Quantum Cores Now Required in Upwell Structures

Today is the day that Quantum Cores are required for all Upwell structures that provide tethering.

There is 100 billion ISK in cores

Quantum Cores were introduced in a Dev Blog back in September of 2020 and the cores themselves were seeded into the game as part of a patch that month.

The schedule for their deployment to the game was

• Seeding – September 8, 2020
• Required for new structures – October 13, 2020
• Required for existing structures – January 12, 2021

Now that the final date has passed, any currently deployed Upwell structure without a Quantum Core will face the following restrictions:

• The structure will not provide any tethering support to nearby ships.
• The ship fitting service will be unavailable to any ships docked within the structure.
• The ship/module repair service will be unavailable to any ships docked within the structure.

In addition, any NEW structure that is deployed as of this date without a Quantum Core installed will remain in the onlining vulnerable stage where the hull HP layer is exposed and the structure is vulnerable to destruction.

So structures already out there will still require the usual pass through the armor and hull timers.  My mention of a possible new “happy time” of destruction yesterday was incorrect.

The idea behind Quantum Cores was to curtail some of the structure spam in New Eden… again… by making Upwell structures more expensive and awkward to deploy as well as providing an incentive for people to blow them up.

The first two come with the price and size of the cores, which have to be purchased and transported to the structure being deployed.

The Quantum Core Menu

Those prices inflate the cost of deploying structures significantly.  An Astrahus can be had for about 800 million ISK in Jita and a Raitaru just under 400 million.  And the high end, a Sotiyo is about 22 billion ISK in Jita (nobody sells Keepstars it seems) and the core adds another 10 billion on top of that.

The need to buy cores was part of the reason why the Imperium issued war bonds at the end of last year; there was a spike in our liquid ISK requirements.  Likewise, I mentioned that TEST was pulling down some structures in order to avoid having to spend the ISK to core them.  So they are having an impact of sorts.

As for the incentive, when you kill a structure the core drops 100% of the time and can be sold back to the NPC vendor for the full price it cost to buy, so there is a 600 million ISK incentive to blow up an Astrahus and 30 billion ISK incentive for a Keepstar.

A tidy sum if you can collect.

As for whether things will go as CCP plans, we shall see.  I am pretty sure people blow up structures already just for the joy and the kill mail.  And I know that making deploying a structure more expensive and awkward to deploy will keep some people from bothering.

But when I looked out on the array of structures in 1DQ1-A this morning on the main Keepstar grid and didn’t see a single one with the “CORE ABSENT” status, so if somebody was hoping the Imperium would be unanchoring structures they might be a bit disappointed.

Tales from New Eden – The Ghost Training GDC Presentation

Back at GDC 2018 up in San Francisco, CCP gave a presentation about the “ghost training” exploit that was introduced into EVE Online with free to play.  At the time this got some coverage, including over at Massively OP.  But to actually see the talk you had to be there or pay for access to the GDC recorded archives.

However, the GDC organizers post older presentations to their YouTube channel on a regular basis, and this session was posted in December so we are all free to watch it.

 

The presentation is just under an hour and opens with a few minutes of describing EVE Online before getting to the exploit.  It then unfolds with what the problem was and how CCP went to address it.

Interesting, and relatable to anybody in enterprise software, is how critical accurate and detailed steps to reproduce are, how unexpected results can come from interactions in complex and often aging systems, how the simple “just do this!” fix may not actually fix the issue (in this case it made things worse), and how assumptions about players/customers need to be validated.  That latter was especially important as the mood was “ban them all” both inside and outside of CCP because it was assumed this was primarily and deliberately being exploited by skill farm operators.

Some people were still banned, but the lighter approach the company chose to take meant that a range quite a few people remained customers after having their ghost training gains pointed out to them and given options to correct the situation.  In a game… in a genre… in an industry… where customer retention is vital for ongoing success, this seems like a wise approach.

