Warp Speeds Raised in New Eden

Once upon a time, in the bygone days of New Eden, all ships entered warp with equal rapidity.  Once aligned you went to top speed pretty much up to your destination.

And then CCP decided this was wrong.  With the Rubicon expansion changes were made, and acceleration and deceleration were made part of the equation.  It was all covered in a dev blog, because of course it was. (More numbers over at EVE Uni.)

When battleship warps became really slow

This made traveling with battleships a painful process, as they were slow to accelerate, slow in warp, and slow to decelerate.  Moving bigger ships became annoying and there was no greater pariah than the person who brought a battlecruiser to a cruiser fleet, causing fleet warps to slow down to their level.

Today however CCP made a change.  There was a somewhat less than informative announcement that warp speeds had been changed.  It is short enough to quote in full:

Warp Drive Active – Warp Speed Changes Now Live!

Got somewhere to be in New Eden?

Every Cruiser, Battlecruiser and Battleship now warps faster than before.

Travelling via autopilot will also be faster now with the warp in distance changed from 15km to 10km.

Head into New Eden to find out more!

Fortunately, Reddit is there for us to figure out the changes.  At the top of the thread there is a post which lists out what changed generally, but I am going to steal a chart posted by Sticky Mess (whose flair says Suddenly Spaceships) which goes into finer detail.

Image credit: Sticky Mess

So subcaps from cruisers on up will now move faster in the warp stage of their travel.  People have been asking for this for a long time.  I guess after the Chaos Era CCP felt they needed to throw out a quality of life improvement for everybody.  Judging from the calculations, an increase in warp speed should also shave off some time at both the acceleration and deceleration ends of each warp.

The other interesting, but less discussed bit, was auto pilot warps now landing at 10km off their destination, down from 15km.  That number has been at 15km since I started playing EVE Online back in 2006. (Obligatory “I played before ‘warp to 0’ was a thing.”)  It has been that since forever so far as I know.

So what will that change mean?

Yes, auto pilot trips will now be shorter in duration.  Ships on auto pilot will now be exposed to attack for less time on each gate.  I suppose that will give scouts less time to scan them for ganks in high sec, though the window is still pretty large for that and ganks themselves seem to happen on the other side of the gate when ships are preparing to warp and bumping them can delay their departure.

Anyway, something new in New Eden today.