Goodbye Clone Costs

Halfway through today's upgrade to Rhea I happened to flick past EVEMon. The warning message that strikes fear into the heart of many wormhole pilots was present on all of my characters!

The reason for the fear is any wormhole resident permanently lives undocked in space. When you are undocked with an out of date clone Murphy's law dictates you will die and you will lose skill points. It took a moment for me to remember that it is the turn of clone upgrades themselves to die with Rhea. It took another moment to notice the "Clone Limit" in EVEMon showed 0 Skill Points.

I won't be sad to see this particular feature go away. As a new player I avoided PvP because I couldn't afford to replace ships, implants, and my clone. The first two can be ignored to a certain extent, the final one cannot. Losing skill points equated to losing time. As I got older I cared less but still having to shell out another 10 million ISK because I had dared to fight other players seemed pointlessly harsh. Finally, the one time I was a victim of losing SP due to not updating my clone was because I was rushing to get back into a fight too quickly.

Goodbye clone upgrade. Not going to miss you. I do, however, look forward to where this ISK sink is reimplemented.

Gladiators, start your engines!

For the first expansion since Apocrypha, in Rhea new wormhole systems are being added to New Eden's universe. It will not be possible to anchor POSs in any of these systems due to the lack of any moons. The lack of moons is being explained by every single planet being Shattered, leading to the classification of this new type of space as 'S-space'. As well as the lack of moons to anchor POSs at these new systems have several other features to distinguish them from the W-space I am so familiar with:

• Landmark sites
• High frequency of wormholes
• Extra-rich asteroid belts
• Ice mining

In addition to this list there will be no possibility of getting capital ships into S-space, either by flying, jumping or construction. It seems CCP are really pushing back to basics with this new space. I've read at least one comment suggestion CCP are creating new space to remove features (read: cap and supercap ships) they would like gone from K-space but could never risk the player outrage to do so.

Out of the 101 systems there is one extra-special new solar system called Thera. In addition to the above features Thera will also have four dockable stations. These stations have the normal facilities of industry, repair, medical and a market. Currently you can even install a jump clone in one if you want. The two things which distinguish this system from any other K-space system is the lack of jump gates and its massive size.

As mentioned Thera has a market to buy your ships, there are medical facilities so if you get podded you don't have to find your way back in, this is technically nullsec so there are no security status penalties for engaging in combat. In addition to the above Rhea also brings the removal of clone costs to protect your skill points after being podded. The sum of the above is CCP are essentially introducing a combat arena to New Eden. In true CCP style this is not an honourable arena where 1v1 battles are forced to be honoured, rather this is more like a free for all with no end.

- Want to fleet up to kill that Machariel?
- Sure, but can I shoot you after it dies?
- Okay!

There are already cries that the large nullsec alliances will just move in, assert control and ruin it for everyone. Those same arguments appear for almost every new feature CCP release. Yes, it is a possibility but rather than assume this potentially wonderful new feature will be a flop how about supporting what it could be. Go out and help to realise the potential of Thera as a bloody battlefield of epic proportions. Install a jump clone and when you want some casual, consentual, unprotected pewpew head over to Thera to die gloriously.

Enjoy the Outback: Station camping on Sisi

CCP Buff Vacations

One of the annoyances for any EVE player who cares about continuous skill training is figuring out what long skill to train whilst on vacation. The other tricky part is padding in shortish skills on the lead up to vacation so you can start whatever skill you want to train so it doesn't finish halfway through your holiday. Today CCP released a devblog talking about this:

Good for two years or so

No more rocket-scientist levels of planning. No more Gantt charts to ensure the correct set of skills go in the correct order at the correct time. No more sneaking a laptop on holiday because you could only get skills to go 12 days into your two week holiday.

CCP's best buff ever! Coming soon in Phoebe.

The Infinite Universe (part 2)

I should know better than to have promised part 2 of this during the week. Life rarely leaves me the time to focus on a long post like this. Plus, when I do have spare time during the week I prefer to actually play EVE. Crazy, huh?

If you've not read part one click the link and read it now.

