Friday Bullet Points with a Sore Arm

It is time for some bullet points again.  My arm is sore because I managed to get my first COVID-19 vaccine shot this week.  How easy it is to get an appointment for a shot varies from place to place, but here in Silicon Valley it was rather like trying to get Madonna or Lady Gaga concert tickets… only there were about half a dozen different web sites to check.  The state had one, my healthcare provider another, and then a few different store chains with their own.

Several times I had an appointment slot, but by the time I filled out the necessary form, all the appointments had been taken.  I finally lucked out on Safeway’s site and ended up getting my first shot on Wednesday at the store I worked at back in college.

I’m a bit tired still, which is a common side effect, and my left arm hurts.  But I still have enough in me to write up some bullet points.

• Diablo II Resurrected Alpha

We first officially heard about Diablo II Resurrected at BlizzConline back in February, with a promise that it would ship at some point in 2021.  This weekend is the start of the technical alpha and it is getting some buzz.

The testing has begun

Some of the buzz is due to Blizz doing a give-away for access, but there does seem to be some general excitement about the remaster of this classic ARPG.  For this stage those invited to participate will be able to play the amazon, sorceress, or barbarian, single player, through acts one and two, with no level cap restrictions.  Acts one and two are the best of the game, so I am feeling a bit jealous that I opted in for testing and didn’t get picked. (Invites were all sent by 7am PDT and there was nothing for me.)  But I’ll be able to play soon enough I guess.

• Enad Global 7 Completes Another Acquisition

I alluded to the fact that EG7 was buying another studio in my EverQuest at 22 post in March because Daybreak titles are now highlighted when EG7 speaks about the IPs they have.  They have now closed the deal, announced back in February, to acquire Innova, a publisher that runs MMORPGs in the EU and Russia.  The price was 109 million Euros (and not $109 million as was reported elsewhere.)

Crowfall released in 2018? Who knew?

While the titles they have listed do not excite me, Daybreak having access to people on the ground to run games further afield than the greater San Diego metropolitan area might mean something good for them in the long term.  It would certainly be a better plan than selling their players to Pro.SiebenSat.1 or the like.

• CCP Talks About A Shooter They’re Not Talking About

About two years back CCP said that their planned shooter, Project Nova, which they had been hyping up as late as EVE Vegas 2018, when we were encouraged to sign up for alpha, was going into a transitional stage.  It was going to get a new name and they would not be telling us the name or talking about it until it was ready.

Project Nova no more

Well, now CCP is talking about it, whatever it is now, again.  Sort of.  There are no details, but the new head of the UK studio that is working on the project, Adrian Blunt, gave an interview where he brags that they’re working on a “hugely ambitious” and possibly “genre defining” shooter.  The Nosy Gamer took a look at the whole thing and, so far as I can tell, the only solid information was that 40 people are working on the project.  I’ll be impressed when they have something to actually demo.

• Runes of Magic has More Things for You

I wrote a bit about Runes of Magic and their twelfth anniversary on Monday, and they were soon back with an addition.  Later that day a message arrived with an offer of more goodies.

You actually have no idea how fast I have leveled up ever

Clicking on the “collect your gifts” link got me to a page that said they had given me a advanced experience charm, a potion of some sort, and 250 gold.  However, where all of that was delivered remains a bit of a mystery.  It wasn’t on my character on the super new EU server.  A friend suggested that it might be a US server thing, but it wasn’t on my character there.

At this point I suspect it went to my old account, which I mentioned they managed to block me from accessing, so the charm and the potion are probably hanging out with my lost diamonds wondering when I will return.

And that is all I have.  I get to head back for my second vaccine shot on the 28th.  Until then, I am still staying home and safe.

Log In To EVE Online for Generosity Celebration SKINs… also Surgical Strike is Coming

CCP has decided to celebrate the fact that capsuleers have raised well over half a million dollars in the various PLEX for Good campaigns over the years, with the most recent having kicked off last week in support of the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

The celebration takes the form of a login event running from downtime on April 9th until downtime on April 16th with SKINs and other rewards for those who log in.

