On The Road Again in New Eden

The Chaos Era has been a bit of a bust for me.  I don’t rat or mine, so I am not on that declining indicator, but with a lot of people turtling up there are not as many defense fleets to go save people.  I am also not a solo PvPer, so I haven’t been out hunting.  I generally depend on SIG or squad deployments for my content and, aside from the short one up to Placid… which was low sec, so no Chaos Era benefits there… I haven’t had much to get me to log in.

There has been talk of a Reavers deployment, but things kept getting in the way, like a hurricane Dorian headed straight for Asher’s home.  That eventually passed and last week Asher got us grouped up.  It was going to be a very traditional Reavers deployment, with Ishtars and support and no station to dock up in.  I had a couple of Guardians left over from past operations already correctly fit, so I put one on my main, one on my alt, and waited for the ping announcing our departure.

I didn’t plan to dual box Guardians.  Keeping up with reps and the cap chain on two screens during a fight is too much for me.  Instead my alt was basically hauling out a reship.  If my main got his ship popped, he could just grab the extra from my alt, while if he got blown up and podded, he could just fly out in an interceptor and swap ships with my alt, who could then fly home.

Soon enough the ping came and we loaded up our ships with the intent to live out of them in hostile space and headed out.

A small fleet warps off

As is tradition, our destination was not announced in advance.  We just went to a series of waypoints along the route to our area of operation.  But Asher couldn’t hide which direction we were going.  We were headed east and were soon into Legacy Coalition space, where the jump gates seemed to be set to less us pass through.

Using the middle management dino gate

I was wondering whether this was a default setting, if Legacy was letting us use their gate network to let Imperium forces pass through their space in order to join in on fights in the east or if we were getting some special treatment.  The war between Legacy and Winter coalitions, which has been running off and on for ages now, continues to bubble down in the southeast of New Eden, with third parties like Pandemic Legion showing up to grab some content.  Certainly the Imperium had sent fleets east before during the war.

However, not all gates were green… or blue I guess… to us.  At an XIX gate we had to stop and hold, hanging in space while Asher found somebody to flip the switch for us.

Waiting for the gate to let us through

That he had to get on a channel somewhere to get us a pass seems to indicate that at least an “Imperium flies free” policy isn’t Legacy wide.  So we sat and waited, no doubt scaring a few of the locals who jumped through to find a fleet of not blue Ishtars and support hanging about.

We had our own fat targets, but no shots were taken

Asher found the right person and we were able to jump through and continue on our way, heading past Legacy space and into Winter Coalition’s domain.  No jump gate travel for us there.  But it was also well past prime time for the locals, and we were able to pass through their space using gates without much notice.

My Guardian aligning out from another gate

The blackout was in effect, so they would have needed to lay eyes on us or catch us on a dscan to know we were there.  Finally a bit of the Chaos Era working in my favor.

Another gate to pass through

Eventually we found a spot to safe up in Insmother, made our safe spots, got out our mobile depots, and fit cloaks in order to be able to cloak up and stay safe.

Living out of a mobile depot

Once there we had to find something to do.

Initially we found a couple of unfueled Fraternity towers, which we proceeded to shoot.  That is all part of the Reavers plan.  We set up in space the start shooting things until somebody shows up to chase us off.  If the hostiles for big, we just cloak up and disappear.  If they form a fleet about our size, then we take the fight if we can.  So we blew up the towers.

An old Minmatar tower blows up

All that yielded was a “But why?” from somebody in local… and I am not even sure they meant us.

The next time I was on we went looking to stir things up with one of the Winter Coalition members more in our time zone, the Lord of Worlds Alliance (LORDE).  Their alliance logo is an angry unicorn on a pink shield, which I guess gives them some synergy with GoonWaffe (GEWNS), whose logo is a unicorn in front of an outline of a heart.

The comparison

This similarity came up on coms and, while the GoonWaffe logo was no doubt chosen for irony, who actually chose it and why has been lost to the mists of time.

Anyway, we went out to entosis a couple of their infrastructure hubs to see if they would come out to play.