***

The Arrival

With a loud bang our intrepid corp of explorers arrives in the distant system. As the Rorqual was using the sun as a destination lock the ship naturally lands in relative close proximity to it. There are no planets, no asteroid belts, and definitely no gates or stations available from the right click menu nor on the overview. The only thing on the overview is the sun and the system doesn't even have a registered name. The first order of business, therefore, is for the other pilots who travelled with the Rorqual to take their clones, jump into scanning ships and start scanning the system. The scanning pilots start hunting down the celestials, warping to them and making assorted tactical bookmarks like any good scouts should. This way they find where the planets, moon, and any other items of interest in the system are.

The Rorqual is vulnerable at the jump-in point and needs to be moved. Our Rorqual pilot, eager to secure the situation gets himself to one of the new tactical bookmarks as soon as possible. This is where the Rorqual reveals its next new trick. Once in position at a bookmark the pilot selects the 'Anchor' option for the Rorqual then moves his pod into another one of the ships stored in the Rorqual. After some period of time the Rorqual goes online and a forcefield is erected to protect the exploration group. Why carry a POS when one of the ships serve the function perfectly well? Our explorers are now working against the clock. They need to do whatever they came here to do and be ready to head home before their safe haven runs out of fuel for the forcefield.

Exploitation

In addition to scanning down planets and moons there also needs to be some worthwhile reason for our explorers to come to this distant system. I've already established there are no freebies on this trip. This means there are no anomalies for people to simply warp to. Everything has to be worked for. This means all ISK will be hidden behind signatures and the dangers within. Given these locations are brand new areas of space I wouldn't expect known NPC classes to exist in any significant numbers. The ship sizes which can be transported needs to be taken into consideration when designing these sites.

Exploration sites requiring little or no combat would add to the empty feeling of space - "someone had been here but has long since gone". Other sites would be well defended by tough NPCs. Some leads could be taken here from the recently unveiled Burner missions. Any NPC living this deep in space is likely to be very self-sufficient and readily able to defend itself. Finally, the complete absence of anything to do should always be an option. Exploration should not guarantee riches or, indeed, anything at all. I'd be quite happy to see people going home entirely empty handed from time to time.

Our explorers now have as long as their Rorqual-POS has forcefield fuel to make the most of the wealth they have unlocked. Why do they need a forcefield? I was just getting to that.

Conflict

This wouldn't be EVE without there being a large possibility for explosions. A lack of local and no obvious pinch-points such as gates, stations or wormholes may make combat seem unlikely. Of course the initial arrival of the Rorqual leaves it fairly vulnerable. Anyone who happens to be combat scanning around the predictable arrival point of the sun will be able to warp in and grab point, hence the need for the explorers to take both exploration and combat ships on their journey. Once the Rorqual is anchored it isn't immune to attack either. Natural resists give it an appropriate number of hit points to defend from attack. This is particularly important given the lack of other automated defences. Should the Rorqual-POS be taken into armor the necessary reinforced timer starts counting down. No point messing around with hauling strontium on the journey for this, let's just use the same mechanism as POCOs and have the anchoring pilot set the time range for reinforced mode exit. If the odds are overwhelming maybe a rescue mission could be staged to save the Rorqual with a backup team (and another Rorqual). Doubling down is always an option.

Other sources of conflict are pretty identical to wormholes with the added difficulty of how the potential aggressors get themselves staged. EVE being EVE I find it incredibly likely that there would be the formation of corps whose sole mission in life was to build up a library of potential locations to jump to hunting for explorers to explode. Of course, this would just drive explorers onto deeper and deeper destinations. Without proper planning people have a real chance of getting stranded and/or need rescued.

Conclusion

I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. I often feel there isn't enough mystery in New Eden, between the well mapped areas of k-space, the well documented routines of all NPCs and the triggers which affect their reinforcements. The infinite EVE universe could go a long way to addressing this. Simply going there should not guarantee instant wealth and sites should be slow to respawn. It should be hard to get there and challenging to exist there. Procedurally generated signatures would hopefully yield the randomness I desire and prevent people from being able to go into auto-pilot mode when running the sites. I also like the idea that people could scan themselves deeper and deeper. Of course, there would always be the challenge of getting home to Jita to turn riches of items into riches of ISK. Finally, there is no isolating yourself as people can arrive at any time. There is no wimping out on the commitment cost though so any potential gankers better be confident they can deal with the mysteries before committing their own Rorqual to the jump.

