The Chaos Era continues in New Eden as CCP proceeds with the dual goals of making the game more difficult for veteran players while simultaneously attempting improve new player retention.
In my book the big item hitting the game for September is the cyno changes, which I mentioned previously. This has been summed up in the patch notes in a single sentence:
Cynosural Field Generator I now only able to be fit to Force Recon Ships and Black Ops Battleships.
Yesterday most of the 345 ships currently flyable in New Ede could have lit a cyno, the requirement having been just a high slot. Today it is down to nine. If you’re like me, you’re now stuck moving your capital ships around in fleet ops unless you are willing to blow a 300 million ISK force recon hull for every jump, or a billion ISK black ops hull. My solo trips in a cap are done, don’t undock what you cannot afford to lose being the iron law of New Eden and all.
No more of this frigate cyno stuff
The one set of hulls excused has been Jump Freighters. Initially CCP was simply going to allow them to use covert cynos, which had its own mix of good and bad. (Which needed Cyno V on your cyno alt as well as the ability to fly a covert ops ship, but exposure would be reduced.) That plan was changed (hopefully before people skill injected their cyno alts to Cyno V) and now there is a new cyno module just for jump freighters. Per the patch notes:
- Added Industrial Cynosural Field Generator.
- Can be fit by Industrials, Deep Space Transports and Blockade Runners.
- Industrial Cynosural Fields can be jumped to by Jump Freighters and Black Ops Battleships.
- Requires Cynosural Field Theory I to activate.
Industrials will be the new cyno ship for jump freighters. This will also keep cyno vigils a thing, though now vigils will be held in haulers, which seemed to be a major factor here. More room to hold fuel I guess. The odd bit is the addition of Black Ops ships to those being able to jump to the new cyno. I did not see a reason listed for that.
And so the chaos continues.
On the new player side of things, the big feature for September looks to be warning messages when players are fitting ships sub-optimally. There will now be four levels of warnings in the fittings window if you commit any of these fitting sins. The warnings are broken out into the following groups:
Crucial/Red if:
- The ship’s CPU is overloaded
- The ship’s Powergrid overloaded
- The ship’s Cargo is overloaded
- The ship is a Strategic Cruiser and is missing a subsystem
Warning/Yellow if:
- The ship has Invalid modules fitted (for example after a ship has been rebalanced or when swapping subsystems on a Strategic Cruiser)
- Some fitted Modules are not providing bonus (for example if you have a Magnetic Field Stabilizer fit but all your guns are projectiles turrets)
- Mixing turret groups
- Mixing turret sizes
- Mixing launcher groups
- Both Shield and Armor modules fitted
- Offline modules
Info/White if:
- Armor tanking a ship categorized as shield ship
- Shield tanking a ship categorized as armor ship
- Polarized weapons fitted
Skill warning if:
- Skills for the ship or fitted modules are missing
- Skills for items in the ships cargohold are missing
Hovering over the warnings will describe which tenant of ship fitting you have broken and highlight the offending modules.
Dual tanked Raven as an example
With this in place can we then assume all bad fits are on purpose?
Other items of note on the list of changes include the long promised warp timer. Previously tossed due to technical reasons, you can now only be kept from warping by bumping for three minutes:
Ships that bump while attempting to enter warp will now automatically enter warp if they remain in the pre-warp state for three minutes continuously. Scramblers or any other form of canceling the warp will reset this timer.
The out is that if the people bumping you are willing to sacrifice a rookie ship and a warp scram to CONCORD every two and a half minutes or so, they can still keep you stuck indefinitely. But if you’ve set yourself to warp in a belt and walked away, you’ll only bump off that asteroid in your way for three minutes… so long as belt rats don’t get you before then.
On the graphics side of things, there has been an update to graphics and shaders related to stars and wormholes. There was a dev blog about this, but I guess it can be quickly summed up in a graphic from that.
The before and after look
Wormhole graphics will also indicate the age and capacity of the wormhole, so capital capable wormholes will be visually distinctive from frigate sized holes.
There are, as always, lots of other small fixes and tweaks in the update. You can find details in the patch notes and on the updates page. Word is that the update has been deployed successfully.
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