You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

Michael Lastucka Leave a comment

I sure hope you didn’t have any serious attachments to your Learning skillbooks, because very very very shortly they will be disappearing from EVE…. foreverrrrrr…

CCP Greyscale (see what I did there, with the picture? whee..) brings us the news in his latest epic dev blog. Here are some highlights:

  • As of downtime today, all NPC sell orders for the eleven skills in the Learning group (hereafter referred to as “learning skills”) have been CANCELLED. They’re really not much use in the long run, we don’t want to complicate later steps with unusual inflows of skillbooks, and it might go some way towards limiting the amount of scams that we know you’re going to be running. Please, think of the children newbies.
FURTHERMORE, as of a patch which should arrive on (or about) the 14th of December:
  • ALL LEARNING SKILLS WILL DISAPPEAR. We’re not kidding. In your head, in your hangar or in your anything else, they’re gone. Vamoosh. Deleted. Sent to the big recycle bin in the sky. Etc etc.
  • All skillpoints invested in learning skills will be reimbursed, including all the fiddly corner cases. If you have 2,012,692 SP in learning, you will find yourself down those skills, but with 2,012,692 skillpoints to redistribute.
  • All skillbooks not currently injected into people’s heads will be reimbursed at the old NPC sell price. The money will go to whichever character or corporation owns the container that the skillbooks are in. For example, things in cans you’ve anchored for yourself will be reimbursed to you, things in corporate hangar arrays or the “deliveries” bin will be reimbursed to the owning corporation.
  • This will also involve cancelling any and all market orders containing these skills. Contracts containing learning skills will have those skillbooks substituted for copies of the Pax Amarria.
  • All new and existing characters will have an extra 12 base points (ie, non-remappable) in each attribute.
  • The 100% training speed bonus up to 1.6m SP will no longer be available. People partway through this bonus will lose the remaining bonus amount. They will of course gain a huge attribute bonus to make up for it.

Obviously it’s not all doom and gloom, the 12 extra base points will help a lot and you’ll have all that extra skillpoint stuff to remap as you see fit. Assuming the big brains at CCP have done their math correctly, all of this will even out skill training for people, and those of us who’ve been around forever won’t really need to care.

The change seems a bit rushed, and even the blog admits that in more than one place, but we’ll just have to wait and see how this all pans out.

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Remaking Planetary Interaction

Michael Lastucka 2 Comments

CCP Omen brings us a dev blog on PI, somehow managing both overstatement and understatement in a single sentence.

Planetary Interaction is good, but it isn’t excellent.

Oh yeah, we know. PI is one of those features which CCP have used to drive the point home about iterative development. The real question is: what’s the next iteration of PI going to do to improve things? Well, Omen tells us.

Here’s some stuff you can expect in Incursion.

  • Upgradable Command Centers will allow players to increase and decrease the CPU/Power capabilities of their colony without having to tear it all down (existing undeployed command centers will be migrated to the new system).
  • Only the first Command Center must be bought and hauled in space, after that there is no longer a need to haul command centers in order to upgrade
  • Surveying has been radically revamped and will allow players to create extraction programs that span anything from an hour to 14 days!
  • Extractors can now be moved when in program creation mode

If you’ve fiddled at all with Planetary Interaction you’ll understand how each and every one of these points is a drastic and much-needed improvement over what is currently in place.

What’s more, these changes have been inspired by input from our very own CSM representatives who proposed several excellent improvements to CCP. This only serves to prove once more that CSM is not only an endless source of entertainment, but also a functioning communications pipeline for improvements to EVE.

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Best Live Game Gets a New Box

Michael Lastucka Leave a comment

It’s been a fairly news-heavy day today from CCP. First up, EVE’s been awarded the Best Live Game award at the GDC this year. This is fantastic news in my opinion, since this award is a pretty significant nod from CCP’s peers.

The Best Live Game award recognizes the best currently-operating online game, having been launched in North America for at least 12 months (before May 2009), and distinguishing itself by that exceptional new content through expansion packs, patches, or other updates in the last 12 months, as well as a vibrant player community, high-quality community management and network operation during that period.

Congratulations to CCP on this win, it’s well deserved.

Hot on the heels of that announcement comes a press release of a brand new boxed edition of EVE, coming to retail stores near you.

This latest boxed edition will include an exclusive in-game item, the Cerebral Accelerator, which is a military-grade implant that significantly increases a new pilot’s skill development. While they are a very strong boost to nearly all abilities, these bonuses are temporary and are only effective for the first 30 days of a pilot’s life as they get up to speed in the universe.

The Commissioned Officer Edition also includes a CD key for starting a new account, 30 days paid game subscription time and an EVE poster with helpful hints and tips for getting started on the reverse side.

You can check the press release link below for some more details, there’s no official release date there but apparently it’s ready for pre-order.

I would also theorize that the super special implant the boxed copy comes with has about as much use for an existing EVE player as a small clump of belly button lint.