The Infinite Universe (part 1)

There has been ongoing speculation for what the promised eventual future of player built stargates will bring. A lot of the speculation predictably revolves around finally unlocking access to Jove space. Others think the gates will unlock access to some other well defined long-forgotten region of space. My personal favourite is that CCP will use player built stargates to replace the distances about to be taken from carriers and other jump-capable ships allowing the largest alliance to ephemerally replace the logistical links they currently rely upon. I think it is time to stop thinking so small and really expand our online universe. Space is infinite so why shouldn't New Eden be so?

Investigation

It's time to properly extend the exploration career to the discovery of entire new solar systems. Doing so should be a corporation wide endeavour requiring the expenditure of a large amount of resources. The basic premise of the discovery portion of this idea is a massive extension of the existing scanning skills except this will be on a galaxy map rather than a solar system map. In addition to this, each 'scanning bubble' will be controllable by a single character. This will require a minimum of four pilots to have any chance of successfully scanning a system and an optimum of seven or eight for more rapid discovery. Each pilot should be based in their own POS and each POS needs to be in a separate solar system. The further apart each pilot the greater the chance a deep scan will work.

Of course we're going to need new probes with their own mini jump drives. Like existing drives these mini jump drives will of course require fuel to jump to these distant regions of space. Deeper exploration may even expend all fuel on the outbound journey resulting in sacrifice of the probe. Will it be worth it? Of course the scan itself shouldn't be as passive as the solar-system scans. Let's introduce a new variant of the hacking mini-game. Rather than just be a random click-fest this should actually require some skill to play. Eight skilled players playing the mini-game at the same time... did I just create an online cooperative game *inside* an MMO?

Exploration

So what happens once our industrious corp pins down the jump coordinates of a distant star worthy of further investigation? Well then the real exploration begins. How do they get there and back safely? Clearly we need a new class of ship. A deep exploration ship. Sounds like something ORE would build? Meet the newly refitted deep exploration Rorqual. This refitted Rorqual comes with a modified jump drive. Unlike existing drives this one has the ability to lock to on to the single gravity well of the distant sun and jump much greater distances. The emphasis on singular gravity wells obviates the possibility of abusing the Rorqual in known space (although future use in W-space could be an interesting option which I won't consider here). Whilst making this a one-way journey would be an interesting choice it's probably not a good idea. A 'point of origin' marker would guide the Rorqual home at the end of the voyage.

So our corp is ready for their jump to deep space. They load their Rorqual with the tools of their trade - more exploration ships and quite probably a smattering of combat ships for defence from the unknown. They 'board' the Rorqual by attaching their current clone to the clone vat bay. Once prepared the Rorqual pilot initiates the jump to the distant system and all the involved parties jump as one ready to brave the dangers of the remote system.

***

This turned into a longer post than expected. I'll continue during the week with what happens next.

Crius is coming

I finally noticed CCP Seagull published a devblog entitled 'Coming in Crius'. While I read most, if not all, of the blogs covering the changes in Crius I figured I should read over this one too in case I missed anything. I also decided to write about each section and how I think it will affect my life in wormholes. This is all based on the devblog and absolutely no testing has been done on Sisi.

A new experience for manufacturing, research, blueprint copying, invention and reverse engineering

The new user interface looks very nice to use. The left-to-right flow of input, process, and output appears pretty clear on what you have, what you need, and what you get. In the current system it was always annoying to gather all the things you thought you needed into the one location and then not find out you were 100 Tritanium short until you clicked that final button. This new UI looks like it will all be clear from the very beginning.

Dynamic pricing across the universe

I really like the idea of a dynamic workforce moving across the galaxy in search of the best wages. I never really considered there were actual people performing my research and manufacturing jobs. Much in the same way I never think about the lore of how many non-capsuleers there are aboard my ship at any one time. The removal of slots is quite a big thing for wormholes. In my corp we provide a research and manufacturing POS as a perk for the members. The bottleneck is most definitely the research lab slots. Now this bottleneck will shift to what people are willing to pay to have research carried out.

