TIL Eve players are Gamers Mk1

The Lead Dev for Ultima Online and Creative Director for Star Wars: Galaxies talks about gaming demographics over the years. Interesting stuff.

Little Things request: the ability to pin item stacks to your cargo hold

I have a harmless quirk, shared by many other Eve players: I like to keep various items in my cargo hold. Some people keep exotic dancers and spirits; I keep anti-shipping mines.

but I have a problem. That problem is ‘select all’.

When I select all and dump stuff in my hangar, so too goes all my cargo hold decorations. I could do right-click->invert selection before dragging the rest to my hangar, but then I started thinking. The only time I’ve ever been tempted to use ‘invert selection’ is to keep one or two things where they are and move the rest. But it’s always the same things I’m excluding every single time. Surely there’s a better way.

What I really wanted from the UI was a way to lock down and pin certain item stacks in my cargo hold and hangar. Being able to pin my ammo and nanite paste into my cargo hold, or pin containers to my hangar floor would be a nice perk. I could use the select-all keyboard shortcut with impunity.

Heck, in one sense, the feature already kinda exists:

Admittedly, this feature is only available to corp hangars, but it’s the same concept: right click to lock a blueprint, then it’s not going anywhere until it’s unlocked. Obviously a personal lock wouldn’t require a corporate vote, just right click and unlock it again.

So, that’s my ‘little things’ idea.

Personally, I think it’s a lot more useful than ‘invert selection’.

Crius Industry Cheat Sheet

Kendrone on Reddit has a great summary of the cost breakdown in Crius.

 

shameless plug: Kendrone’s blog

Hotfix Alpha: The one we needed

CCP Rattati has struck while the iron is hot, announcing Hotfix Alpha, the next patch for Dust 514.

Dear players,

The contents of Hotfix Alpha are responses to issues that have been identified by the use of behavioral data, and/or raised and verified by the forums and CPM. These proposals have taken into account the feedback from the community in the Feedback threads and are primarily based on tweaks to existing balance rather than radical reworks.

We will therefore be locking the current feedback stickies and storing them. Thank you all for contributing in a positive manner, and we‘re hoping you‘ll be back for round two soon.

There are multiple changes that did not make it into this pass because we want to spend a little more time on them. We will open up new feedback stickies on these as soon as we have finished with preparing Hotfix Alpha.

The proposal for Hotfix Alpha will now be open for final review while we finalize the numbers. Once Hotfix Alpha is released, we‘ll be holding off further tweaks to anything in it for a little while to see the impact in gameplay. Based on the trend analysis from 1.8 it takes a few weeks to stabilize, and taking into account that 1.8 had a limited respec, changes in some cases were instantaneous. With some of these tweaks, players will have to collect SP first, and then spec into different playstyles, so it may take a little longer to stabilize.

Finally, to be as transparent and forthcoming with information as possible, we are pushing this high level vision out as early as we can. That also means we have less confidence that these changes will all go in as planned, so please remember that some items may be pushed back to a later date if they‘re not ready.

Tanking Modules
Armor
• We want to reduce the stacking of plates by normalizing pg and cpu a little bit, and also increasing the speed penalty a bit.
• We also want to make repair modules a little more useful so we‘re increasing repair rates by a small amount.
• We also want to make reactive and ferroscale plates more attractive by reducing the PG /CPU requirements so people will use them instead of basic armor plates when they want to maintain some speed.

Shields
• The CPM and community has been vocal on not changing multiple ehp modules at a time. As such we will not be making any changes to shield tanking until the next hotfix. This also gives us a chance to examine new data from rebalanced armor modules.

Weapons
• We will be increasing the damage of the Plasma Assault Rifle and reducing the Combat Rifle‘s damage a little, nothing dramatic. Rail Rifles and Scrambler Rifles will not be changed in this hotfix, but we‘ll keep an eye on them. We‘re not making massive changes here as we expect the armor changes will have an impact on rifle usage due to the damage profiles.
• We are increasing the damage of the PLC against vehicles, to help provide more options for anti-vehicle work using light weapons but we are also looking at adding Plasma Cannon variants at a later stage. The Forge Gun will remain as the strongest infantry AV weapon in each tier.
• We are reducing locus damage and normalizing damage progression to make grenade specialization more worthwhile.

