We are getting an August update this year, which I found a bit surprising. And they even kept the naming consistent for three months running. If they hit four that might be a record. Anyway, lots of people at CCP are generally on vacation during July and August, so the month has been skipped at times for lack of content to deliver.
Not this August though, this August we’re getting some… stuff… I think… even if it was delayed a day.
We got a new event. As a follow on to The Agency event, we got the Lucky Clash event starting today.
I want to say Lucky Cash… or LSMFT
This event pits the Independent Gaming Commission against some pirates known as the Redtail Sharks, and the IGC needs your help fighting them off. So from now through August 23rd you can join help defend the various IGC gambling dens around New Eden from the Redtail Sharks.
So now we’re defending casinos again? I wonder if that was accidental or deliberate irony.
Anyway, check your overview… and then go fix the settings… to find a site to defend near you.
After that, well, CCP giveth, and CCP taketh away. The other big item in the August update, as CCP announced last month, is the removal of the Captain’s Quarters from stations in New Eden.
Me in the Captain’s Quarters back in 2011… the last time I used them
The source of much of the Incarna drama, the captain’s quarters were too much or not enough of something, depending upon whom was speaking. In the end, walking in stations ended with the rejection of the Incarna release and the Captain’s Quarters have been mostly lingering ever since.
No, six years later, they are being removed from the game. CCP posted a dev blog as to why they were doing this, but the upshot is that the code takes dev time to maintain and it is standing in the way of a 64-bit client.
As somebody who went through three Fortizar fights in the last week or so, each of which would have been made better by having a 64-bit client… unless you turn down graphics the current client is likely to access all the memory it can and then crash… I applaud this decision. We’ve had 64-bit processors and 64-bit operating systems for a decade now, time to move the client forward.
I know, somewhere, somebody is really mourning the passing of the Captain’s Quarters. One of my iron laws of MMORPGs is that any feature, no matter how bad, tangential, or useless, is somebody’s absolute favorite feature, and you’ll find out who the moment you remove it. Sorry you have to take one for the team, but dealing with what tends to be called the “technical debt” of old features is painful, and sometimes you have to drop a feature to move forward.
And so it goes.
After that the August release is just fixes and adjustments to things already in the game.
There were some tweaks to how citadel launched void bombs work:
- Reduce the rate of fire of the Structure Guided Bomb Launcher from 20 seconds to 40 seconds
- Reduce the area of effect of Guided Void Bombs from 40km to 20km
- Reduce the neut amount per second of the Guided Void Bomb by 25% (6000GJ every 40 seconds as opposed to the previous 4000Gj every 20s)
- Reduce the velocity of the Guided Void Bomb by 20% (increasing flight time to keep the range the same)
That, however, is not going to be enough to change the structure shooting meta. You will still have to attack them with a fleet doctrine that can shoot when neuted out, so armor tanked Typhoons or Machariels or Hurricanes supported by cap-chaining Guardians will still likely be the only options against slower shooting, but harder hitting, void bombs.
Meanwhile, deploying Upwell Structures has been made a bit easier, and using them has been made more attractive as some of the bonuses for the soon-to-be-removed player-owned starbases have been removed. Industry and reprocessing bonuses are gone.
There were also updated for the standings, scanning, and beta map as covered by a recent dev blog.
The beta map is another one of those features that makes my head hurt. One of my long standing gripes about EVE Online has been that the in-game map isn’t very useful.
It is pretty, and hella impressive to show your non-playing friends, but it just isn’t very practical as an in-game tool. And I say that even today, with the current map, which is a vast improvement over the state of the map back when I started playing EVE.
Seriously, I went to DOTLAN yesterday and got a database error when I tried to look up a system and my heart about stopped. The idea of not having that out-of-game map resource, and being stuck with the in-game map, was painful to even consider.
And then came the beta map, the plan for which seemed to me to be “let’s make something prettier and more impressive to look at, but even less practical to actually use.” And so the new map has lingered as the beta map for a few years now, because it was clearly a step back from the already impractical in-game map in terms of usefulness.
But CCP seems to have decided to get back to work on the long neglected beta map. The list of changes is long and impressive. Somebody spent some time on the project recently. But is that enough to make the beta map useful?
There are a pile of other small fixes that have gone into the August update. Details are available via the Patch Notes and the Updates page.
The update has been reported as successfully deployed, so it is all there waiting for us.
Still no music though. I guess the days of a new song with every update are over.
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