Eve 2.0 available today

[Jonathan]

Well, no, not really. They're launching a new expansion called Apocrypha, but it's a really big one. Some highlights:

* Edit: skill queue so you don't have to log in at all hours to keep training new skills
* new character creation is simpler, easier to follow, harder to screw up
* new player missions have been revamped and old boring tutorial is completely gone
* attribute respecs --- no more gimping your training time
* double speed training for players with less than 1.6M skill points
* new fitting interface gives you more information about your ship as fit and lets you save and trade fits
* higher quality graphics for lower end PCs
* almost every effect in game has been redone to be more visible, useful, and pretty
* 50% more star systems with no way for older players to blob you when you're in them. small gangs only.
* new missions tied to epic story arcs with branching completions (with risk/reward tradeoffs) to make the WoW refugees feel loved
* brand-new Sleeper NPCs have actual AI, should make PvE interesting
* new strategic cruisers are a step in between tech 1 ships and tech 2 ships in terms of skill requirements

You can buy it in stores or download it from the internet. The boxed version comes with 2 months of play time and a standings boost to your home faction. The internet version comes with a 14 day free trial (21 if you download it from Steam). Clocks in at about a 2 GB download.

http://www.eveonline.com/download/

[Jonathan]

http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/03/eve- ... update.php

User-friendly!?!?!!

For the past few years, the process of creating your character has been a multi-step process with a lot of choices. Choices that were intimidating, to say the least, for anyone who had never played EVE before...For Apocrypha, we simplified this process. We eliminated choices that had no effect on you whatsoever and moved these choices to a more appropriate time where you could make an informed decision

But, but, but... my learning cliff backbone!

[Jonathan]

Initial impressions

The splash screen is pretty. The new gunfire is awesome. Most of the secondary effects are cool, but warp disruption bubbles are big shiny space soap bubbles which is much better than the cloud of warp disruption before.
Skill queue and attribute respec are pure win. I have 67% more base perception now.
Dudes are reporting some epic "holy shit" moments traveling through wormholes. Mostly this is because it breaks up some well-defined and boringly static artificial boundaries between players. I will have to check that shit out this weekend.

[Jonathan]

First off, this patch has revitalized the game for me in ways I can't even begin to describe. I haven't had this much fun since my first Taranis.

Wormholes, while sometimes frustrating, sometimes downright miserable to try to find (particularly in W-space), are incredibly rewarding. Even just seeing that 3.54% unknown result eventually evolve into a 100% warpable "Unstable Wormhole" result makes you want to stand up and cheer out loud when you finally get it, and that's even before the fun begins. Where does it go? Is it one of those juicy W-space ones that may well lead to utopian lands of faction-fit hulks and carebear Ravens? Will it be some loltastic jump from Sobaseki to the far reaches of the ass-end of nowhere? Does it drop you out 4 jumps from that last contract in the cluster for a faction small neut that you were contemplating buying but couldn't bring yourself to travel 20 jumps to retrieve? (yes, this actually happened to me today)

W space is simply a joy. While somewhat irritating in the sense that fighting at the wormhole is somewhat pointless as there are no aggression timers on jumping through them, CCP seems to have addressed that a bit. Jump in and out 3 times and you're facing a 3 minute timer before you can activate again, trapping you on whichever side you started on, as the Nighthawk pilot on the killboard learned tonight and bemoaned on his lossmail on his own killboard. I won't even get into the joys that delayed local brings to the game, but it's all I imagined it to be.

Stuck in a system with no exit? No problem--as long as you have a couple of probers with you. Two dedicated probers seemed to be enough to find a way out in reasonable time tonight. We managed in about the time it took a couple of our guys to clear 2-3 complexes and loot them (these were the weaksauce highsec complexes, mind you), meaning by the time we found our way through a second W-space system and back into highsec (way the fuck in the middle of nowhere), we had holds fat and happy with sleeper loot.

The skill queue is brilliant (though ever so slightly buggy) and has already allowed me to fill in about a dozen support skills I'd been procrastinating on across 4 of my 5 accounts.

The new scanner system is, while someone clumsy, quite entertaining and much more interactive than the mere push of a button. And also gives you an endless supply of ball jokes.

Oh, and apparently you can use the combat probes in such a way that if someone warps onto grid with you at long range, if you already have probes deployed you can get a warpable result on them extremely quickly while remaining cloaked. Snipers and Falcons beware. I suddenly see ECCM and probe launcher-fit Rapiers and Arazus cloaking in the middle of a gang expecting a fight and dropping on top of enemy Falcons. Who needs an ECCMed sensor-boosting Raven?!

