New Jump Effect
Very gorgeous and I approve of the War on Loading Screens. Very much so. Anything to drive a more immersive experience is good in my opinion. My only concern is how well it performs under stress (i.e. trying to jump when a big fight is on the gate and if it slows down jump duration any.
New Directional Scanner "Discovery Scanner"
Finally! The outdated and archaic Directional Scanner UI is a particular bugbear of mine which I have argued needs only a little love to make it significantly better. However, I have some questions and concerns. Number one is if we will still be provided a list of hits for 260 degrees because my viewport is at least less than 180 degrees (and more like 90 degrees). If I have to rotate 360 to see all hits at a glance I will be annoyed beyond belief. Also, will it still have range and angel control for fine tuned scanning?
Probe Formations
If this is all they are doing to probing directly, I approve. Assuming the formations are any good. Super bonus if they let us create our own formations and save them, and even more points if they can be exported and imported.
Ice Mining
Not sure why they are moving all ice belts to anomalies... other than it gives them more ability to reduce the amount of ice available overall but controlling the amount of ice in the spawn and how often it respawns once depleted. This change it going to piss off a lot of casual ice miners, especially when coupled with the shortened cycle timers, an obvious attempt to make ice miners look more active for bot detection I wager.
Resource Rebalance
- Moon Goo: At first I questioned the point of the two new materials but I reread the blogs and I get it now. Before the Ferrofluid and NeoMercurite were used across all four empires, but now they are just for Caldari and Minmatar tech II items respectively while the two new materials are for the Amarr and Gallente. So far this change makes sense to me but I leave it to the moon goo number crunchers to really dig into it (paging Ripard Teg!).
- Asteroids: So a lot (I mean a lot!) more low end minerals in null sec and low sec ores. This is supposed to allow null sec manufacturing to thrive because they won't have to import low end ores but in reality this ends up as a nerf to high sec mining as null sec ores now get the high end ores get the same high end minerals and the low end minerals. Hmmmm. I do like that the reward for min-range ores have been brought back in line though.
The removal of grav sites from normal probing to just being picked up by the "discovery scanner" is interesting, but not sure if it will have any impact.
- Outposts: Wow! Outposts got huge upgrades. More manufacturing and research slots, offices, and bigger upgrades.
Overall: This constitutes a massive massive buff to null sec and significant nerf to high sec. Expect to see a lot more production done in null sec and the price of tritanium and pyerite to drop. The ice mining changes will also be a buff to null sec as high sec will be less able to meet the demands of hungry towers and capitals and I expect these prices to rise accordingly as well.
CSM Election Results
I'm very happy that four of my six endorsements made it on the CSM and extremely pleased that Mike Azariah was one of them. Except for the glaring hole of low sec/ faction war representatives it seems like a good spread of candidates, although I think this is the first time there is no null sec Russian rep if I'm not mistaken.
EDIT: It was pointed out to me that Korvin is a Russian candidate so hopefully he provides the Russian community with the communication channel to the CSM they deserve.
I'm sad that election turnout is down. I think its a combination of no pressing outrages and a disappointing CCP effort to make the CSM election important (to be fair, after I posted that CCP did make a good dev blog post with developer testimonials and I saw Devs in local promoting the election in trade hubs) along with a frustrating voting experience that forced turnout down. Part of me wonders if fanfest preparation takes too much of CCP's attention from running a good election. We'll see next year I guess.
New Trailer "Origins"
Its very slick, but obviously marketing material and not reflective of actual gameplay footage for a large degree. I would love for some of those damage effects in game.
The visual of that planetary defence beam poking a hole right through the super made me grin wildly.
ReplyDeleteDitto on the model deformation - ships should show the effect of structural damage (beyond smoke trails).
I don't think the ice changes are designed to detect miners. I think that the AFK play irritated the devs.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't underestimate the impact of the change to making the grav sites no longer needing to be probed down. That is going to make mining in low and null sec a lot more dangerous for organized groups. On the bright side, a soloist like me won't be worth hot-dropping in low :)
I have to admit, the better ores in Lowsec are all a part of the 'carrot' to draw more players out of Hisec... I am pretty sure that making them easier to find just might counterbalance the higher ISK per hour due to the higher risk of ganks per hour... I do not see any mass movement out of Hisec. Too many solo players simply don't want to take the risks inherent in Lowsec play and CCP stated that approx half the players play some form of solo game.
ReplyDeleteYou don't make money catering to less than half your customers... or pissing off more than half. But, we'll see... we'll see...
I don't think the discovery scanner is what you think it is. I haven't seen any details anywhere, but it looked to me like the system scanner (not the directional scanner) which showed deadspace anomalies.
ReplyDelete