Vehicles
• We believe, based on data, that Tank v Tank is in a good place. However, with the grenade number being reduced, we believe that AV grenades need to do more damage overall to become a viable threat to vehicles again.
• However, we propose that they replenish less at hives so we want to increase nanite cost of grenades. We‘re also examining the option of removing their ability to restock at nanohives, but we want to see how increased nanite cost plays out first.
• We‘re slightly increasing HMG damage against vehicles to make them a little more threatening to LAVs. They should still get laughed off by tanks.

Dropsuits
• We will do a normalizing pass on PG/CPU on a few dropsuits; Sentinels in general have a lot of PG/CPU and Basic Heavies are a little out of sync. However, this likely won‘t make it into Hotfix Alpha because it warrants a deeper dive.

Commandos
• Commandos play a big role by being flexible; you can throw on your rifle of choice and favorite secondary weapon, a suppression weapon, some long range support or AV.
• Tweaking the CR will bring the Minmatar Commando closer to his brethren but he will still be the favored by mass driver/swarm players, but his speed is somewhat overlapping Assault so we‘re reducing speed a little bit. He will still be the fastest Commando though.
• Introducing the PLC as a viable AV will encourage Gallente Commandos to come out and play, as well as some tweaking of the plasma rifle. Because of this, we‘re not making any changes to it this pass but we‘ll keep an eye on it.
• If players migrate from armor to shield tanking, the Amarr Commando will become more useful as well as shielded targets become more plentiful. We‘ll likely hold off major changes to it until we‘ve gotten shield tanking in a spot we‘re happy with, but we are aware it‘s lacking in bonused AV power.

Sentinels
• We‘re hoping changes to plates will help encourage other playstyles than Gallente Sentinels, as well as the eventual CPU/PG changes to make Sentinels actually have to pick what they want to fit, rather than throwing it all on without worrying.
Scouts
• We know that Amarr scouts are underused, but want to wait and see what the module changes bring. We are still looking at smart bonus changes, mainly a biotic efficacy
• We want to reward specalizing so we are lowering the base duration of the cloak. This should hopefully make the higher tier cloaks more useful.
• We are removing the dampening effect of the cloak. If you want to to be truly invisible, both to the eye and scanners, you must specialize and sacrifice slots to do so.
• We‘re also looking to increase the delay between decloaking and being able to shoot. This is pending some playtest results.

Assault
• At this stage we want to see what impact the rifle tweaks and the armor module changes bring before making any changes to the Assault suits. It is however definitely on our list for later hotfixes.

Turrets
• We want to boost efficiency for Small Rails against vehicles so there is a stronger purpose for them. A tank with a small railgun co-pilot should have an advantage in tank vs tank combat. This shouldn‘t mess with their effectiveness against infantry, but we‘ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.
• We want to increase Small Blaster ROF, keep damage, reduce overheat, and improve hit detection so as to make it a viable anti-infantry weapon. We‘re also considering a range increase, but we would like to see the impact the other three changes make first.
• The Large Blaster dispersion will be increased a little bit to make it less reliable against infantry, without majorly impacting it‘s power against vehicles at closer ranges. Reducing its range a little is on the table, but we‘re looking to see if the dispersion impact brings it back far enough on its own due to reduced accuracy.

Planetary Conquest
Overall, these are our objectives to reduce district locking and risk free ISK accumulation
• Decrease/remove passive ISK generation
• Increase ISK payouts from battles
• Increase Clone Pack Prices and number of clones in a Clone Pack

The idea here should be that if you want to make ISK, you should fight and consume clones. We also want clone packs to be a viable method of breaking into Planetary Conquest, but not useful for launching every attack you make; using clones you own should be the better option.

Please post your feedback in this thread, and keep it civil and constructive. Please also refrain from discussing things that are not planned for Hotfix Alpha; there will another time and thread to discuss those ideas soon after Hotfix Alpha is deployed.

Yours,
CCP Rattati

Of all the changes, the removal of profile dampening from cloaks is the most contentious. The idea is that by removing the damp bonus, it forces scout suits to use more low slots if they want to escape scanning (I support this concept)

On the other hand, it’s extraordinarily difficult to escape a Scout CK.0 with three scan precision modules (by all accounts, it takes either three or four damps to avoid it, given that the CK.0 has a free precision amp as part of the skill bonus). In fact, for AK.0 and MK.0, it’s impossible due to not having enough low slots.