The ihub awaits

The word was that they were on during our time frame and would form up and fight if the numbers worked out.  After tinkering around a bit to get and entosis link on the right ship… it started on a Tengu and there was some awkward work with people swapping ships and using mobile depots in order to get it fitted on an Ishtar… we commenced to fly in circles around the ihub and run the magic entosis wand over it.  Exciting game play.

Entosis coming from the Ishtar in the middle

There was a bit of trouble with the Ishtar running out of capacitor, but one of the Guardians in the cap chain just diverted one of their cap transfer modules onto it and we were set.  And then around and around we went.

The locals did come out to play, but apparently couldn’t get enough people together for a stand up fight.  Instead they came out in bombers and interceptors to try and and interrupt the entosis ship.  That was mildly annoying, but not enough to get us to break orbit, and we ended up getting a couple of kills.  Ishtars racing in a circle with props on move pretty quickly so you have to anticipate where they’ll be before you bomb.  The locals were not quite that good.

Things were quiet enough that I put EVE Online on my second monitor and played WoW Classic for part of the op.  That is EVE Online some days, a game that lets you watch movies or play other games.

That ended up with a couple of ihubs reinforced, after which we went back to where we were living, where we safed up, put on our cloaks, and logged out again.  I didn’t do much with EVE Online over the weekend.  I missed any ops we might have run.  But today things changed.  As CCP announced on Saturday, the blackout is over.  We’re no longer invisible in space.  People can now see us in the local channel when we log in.  Our extra cloak is gone.  But we have always had to deal with that in the past.  And us being logged in and cloaked up can be a deterrent on its own.  And so it goes, living out in hostile space on another Reavers op.

WoWCraft and Classic Queues

Carbot Animation appears to be jumping on the WoW Classic train along with a lot of other people.  They revived their WoWCraft series of videos with the launch of WoW Classic and have another video up in the series about queues.

The joke isn’t about the queues to get into the game, but the queues that appeared in some parts of the game as players swarmed in and ended up at bottle necks for various objectives.  I was witness to some of those on the Alliance side of the game.

Everybody will get their turn

While I was not a witness, I did hear that on the Horde side of the game polite queuing was much less of a thing.

And, of course, there are still queues to get into the game.  However, Blizzard has opened up more free character transfer options for both US and EU servers which are expected to be available through the weekend.  If you want a free move, you should get on that quickly.

Null Sec Blackout to End on Monday

I woke up this morning to find some fresh news from the Chaos Era, though this time it seemed a bit counter-chaos.  CCP Cognac announced at the Berlin Fanfest that delayed local in null sec, the blackout, will be over after downtime on Monday.

CCP says Blackout

CCP had said previously that the blackout would be for an indefinite duration, but its introduction two months back came with quite a bit of warning, discussion, and even a setup via the in-game lore.  Has a new supply of Quantum-Entangled 4-Helium been secured?

We don’t know.  Not yet anyway.  CCP did not say why they are bringing the blackout to an end, just that it is happening.  The announcement could charitably be called perfunctory.  Clip of the announcement, and I have seen several, run about 30 seconds.

Of course, there is quite a bit of speculation as to why it is happening.  You need only go over to cesspool of /r/eve to see various theories.  But /r/eve has been at war with itself over the Chaos Era since it started. (At war with itself more so than usual at least, likely because the Chaos Era has been focused on nerfing null sec, which has led to the usual tribal division who see somebody else getting hit as good for them.)  A leading candidate is the dropping concurrent player numbers, something I mentioned on Monday.  The count fell off noticeably with the end of the Season of Skills event and has been slowly falling ever since.  I was concerned to log in on a week night to find the online count under 15K, but this week I was on when it was around 12K.  18K used to seem like the low bar for my usual evening play time on the west coast.

There is even a post up over at Massively OP trying to sum up the various evidence and theories which, including the comments, range from summer vacations to WoW Classic to the core player base getting old and dying off.  But back in the EVE Online player base people are still denying there has been any decline at all.  So your mileage may vary.

Anyway, we shall see if the removal of the blackout has an impact on those numbers.  I do expect that AFK cloaky campers will soon be back in null sec space to keep the ratters and miners on their toes.

I am sure there will be plenty of hot takes and summaries of the blackout.  I might have a few additional words myself.  But the end of the Chaos Era hasn’t been announced, so expect humans to continue to behave like humans when faced with uncertainty.

