It is patch day again in New Eden. I was a little confused about the designation YC118.7 when it was first announced. To me, YC118.7 looks like a data, as in a Star Trek stardate or such, and the last digit always lining up to the month so far this year seemed to confirm this in the back of my brain.
I thought that was a pretty good idea too, as at least people would remember when an update went live without having to go look it up. That was always the problem with their monthly named updates, they sort of merged together into a blur.
But no, the last digit is just the release number. This is the 7th release for YC118, which just happens to be coming during the 8th month of the year. Bleh.
Like many of these updates, there isn’t much to get hugely excited about. There are some graphics improvements. Clouds in space will now be rendered better, so long as you aren’t still lingering back in DirectX 9.
Literally the picture from the updates page
We are also getting the physically based rendering applied to in-space modules as well as another pass at the visual damage system.
Going to need more than a bit of Nanite paste for that…
Damage will also now appear on some structures when you shoot them.
And we are also getting a bit more data on our display. In this case, when you mouse over your cargo icon you will get a read out of just how full your cargo bay is at the moment.
This I really like
But probably the biggest “new” thing is contracts now being available within citadels. We have had the structures since April 27th, when the Citadel expansion hit, but it has taken CCP some time to get them functioning as the surrogate stations they are apparently intended to be. And with this, citadels are one step closer to being null sec stations… which are owned by players who can control access to them… that you can deploy just about anywhere you choose.
I expect a follow up patch soon to fix the inevitable issues that the player base finds. We are very good at that. And given that you’ll now have to be able to search through citadels in the contracts window and such, it feels like it might be a target rich environment for bugs.
On the fix front, there are a couple of null sec important items. The first is the change to warp disruption bubbles, which will now only pull/drag you if you pass within 500km of them. This change is being made specifically to stop people from camping gates using a citadel. You can still create bubble traps, you just can’t do it on a gate with a structure now.
And then there is this rather minimalist line item in the patch notes:
Several issues with Burst Jammers and Burst Projectors have been fixed.
There are a couple of issues I know about. One was the question about whether or not ECM burst projectors were supposed to affect force auxiliaries when they are sieged and supposed to be immune to ECM effects. That would make our fax machine entosis tactics more effective, as their lock will no longer be broken by ECM burst interceptors landing on them.
And then there is the fact that ECM burst attacks were being used to untether ships from citadels and give them logoff timers, an exploit that became a multi-thread issue on Reddit when PL used it to kill a GSF titan.
That doesn’t look like an Avatar
But that is just two items, and CCP wrote “several,” which is generally understood to be more than two, so I wonder what else might have been fixed. Of course didn’t specify the two items I brought up, so we will have to see if those were really addressed or not I suppose.
That is about it from the list that interests me. There are more fixes covered in the YC118.7 Patch Notes, but I think I mentioned everything on the updates page for once.
And, of course, there is music for the release.
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