This further exacerbates the Caldari-vs-Gallente scout war that has been brewing ever since the scout suits were rebalanced. Note, however, that avoiding scanning still takes three low slots now, leaving the GK.0 very vulnerable, and the CK.0 remains paper thin due to the number of EWAR modules on it. Perhaps the AK.0 and MK.0 can live with the occasional scan, since they actually have hit points now. I guess we’ll see. (more discussion in this thread)

All in all, I rate this change set a 9/10.

Devpost Avalanche

CCP Fozzie has posted a spate of changes for the upcoming expansion:

• Energy Vampire ROF buff of 16%
• Drone item and skill rebalance
• Mining Barge re-rebalance

Let’s take it from the top:

Nos Buff

Not much to say here. They’ll get better, and might be used more often than the edge case of ‘small ship tacking big target’. It is, however, an indirect buff to the Curse, Pilgrim and any rebalanced Blood Raider faction ships.

Drone Rebalance

There’s a lot of changes in this dev blog, so we’ll take it from the top.

The racial light/medium drone change is welcome, but I don’t think it will be sufficient to shift the PVP meta much. There will be an upswing for Caldari drones in PvE because the 8% drop in damage is counteracted by hitting Guristas kinetic resist hole. I don’t think the same could be said for Amarr drones in PvE, since the damage differential is considerably more stark and the resistance differential less stark. Amarr drones are more fragile as well. It’s good to see that Augmented drones will soon be the go-to PVE drones of choice; as good as tech 2, but faster and tougher.

Medium and heavy drones getting increased speed is a good thing, provided the weirdness about drones not being able to track targets due to overshooting doesn’t crop up more often.

The drone skill rebalance is fairly well done and welcome.

The sentry drone changes are a mixed bag. There’s an inherent 6.5% damage nerf for Tech 2 Sentries (tech 1 is about the same DPS as before) which didn’t get mentioned. The changes to the racial range/tracking are good, and follow the general engagement envelopes of their corresponding racial ships well. It does  make the contrast between light/medium/heavy drones  and sentries a bit jarring though.

Most of the changes to fighters and fighter-bombers is welcome, now that more drone skills affect their behaviour. The reduction in number of fighter-bombers is also going to reduce server load, but I’m not sure why super-carriers get +100% damage bonus to fighter-bombers: why not just bake that into the base stats of the fighter-bombers? unless more ships will be able to use fighter-bombers in future?

However, it’s important to note that, since drone damage amplifiers will now affect fighter-bombers, the Nyx’s +5%/level bonus to FB damage is outclassed by the Aeon, since the Aeon has an extra low slot to put a DDA in while retaining a greater armour tank. It even has the energy transfer range that the Nyx doesn’t. So yeah, at the moment, there’s no reason to fly a Nyx unless it’s some sort of shield-tanked gank fit.

Also, to whoever is thinking of building fighter-bombers before the material requirements increase: remember that super carriers will only need half as many as they do now, so the market for them will likely be flooded for a long, long time to come.

Mining Barge Rebalance

A series of tweaks to mining barges that overall look quite okay.

• Ore yield in general is getting a slight haircut: (see chart for ‘effective strip miner’ equivalents)
  
• All types of barge gain an additional low slot, which will put more pressure on fits if a mining upgrade is fit, so consider a damage control instead.
• Procurer line will gain more drone damage, although the Procurer itself is losing a mid slot (which is okay, since its tank was more than enough before)
• Retriever line loses a bit of yield (now same as the Procurer), because the ore cargo hold size appears to be just way too popular
• Covetor line gains more agility and range but higher signature radius, making it an ‘at-keyboard player only’ type ship. I still think the yield bonus isn’t good enough for the risk, considering the ease of finding mining sites with interceptors, but perhaps that’s #justanullsecthing.

In regards to the mining barge changes, I’ll put up some suggested fits when EFT gets updated, just like last time.

