It's called "space" for a reason

Yesterday CCP announced the first wave of planned changes to address stagnation in nullsec. There is a 220 page (and growing) threadnaught in the EVE-O forums. Whilst CCP Greyscale has to dedicate the time to read all the posts in that thread I have no desire to. Instead I restricted myself to dev posts answering valid and useful points and then I did a random sample of a handful of pages to get a more general feel for how people are reacting. Not scientific but who cares. The mood of the posters is not entirely predictable, however.

Of course there are the posts from idiots who announce they will stop playing (hint: bye bye). There are the other posts from people who say nullsec is impossible to handle without caps jumping (hint: caps haven't always been in EVE). There have been a fair few posts from people who totally don't understand the point of this change and want to know how their alliance is meant to rapidly defend territory spread far and wide across New Eden (hint: you don't). Yes it makes force projection harder but that is exactly the bloody point. Space is big yet in New Eden it has been shrunk so much by jump drives that large alliances think nothing of crossing the whole map for a fight then back home for kippers.

The other half of the posts seem to recognise this shake up for the good thing it is. Force projection for the largest alliances will be reduced. People will have to think carefully about where they live as their 'big blue doughnut' won't be as effective any more. What's the point of being in a large coalition if they can't really help you? Maybe it's better to have neutrals to shoot in close proximity to home? Hopefully super-massive alliances start to shrink back on themselves and new alliances are able to get a foothold in nullsec.

There have been valid points about Black Ops ships receiving the same penalty as Carriers and Supers. Black Ops should be fast in and out guerilla style ships as opposed to caps which are meant to be deployed in more protracted battles. Maybe CCP should link jump fatigue to ship mass? There has also been the valid point about new characters joining corps deep in nullsec and how they join their new space friends out there. These issues can all be dealt with for the good of EVE. More issues will no doubt rear their heads but either the players will figure out clever new ways to handle those or CCP will make more balancing passes if it is
deemed necessary.

With the last expansion wormholes were nerfed with what is possibly the exact opposite of the proposed changes to nullsec. We have been forced into massively large chains of systems, all of which we have to scan and map in order to find people to shoot at or go run sleeper sites to make ISK when no targets are around. We have been forced into larger space and had our ability to control our environment reduced with the hole rolling nerf. We have survived by adapting and figuring out how to do so has been more engaging than much of what I'd been doing for some time prior to these changes. Sensible people play games to be challenged. I am fairly confident that the existing nullsec alliances will adapt equally well. Some will fall by the wayside and make space for new, more enduring corps to make their mark on New Eden. I look forward to watching how these changes pan out, but in the meantime I'm also enjoying the tasty nullbear tears.

Ships of Many Colours

This appeared in a dev blog today. It would appear we are getting ever closer to properly customisable paint jobs on our internet spaceships.

You really want to click this to make it bigger

People sometimes sound surprised when I mention I don't play EVE fully zoomed out. I like my pretty spaceships and play at a zoom level where I can appreciate them. I'm looking forward to CCP releasing another render like the above including my favourite looking ship - the Caldari Navy Megathron...

EVE Probe

Back in July CCP announced a graphics testing and benchmarking tool they were working on. The tool is called EVE Probe and uses the same graphics engine as the main EVE client. The idea for CCP is to release this tool to gather as much information from as many different computers as possible. The information is uploaded to CCP and they hope to analyse all the data to help increase the stability of the EVE client for everyone.

Yesterday CCP finally released the first public version for us to play with. Of course I had to download and try it as soon as I could. The first PC I ran it on was one I have at work. Said PC is an aging Dell PC and generally loads EVE over lunch to chat with people, put on gas reaction or other administrivia. All of this needs done with the graphics set to minimum. The results from EVE Probe reflected the lack of oomph in this work PC. I forgot to screenshot the results window but all five scenes were in the low single digits. One or two showed a mere 2 frames per second. Yup, knew that would struggle.