Generosity with SKINs

Alpha Clones who log in will get the Frontier Safeguarder SKIN for the Osprey, Augoror, Scythe and Exequror.

Omega Clones will get those SKINs, as well as crates that may provide random Agency Combat Boosters, a random T2 Logistics Cruiser Frontier Safeguarder SKIN, a random Force Auxiliary Frontier Safeguarder SKIN, and another random Frontier Safeguarder SKIN for T2 Cruisers or Force Auxiliaries.

There are only four days of rewards, so you do not have to log in every single day for a week.  Just any four days in the range will get you there.

Day one of gifts

Since I love SKINs and fly logi and have donated to several of the PLEX for Good campaigns, I am all in on this.

Beware though when you claim your gifts.  CCP has a little change-up in how things work and, judging by surprised player (and CCP) responses, this was not communicated well.  When you redeem the gift, the SKIN is activated for the character on which you redeem it.  It won’t drop into your hangar, there will be no little red dot in your inventory, you can’t hand it over to an alt, it is staying where it is redeemed.

The tool tip confirms that this is expected behavior.

Activated on redemption

So don’t redeem this on your Jita alt expecting to sell it.  You’ll just end up with a sales alt with a nice SKIN they will probably never use.  Some people are saying that they didn’t get the SKIN, but it isn’t clear if they noticed the tool tip.  One sure way to check is to go to your SKINs inventory in your character sheet.

Where your SKIN ends up

While this does diminish my need to collect these SKINs on my random alpha clones… I have two characters on my main account that would use the Osprey SKIN and can’t hand them over… I’ll still go grab them all the same.  You never know when an alt might rise.

And if those aren’t enough SKINs for you, CCP has some new ones for Guristas hulls in the store and others on sale.  SKINs for everybody.

We can collect those while we wait for next week’s Surgical Strike update.

I didn’t do a post about that announcement because I had another post queued up and because there were enough questions raised that I figured I ought to wait until CCP came back to clarify and adjust, which they did.   We’ll get those changes as a follow on patch, but they are planned.

Overall though, I am in favor of more spaceships exploding… and nerfing Munnins… but there will be some adjustment time after the update hits.

CCP has also been talking to MMORPG.com about how they have shaken up their development process since the Chaos Era.

The EVE Online April Update Brings Capital Nerfs

The April update is here and we had been warned that big things were coming.

The first item on the list is the change to remote repairs that gives them diminishing returns, so that the more reps on a target the less effective each rep becomes as the number or reps increases.

Call a fax nerf a fax nerf

There was a whole dev blog released about upcoming changes for April, and this was at the top of the list.  The idea is to have more capital ships die by once again trying to nerf faxes.  We’ve been here before, as the Onslaught expansion nerfed faxes last November.

While this change also affects sub capital reps as well, CCP has charts to prove that the impact on them should be minimal compared to the hit to force auxiliaries.

Also on the capital front, the dev blog above also contains some nerfs to how well they can apply damage to sub caps.  High angle weapons (read: anti sub cap weapons) are being nerfed in order to make titans less able to kill sub caps with impunity, while boosting their effectiveness when used with a siege module, to keep dreadnoughts in the game against subs.

Also, damage application for fighters is being nerfed, which I imagine will have an impact on both the effectiveness of carriers and super carries at gate camps as well as for anomaly ratting.

And, with anomaly ratting being mentioned, there is once again this line in the patch notes:

Adjustments have been made to the respawn rates of certain nullsec anomalies. These adjustments are part of a gradual ongoing process that will see further tweaks for this type of content.

As I mentioned in reference to last month’s economic report, they are still tinkering with anomalies and ratting to try and stem some of the flow of ISK.

