND FIXES

"Very nicely done CCP. Gone a long way to restoring faith in the company's commitment to this game. With more time for you to plan and test I have great expectations for future expansions." – Ad'Hakim Tahous, Science and Trade Institute

"I knew this expansion provided loads of convenience alterations, but I was still amazed how much difference some of the changes actually made in my playing experience." – Destination SkillQueue, Are We There Yet

GET IN THE GAME NOW
9.99 for your first 30 days back

Just in time for the holidays!

Reactivate today, as the great holiday gifts and giveaways we have lined up for our active subscribers this year are available for a limited time only! You'll also receive a free 60-Day trial code to give away to a friend interested in EVE, offering them the time to really experience the depth of EVE at their leisure during this hectic holiday and gaming time of year.


Reactivate and experience EVE Online: Crucible today!

- The EVE Online Dev Team
 

[Kageru]

Exciting new gameplay! ..... oh, no, wait.

[ajax34i]

I'm not getting any emails, not even the newsletters.  You can disable emails in Account Management.

[tgr]

Don't take away their bitter vet pleasures.

[Stabs]

Really enjoying the patch. I put up a couple of POCOs and am seeing how long I can make them last solo. They're in and out of reinforcement daily. I tihnk I may have lured someone into killing mine with an intention to put there own up which will give me the enormous schadenfreude of camping their wormhole keeping their pocos dead for the next few months.

[Kageru]

Reading some analysis on the Tier-3 Battlecruisers which seem to have a limited to non-existent practical role other than gank ships.

[tgr]

I have 2 maelstroms and 10-15 hurricanes to kill off before I'll start derping around in fleets with a sensorboosted instanado to see how it works as an anti-bomber platform compared to the hurricanes.

[Stabs]

Reading some analysis on the Tier-3 Battlecruisers which seem to have a limited to non-existent practical role other than gank ships.

Just lost one to a Drake. I misplayed it, leaving my MWD on but I think he would have won anyway. There's a downside to having a ship specifically designed to be a paper-thin glass cannon.

[squirrel]

I have 2 maelstroms and 10-15 hurricanes to kill off before I'll start derping around in fleets with a sensorboosted instanado to see how it works as an anti-bomber platform compared to the hurricanes.

Got a couple kills in one last night gate camping - 4x sebos - 7k hp heh.

Good alpha, paper thin though. Not sure I'd fly one in a roam if I wanted to keep it.

They might be better at 80k range, fly em almost like ecm - stay aligned and snipe. Still not that practical in gangs/fleets but. IDK Im not that experienced. Fun though, I'm tempted to buy lose a Naga just to play with one.

[Stabs]

As far as the economy is concerned it's genius. Let's encourage everyone to fly high dps glass cannons. There's always a spike on patch day when a new ship comes but I think we may see a second spike (on minerals, on large guns, on modules etc) as the market fails to supply the sheer numbers that get blown up.

Buy Mexallon.

[tgr]

Mex has already spiked from around 30 to 40+ last I checked, and stayed there for a while.

[Gets]

And Tachyons are already expensivo.

[Gets]

CCP Punkturis posted the improvements coming in the next patch:

*New agents list, it tells you if you've been offered or if you've accepted a mission from an agent
*Watch list can now have 15 people
*Watch list can now be ordered by dragging and dropping pilots
*Chat member list can be made more compact, right click on chat tab and "Show Compact Member List"
*New icons for online/offline, blocked and voice in member lists
*The online/offline notification which pops up when your buddy/enemy logs in is now has standings icon
*Said notificaction can be dragged to chat to info link that pilot and right clicked on
*You can now shift click modules to overload them
*Overload button shows feedback from when it's been clicked until it's activated/deactivated
*You can now filter the skills you see in your character sheet and skill queue to find the skill you want

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=54035

[Thrawn]

CCP Punkturis posted the improvements coming in the next patch:

*You can now filter the skills you see in your character sheet and skill queue to find the skill you want

Huh, one of those things that I just got so used to how it is so it never even occured to me how stupid it was this option hasn't been available for a long time.

[Kageru]

So it seems the Titan nerf didn't do much. Apart from making it even more riskier to field Titans unless you are pretty sure you can get a superior blob of them. I assume that a lot of null-sec is hollowing out (white noise being the latest example) other than PL (driven by ego) and Goons (driven by tear-harvesting) leading to some sort of eventual Eve end-game. Certainly PL are smug as all get out on Kugutsumen which is a bad sign.

Only thing that can stop it would be a serious re-examination of SoV. If CCP wanted a forever war then SOV needs to be redesigned so that you don't really want to hold all of it, so that there aren't critical timers (which are blobbable) and that rewards are through activity rather than passively holding space. Both a maelstrom and titan blob become less scary when you have freedom to maneuver. Running away and gorilla tactics should be the training ground for small alliances and they should be able to gather enough rewards for the null-sec game to fund that. Indeed make being part of a small and agile corporation worth doing and a lot of the blobs would split up once you don't need hundreds of "friends" to be meaningful. But CCP are busy adding fluff (which is, admittedly, better than WiS) and probably don't have the energy / courage to shake things up to that extent. They know where it is heading though, that's why they are so keen to get other income streams.

Also a good post from Shadoo (PL Elder) on the nature of an aging sandbox. The original is here but the thread descends into shit immediately after.

I'm actually with Yoji on some of his arguments, and had considered writing a big Manifesto on EVE-O about how I think the "EVE Sandbox" has overflown.