My home PC faired better but still betrays the age of the ATI HD5770 graphics card I use to power my two monitors. Frames per second ranged from 8 fps for fleet 3 to 56 fps for the fireworks display.

Generally when I'm playing I'll have two clients running. My main client runs with the settings on the 'Quality' preset running in a 1920x1080 Fixed Window screen. I like EVE to look pretty. I generally run a second client with the settings turned down to the 'Performance' setting and in a much smaller window (1600x900). As long as I'm not sitting in a POS I find the graphics perfectly acceptable. If I'm sitting at a POS with both clients I'm doing something very wrong so this isn't an issue.

CCP have also added a new subforum so people can share their results. It's very tempting to be suckered into buying a graphics card to get higher numbers, particularly when I see what numbers others are achieving. Must... resist... shopping...

Cloaking Porn

It's always the little things which leap out and grab me with excitement. Recently we had the pop/flash as people land on grid from warp. Not only does this add a little aural situational awareness it also looks really sci-fi cool. So on Sisi we have this new cloaking animation. It will make absolutely no difference to any mechanic in the game but oh my god does it look sexy! I can has now plz?

Well Connected II

To highlight the incontinent nature of wormhole spawn I give you this screenshot from our intel tool

With more connections than Jita I really wouldn't want to be the poor corp stuck in there.

Well Connected

With Hyperion nearly a week old the changes made are most definitely being felt in my corp. With the addition of a second static to class four wormhole systems we knew for sure that life would be busier. Instead of having one or occasionally two holes connected to our home system we would have two and occasionally three. It turns out, however, that we were very wrong. The new norm seems to be we have a whopping four connections into our system at any given time. This is not something we were expecting and massively changes the nature of our home system. Instead of being an outpost system in w-space we seem to be very much a thoroughfare. Even more mental adjustments need made than was expected and the number of online pilots to ensure proper security just quadrupled. Not terrible for us but the really small corps will feel the pain there.

The changes to jump distance based on mass has had it's desired impact on hole rolling. I've rolled our C3 static with my Orca once so far. This seemed to take a lot longer but had no more risk than before Hyperion as we had well scouted the system before declaring it dead. The C5 wasn't any better as we've not yet tooled up for running anything in C5s. Since then we've mostly been using battleships for rolling duties but more on that later. Thankfully, the increased length of chains and/or number of direct connections to home has given more potential for places to go scouting thus reducing the need to roll holes. With these longer chains we can keep ourselves amused by at least the prospect of finding someone to explode. Case in point, last night we went three or four jumps through wormholes to kill a poor miner. Even better, a C5 crew didn't like the look of us and tried to roll us away. I look forward to more opportunities like those.

These big changes to wormhole space have necessitated a change to how we will be composing our fleets in future. Until now we have had our PvE ships, mostly Tengus with remote reps, and our PvP ships were just about anything else we fancied flying. For hole rolling we used Orcas, sometimes with but often without support. Now our plan is to be flying PvP-ready ships all the time. Logi support, points and webs spread on ships, maybe even some EWAR waiting in the wings. If we're running sites the same fleet should be able to warp to a hole for unexpect pewpew without a second though. Hole rolling will be in a similar vein - out go the Orcas and in come properly fitted battleships. Truth be told I've been wanting to make a switch to something like this since we tried to take on some site runners in a C4 connected to use some months back. They swatted us down like just another wave of sleepers, a fairly easy wave at that. Until now there hasn't been the motivation but it seems wormholes just got more dangerous.

So far I'm liking the changes. Time will tell if I keep that frame of mind.

Wormhole Town Hall - 16 August

This evening at 22:00 GMT CSM member corbexx is running a wormhole town hall. CCP Fozzie has been confirmed to be attending. Read the forum post to keep up with any changing details.

If you care about wormholes and have the time to spare you should get yourself along to this. I think CCP already have a good idea of how we feel about the changes proposed for the Hyperion release but it does no harm to make sure.