BlizzCon Cancelled for 2020

Blizzard has put out an update to say that there will not be a BlizzCon down in Anaheim this year.  Not an unexpected turn of events given the state of the pandemic, the uncertainty surrounding when things like this will be safe again, and the past statement from Blizz.

BlizzCon in Blue

The statement was short enough to quote here:

Hello Blizzard community,

Several weeks ago, I shared an update about our uncertainty around holding BlizzCon this year. Since then, a lot has changed . . . and a lot also hasn’t changed. During this time, we’ve had many discussions about what holding a convention could look like in light of all the health and safety considerations we’d want to make. We’ve also talked about different paths we could take, and how each one could be complicated by fluctuations in national and local health guidelines in the months ahead. Ultimately, after considering our options, we’ve come to the very difficult decision to not have BlizzCon this year.

We’re feeling deeply disappointed about this decision, and imagine many of you will feel the same. I truly love BlizzCon, and I know that’s a sentiment shared by everyone at Blizzard. We will sorely miss connecting with so many of you at the convention and “recharging our geek batteries” this fall.

But we will meet again!

We’re talking about how we might be able to channel the BlizzCon spirit and connect with you in some way online, far less impacted by the state of health and safety protocols for mass in-person gatherings. We’d want to do this as soon as we could, but given that this is new-ish territory and the different factors involved, it will most likely be sometime early next year. BlizzCon is also a stage for big esports events in Blizzard games each year, so we’re also looking into alternatives for supporting some of the high-level competition that would normally take place at the show.

We’ll tell you more about our plans as they develop—but in the meantime, we hope to see you exploring the Shadowlands, hanging out in the Tavern, pushing the payload (do it!), and wherever else in the Blizzard universes you may roam.

Stay safe and stay well,

Saralyn Smith
Whirlwind Barbarian, Executive Producer of BlizzCon

This does hold out the possibility of some sort of virtual or online event… no doubt Blizzard will have some announcements coming that they will want to highlight… but the press of the big crowd in the Anaheim Convention Center and all that goes with it won’t be happening in 2020.

As for the “early next year” suggestion, I suspect that won’t come to pass unless things take a significant turn for the better and stay that way through the end of the year.

The Forsaken Fortress Update comes to EVE Online

CCP announced the Forsaken Fortress update a almost a month ago, which is a long lead time for them these days.  We got that and some more today.

Forsaken Fortress Day

The plan here was, once more, to reduce structure spam in New Eden by making unattended Upwell structures easier to blow up.  This adds on to the Kicking over Castles changes that we got back in December. (Along with the odious HyperNet Relay spam and scam platform.)

The idea is that if an Upwell structure has not consumed any fuel for seven days, it will enter a new “abandoned” state.  Once a structure enters this new state, the following will be true:

• It will skip the Hull Reinforcement phase. This means it has no reinforcement cycles at all, and can be destroyed in a single attack session. (Damage caps will continue to apply as normal. Normal war-dec/CONCORD rules continue to apply)
• It does not have any tethering capability at all.
• If it explodes, an abandoned structure will not push any items into asset safety whatsoever. All assets located the structure are eligible to drop as loot. (This will be the same behaviour as a current wormhole structure)
  • Note that as long as the structure is still in space, you can still manually push your assets into asset safety as normal.
  • When a structure is close to becoming abandoned, all characters/corporations with assets in the structure will receive a notification that their assets are potentially at risk.
  • Unanchoring an abandoned structure will push all assets into asset safety as normal. The loot drop only applies to exploding abandoned structures.

This also applies to normal and flex structures, each of which apparently now requires a flow chart to figure out what happens under which set of circumstances.

Life cycle of the standard Upwell structure – Click to view full size

Life cycle of an Upwell Flex structure – Click to view full size

The following changes have also been made around this update.