This game is currently about numbers. Numbers of support and/or numbers of capitals and/or numbers of supercapitals.

Yes, there are ways to counter numbers to certain extent, but at certain point that becomes impossible due to the sheer numbers that counter draws. In not too distant future (ie within the next 6 months) -- you WILL see one side in EVE field over 200 Titans in battle. Or non-battle as it will be -- because there is nothing you can do about that number of Titans.

But is that ultimately any more or less broken than what we have already seen on the number of subcapitals? 1500 pilots, with say 800+ Maelstroms have already been fielded. And there's fuckall you can do about that either.

The sandbox has spiralled overtime to counter subcapitals with capitals, which in turn have been countered with more subcapitals by creating coalitions, which in turn have been countered by yet more capitals by forming coalitions already heavy in capitals. And so the hamster wheel will continue to turn and turn and turn.

About the only thing going for EVE right now is that there are entities like -A- (and PL at the time), who are not attached to their space and will simply walk away. And come back in some time in the future when the numbers can be countered.

But -- to suggest that somehow simply changing one leg of the wheel (ie. lets say titans) will somehow magically "fix" this game, I believe is fucking retarded and ultimately selfserving to the interest and fighting type of the alliance the member is part of who is suggesting this. All you will do is force yet more megacoalitions to be formed and suddenly everyone in EVE will have to have a 600 man BS gang to defend their most important assets. Or everyone will have to go the way of the blueball and recapture.

I think we'd be far better off fucking accepting the fact that the sandbox has overflown. It's fucking done. No point in trying to patch the holes, fucking knock that shit down and build yourself a playground instead. Playground with rules, guidelines and barriers to limit and direct what and how you are able to do things.

I think that Titans shouldn't be the end-all of combat in EVE. I've said that for like 2-3 years now. I'd like all offensive abilities removed from them. But I also believe that what the game needs are ways to limit and discourage what the end-all of current combat ships (Titan) is countering -- ie. subcapital numbers.

How you do it is of course up for debate, but you could fucking start by first acknowledging that sandbox was for time when this game wasn't ancient. It was for when EVE was young and fresh, not when a new person can go and buy a character that can fly any ship they want + the ship itself with relative ease. The game is old and old sandboxes break under wear and tear.

So start implementing encouragements to smaller size combat (not a single sov objective for example) and start limiting what pure numbers are able to do (ie. damage mitigation, or proximity sensor strenght disruption, etc). Yes. It is sandbox no more, but fuck it at least it's got a chance to NOT be so FUCKING broken.

Make sov taking EASY, not hard. If you make it easy, you allow small entities to take space without having to wait fucking 4-6 days for it. You make it harder for massive alliances to defend 4 regions. Yes, it makes it VERY easy to also LOSE space -- but fuck it -- I think -A- has it right in many ways in that if you get blobbed to fuck, you should just be able to go v0v and come back few weeks after if the assaulter REALLY doesn't want to live in the space they just conquered.

But -- you have to balance that by making it hurt financially if you walk away. Sure -- make stations destroyable, but create a wreck instead for example which you can rebuild -- at cost. Also boost the rewards of owning space, so people will want to rebuild said wrecks and defend the space they own so they won't loose income/have to rebuild assets.

Anyway... maybe one day I will write my manifesto for broken sandboxes, but today I will just bitch and whine v0v.

[tgr]

I keep arguing that SOV needs to be much easier to gain AND lose, and something which can be captured by a much smaller gang than today's system allows. Something which encourages a war to be fought on multiple fronts, not just blob up in one system because if you don't, you lose all progress and have to start from scratch.

[Gets]

It is true that more and more people are coming to the opinion that there really is no better solution to the supercap problem than to make them purely support. Doomsdays, despite being in their third iteration, are still a blight. There are even sentiments of getting rid of them entirely because people are just tired of the neverending capital balance thematic. However, today the CFC fought against WN. as they were hitting a goon TCU using Abbaddons, dreads and carriers while the coalition rounded up Maelstroms and their own supercarriers. Even with the current sov mechanic being a horrible repeating structure shoot it was very intense for all parties involved as ships died in the battle while the WN. fleets pushed the TCU into armour, then structure.

CCP is doing a survey yet again (which got goonrushed and 404'd at one point, oops) and we'll see what they'll make of our anti-supercap sentiments. While I'm not hopeful of ever getting to play Eve Online 2: the not so bad game, I am enjoying the territorial warfare in World of Tanks, where similarly coalitions are made and land is being fought over. Even with the benefit of arcade gameplay giving everyone even grounds groups who can't squeeze themselves onto the map complain it is just too hard to bulge existing groups off the map. If I wasn't aware and someone showed me the concept of Eve's 0.0 gameplay I would be baffled with the lack of elements that make empire building a living X4 game, like main income being not related to holding space, owning space itself being a costly burden and having to waste millions of rounds of ammo even if there is literally no opposition. Biggest pet peeve with Eve is generally that it's Eve and to fix its irrational mechanics requires seemingly irrational solutions.

Time Dilation was turned on unannounced recently. It crashed the node almost instantly.

[tgr]

I actually didn't touch upon supercaps much in my response on the survey, but I lambasted the fuck out of the SOV system and bitched about the suckfest that is nullsec industry.

[Kageru]

Time Dilation was turned on unannounced recently. It crashed the node almost instantly.

Yes, I saw that one. I don't think anyone was in the least surprised because it is a fairly complex change with a lot of details than can trip you up. And CCP aren't nearly as clever as they think they are.