Travelling worker teams

This really continues on from the above section. These teams add a nice little twist to manufacturing in known space. I've no idea if we would be able to recruit specialised teams into our wormhole system, never mind if we would even want to.

Reprocessing renewed

The UI shown in the devblog is nicer than the current interface but the existing interface was good enough for what I needed. Unlike manufactoring, reprocessing was quite often a case of 'select all → reprocess' and see what minerals turned up in the hanger. For me, though, the real improvement here is the removal of the perfect refine. That never made sense to me. Even the best manufacturing process should produce some waste, and no recycling process can recover absolutely all the materials present in a given item. Adding these inefficiencies up struck a hollow note when hearing how people would haul masses of minerals around space by building then reprocessing 425mm railguns.

Blueprints and research

I don't really have an opinion on the changes to material efficiency and production efficiency. It's just replacing one set of numbers with a different set of numbers. For new players coming into the game it will be more intuitive I guess. When I didn't know better I would just research everything to 10 anyway. Thankfully I knew better by the time I acquired an Orca BPO.

Starbases

Living in a POS means this directly applies to me. It will finally be worthwhile reprocessing ore in a wormhole due to the k-space reprocessing nerf. We rarely bother to mine but when we do it was always a pain to accept the large refining loss or haul out to K-space to avoid that. Now we'll have a better yield in the wormhole. Yay, one less chore. Also the new compression array will be sweet should we ever go full carebear and start giant mining fleets munching on the ore sigs in our system. But what about the poor Rorqual? The other changes are mostly the removal of slots so see comments in other sections above. The only addition is the bonus to costs by anchoring more than one of a given module. We're not an industrial corp so I can't see me bothering to do that. In fact, where we already have more than one of a given module I'll probably be pulling the spare one down.

Dynamic station sound

The sound changes based on the amount and type of industrial activity going on in a station? That sound pretty cool actually (sounds... geddit??)

New API endpoints for industry features

I'm sure the community will release some cool new tools off the back of this. For me though it's a pretty 'Meh' thing.

Fleet Warp Opt-out

This is going to be hilarious on RvB Ganked roams when splinters of people get left behind and have no idea why. I must sort out some time to get on one of those roams, post-Crius.

Fit modules without having the required skills

From time to time I put together a selection of ships for corp or alliance roams. I have a 'janitor' character out near Amarr who takes care of this for me. Usually he just bundles all the pieces together in a contract and leaves the recipient to assemble the ship. Now I'll have the option to actually fit the ships properly (if I spend the SP on being able to sit in them in the first place). Maybe I'll finally have a reason to activate dual-training on that account.

So there we have it folks. My thoughts on the upcoming expansion patch release Crius thingy, which is coming to us on July 22nd.

Handy Search Tip

For as long as I can remember there has been a search box at the top of hanger windows. In the wormhole I regularly use this feature to find any given ship by typing part of its name. To get an overview of all my own ships in our shared SMAs I can type my unique identifying characters into the search box and only my handful of ships show. As you can imagine this makes life much easier when 20+ people store their ships in the same place.

Many Ships

Name Search for 'Blue'

By complete accident the other day I discovered the search feature extends to ship types as well as ship name. I was hunting in our corp SMA for a particular ship with the letters 'mot' in the name. I didn't find the ship I wanted but another totally random ship appeared in the list whose name did not include the string 'mot'. It took a little while for me to realise I was looking at a Mammoth and that was why the match was made.

Type Search for 'Dominix'

Matches for 'nav' include Navitas and Navy Domi

I've already taken to this new found, and probably ancient, feature like a duck to water. Gone are the days hunting for familiar icons in the SMA window; now I can just type "noctis" when I want to bait people into shooting me. Hopefully some of you reading this post will also find this wonderful discovery useful to know too.

API NPC Changes

I rarely venture into the eve-o forums. I find them to be a wasteland of bitterness which sucks the soul and removes my desire to play EVE. The only time I go there is when some other, tougher soul tells me there is something worth reading. Right now the 'something worth reading' is a threadnaught initiated by CCP SoxFoxFour on an intended change to the data available to pull from the EVE API.