Update from Fozzie clarifies some things. Still want an explanation of T2 drones though. Is my math wrong?

ooooh, CREST API endpoint for market history

Because historical market data?
byu/ccp_foxfour inevetech

This is the start of something beautiful.

edit: it begins.

Cancers of EVE Online: Teleportation ~Marlona Sky

Marlona Sky, perennial progressive-poster and founder of Flight of a Thousand Rifters, has finally pulled the trigger and started a blog to store all his big-picture posts.

His first post has already been picked up by EN24 and ~spirited discussion~ is happening on Failheap.

Reversal of Fortune

Everyone wants to win. No one logs in wanting to get their teeth kicked in. Entering the game and being surrounded by bad guys on your front door is not appealing and neither is spending 99% of your time looking for someone to shoot. So players keep their enemy at arm’s length. No closer, no further. There is a certain amount of effort they are willing to spend to get to a fight. The effort is not measured in gates, jumps or bridges; it is measured in time. If players are willing to spend an hour or more to get to a fight and you factor in all the teleportation mechanics available, the arm becomes incredibly long. So much so that it crosses the map several times over during that hour. The jump sphere on the map not only is the places you can attack, but the places that can…

View original post 4,859 more words

Which Dust blueprints to buy?

As mentioned before, all blueprints will be removed from the Dust 514 online store in anticipation of Eve supplying stuff to Dust players. However, they can still be purchased until October 8, so there’s an opportunity to buy stuff before you get locked out.

So, let’s take a tour of the various types of blueprints available.

dropsuit blueprints

With few exceptions, the drop suit blueprints are militia grade. This means each time you are killed in a blueprint drop suit compared to a paid suit, you’re saving 585 isk per death. In addition, you’re wearing a militia-grade suit, so you’re probably going to die more often anyway.

Estimated savings per match

• 3510 ISK, assuming six deaths per game.

handheld weapon blueprints

Aside from the Toxin SMG, all handheld weapon blueprints are militia-grade. This results in a saving of, generously, 830 isk per death (up to about 1500 isk for militia forge guns). In comparison, a standard-grade SMG is something like 2800 isk which is a big jump in cost-effectiveness.

Note that there are other ways to get standard-grade blueprints (Recruit a Friend, various game packs), but for the most part those will remain after the October 8 deadline, and usually you buy the game pack for the Aurum and boosters rather than the blueprints anyway.

Estimated savings per match

• 4980 ISK for militia weapons
• 16800 ISK for standard weapons (i.e. Toxin SMG)

Vehicle Modules

I originally thought that the vehicle module blueprints had already been removed from the store, but VideoJanitor mentioned that they can be accessed through the ‘marketplace’ section of the fitting screen.

Okay, whatever, CCP.

Moving on, CCP also released their plans for the vehicle rebalance. This threw a spanner in the works, since the relative worth of the various modules is in flux.

Light Shield Extenders

For instance, let’s look at a standard LAV for reference:

♦ Saga: 1425 shields, 900 armour, 155cpu, 170pg, 3 highs, 2 low slots, 40k isk.

Then look at light shield extenders:

♦ Militia shield extender: +390 shields, 11k isk
♦ Shield extender I: +650 shields, 16k isk
♦ Azeotropic Shield Extender: +748 shields, 33.5k

So a militia extender gives +27% more hit points to a Saga, and an azeotropic gives +53% more.

So a militia extender is 52% as effective as a top-tier version for a third the price. Considering the low price of a Saga, it doesn’t really make sense to spend too much on modules, so there’s a valid case that you should buy a militia shield extender to further reduce its cost (so you can abandon it without taking a hit to your wallet)

Furthermore, you can fit two of them from the same blueprint, so your estimated savings are 22k ISK per match, even if you only lose one LAV.

However, let’s look at the rebalanced stats:

♦ New Saga: 1200 shields, 900 armour, 420cpu, 450g, 2 highs, 1 low slot.
♦ New Militia Light Shield Extender: +180 shields for 99pg
♦ New Basic Light Shield Extender: +180 shields for 90pg
♦ New Enhanced Light Shield Extender: +312 shields for 113pg
♦ New Complex Light Shield Extender: +480 shields for 153pg
♦ New Militia Heavy Shield Extender: +689 shields for 322pg

A militia light extender gives +15% more hit points to a Saga, and a complex gives +57.5% more.