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Winter Expansion Page Now Live

Michael Lastucka 1 Comment

CCP has put up an announcement page for their winter expansion, titled INCURSION. I can only hope some beefier content comes to the page in the coming days, for now it’s basically a pretty press release.

In summary, the expansion will feature:

  • Incursions into EVE space by the evil scary Sanshas, providing some random-but-possibly-interesting new PVE content.
  • New character creation, letting us all have new portraits.
  • New ships, missions, effects, etc.
  • EVE Gate improvements.
  • Hardware and software upgrades which may, or may not, improve performance during fleet fights (that’s my internal bitter vet speaking).
  • And possibly the most important improvement in the history of EVE: new forums.

I’m interested in seeing how the incursions aspect of this plays out. I’d commented here and there after playing Tabula Rasa that random, violent NPC encounters could spice things up a bit. I’m interested in seeing if they’re only going to be massively large scale in nature or whether the lone wolf pilot doing some random business will have a smaller encounter tailored for one or two people.

My guess is: No.

That being said, the Carbon character thing is proof that the tech teams for Incarna have actually produced something usable by EVE players before the world ends in 2012.

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PLEXes for Pakistan

PLEXes for Pakistan

Michael Lastucka 1 Comment

Most of the news and devblogs from EVE these days has been all about lag. Lag this, lag that, it’s all getting kind of tiring to report on. How awesome is it then that we have this feel-good news item brought to you by the venerable CCP Fallout:

Beginning September 15, 2010 and ending on October 6, 2010, CCP will be accepting PLEX donations for the PLEX for GOOD: Pakistan program. Each donation will be converted into cash currency and donated to the Pakistan Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian and relief organization based in Pakistan that is working towards helping those affected by the flooding.

To say the disaster in Pakistan is devastating is an understatement, so any type of donation towards relief funds over there will directly benefit someone in need. How cool is it that we can help the real world from our virtual one?

More details on the program and how you can help in the link below.

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Podcast #55: Iterative Emo Rage

Michael Lastucka 8 Comments

Hot Drop Target: Digital Solaris

Direct Download

I stick a microphone in front of Digital Solaris (full-time forum whorewarrior), who rants with me about the current state of EVE.  Like well… everyone else seems to be doing these days.  I apologize in advance for the wonky quality of the interview section of the recording.

Subscribe in iTunes

Episode Music:

Every Little StarRufus White
“Every Little Star” (mp3)
from “Every Little Star”
(Soul Shift Music)

More On This Album

The Great Wall Falls?

Michael Lastucka 3 Comments

In what could possibly be the scariest thing ever to come out of CGDC, we’re treated to the following news about EVE.

At CGDC 2010 (Game Developers Conference) held in Shanghai, China, Hilmar V. Petursson, CEO of CCP Games, disclosed a crazy plan that they would connect the Chinese server of EVE Online with its world server in the future to make all EVE Online players throughout the world gather together.

If by some chance you were unaware, there are actually two EVE Onlines. One that you’re probably playing, and a second in China which so far has been kept entirely separate from the the first EVE Online.

According to Hilmar Petursson, this plan will provide an opportunity for Chinese players and other players in the world to compete with each other in a same place and make them enjoy better gaming services.

At this point, I’ll break out a big bag of popcorn and start munching away.

Personally, I feel EVE has enough of its own issues currently that should be addressed first before anything like this is even entertained.  You know, maybe the solution to curing lag isn’t to add 1.3 billion new potential customers.

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The Coming of Things

Michael Lastucka 4 Comments

CCP Zulu shows those other devs how it’s done, combo-breaking the recent string of boring, uninformative dev blogs with something players might appreciate: a list of stuff CCP is actually working on.

You can click the link below for the full details, but for now lets look at the breakdown:

  • Incarna: 9 teams, approximately 70 developers
  • Dust 514/EVE link: 1 team, approximately 7 developers
  • In-space features: 3 teams, approximately 22 developers
  • EVE Gate: 1 team, approximately 10 developers
  • Others: 4 teams, approximately 15 developers

Nine teams for Incarna, huh.  Admittedly it’s going to be a very tech-heavy expansion, involving folks from multiple disciplines to pull off, but for a lot of folks we’re talking about something that is utterly forgettable if all you want to do is undock and blow ships to pieces.

All is not lost, if you’re thinking this means all CCP is doing is tacking on frivolous features to EVE…

That does not mean that we won‘t make any improvements until then!  We haven‘t started planning the Spring 2011 or Winter 2011 expansions yet (not to that level of granularity) but we do realize the urgency of revisiting certain key game features. Rest assured, the CSM will play a large role in identifying those.

Please, also keep in mind that our developers are constantly fixing bugs – small ones, big ones, important ones and obvious ones. But also bugs you‘ve never experienced, never seen and never heard of. The EVE code base is as big as the universe itself and we‘re constantly engaged in cleanup and backend work that the players will never notice unless something goes horribly wrong.

I’m sure at least some of those people are also hard at work with new COSMOS constellation content, and bringing Faction Warfare across the finish line.

…right?

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