"as a heads up as soon as I can find the time I will be removing WH systems map/kills endpoint. This is data that exists in the API but not the client and is incredibly powerful. As with everything I am open to discussing this, but I will admit that you will have a damn hard time convincing me of not doing it."

 The resulting thread which followed this was at 23 pages when I last looked with a fairly even split of people who welcome the change and people who absolutely hate the idea of this information going away. Those in favour cite the reason that wormholes exist is to be mysterious with no way of knowing what is out there, particularly not from external tools pulling from the API. Those against raise the point that it is already hard to find people in wormholes and this information is the only way they can find people to kill in a long, pre-scanned chain.

I see there being two problems here which are not entirely unrelated. Problem one is the existence of this information in the API which shouldn't be there. The people pointing out that wormholes are meant to be mysterious areas with no intel not gathered with your own eyes are 100% correct. We already had wormhole system jumps removed many moons ago for this very reason. The NPC kill data should also have been removed at that point. We should not know anything about wormholes which wasn't learnt from d-scan or other in-game intel gathering means. If my corp scans out a long chain then it is up to us to station scouts in each link to wait for activity, or actually patrol the chain to find someone to shoot. The key concept here is we need to be active to find things.

The mildly related second problem was introduced with the Odyssey expansion. In Odyssey we were lumped with the wonderful new scanner. No more did we have to actively probe systems to see what was out there. No more did we have to proactively scan our own systems during operations to see if any new signatures were present in our home system or where ever we happened to be operating. No more did we have to be surprised when ships appeared from nowhere to gank us when we thought we have all our exits covered. See where I'm going with this? Ostensibly the reason for this change was to bring more people into exploration. While a laudably intention we rarely find anyone else in our chains at all. When we do we have to be really quick to catch them if they are running sites, or they have to be really dumb and not notice the new signature auto-populate in their signature scanner. The balance of risk has shifted too far and the new proposal shifts this even further in favour of carebears. I'm sure this in unintended by CCP...

I agree with both sides but the fix is not to do nothing. I fully support removing this information from the API. Wormholes are big spaces where intel comes at a premium. You should have to work hard to get your kills. The first part is scanning, the second part is keeping the intel current, the final part is the kill. The real problem here happened with Odyssey and should be removed. Get rid of the signature scanner autopopulating. Force people running sites to have probes in the air actively scanning for new sigs. Take us back to pre-Odyssey scanning. If passive intel for the hunter is removed then so too should passive intel for the prey.

More Posterity

On the eve of EVE crossing the Rubicon I took more screenshots to record for posterity. As many of you know, the old certification system is going away to be replaced by ship mastery. For a lot of people this will be considered a good thing as many of the certificates are a bit outdated now. For me, as useful as I hope the new mastery system will be, I will be a little sad at them passing into history. Certificates didn't exist when I first played EVE in 2005. A lot of the problems I had back then was from overload at the vast array of skills I could train. I had no idea what would be a good idea and what wasn't. In the end I didn't make it past the two week trial back then. The same story happened in 2007 when I gave EVE a second chance. By 2009 the certificate system existed and what a major difference it made to me.

I trained many skills since then, some following the certificates and others ignore them completely. There are two categories of certificates I got to elite level which I am rather proud of - Elite Core skills and Elite Defence.

Elite Core Skills

Elite Defence Skills

I have no idea how my skills will shape up under the new mastery ratings so let the record show I once was Elite at something.

Sisters are doing it for themselves

There's been a bit of excitement in my corp with people keen to get their hands on the new Sisters of EVE cruiser, the Stratios. There's less excitement about the frigate, the Astero, as we already have covops frigates and cloaky bombers. The Stratios, on the other hand, looks like a worthy replacement for some current scanning boats. It's better than a Covops frigate because it can fit guns. It should be better than my trusted cloaky Loki because it will hopefully be cheaper. Also, dying in one won't result in skill point loss. It does remain to be seen if I can tear myself away from my precious, rhyming cloaky loki...