• The five faction citadels introduced as replacements for Outposts and Conquerable Stations (Moreau, Draccous, Horizon, Marginis, and Prometheus fortizars) are exempt from the asset safety penalty, because they have a special bonus meaning that they will never transition to Abandoned. These citadels can remain in a Low Power state indefinitely.
• The Structure Browser window lists a corporation’s own structures. This will now include an indication of which structures are Low Power and which are Abandoned.
• The Asset Browser window will highlight any structures containing your personal assets which are currently Low Power or Abandoned. You are advised to consider pushing your assets in Abandoned structures into asset safety, as otherwise they are at risk of sudden loss.
• When a structure is forced into Low Power mode as a result of entering a Hull Repair/Reinforcement cycle, it will now internally remember which service modules were online at the time. If it survives and returns to full health, it will automatically make an attempt to re-online those service modules (provided that it has sufficient fuel to cover the onlining cost).
• All these changes apply equally to FLEX structures as well as regular structures. So for example, Jump Bridges and Cyno Jammer/Beacon structures will automatically re-online their service modules, and thus re-enable their specific functionalities, after surviving an attack.
• Structures that are Low Power on patch day will begin their 7-8 day countdown as soon as the server is restarted.

 

It is hard to decide which is the biggest change for this new structure state.  The lack of timers makes them quick to kill, the lack of tethering makes them more difficult to defend, and the lack of automatic asset safety makes them irresistible loot pinatas.

I suspect that we will see a surge in kills as people hunt down structures in the new abandoned state in a week.

You will still need a war dec to shoot a structure in high security space, but that seems like a low bar.

In addition to that, we also got an armor hardener tiericide to try and make armor hardener names and stats fit into a regular pattern.  The list of modules that were touched is long, so you’ll have to browse the patch notes for that.

In addition, there were also revisions to the armor repair unit, shield hardener, and shield booster tiericide passes to tweak the values across the various module flavors.  Again, longs lists in the patch notes, but I will note this item, since it will probably confuse people for a while:

• All Adaptive Invulnerability Shield Hardeners have been renamed to Multispectrum Shield Hardeners

They have also done away with “anti” in the names.

The armor and shield rigs that provide damage bonuses were renamed in order to make it clear exactly what they do.  Their names were also changes to remove the “anti” prefix, so they all look more affirmative and, since there are only eight, I’ll copy and paste that list:

• Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer → EM Shield Reinforcer
• Anti-Explosive Screen Reinforcer → Explosive Shield Reinforcer
• Anti-Kinetic Screen Reinforcer → Kinetic Shield Reinforcer
• Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer → Thermal Shield Reinforcer
• Anti-EM Pump → EM Armor Reinforcer
• Anti-Explosive Pump → Explosive Armor Reinforcer
• Anti-Kinetic Pump → Kinetic Armor Reinforcer
• Anti-Thermal Pump → Thermal Armor Reinforcer

And then there was this one-liner in the mix:

Removed mining asteroids from non-mining, Null Sec Combat Anomalies.

I guess CCP is serious about closing the door on minerals.  I don’t know how big of an impact that will make, but every little bit hurts.  I’ll get to the April MER later this week.

And, finally, there is the final chapter of the Triglavian saga, which doesn’t get very much mention in the patch notes either, relative to how much CCP has been hyping it up:

The next chapter of the Triglavian Invasion will unfold over the coming months.

Seriously, if you glance at how CCP is pitching this update, you’d think Triglavians were all there were.  The patch notes are officially named after this.

The official logo celebrating the single sentence above

There is a news post announcing it, but details are sparse there as well.  So look for that I guess.

There were the usual series of smaller fixes and tweaks.  You can see them all in the patch notes.  Would it kill CCP to pick a naming scheme for patch notes and stick with it?  The “month year” pattern seemed about right, since they update the patch notes during the month some times.  But now the pattern is “day month” when that title will become inaccurate with the first revision.  Oh well.  It is probably better than the “name every patch” idea that ran for a while.

The updates page is still there, but isn’t all that useful.  It is only sporadically tended these days.

If you want to see what people are complaining about there is the feedback thread in the forums, as well as the known issues thread to see why they might be pushing an update.