Others on this topic:

• Official Announcement from CCP
• The Nosy Gamer
• Somebody on Reddit notices the Blackout communication disparity
• And the lore post to support the resumption of normal local in null sec

The August MER and the Fall of NPC Bounties

We got the Monthly Economic Report for July somewhat late last month, but this month CCP has the MER for August out already, so it is time to take a look.  And the big chart for the month is the sinks and faucets.  That will be my main focus this time around.

August 2019 – Sinks and Faucets

There are a few items of significance on that chart.

Up front, for the first time in a long time, sinks out paced faucets in the game, with just shy of 64 trillion ISK coming into the game from faucets but almost 70 trillion ISK leaving the game via sinks.  That, plus the Active ISK delta, which includes ISK removed via GM actions, saw 49 trillion ISK leave the New Eden economy in August.

The big change continues to be falling totals from NPC bounties, which dropped to a recent low of 21.1 trillion ISK for August.   There has been a pretty consistent drop so far in 2019, with NPC bounties at about a quarter of where they stood in January.

• August – 21.1 trillion
• July – 29.1 trillion
• June – 48.2 trillion
• May – 55.5 trillion
• April – 57.2 trillion
• March – 71.4 trillion
• February – 69.8 trillion
• January – 83.8 trillion

And where were those bounties being harvested?  20% of it was in Delve, which is back at the top of the list for NPC bounties since the Imperium pulled back home back when the Drifters started hitting.

August 2019 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

Most every region was down, with some more than others.  The top ten regions for August were:

1. Delve – 4.39 trillion
2. Insmother – 1.30 trillion
3. Detorid – 1.23 trillion
4. Esoteria – 1.05 trillion
5. Querious – 753 billion
6. Cobalt Edge – 705 billion
7. Metropolis – 543 billion
8. Omist – 526 billion
9. Fountain – 515 billion
10. Malpais – 514 billion

Compare that with the list from July:

1. Delve – 4.71 trillion
2. Esoteria – 1.77 trillion
3. Branch – 1.61 trillion
4. Detorid – 1.23 trillion
5. Deklein – 1.22 trillion
6. Insmother – 1.10 trillion
7. Tenal – 1.1 trillion
8. Fountain – 1.06 trillion
9. Omist – 850 billion
10. Feythabolis – 810 billion

Delve remained on top, and five others remained on the list, four new regions made it into the top ten, including a high sec region, Metropolis.  Metropolis didn’t make the top ten due to a huge surge in bounties.  It rang in at 529 billion ISK in July, so was only up a bit.  It made the cut because just about every other region fell.  Of last month’s top ten, only Detroid stayed about the same.

That meant the percentage of bounties claimed in high sec went up as the bounty totals went down.

August 2019 – NPC Bounty Percentage by Sec Status

Zero, high, and low sect were 81.7%, 15.9%, and 2.4% respectively.  The balance in July was 88.7%, 9.9%, and 1.5%, while in June it was 93.6%, 5.6%, and 0.8%.  Given that the August NPC bounty total was less than half of June’s, this appears to be much more a matter of null sec totals being reduced rather than any large increase in the other areas of space.

Continuing on with NPC bounties, they also used to be the biggest number on that sinks and faucets chart, often obnoxiously so.  With the coming of the August MER, two other numbers have passed bounties.

The first item is NPC Commodities, items that drop from sleepers or combat sites or Abyssal Deadspace that can be cashed in via NPC buy orders in select stations.  I honestly don’t know a lot about this, save for the Triglavian Survey Database that drop from Abyssal Deadspace.  And, honestly, CCP isn’t much help on this front.  Look at this chart.

August 2019 – Commodities Breakdown

According to that 14% of the commodity income is from Overseer’s Personal Effects, 25.7% is from “Other,” none is from Sleeper Components, so I guess wormhole space makes no money anymore,  and 60.3%, or roughly 14 trillion ISK of the total, isn’t accounted for at all.  I suspect this is a matter of CCP Quant having created these reports and, when he left, people assumed they would just need to run his script and everything would be fine and nothing would ever change and it isn’t anybody’s job to fix this so the reports will just get comically out of whack over time.