When I was on SiSi the other night it was to check if the new anchorables were up yet for us to see. Sadly they weren't so I played around with getting the golden pod and then with the improved warp acceleration. I then set to finding the unskinned models of the SoE ships which I read were available. So you don't also have to dig around to see them, I present the screenshots I took for your perusal.

Astero Frigate

Stratios Cruiser

To be honest, the concept work showed skins which didn't look a million miles from the very white nekkid models above. Just add some red stripes here and there. I do look forward to seeing these fully skinned and live on TQ during November. I also look forward to the names and designs for the SoE Battlecruiser and Battleship which everyone should start clamouring for around November 20th..

CCP Abandon POSs

In case you missed it, the CSM summit minutes are out. You can go read the 113 pages of minutes if you like. I can't bring myself to read something as verbose as that so I'll go with the digested output from others.

The first rage inducing thing that has come out of these minutes is CCP's position on the POS rework. Bizarrely, CCP has the opinion that only a very small number of people who play EVE are impacted by the terribleness that is the POS management system. The last time I checked there were POSs in highsec, lowsec, nullsec and wormholes. For sure the terrible permissions system does not impact the teeny little corps who have a single person managing their POS. As soon as you try to have any sensible level of hierarchy in a larger corp you run face first into the limited flexibility of the massive number of permissions available.

Bob help us wormhole dwellers who actually have to live in a POS. The POS security is probably the single largest sticking point for corp recruitment. Before I can recruit someone I need to form as good a picture as possible of who that person is and what they are likely to do to the existing members. Is this person a nice guy? Is he a total asshat who's going to steal all our ships? Is he a spy who aim is to offline the POSs as soon as he gets the rights to react some gas? While this is all part of living in wormholes, I would also like to be able to relax some and take many more people in to enjoy the first-class content we have access to in W-space.

CCP started to go down a route of removing complexity for the sake of complexity. This problem still exists in spades with POSs. If you've ever done gas reactions you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you have ever been unfortunate enough to set up titles for reasonable secure hanger tabs or to allow people to have the correct permissions to make them useful without giving dangerous levels of access you'll know what I'm talking about. Unfortunately CCP only see this one side of the problem - the person making the permissions.

The other side is the inconveniences the rest of the players who have any interaction with POSs have to endure. Many wormhole corps have a POS per small group of corp members. This means the whole corp has to deal with getting in a ridiculous quantity of POS fuel on a regular basis, taking time away from more enjoyable activities. POS passwords became slightly less annoying recently, but the fact we need them at all is a pain.

Two Step has a forum threadnaught up to show CCP just how small the affected player base actually is. There are 79 pages as I write this. I suggest you go add a message there to show your support to fix this embarrassingly broken aspect of life in New Eden.

Or wear the t-shirt to Fanfest

Tracking Camera d-scan buff

One of the things I've heard you can do with the new tracking camera is increase your d-scanning efficiency. I had someone mention this to me as soon as the new camera options were patched in but didn't really understand what they were explaining. Today I found this video linked on Google+ and it really helps.

This looks like a massive improvement for people living in K-space where the majority of people will be in locations which appear in the overview. I guess the main improvement for W-space will be for POS hunting, although that didn't exactly take long anyway. Like the advert says: "Every little helps".

Goodbye Annoying Hangers

I read about the impending demise of corporate hangers in ship ages ago, so I was somewhat surprised to see a devblog only just appearing now. CCP tell us they are making this change to remove more unnecessary complexity from the system, which is something I fully support. As an added bonus, as I sometimes move stuff around in an Orca, I really like this change.

I never understood the reasons behind splitting up the Orca into so many different compartments when the Orca pilot is able to do what he wants with the contents of any of them. For me it has only ever meant I look through several tabs before finding what I'm actually looking for. Whenever I've dealt with accessing other peoples' Orcas they generally tell me what I'm looking for is 'probably in tab X but just rake around'.

For the few cases where access restrictions are required CCP have put more cargo containers sizes into New Eden. An Orca corporate hanger space is 40,000 m³ and CCP have conveniently added 10,000 m³ and 5,000 m³ containers. If you do want to restrict access simply put in three of the 10k m³ containers and one 5k m³ container to hold everything in. Doing it this way leaves 5k m³ of space where you can move stuff you want people to access. Simples.