Wormholes in particular bring with them all sorts of possibilities. The next time Sakura magellans a fleet, he might be able to have his Falcon (fit with a handy dandy probe launcher as any respectable Falcon should!) quickly find a wormhole the gang can retreat into, and hope that it will either whisk them away to safety or dump them into the far reaches of w-space, perhaps with another wormhole inside it leading further down the rabbit hole with an eventual escape for the doomed fleet. Better yet, the enemy gang may find their way in and collapse the wormhole mid-entry, splitting their forces and allowing you to ravage the parts of their fleet that did manage to get in.

Ultimately I see this patch having enough impact on EVE that we'll learn to live with the changes on a daily basis. It may not revolutionize the way we all play EVE and change how we all fit our ships, but I do see it adding several things to be aware of and several more tools to the box to be wielded by those who choose to learn how.

And, quite frankly, I could kiss CCP for the timing. It's a great way to buy us some time and keep us entertained while us leadership types sort our next moves out. And in all honesty, I urge you all to pour some time into learning all of the new mechanics. Probing, w-space, exploration, etc. They are all things that will empower a smaller group like ours skilled in their applications.

[Jonathan]

I had one of the funnest nights in Eve I've ever played last night. No joke. Short story: we went into a WH from high sec near Jita, found guys. They came to the WH entrance and bounced in/out. We had some trouble keeping them from leaving, but managed to score a few kills. They collapsed the WH on us, thinking they trapped us. We traveled to a neighboring WH, ratted a little while yest one more WH was found. That led us out to high sec near Amarr, like 14 jumps from where we started. Good fun.

We actually formed up once more to go back through another WH, but didn't see anyone.

A HIC would be helpful. But to use it, we'd need some fast tackle at the bubble edge, like your normal camping type layout.

When we played the go in/out games last night with the drakes and the nighthawk, it was never clear to me how far away a ship needs to be in order to be at WH jump range. I learned a few things last night, however:

1. You can jump through a WH with aggression. We had a couple ships sit there until they got into half armor and they just jumped out. It was very frustrating.

2. If you go through a WH three times, you get a timer. I think it's three minutes. That nighthawk we killed was going in and out of that unstable WH in hopes of trying to collapse it on us I think. Then when he didn't jump back out, we thought maybe we had bumped him enough. Not so, he had a timer and so died.

3. When the WH starts to tell you it's really unstable and starts to shrink, you can get a couple CBCs and HACs/recons through probably without trouble. But the last ships to go through should have probe launchers fit. Actually, that should always be the case.

4. It's not a good idea for guys to hang about right on the high sec side of a WH. Best to make a safe spot close by the WH (some place off grid from the WH entrance) and gather there.

5. You can get right up in the shimmery sphere thing of a WH. But if you jettison anything, like a deployable bubble, the WH will "squish" it out of the spherical effect thing. It winds up like 1km from the actual WH icon in space. When laying a bubble, best to approach from the side that has a lot of the planets and suns and stuff, so that the bubble deploys mostly toward the likely place(s) where the enemies are. An extra KM from the gate is an extra KM...

6. Cloaky probers have to watch out for a gas cloud near encounters from decloaking them. Same as with probing out missions, I guess.

7. A WH that enters from high sec seems to also lead you back out to high sec. Of course, that hypothesis is supported by one data loint (last night's travels), and you can draw any sort of trend you want with just one point on the graph...

Our second round through, I picked up a T2 medium deployable bubble. It's got a 17km range, which appears to be quite sufficient at keeping scared WH carebears from immediately exiting. It anchors in two minutes, which is enough time to scan them.

So the prober goes in, scans. If nothing is on scan from the WH entrance, the bubble-layer goes in. Prober launches probes, bubble starts anchoring and then heads somewhere close to the outside edge. Once folks are found, guys on the other side can come through. Cloaker gets a warp-in point, every heads in to pewpew.

Another option when bubbled might be to send a few ships in to bad guys at the encoutner, but have a few hang back just outside the bubble. The guys going in can align to the WH exit once there and start shooting. Anyone who tries to rabbit back to the WH to GTFO gets nailed by fast tackle. If everyone makes a run back to the WH, then everyone dogpiles on the bubble edge.

I think either way it'll mean a few guys slipping away and trying to hide in the WH, but with the entrance guarded, you can probe them out.

Great stuff! And for the next couple weeks, people aren't going to know what they are doing and so will be easy targets.

[Jonathan]

These posts are made by guys who've been playing Eve for four years.

[Jonathan]

http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/03/tam ... -onli.html

If you're at all interested in MMOs, and don't mind putting on your thinking cap from time to time, you've officially run out of reasons to avoid trying EVE Online.

[Jonathan]

Just when you thought shit was getting easy:

nice thread about the mathematics behind quadrangulating locations using the probe scanner

Whew, I was worried there for a second.

Anyway: quadrangulation (like triangulation, but with three degrees of freedom).