Such is the way of things.  If nobody owns it, nobody is going to fix it.

These commodities, whatever they were, brought in 23.8 trillion ISK to the New Eden economy, putting them ahead of the 21.1 trillion ISK brought in by NPC bounties.

But this wasn’t any rush away from null sec or NPC bounties.  Commodities have been stable, or even down a little bit (the number was almost 26 trillion back in January), for most of the year.  NPC bounties have just fallen below where commodities have lingered.

The other item on the sinks and faucets chart that now exceeds NPC bounties is actually a sink.

In late July CCP announced an increase in transaction taxes and brokerage fees, which came into effect at the start of August.  This saw transaction taxes collected jump from 11.6 trillion ISK in July to 22.1 trillion ISK in August, putting the number ahead of NPC bounties.

So basically two things changed on that initial chart, transaction taxes went up and NPC bounties continued to go down.  This is visualized on the sinks and faucets over time graph.

August 2019 – Top Sinks and Faucets over time

NPC bounties, after a steep drop, seem to have leveled off, while transaction taxes saw a sharp spike… downward, because faucets go up and sinks go down on this chart.

Alright.  Off the sinks and faucets chart, I thought I would take a side trip into another old favorite, which is mining value per region.  Again, Delve is at the top of the chart still.

August 2019 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

The top ten regions on that chart, and the value mined, are:

1. Delve – 3.62 trillion
2. Domain – 1.59 trillion
3. Esoteria – 1.46 trillion
4. The Forge – 1.40 trillion
5. Querious – 1.10 trillion
6. Sinq Laison – 1.02 trillion
7. Lonetrek – 972 billion
8. Metropolis – 895 billion
9. Everyshore – 777 billion
10. Tash-Murkon – 773 billion

For null sec, that is basically the Imperium in Delve and Querious and TEST in Esotaria.  The other seven are high sec.  I had to go look up Everyshore region, because I could not recall it ever being mentioned anywhere.  But DOTLAN says it is a thing, a part of Gallente empire space.

That put null sec way down compare to the number from July:

1. Delve – 5.77 trillion
2. Querious – 3.18 trillion
3. Esoteria – 2.61 trillion
4. Syndicate – 1.99 trillion
5. Fountain – 1.92 trillion
6. Etherium Reach – 1.77 trillion
7. Domain – 1.69 trillion
8. Malpais – 1.64 trillion
9. The Kalevala Expanse – 1.61 trillion
10. The Forge – 1.47 trillion

The rumor was that mining botters simply moved en masse to high sec to with the coming of the blackout.  I can’t say that this proves it, but it certainly seems to support the suggestion.  I guess those roving Triglavian scouts need to start working harder.

And that drop in output, it wasn’t related to a price drop in minerals.  According to the economic indices, mineral prices remained flat, so those numbers are a reasonable month over month comparison.

August 2019 – Economic Indices

I might have skipped past mining this month, what with the NPC bounty thing, but I figure those numbers might be relevant next month.  As you may know, earlier this week the September update introduced the big cyno change, the latest in the Chaos Era campaign.

I suspect that next month, when we get the September MER, we will see NPC bounties dropping even more as the big coalitions that have depended on super capital umbrellas to stay safe have asked their super and titan ratters to stay docked while new defense strategies are worked out.

Likewise, Rorquals are probably staying safe for now, though I know in the Imperium they are free to get back to work, but only if they stay in certain systems, get in the standing fleet, have a specific fit, and have an alt in a force recon with a cyno cloaked up and ready to bring in the cavalry should somebody drop on you.  The upside is that if you follow the new rules, you get SRP if your Rorqual dies.  Or Goons get SRP.  In TNT we just get yelled at.  But I don’t own a super or a Rorqual, so I only know what gets pinged out over Jabber.

So look in next month for another drop.

Meanwhile, you can go grab the full August MER, which is chock full of additional charts and data and what not, if you want to peruse that at your leisure.

Others looking at the MER:

• Noisy Gamer – Hurricane Hilmar
• Evehermit – Bounties

The Thirteenth Floor

Another year has come and gone and here we are at thirteen.

