Ah, politics. It's why we play Eve and as I shuffle up the management tree in my corp I seem to get more and more of it. In a good way of course. Well the POS division complaining about carrier nerfs is a little stressful, but a Jump Freighter or two will keep them happy.
Lots is happening in Eve Land, and some of it even involved me undocking! I'll not bore everybody with my almost stunning exploration find (real invention gear in lowsec, they say that never happens on the forums...) so I'll restrict myself to things that I am allowed to talk about (loose lips skinks ships and all that)
The biggest thing to hit Eve this year is going to be Trinity, which CCP have released some details and videos for. Lots of pretty pictures and things to get everybody excited, but no release date yet. My money is on the 4th or, more likely the 11th of December. Any later and it'll clash with Christmas and if any of you are old enough to remember why patch day is a Tuesday and not, say, straight before the weekend will know why CCP aren't going to want that. I still have nightmares about some of those post patch weekends...
The really important feature of this patch isn't the fancy graphics, the most important functional change will be for the old graphics as well. The graphics engine is going to not wait for all art assets to load before it starts rendering. What this means in practice is that when you jump into a system and there's lots of hostiles sitting there you'll not have a few seconds pause as all those graphics are pulled from disk. This should make PvP a lot nicer, and it'll even help mission runners out a bit as well.
And then they're making it so that Carriers can't hold ships that have anything in their cargo holds beyond ammo. Since the way to boost a carriers cargo capacity at the moment is to hold an Iteron V and Hulk, both with T2 cargo expanders and maybe even cargo rigs as well (on a Hulk? Sacrilege) this is seriously gimping the ability for logistics using jump drives. In return Tech 2 Freighters are being introduced that, at the cost of some cargo capacity, can both use gates AND a jump drive while also being faster and more agile. Personally I'd rather have a T2 freighter at this point than a T1 one for the agility bonus alone so it's a ship I'm really looking forwards to. They're going to be VERY expensive to start with so I think I'll have to get our capital production team on it.
I can also report that the Mac client almost works flawlessly. A few graphical glitches still, but after some real testing (including some combat) it seems rock solid and stable on my iMac.
While I'm actually posting I'll mention a couple of dev blog because of something cool it mentions. A recent post about some new features for advertising jobs in corps sounds good, but the real gem is a post about E-ON, the magazine. You've always been able to put adverts into the magazine for your corp, but they're changing the pricing to make it more expensive. I don't have a massive problem with this, the old price was really cheap and although we've advertised ourselves in the mag the cost was basically just a throw away amount we threw together. The really interesting part with the changes is that the adverts will also appear on the login screen for the game itself. Now don't forget that these are adverts for IN GAME organisations so it's the good kind of adverts :)
Last up is Eve TV. I'm a massive fan of the show and I think it really brings something to the community, even if it isn't always as informative as people would like. Sadly it's taking a break until February after this Saturday and it sounds like they're re-evaluating what they want it to be. Shame, but hopefully it will return bigger and better than ever. Just keep it weekly and regular, OK?
posted @ Thursday, November 22, 2007 3:12 PM