Now, dear CCP, there are a handful of other places the breakdown into corporate hanger tabs needs removed. Whilst these corp tabs are essential in many POS modules, there are others where they are not needed. Eliminate these from mobile laboratories and their ilk and suddenly it becomes possible for alliance members to use labs for copying or invention. Eliminate them from other POS modules and suddenly reverse engineering and even manufacturing could be opened up.

If it was possible to remove the corp hangers from the Orca it could just be as doable to remove them from a handful more places.

EVE 2.0

Just a quick post. Have you seen the new planned UI for Retribution? It looks like CCP have taken some tips from the 'Web 2.0' crowd and decided rounded corners are a good thing. Of course, being CCP they've taken the concept to the max and completely removed the sides.

Can't say I'd expect to gain a positive lock like this for long

Reading through the devblog there are more changes than just rounding of the targetting reticule. The yellow and red boxes will also become circles although I don't expect in-game terminology to change from getting "red boxed". Also there will be representative visual indicator of who is actually shooting at you and how much damage they are delivering. I personally think this has the potential to be a much better system than the current boxes of text telling you who did what that disappear too fast to read. Actually anything is better than giving someone two lines of text to read for each hit they take.

Finally, the targetting reticule is going to subtly change when you get into targeting range of a ship. This should mean less ignoring the pretty spaceships in favour of the overview panel when in combat. Personally I would prefer if this reticule changed when a particular module was within range. Drifting out of lock range is not as common as moving beyond the optimal and/or drop off limits of your guns or missiles. For that you'll still need to be glued to the overview.

Fishing with the Sleepers

I think the discussion about reworking POSs is all good and well, but what about in wormhole space? In the sparsely populated areas I call home CCP have a great opportunity to do something truly different. While it is accepted that we can take a POS structure through some wormholes and assemble it to call home, how about further differentiation these unknown regions of space further buy creating a second choice?

This idea of mine has cropped up a few times in various random discussion on comms but this is the first time I've tried to actually write it down. I was prompted to scribble this down having seen the very basic gameplay demo for Incarna toons exploring Sleeper structures. Forgive me if I wander in my thoughts.

In wormhole space we should be able to capture, occupy and live in some Sleeper structures.

This is my home, there are many like it but this one is mine.

How does that strike you as a genious idea?

Fleshing this out now. How would this work initially? Well, CCP would define a subset of Sleeper structures that would be inhabitable by Capsuleers. Maybe some new artwork to create additional structures would be in order to create something suitable. But I would be quite happy with owning something like this structure.

Obviously we wouldn't want this to be an easily attainable structure to acquire so there should be a new, hard to scan down signature type 'Sleeper Domicile' could be a good name. The spawn rate of such signature should be kept really low. The idea being that players shouldn't be able to move into a wormhole expecting such structures to appear within any particule time frame. The slow spawn randomness would also make it harder for a corp to hire someone in advance to do the hard combat. The very nature of this site would push it to be the hardest type to run requiring a large investment in player combat to clear the site before they could think about taking control. Actually, by control, what if this meant something similar to the incursion or faction warfare mechanic? Sleeper control is reduced by running numerous sites and only once sleeper control is removed does the 'Domicile' become vulnerable.

Clearing the 'Domicile' site isn't the end of this though. In order to gain access we need three areas to be hacked within a limited time frame. This time frame should be too small to allow a single player to hack all three alone but large enough to take into account the random chance of hacking success. Once control has been passed to the player they own it but cannot use it. There is still a risk of despawn.

To make the ownership permanent there would be a final step similar to assembling a customs office where a set number of PI products need deposited in the structure to make it inhabitable for Capsuleers. I have no idea what a suitable level of item volume should be here. It needs to be something feasible to achieve given the mass limits and potential poor routes to haul stuff into a wormhole system. Maybe tuning the requirements to what can be made through PI in each wormhole would work. A wormhole with the ability to make all top tier PI outputs would have a requirement spread across all their possible outputs; a wormhole with only one or two top tier products would require a higher number of each of the two outputs plus some lower tier items. Probably an upgrade process could be in order here so 'stabilising' a structure to not despawn is readily achievable but  actually being able to dock all your ships requires time and coordinated effort.

