Introducing Carnyx the Magnificent

Answer: The New Eden Store, a Panther, and the EVE Online Launcher.

Envelope reveals: Name a shop, a blop, and a flop.

Come on old people, laugh at the ancient, late night TV reference!

Nothing?  May Mister Vee call you as primary just as you go for a bio break!

Anyway, today is the day for the Carnyx release, a carnyx being some sort of ancient Celtic wind instrument, leaving open the option to claim that this expansion blows I guess.

The big thing for me this time around will likely be the ongoing null sec sovereignty updates.

Five weeks back, with the Mosaic expansion, CCP put the Entosis Link module into the game, the key item in CCP’s planned “Summer of Sov” changes.  Now that we’ve all had time to make the modules, their first use is becoming available with Carnyx, the ability to assail station services.

• Station services for outposts and conquerable stations are now enabled/disabled using the Entosis Link module. They have become immune to regular damage.
• The structures have been moved away from the center of station to more appropriate locations on the station model. Each type of station/outpost has a different layout of service locations.
• Services will take 5 minutes of uncontested Entosis Link activation (after completing a warm-up cycle) to enable/disable. To provide a defensive bonus, the time take to disable a service is increased according to the solar system’s occupancy multiplier (more details in the dev blogs linked here)

That means no more sitting on stations expending ammunition, a current favorite pastime for both sides in the Querious war.

Shoot the big thing… no, you don’t get a kill  mail

Instead the attacking side will have to hold the station grid and keep the defenders from killing any ships running the Entosis Link module which, as was announced in a previous post, will be unable to cloak, warp, dock, jump, or receive remote assistance.  No reps, no running, no hiding, the Entosis Link ship has to survive on its own.  I will be interested to see what fits end up becoming common for link ships.

It also means that the activity defense multiplier will be in effect.

Activity Defense Multiplier

This gives a bonus to your defense, in the form of increasing the amount of time an attacking Entosis Link module must run in order to complete its conquest, based on how much mining and ratting has been done in the system as well as how old the currently active infrastructure hub is.  This should lead to some comedy in Querious, where nobody is ratting or mining and nobody has held any of their current systems long enough to have built up much age on their ihubs.

So I have that to look forward to.

Otherwise, the updates page has some additional goodies.

We get another new ship today, the Caldari tech III destroyer, the Jackdaw.

Enjoy me before I am nerfed

There is the next round of Pabst Blue Ribbon physically based rendering graphics updates and changes to lighting.  More screen shots required.

Also on the list:

• New overview icons, so everybody will be confused for a while
• The next round of module rebalancing, with shield extenders and armor plates getting a pass along with a rework of propulsion modules. (MWDs will now be 5/50/500NM and Afterburners will be 1/10/100MN, or something like that, to make them more distinguishable.)
• Sentry drone nerf, because the game is still Ishtars Online most nights.
• New ship SKINS for marauders, and SKINS for the Astero, Stratios, and Nestor coming soon.
• New Angel Cartel burner missions
• Updated graphics for the Caldari Naga battlecruiser.

Hail to the new Naga… pretty close to the old Naga to me…

And then there are the full patch notes, where CCP tends to bury a few interesting nuggets.  I like these line items:

• Drifter presence has reportedly been increased throughout Amarr space.

No doubt something will come of this.

• New systems are available that can be accessed via the Unidentified wormholes. (Unidentified wormholes can be found in systems that contain the Jove Observatory)

Makes me want to figure out scanning again.  I don’t think I have done that since the Apocrypha expansion was fresh and new.

• Ships in high-sec space piloted by a character with a Criminal Flag will now be unable to use in-space re-fitting facilities.

I have seen this mentioned a few times, and I am sure it is meaningful, but I haven’t seen the impact fully explained.  Some aspect of suicide ganking will no doubt have to change with this.

Then there was the announcement that players would no longer be allowed to start the game from the exefile.exe, but would have to use the still flawed and somewhat annoying launcher to access the game.

With Carnyx coming to Tranquility it will no longer be possible to launch EVE Online using the exefile.exe file from EVE/bin/ folder. If you are using this method due to the issue with your launcher where “PLAY” button remains gray after downloading an update, please pay close attention to the information provided in this article.

If you still have other issues launching the game, please contact our Customer Support team.

This caused much groaning in the bit of the community that actually pays attention to these announcements, as well as prompting my little attempt at a joke at the top of this post.

But that announcement was contradicted the same day by an announcement regarding the repair tool, which included this addendum:

Please note that contrary to the earlier news article, launching the EVE Online client using exefile.exe will continue to work after the deployment of the Carnyx release.

The original announcement was tossed down the memory hole, never to be seen on the official site again.  But the RSS archive remembers!

So that is what has gone live today.

Addendum: Also, a new model for the Caracal, which I know was talked about, but which didn’t quite make it to the patch notes.  Rixx Javix has a picture of it in his post about the new PBR rendering.

Meanwhile the next expansion, Aegis, which will deliver the balance of the null sec sovereignty updates, has been pushed back one week and is now slated to launch on July 14.  Happy Bastille Day I guess.  I do not know if that will push out all of the subsequent expansions by an additional week.  There was already a six week gap planned after Aegis (vacations, no doubt), so if nothing else changes the launch dates should look like this…

Edit: The Fozzie Sov stuff will be going live July 14, the Aegis expansion appears to still be on track for July 7 otherwise, so I misunderstood what was being said… again.  So the dates look like this for expansions still:

• July 7th
• August 25th
• September 29th
• November 3rd
• December 8th

No word on the whole “features between releases” idea that was floated with the Mosaic expansion.  I don’t think adding stuff to the New Eden Store counts.

And, finally, there is the Carnyx launch music, which is kind of moody and foreboding in its own electronica way.