EVE Online gets Low Sec Love and the Frigate Escape Bay

A week back CCP announced that today they would unleash a load of changes and updates to help out arguably the most neglected region of New Eden, low security space.

Feeling the low sec love

The premier event of this update is likely the Champions of Low Sec contest that CCP announced this past Friday.

Who will be the banner bearer

The event runs for five days, starting as of downtime today and running until downtime on the 31st.  The rules are:

• The winner will be the alliance or independent corporation that accrues the highest ISK value of ship & pod kills during that period. Structure kills will not be counted.
• The alliance or independent corporation of whoever receives the final blow on the killmail will be credited with the full value of the kill.
• The ISK value credited will be equivalent to value of the hull and items destroyed on the killmail. Dropped items won’t be counted.
• Only kills made in low security space (0.1 to 0.4 systems) will count.
• Only kills of other players will count. NPC, CCP, ISD or GM kills will not be counted.
• All kills which adhere to these guidelines will count, regardless of the circumstances surrounding them.

The winning corporation or alliance will be declared the Champions of Lows Sec and   There will be medals and a tribute video to play on the in-game billboards and the alliance’s logo flag will be displayed at CCP’s new HQ. (CCP will help a winning group without a logo create one.)

So that is off and running.  I know nobody will try to cheese through to win.  That would never happen in New Eden.

In order to help that along and make things go in low sec, warp speed for all ships in Low Security system by 2AU/s through April 6th.  So your travel ‘ceptors will really zip through low.  Also, the Loot drop chance has been increased to 90% in Low Security space until April 6th as well, so wrecks will be a bounty.

More substantial are the changes to the long neglected Faction Warfare aspect of the game.  These include:

• Faction Warfare complex Acceleration Gate will give a Suspect Flag if activated by non-Faction Warfare Capsuleer.
  • In such cases, the Safety setting must be to Partial or No Safety (orange or red) to activate the gate. When safety is Full (green) the gate cannot be activated.
  • FW participants will be able to activate the acceleration gates without penalty.
• Faction Warfare Acceleration Gates have an increased activation range allowing for activation at 90km radius
• Adding a new 5th tier of Faction Warfare sites, and renaming the ‘Large’ tier:
  • Large Compounds are now (Faction) Open Compounds
  • Large Strongholds are now (Faction) Open Strongholds
  • Added a new tier of sites. These sites have gate restrictions that allow only Battleship sized and smaller ships
  • The new Battleship Complexes are named (Faction) Large Outpost
  • The progression in tiers is now:
    • Novice (unchanged)
    • Small (unchanged)
    • Medium (unchanged)
    • Large (new Battleship tier)
    • Open (formerly “Large”)
• Loyalty Point payouts for Faction Warfare PVP kills have been given a fixed increase, and no longer linked to the warzone tier multiplier. The LP payout rate is now fixed at approximately the same level as it previously was when the attacker held tier 5 warzone control.
• Loyalty Point payouts for Faction Warfare missions have been reduced by approximately 30%

I am sure all of this means something… good or ill… but I haven’t touched Faction Warfare since it launched, so couldn’t tell you what.

Closer to home… for me at least… CCP is also launching the frigate escape bay feature.  This allows you to put a frigate of any time in a bay in your battleship, so if your battleship explodes, you will be ejected in the frigate rather than your pod.

I tinkered with this a bit on Singularity, the test server, and you do indeed get a bay with the capacity of one unit of frigate.  Size of frigate does not matter.

One frigate will fit nicely

Some experimentation showed that if you simply eject from your battleship you will end up in your frigate.  You do not even need to get all blown up.

Leaving the battleship behind

However, I couldn’t recommend that as once it is ejected you cannot stuff the frigate back in the battleship.  I wonder if we can get a “scoop frigate to frigate bay” option?  I am sure that would never be abused.

I am interested to see how doctrines out in null sec will evolve around this feature.

Also on the list were a couple of war dec changes:

• If a war ends because the attacking Corporation/Alliance fails to pay their War Declaration bill, a forced peace treaty for 14 days is triggered. This will prevent the attackers from re-declaring another war against the same target.
• Hull Reinforcement Duration for War Headquarters structures reduced to 24 hours (down from 4.5 days). This is intended to give defenders a realistic chance of taking down the HQ within 7 days.

Those seem non-controversial.

Anyway, the word is that the update has been deployed.  The March patch notes have been updated to include the new changes.  The servers are up and it is time to start blowing people up.