This car does not stop at that floor

Thirteen is an unlucky number to some, but it has always been a bit of a talisman in our family, something of an attraction rather than an aversion.  I went skydiving with a friend on Friday the 13th, picking that day specifically for the unlucky connotation.  In the end though, it is just a number, something that passes by fleetingly, unless you’re 13 years old.  I’ve never been more miserable in my life than when I was 13, an age that seemed to last forever.

Now my blog is thirteen.  I hope it isn’t as bad off as I was at that age.

For those new to the site… how did you end up here… this is an annual tradition.  If you’re a glutton for punishment, there are twelve past entries to review.

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch
• Eight Years of Link Rot
• Nine is a Magic Number
• A Decade Under the Influence of Online Games
• Elf
• The Dozens

I used to do cute themes for this post.  Years five and six are probably the best efforts for that, while I think eight is where I get the most philosophical.  That is where I said I would stop blogging at the ten year mark.  But here I am.  There are days when I am just so very tired that I can barely crank out the 2,000 words that make up the core of the post like this.  Cute pictures and the philosophy of the internet just aren’t in me anymore.

But on we go, as we do every year, for a look behind the curtain at the numbers and such that inform about this blog.

Base Statistics

The same thing every year, looking at how the various needled moved over the last dozen months.

Days since launch: 4,748 (+365)
Posts total: 5,215 (+420)
Total Words: 3,967,279 (not including this post)
Average words per post: 761.18
Post Likes: 9,521
Average posts per day: 1.098 (+0.05)
Comments: 32,451 (+1,670)
Average comments per post: 6.22 (-0.20)
Average comments per day: 6.83 (-0.18)
Spam comments: 1,482,548 (+32,607)
Comments Rescued from the Spam Filter: 438 (+4)
Average spam comments per day: 312.24 (-18.7)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 45.6 (-1)
Comments written by me: 6,430 or 19.8%
Images uploaded: 14,575 (+1,432)
Space used by images: 603.7MB 1.2 GB of my 3 GB allocation (33%, up 100%)
Blog Followers: 1,701 (+209)
Twitter Followers: 743 (+14)
Tumblr Followers: 33 (+7)
US Presidents since launch: 3
British Monarchs since launch: 1
Prime Ministers of Italy since launch: 7

Much more after the cut, if you feel like looking at a lot of charts, lists, and numbers.  Actual page view numbers are available.

Everybody Comes to Westfall

We are now past the two week mark for WoW Classic and I feel like I haven’t gotten very far along.  People are moving along, I see people past level 30 in Stormwind regularly and “that guy on the horse” has become a regular feature. (Was it Ethic who named that concept, the person on their mount in town sitting there to show it off?)  Beside that I feel like I am poking along so slowly.

This is somewhat self-imposed as the instance group hasn’t been ready to ride yet, with moves, business trips, and end of summer vacations keeping people away.

And moving slowly isn’t all that bad.  I am not in any crazy race, nor was I ever likely to be in contention for any “world first” in the game.  There is lots to explore and see and do while keeping characters down in the level range for the first dungeon, Ragefire Chasm.

Plus, there are always alts.  I’m prone to making too many alts to start with, so keeping in the right level range has gotten me to four characters now in the level 14-16 range.  I have all four alliance races covered as well, as I now have:

• Level 14 gnome warrior
• Level 14 human paladin
• Level 16 night elf druid
• Level 16 dwarf hunter

That warrior might be my first gnome character in WoW.

So I have not been idle.  And they have all stepped into the zone where we’ll be headed, the zone where most people end up in at some point or another; Westfall.

Westfall – This Way

Westfall is one of the quintessential zones of Azeroth.  For the Alliance it is where a lot of players converge as the quest lines there lead to the Deadmines instance.  If you want to have Gryan Stoutmantle shout your name out to the zone you have to get on board the quest train.

He’s just hanging out waiting for you to show up

And, of course, Horde players have to find their way there as well if they want to do the instance.

While some of the starter zones have calmed down quite a bit… they are not dead, but I got my gnome warrior through the Coldridge Valley part of the dwarf/gnome starter zone in about 20 minutes because there were no more lines… Westfall feels like it is still full tilt crowded a lot of the time and very much alive with players.  And NPCs of memory.  Running into the zone you are greeted with the first quests right away from familiar faces.

