Coming to an EVE cluster near you this Thursday, a new patch for the recently-deployed Dominion expansion has its patch notes unleashed today.

There are some interesting  fixes in there, including the one allowing Russian clients to open Strontium bays (in Soviet Russia, Strontium bays open YOU), but my favorite has to be this one:

Scooping your own drones will no longer be counted as looting in the loot logging fleet tool.

Oh come on… that’s comedy, handed to us on a silver platter. But now I’m curious if someone’s in fleet but doing a mission somewhere, does looting  a Damsel show in the fleet loot log?

Feel free to check out the full patch notes below.

Source: Dominion 1.0.1 Patch Notes

It seems that the deployment of Dominion has been completed, with a minimum of pain and suffering.  Well, unless you’re the IT guys at CCP in charge of handling the deployment.

I deliberately avoided the test server so as to experience the new planets and vistas first hand when the expansion went live, and to say the game looks gorgeous is an understatement.  Heh, well I mean EVE’s always looked amazing, but the planets, my God.. the most hilariously pointless thingies in space now rank among the most striking features of the game.  Check out this shot of the graveyard in Luminaire.

I can only assume people are having similar feelings of amazement at the visuals, but more importantly there’s some seriously great features here in this update.

The fleet finder is an incredibly intuitive way to find a group of friends to get blown up with, and I don’t think people are going to be able to live without it now that it’s around.  One of the things I always hated was having to interrogate people in multiple mediums (TS/vent, chat, etc.) in order to find out what’s going on.  Now it’s all there for you to find out that information yourself.  In short: you have no excuse to not get into a gang.

Unless of course you just got blown up because you were staring at the new planets.  Hell even the Jukebox can be legitimately manhandled into playing custom music.  And finally.. FINALLY, you can whore the EVE forums in the game itself, since the browser is actually capable of rendering something designed to post-1996 standards.

No, I’m not kidding.  Hell even this site renders properly.  This has to be some sort of CCP trickery.

All of this is window dressing though, pure icing on the moist, chocolatey cake at the heart of this thing: the changes to sovereignty.

While you’ve been reading this, practically every single alliance with leadership worth their weight in metal scraps is hard at work figuring out how to harden (lol?), improve, and redesign their territories to take advantage of the new system.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my eye’s on the map to see how things shake down, and to see if CCP’s wet dream of properly-utilized space will come true.

OMG EVE IS DEAD!!! Well I guess it kind of is for a little while, so CCP can drop Dominion onto the servers.  I hope you’ve done yourself a favor and set a long skill to train, you never know how things things can go. I mean just take a look at the busted news feeds on the right. Sheesh!

If you’re curious what the hell Dominion is, or just want to watch it again for the billionth time like me, here’s the trailer in all of its glory.

So wait, holy crap, what the hell Blinky, where have you been?  What’s happened to the site?  OMG!  Well things have been pretty hectic lately but I haven’t been just sitting on my laurels.  I decided on a site revamp a while back, and here are the initial results.

There’s some things that won’t be fully going yet, for instance I haven’t gone back through the entire back catalog of posts to update the comics to display correctly. I’ll be slaving away on that for a while, as well as getting new comics and *drumroll* podcasts going.  It’s been a silly last while in real life for me. Urban’s still on walkabout deep in a Malaysian jungle, but hopefully he finds himself and comes back to us all. In the meantime, please bear with stuff around here that doesn’t seem to be working properly. Nothing’s lost!

Some new stuff to poke around with, the news thingy on the right ties into CCP feeds, and there’s a couple of interesting goodies on the way for that area. Below you’ll find post history, categories, etc. Even FURTHER below are subtle links off to other interesting social stuff (yes, there’s a WDA Facebook page, has been for a while!). Feel free to comment on things you love and hate, and expect some good stuff soon.

So, while Dominion’s being put on the servers, what do you all think of the new changes documented in those ridiculously long patch notes? There seems to be something for everyone.