There also needs to be some form of fuel requirement. There is a temptation to say this should fully consist of things found in wormhole space, but that would take away from some of the current challange of living in wormholes. I'm also not sure what facilities should be available in the structure - should it just hanger space and "Captain's Quarters"? Should it be shared storage as in POSs or more like the privacy afforded in empire-based stations? What about manufacturing, research, invention facilities? I think this should really be kept in traditional POSs with the exception of T3 reverse engineering and construction. This would be the perfect time to allow us wormholers to actually follow the T3 production process from start to end in completeness in the wormhole. The missing piece being able to assemble the subsystems in W-space. What about forcing this to only be possible in W-space?! Well, the reverse engineering and subsystem/hull manufacture anyway. It's a bit much to expect a capsuleer to buy the parts in Jita then haul them to W-space before flying their new ship.

Of course, these structures should definitely be destroyable by hostile players. They should be tougher than large POSs but I'm not sure what the defences would consist of. If there are people docked in a structure when it explodes they should find themselves back in Empire space in a new clone. If they had any possessions in the structure they get destroyed. Simple. While this is harsh, it gives a real goal to fight for if you are invaded. Reinforced timers give you a chance to be organised and also for invaders to get bored and leave.

So, what do you think?

Watch the Space

Last weekend I had Alliance Tournament X streaming on my PC. The battles are quite convenient little chunks of time lasting no more than ten minutes. This meant I could take care of non-EVE stuff while diverting my attention every now and again to the raging battles on my screen. However, I'm not going to write about those fights as I am far from qualified to do so.

What did catch my attention was the intermission feed, live from space in a couple of locations around New Eden. I caught feeds from the popular market hubs of Jita 4-4 and Amarr 8 (Oris). Both of these feeds filled up rapidly with pilots showing off their blingiest ships or giving us laser shows and exploding ships. In a genius move by CCP they then set up a feed from the Osoggur gate in Amamake. What better way to create some good viewing than setting up a focus point in lowsec. Everyone wants their five minutes of fame and I'm sure the resident pirates gave them that and more. I certainly saw a few ships go pop.

As far as I know, this 'feature' provided during the intermissions was inspired by the actions taken by a player during the recent 'Burn Jita' campaign. During that event someone had a pilot undocked and was broadcasting the expected carnage live from the Jita 4-4 undock. Unfortunately most of the action occurred at the gates of the system, but the idea was there. And what a good idea I think it was and is.

So, what do I think CCP should be doing with this? Well the answer is pretty obvious. For some time people have been complaining about not being able to see the outside of a station when they are docked up. People also complain about 'station games' where people undock to take a look outside and then redock as soon as their session timer allow it. Add to that the complaints about there being nothing of any value on the Captains Quarters TV screen and you get a perfect recipe for success: Showing the outside of stations from the inside.

Now, with us EVE players being the devious people we are, the first challenge will be handling the inevitable parking of ships in front of the camera to obscure the view. The obvious way to handle this would be to reposition the camera to another location with a nice smooth fade effect, like a director switching camera angles at a concert. In fact, a cycling of the camera view every few minutes or so would possibly be a good idea anyway to generally make it harder to block the view even temporarily. I would suggest these positions be decided at random rather than set a finite number of positions, to further increase the difficulty of screwing with the system. I wouldn't want to make things too easy on people watching this for a safe undock. There would be no desire to display information such as standings or pilot names, etc. This really should be a single feed provided to everyone who wants to engage Captains Quarters and simply peer outside.

Setting this up on all stations in EVE is probably a real stretch from a technical point of view. A limited roll out to the most popular stations would be sufficient to prove the idea works. Following on from that CCP could roll out to at least one station per solar system, maybe even charging higher taxes for the services on these 'safer' stations.

However this is handled it would be really cool to have the Captains Quarters TV actually do something useful and may even prompt me to switch to CQ from time to time (on the odd occasion I'm actually in known space). What do you think?