Welcome to Westfall! How about a few quests?

Those are the Furlbrows, with Old Blanchy, who features in a couple other places in the game, including an appearance in the Old Hillsbrad dungeon in the Caverns of Time.  It was a bit of a shock when Blizz killed the lot of them for Cataclysm.

But there is no time to hang about there.  There are so many semi-overlapping quests in the zone that you might as well get them all.  One of the quests sends you to the next location anyway, Saldean’s Farm, where you pick up a few more. (And maybe stand around clucking in hopes of getting a chicken pet.)  Then it is off to Sentinal Hill to turn in the quest from Goldshire sending you to check in with Gryan Stoutmantle, who also has a quest for you, as does a couple of other NPCs.  Don’t miss the one down the hill by the inn… and don’t forget to grab the flight point.  Running is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you just want to get places.

The list of quests alone brings up a small wave of nostalgia.

Some of the early Westfall quests

Here the game starts to stress your inventory management.  Half of those quests need you to collect things.  You need four stacks of ingredients for Westfall Stew, another stack for Goretusk Liver Pie, gnoll paws for another, Defias bandanas for yet another, bags of oats for Old Blanchy, and a pocket watch for Ted Furlbrow.  It isn’t quite Green Hills of Stranglethorn level of inventory management, but when you are likely rocking six slot bags, things start to fill up fast.   And that doesn’t even start to count the random drops you’ll get.

Then you have to find the mobs for the drops.  That isn’t too hard.  They are often in handy camps.  The problem is that the camps are often well camped by players.  But the pick up group cooperation spirit of WoW Classic, or at least the Bloodsail Buccaneer server, continues on.  With a couple of characters I was able to find groups to hunt with.

Slaughtering the Defias at one of their camps

Grouping up is a great way to knock out the quests where you have to kill 15 of this or 20 of that, since everybody in the group gets credit.  And a group can hold and wipe out a camp that might be a bit much to take on solo.  Mobs, especially the gnolls, spawn close together so you often cannot pull just one.  With a group you can do the whole village.

Waiting for gnolls to pop again

The problem is the quests that require drops dole them out one at a time.  A good group will swap to free-for-all looting and people will stick around until everybody is covered.  Or mostly covered.  Sometimes somebody leaves and another joins and they’re just starting and there is a cycle through the group that could last all night if you stuck around.

And some of the drop rates kind of suck.

Welcome to the gnoll hunt

I get that maybe every Defias isn’t following dress code or maybe left their bandana on the dresser at home in the rush to get out to Westfall, but Gnolls would seem to have four paws, and boars at least one liver per.  Yet we ran across many a pawless gnoll or heavy drinking goretusk whose liver had decayed to the point of being useless for cooking.

I remember a late 2004 Lore Sjöberg article over at Wired from back in the day that spoke of the “kinder, gentler” ways of World of Warcraft (which is a bit of a time capsule point of view you can find here), that included a reference to how, if you slew a named mob for a quest that required you bring back their head, the corpse would nicely provide a head for everybody in the party.

And that is the case certainly, for a specific named quest mob.  But for a run of the mill Defias or gnoll, it is a maximum of one per corpse, not guaranteed.

Not that it is a huge burden.  I have always toyed with the idea in the back of my mind that this was on purpose back in the day, that in order to off-set the reduced experience you get for grouping Blizz makes you slay more mobs.  And, in the end, when you need eight or fifteen drops and you have none it feels like it will take forever, but it never takes too long until you’ve just got one left.

Anyway, I am through that first wave of quests in Westfall on a couple of characters, and into it with the others.  The hope is that we’ll be able to get a group together to try Ragefire Chasm this weekend.  That it is located in the back end of Orgrimmar will make this comedy gold I am sure.  But if we need to stall some more I am going to have to start another alt, and I am well down the list of options.  I only have rogues and cloth wearing casters left.  Or I could go Horde I suppose.  We’ll see.

Addendum: I noticed that I used the title of this post before.  I cannot resist an obscure allusion I guess.