Ratting is also a passing focus of the sub cap rebalance, which nerfs the Vexor Navy Issue, everybody’s favorite forsaken hub runner, by removing its drone velocity buff and increasing its signature radius.

Finally on the economic front, there are a few hits against Rorqual mining.

• Reduced the bonus to shield boost amount provided by the Industrial Core to 60% for T1 Industrial Cores and 75% for T2 (was 120% and 140% respectively)
• Reduced the base duration of the PANIC module to 4 minutes (was 5 minutes)
• Increased the bonus to mining foreman burst strength provided by the Industrial Core to 30% for T1 Cores and 36% for T2 (was 25% and 30% respectively)
• ‘Excavator’ Mining Drone base mining yield decreased to 80m3 (was 100m3)
• ‘Excavator’ Ice Harvesting Drone base cycle time slowed to 310s (was 250s)
• Excavator drone volume increased to 1100m3 (was 750m3) and Rorqual drone bay volume increased to 8800m3 (was 6000m3)

Mining yield and cycle time are easy to see as attempts to slow down the voracious null sec Rorquals. Likewise, reducing the duration to the PANIC module makes a Rorqual more likely to die.

The size of excavator drones however, that is an attempt to get a side effect.  Right now if your Rorqual gets dropped on you drop a mobile depot and put your excavator drones in there.  Those drones are expensive and that helps mitigate the loss of your ship.  Making them bigger means you can’t hide as many, meaning if your Rorqual gets destroyed you’ll lose some excavators making the loss more expensive.

Meanwhile, if the Rorqual is shepherding sub cap mining ships, they’ll be more vulnerable but will have better mining yields.

So that is the capital and economy themes of the patch, but that isn’t all.

On the war declarations front there are updates (covered in this dev blog) to close the neutral assist loophole.

• Neutral remote assistance will now cause a criminal timer and CONCORD response when applied to an active war declaration combat participant or limited engagement participant in highsec space
• Command bursts deployed by neutral characters will no longer apply any bonuses to active war declaration combat participants in highsec space

Then there is the rest of the sub cap rebalance which nerfs the popular Ferox some and improves medium beam lasers so maybe the long neglected Harbinger, which also got an increase to its power grid, will see some use in fleets.

The Harbinger is the screen shot used for the sub cap rebalance

And the patch notes keep on going.  There are some graphical updates to station hangars (mood lighting), the monument to commemorate Katia Sai’s journey has now been deployed in the Saisio system, and the planet at Yulai IX has been named “Kjarval” to honor the long service of CCP Guard who recently left CCP to pursue another dream.

Missing from the patch notes, but called out in the Spring update dev blog, were changes to insurance.  It is not uncommon for CCP to miss something, but that is kind of a big item to omit.

There are more details, but I think those are the highlights of the update.  That is certainly all I am going to bother calling out.  Now we will just have to wait and see if any of this changes the meta.  I personally want to fly a Harbinger because I like lasers.

News of the successful deployment of the update went out earlier today.  For all the details that CCP opted to share you can read through the patch notes or take a look at the updates page.

Delve – Now With Contract Values

The Monthly Economic Report for March dropped on Friday and contains all the usual fun data to peruse.  This is the first MER since CCP Quant left the company, so we get to blame any errors on the new minder of the report, CCP Larrikin. (We’ll get to that.)

Going down the usual path I want to look at mining first.

March 2018 – Mining Value by Region

Mining value was up in Delve by almost a trillion ISK.  This came in the face of sagging mineral prices in the market overall.

March 2018 – Economic Indices

That means that there was just more mining going on in Delve, likely related to the ever expanding moon mining operations in the region, all of which left Delve at the top of the stack again.

March 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Of note are the rather static month over month value of Querious.  I was wondering if that might go up due to Locust Fleet, the attempt to mine out all of the moon mining operations in a single day.  Perhaps that did not go as well as planned.  I heard it was of to a rough start, but did well enough to carry on again this month, running yesterday.  We’ll look back again next month to see if that raises Querious.

