This patch needs a closer look.
I’ve taken several days off of EVE Online to enjoy some time with my family and loved ones (plus, oddly, a lot of work). However, CCP have released the Dominion patch notes so I thought I’d take a few moments to review some welcome surprises (and reminders) found within! In general, this post will address little bits of the expansion that haven’t already received lots of attention, so no talk about sovereignty and factional ships and such.
And post a comment about your favorite bits!
You can indeed fail at being hardcore. Hopefully CCP won't.
“The user system of EVE got corified in order to be more easily used in other CCP products. The UI was also corified and is now hardcore.” I assume this refers to some refactoring to allow for better code abstraction but will reserve judgment on whether we now actually have a hardcore UI… Judging by the list below, they really did try, at any rate.
“Two new career paths have been introduced: Exploration, which teaches players about scanning and exploration sites, and Advanced Military, which builds on the first Military career path and introduced more advanced combat tactics.” Exploration as a career path will cause some trouble in the short term, I think, as high sec explorers may have a lot more competition and such, but in the long term this will benefit us in the form of new recruits to Back Alley Trading Company and of course more support for development. Advanced Military sounds like an introduction to PvP, which EVE really could use.
“It is now impossible for players to never have access to agents. Level 1 agents, up to Quality 0, will be available to all players regardless of their faction, corporation, or personal standing with the agent.” Translation: CCP fixed standings recovery (in addition to the epic arcs granting faction standings). Praise be!
“New Gallente Storyline missions, levels 1 through 4 have been introduced, reacting to the recent purchase of contested systems by Caldari megacorps.” I don’t run missions very often, and practically never for the Gallente, but I do like seeing the continuation of making the game world reflect the results of in-game player action (i.e. the defeat of the Federation in factional warfare). Additional changes, like adding Ishukone / Mordu NPCs in Intaki and allowing the Roden police to help around gates, also support this.
“Voice fonts have been added to chat channels.” Hmm. Did they do this to allow “stealth sausages” to maintain their cover? Does Mynxee have any particular opinions on this? I must have missed something about this change and why they implemented it.
“The jukebox now uses MP3 format for its music. Additionally, custom playlists may be specified. MP3 based Jukebox now supports custom play-lists in .m3u / .pls / .ram / .pink format.” If CCP ever implemented a change that would unite the players in rapt adoration, this would be it. YAYAYAYAY!
“The location of your clone is now displayed on the character sheet under the clone grade.” This has annoyed me quite a few times, so I welcome this (admittedly small) change.
“A new ‘Loot Logging’ optional mode has been added for fleets. This works for taking from cans and wrecks as well as for salvaging and mining. Everyone in the fleet will be notified of all these events. You can then export the logs as a text file.” What does it say about me that I thought of corporate “aggressive salvaging” operations as soon as I read this?
“You can now report players as ‘ISK Spammer’ from the right click menu of a character in chat. This will remove all their messages from that channel and report it to the GMs. Anything to streamline the process will result in more player petitions (and thus catching spammers more quickly). Good change.
“The old EVE mail and mailing list system got replaced by a new and better one. It can be sorted by date and much more!” I will have much, MUCH more to say about this later, but for now, I will repeat my YAYAYAYAY!
“Small Tractor Beam skills have been lowered to requiring Science at level 3 instead of level 4… Hacking has the following prerequisites: Science level 3 (down from level 5), Electronics Upgrades level 3 (down from level 5), Electronics level 1 (down from level 2), Engineering level 1 (down from level 2). Archaeology has the following prerequisites: Science level 3 (down from level 5), Survey level 3 (down from level 5), Electronics level 1. Salvaging has the following prerequisites: Mechanic level 3, Survey at level 3 and Engineering at level 1. Cloaking has the following prerequisites Electronics level 4 (was 5).” One tiny part of me feels a twinge of sadness that things have gotten a little easier, but since I eventually needed all the “original” prerequisites for other things, and it will make it easier to get recruits, I suppose I’ll live. Survey V feels a little useless now, though.
But will they sweep up the casings?
“All projectile weapons have been rebalanced so each tier (long range/short range, small/medium/large) have more consistent attributes and the increase between each tier is more defined.” Good, this should make Minmatar somewhat better. Due to damage type choices, this may have an effect on K-space mission runners, and I don’t know whether those changes will make life better or worse. I’ll need to look a little more closely if I ever go back to that life.
“The Tech 2 ship component composition has been changed. Full details can be found in the blog by CCP Chronotis The streams must flow.” I need to review this in greater detail, particularly if I return to my tech 2 ship production ways…
“no longer CSPA charges to send to your corp (I think there were), can no longer send to NPC corp.” Crazy Vikings. Wut?
“You can now add corp/alliances as buddies.” Does this mean I can add other corps as buddies? If so, intel gathering just got a HUGE new tool!
“When opening the character sheet you will no longer see the typewriter effect in the character information – the text will be displayed instantly.” Seriously, how has the game kept that old piece of crap in there this long?
“The option to show position of fleet members on the solar system map was removed.” I will actually miss this.
“The memory consumption of the client was too high when started with audio disabled. This has now been fixed.” YES. I have to run it without audio, generally speaking, due to crashes in Linux, so this makes life a little better for me in the interim.
“The Orca no longer applies wrong math when calculating the volume of items it is containing.” Didn’t notice it but glad to hear they fixed this problem.
“Jamyl Sarum is now listed as CEO of the Emperor Family corporation.” Seriously, why did this slip through the cracks for so long?
“Declining Factional Warfare missions more often than once every 4 hours will now (once again) incur a standings loss, as with all other type of agent missions.” The gravy train just dried up. No more farming 1-kill missions. And just as they implement new FW LP rewards (T1 battleships), too. Not that it made a huge amount of sense, but I prefer boosting over nerfing and this doesn’t do that. Why not give LPs for plexing instead?
“After leaving wormholes space you can now see all the world information again.” I think this refers to “Locus Signature” replacing the region listing? If so, thanks!
“Expeditions no longer disappear when being escalated to Jita.” I love this.
“Asteroids in gravimetric plexes in Wormhole space are not disappearing any longer at warp-in.” I haven’t ever noticed this, but I suspect some of my friends have.
“An issue when players tried to jump through a wormhole that was about to collapse has been fixed.” What was the specific issue? I’ve seen problems with it not properly calculating mass allowances with collapsing WHs, but not sure since they didn’t give us much info here.
“36 gravimetric sites have been renamed to be more RP-friendly. For example “Exploration – Large – Arkonor, Bistot” has become “Large Arkonor and Bistot Deposit”. Various NPC names have been renamed to be more RP-friendly. For example the “Pith_Defender_Battleship” was renamed to “Pith Defender”.” Any change whose purpose is “to be more RP-friendly” pleases me.
“Roden Shipyards Manufacting Centre had some typos corrected.” The irony, she chokes me.
Flat AND square
“The UI is now flatter and squarer.” Um?
“Dropping a bookmark voucher onto any bookmark in the people and places bookmark list adds it to the list properly. Trying to create a bookmark voucher in an invalid location (Trade window, Corp hangar) now gives a proper error message. The star of a system can now be added to the overview… Chat channel text is now properly refreshed when channel member list is hidden or displayed… Text in the LP store is no longer clipped.” These really annoyed me before. The list of UI fixes is truly epic, but these stood out based on my own experience.
“Fixed issues in 36 systems where the warp-in point for an asteroid belt was over 100km away from the asteroids.” This should make some pirates happy. Oh, and miners too…
Image credits limowreck666, sincretic, Luodanli, and EricGjerde
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