This makes militia grade stuff only 37.5% as good as top-tier, which is a strong disincentive to run it. In fact, it’s way more likely that you’d run a basic/militia heavy extender (+689 shields) instead, and skimp on other things to fit it.

Light Armor Plates

Let’s also look at the armour side:

♦ Methana: 503 shields, 2138 armour, 105cpu, 275pg, 2 highs, 3 low slots, 40k isk.
♦ Militia 60mm Reinforced Steel Plates: +408 armor, 11k isk
♦ 60mm Reinforced Steel Plates: +680 armor, 16k isk
♦ 60mm Reinforced Nanofibre Plates: +612 armor, 23k isk
♦ 60mm Reinforced Polycrystalline Plates: +782 armor, 33k isk

A militia plate gives +19% more hit points to a Methana, and a polycrystalline gives +36% more.

So militia grade is 52% as effective as top-tier, while being a third of the price and a viable candidate for saving 11k or 22k per match (more if you subscribe to the disposable LAV theory of mobility)

♦ New Methana: 650 shields, 2450 armour, 310cpu, 560pg, 1 high, 2 low slots.
♦ New Militia 60mm Armor Plates: +385 armor
♦ New Basic 60mm Armor Plates: +385 armor
♦ New Enhanced 60mm Armor Plates: +513 armor
♦ New Complex 60mm Armor Plates: +684 armor
♦ New Militia 120mm Armor Plates: +684 armor

A militia plate gives +16% more hit points to a Methana, and a complex gives +28% more.

Interestingly, we see militia grade plates being 56% as effective as complex plates, while presumably being cheaper and easier to fit. They also don’t give as much percentage benefit as expected, so perhaps hardeners would be better, or hardeners+basic plate.

wait, isn’t this the same balance problem we’re already having with dropsuit plates, i.e. enhanced and complex plates not being worth the grid compared to basic plates? Grr. Not happy.

Reppers

Reppers are less of an issue for vehicles because they (currently) come with an armor or shield repper. So, they’re kinda not worth buying a blueprint for unless you want dual repper fits (which given the paucity of slots in the rebalanced vehicles seems like an invitation to be blapped by forge guns because you don’t have a hardener up)

Having said that, it’s looking like shield boosters are way more effective than shield extenders, and armor reps are about 50% more effective, percentage-wise, than their dropsuit versions (a complex heavy repper can rep an armour tank to full in about 30 seconds, depending on how many plates they have).

Conclusion

• Militia light shield extender blueprints are bad
• Militia heavy shield extender blueprints are not bad when fit to smaller vehicles
• Militia armor plates are okay, but large ones probably won’t fit on smaller vehicles
• Militia reppers are redundant because they come for free with your vehicle
• You’ll only be fitting militia stuff to disposable vehicles because they get a lot better at enhanced
• You’ll probably be fitting hardeners to everything, sadly there’s no blueprints to buy
• There are, however, shield resistance amplifier blueprints…

Dust 514 auto-aim examples

The Dust 514 Uprising 1.4 patch was released last week, and the most contentious part of it has been the reintroduction of aim assist. Since I’m a mouse+Keyboard (MKB) user, I didn’t know what the changes were, except that I was dying approximately three times as frequently and being killed at previously-unheard of ranges.

Helpfully, some forum-goers have compiled a video of what aim assist does for a player with a controller.

• All suits track and are tracked equally well.
• Assault Rifle tracks to 60m
• Scambler Rifle tracks to 60m
• HMG tracks to 50m
• SMG tracks to 30m
• Shotgun tracks to 16m
• Scrambler Pistol tracks to 55m!
• Mass drivers, forge guns, flaylocks and plasma cannons do not track.

forum thread

From what I gather, the aim assist works all the way to a weapon’s effective range (think optimal + falloff in Eve) which, looking at the numbers, is a very long distance. In addition, since you have lower transversal at longer ranges, the aim assist makes you more accurate at long ranges compared to short ranges, which is counter-intuitive and adds to the ‘cone of death’ effect.

I hope CCP tweaks the aim assist downwards in the next patch, because losing ranged shootouts against militia assault rifles is getting a bit old.

Uplinks are fine; lern2play