The September Update Brings Cyno Changes and New Player Improvements to EVE Online

The Chaos Era continues in New Eden as CCP proceeds with the dual goals of making the game more difficult for veteran players while simultaneously attempting improve new player retention.

In my book the big item hitting the game for September is the cyno changes, which I mentioned previously.  This has been summed up in the patch notes in a single sentence:

Cynosural Field Generator I now only able to be fit to Force Recon Ships and Black Ops Battleships.

Yesterday most of the 345 ships currently flyable in New Ede could have lit a cyno, the requirement having been just a high slot.  Today it is down to nine.  If you’re like me, you’re now stuck moving your capital ships around in fleet ops unless you are willing to blow a 300 million ISK force recon hull for every jump, or a billion ISK black ops hull.  My solo trips in a cap are done, don’t undock what you cannot afford to lose being the iron law of New Eden and all.

No more of this frigate cyno stuff

The one set of hulls excused has been Jump Freighters.  Initially CCP was simply going to allow them to use covert cynos, which had its own mix of good and bad. (Which needed Cyno V on your cyno alt as well as the ability to fly a covert ops ship, but exposure would be reduced.)  That plan was changed (hopefully before people skill injected their cyno alts to Cyno V) and now there is a new cyno module just for jump freighters.  Per the patch notes:

• Added Industrial Cynosural Field Generator.
  • Can be fit by Industrials, Deep Space Transports and Blockade Runners.
  • Industrial Cynosural Fields can be jumped to by Jump Freighters and Black Ops Battleships.
  • Requires Cynosural Field Theory I to activate.

Industrials will be the new cyno ship for jump freighters.  This will also keep cyno vigils a thing, though now vigils will be held in haulers, which seemed to be a major factor here.  More room to hold fuel I guess.  The odd bit is the addition of Black Ops ships to those being able to jump to the new cyno.  I did not see a reason listed for that.

And so the chaos continues.

On the new player side of things, the big feature for September looks to be warning messages when players are fitting ships sub-optimally.  There will now be four levels of warnings in the fittings window if you commit any of these fitting sins.   The warnings are broken out into the following groups:

Crucial/Red if:

• The ship’s CPU is overloaded
• The ship’s Powergrid overloaded
• The ship’s Cargo is overloaded
• The ship is a Strategic Cruiser and is missing a subsystem

Warning/Yellow if:

• The ship has Invalid modules fitted (for example after a ship has been rebalanced or when swapping subsystems on a Strategic Cruiser)
• Some fitted Modules are not providing bonus (for example if you have a Magnetic Field Stabilizer fit but all your guns are projectiles turrets)
• Mixing turret groups
• Mixing turret sizes
• Mixing launcher groups
• Both Shield and Armor modules fitted
• Offline modules

Info/White if:

• Armor tanking a ship categorized as shield ship
• Shield tanking a ship categorized as armor ship
• Polarized weapons fitted

Skill warning if:

• Skills for the ship or fitted modules are missing
• Skills for items in the ships cargohold are missing

Hovering over the warnings will describe which tenant of ship fitting you have broken and highlight the offending modules.

Dual tanked Raven as an example

With this in place can we then assume all bad fits are on purpose?

Other items of note on the list of changes include the long promised warp timer.  Previously tossed due to technical reasons, you can now only be kept from warping by bumping for three minutes:

Ships that bump while attempting to enter warp will now automatically enter warp if they remain in the pre-warp state for three minutes continuously. Scramblers or any other form of canceling the warp will reset this timer.

The out is that if the people bumping you are willing to sacrifice a rookie ship and a warp scram to CONCORD every two and a half minutes or so, they can still keep you stuck indefinitely.  But if you’ve set yourself to warp in a belt and walked away, you’ll only bump off that asteroid in your way for three minutes… so long as belt rats don’t get you before then.

On the graphics side of things, there has been an update to graphics and shaders related to stars and wormholes.  There was a dev blog about this, but I guess it can be quickly summed up in a graphic from that.

The before and after look

Wormhole graphics will also indicate the age and capacity of the wormhole, so capital capable wormholes will be visually distinctive from frigate sized holes.

There are, as always, lots of other small fixes and tweaks in the update.  You can find details in the patch notes and on the updates page.  Word is that the update has been deployed successfully.