Also of note are the falling mining output numbers for Fade, Pure Blind, and Deklein, regions in the north that have been hunted by several Imperium SIGs.  They are all down noticeably over last month, more so than the dip in prices would explain. With the departure of Pandemic Horde for Geminate, the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition has pretty much ceded the staging systems being used against them and has adopted a defensive posture, allowing the Imperium to do its fighting on their home turf, inhibiting mining and ratting operations in those regions.

And since we’re on about that, I might as well move to NPC bounty payouts where, as expected, Delve remains at the top.

March 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

The change is moderate, up about a trillion ISK for Delve… what a world when that much ISK is a moderate change… so holds its place in the stack ranking.

March 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

As noted above, the regions in the north being stalked by Imperium forces saw some impact.  Deklein, once number three on the list, fell back to fifth, having shed nearly a trillion ISK from its 3.6 trillion ISK February number.  In this case a trillion ISK represents more than a 25% drop.  Likewise, Fade saw a significant drop, while Pure Blind wasn’t hurt too bad, but its February number wasn’t that hot to begin with.

As usual, null sec remained the prime recipient of NPC bounties, with its percentage dropping a bit, from 93.3% last month to 93.1% this month.

March 2018 – Bounties by Space Sec Rating

Overall however bounties saw a noticeable dip on the sinks and faucets chart during March, though it recovered somewhat by the end of the month.

March 2018 – Top 8 ISK Sinks and Faucets

I am not sure what was going on during that part of the month, but overall NPC bounties are down some.

On the production front Delve saw a huge surge in March, jumping from 29 trillion ISK in value in February to just past 40 trillion ISK last month.

March 2018 – Production Values by Region

This surge managed to push Delve past The Forge, the region that is home to Jita, in total production value.

March 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

That is quite an accomplishment but, as I have noted in the past, Jita sits at the intersection of three regions, The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel, so production centered on the marked hub of New Eden still exceeds Delve overall.  Still, the Imperium is building a lot of stuff as The Mittani encourages people to train into titans.

On the trade value front The Forge remains dominate.  There is a reason manufacturing is clustered around there, it is the place to sell things.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region

The dominance of The Forge and its Jita market nexus is made starkly clear by the bar graph.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

The next two contenders, Domain, home to Amarr, and Delve, fade in comparison to such an extent that CCP provides the same graph without The Forge every month, just so you can see how the rest of New Eden compares.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

There you can see how the other regions compare to each other when the shadow of The Forge is removed.

This month we got an additional insight into trade when CCP Larrikin added charts about the value of contract transactions per region.  Unfortunately, the main chart appears to have problems.  It is not labelled correctly (it just says trade value by regions) and the number for The Forge is clearly wrong. (Blame assigned.)  However, the accompanying bar chart appears to be correct both in labeling and data, so I will toss that in.

March 2018 – Contracts Trade Value by Region – Bar Chart

Here The Forge is still on top, but Delve is not too far behind.  This is likely due to the fact that doctrine ships are generally purchased by line members assembled and loaded via contract and because capital and super capital purchases are also often done by contract.

Finally, I will end on the usual chart, the comparison of various stats across key regions.

March 2018 – Regional Summary Stats

Things to look for next month:

• Will Fade, Pure Blind, and Deklein remain down?
• Will the Space Violence SIG showing up in the north push them down further?
• Will the “Bee Control” attacks on Delve suppress its numbers?
• Will the Locust Fleet boost Querious mining?
• Will Delve production remain this high?
• Am I going to have to bring up Fountain at some point?

Anyway, that is my look at the New Eden Monthly Economic Report.  The report itself has many more charts and the raw data on which they were based, so if numbers are your thing you should go take a look.  Over at INN they have taken the raw data and rolled a few of their own graphs, if you want to see some of the data presented in a different way.