A Glimpse of Anarchy

I wrote my 2018 MMO outlook post a few days in advance, as I tend to do with those sorts of end-of-year posts.  They lend themselves to stewing in the drafts folder for a while.  I think I only had 5 choices on the first draft.

So I had already been thinking about those titles for a bit, enough so that when I was sitting around on New Years Day I decided to poke my nose into one of them, a day before the post even went live.  I picked Anarchy Online for my pre-post peek, a game which has since stayed near the top of the poll results.

Anarchy Online is Loading…

I went to the web site for the game, made an account, downloaded the client, and got stuck into things.

As a pre-WoW MMORPG outside of the fantasy genre, I really wasn’t sure what to expect.  I can’t even recall having ever seen a screen shot from the game before I logged in.  And back in 2001 the conventions for even the simplest things… like how hot bars ought to work… were not yet set in stone.

Still, the first steps seemed familiar, as character creation hasn’t changed too much since A Bard’s Tale back in the 80s.  First up was race… or I guess breed in the case of AO.

Can I achieve best of breed?

I opted for the Solitus… the ones on the right… simply because they were the most human looking of the choices.  The others struck me as bordering on space elves, save for the space troll on the other end.

Then there was the bit of character customization.

Where I make myself look like a space elf anyway

That is some old school level of polygon count right there.  I think my head has as many facets as that old marmot model in WoW… which is still in game.

Then game the tough choice, that of which vocation to follow.  In fantasy your classes tend to shake out into three or four standard categories.  But what can one say of the future when the possibilities are limited only to the imagination?  And there was quite a list from which to choose.

Which path will you choose?

I could probably guess well enough at what a Trader or a Soldier or a Martial Artist or a Doctor might do, and even a Shade, or an Enforcer, or an Engineer hinted at what they might hold in store, but what is the Metaphysicist play style like, how does a Bureaucrat gain levels, and what is it that a Keeper keeps?

So I tabbed out and used Google to search on the best class for a new player and got Adventurer as the top result, so I went with that.

In search of adventure!

The description seemed to paint it as the jack of all trades class, so why not.  From there it was just a matter of giving my character a name and getting into the world.

With a game this old though, one expects that getting a reasonable name might be a chore, and doubly so when the game has had a free to play option for so long.  So I decided to let the name generator come up with some options for me.  Let it do the work.

The first name it rolled up was Sammy, which seemed suspiciously likely to have been taken.  But still, it was offering it to me, why not take it.

You will not be Sammy

However, when I tried to take the name it popped a window saying that the name have already been taken or was reserved.

I gave it another try, just in case that was a one-off error.  This time it threw up Bred as an option and, not unlike that time I threw up bread after a party, the results were not the best.

Nor will you be Bred

A pity, thinking that being Bred after choosing my breed was amusing.  Anyway, a couple more tries made it clear that the name generator does not in any way vet the availability of names it offers up, making its utility for a game of this age somewhat dubious.

So I put in one of my standard names, Tistann, which was accepted right away.  Go me.  Then it was off to my new life in the off world colonies on Rubi-Ka.

Behold the many splendors of Rubi-Ka

That splash screen belies what came next.  Rather than a glorious future on a modern new planet I was transported back nearly 20 years in time when polygon counts were low, UI design consisted of throwing windows about at random, and 1024×768 was deemed a large enough screen resolution for anybody’s needs.

Seriously, I went into the settings and told it how large my screen was and turned up all the other settings… or both of the other settings really.

No, I have a BIG screen… well, big for 2001…

But as you can see, all the screen shots are 1024×768 and the world is dark, grim, and full of the sharp edges of polygons.  Welcome to history.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t much of a tutorial.

Shift plus Click equals?

That is about all I saw, and I couldn’t get it to do anything, so I was left to the occasional pop-up tip and my own imagination as to how to proceed.

Of course, the first thing I had to do was figure out how to take screen shots.

Ironically, my first screen shot

And then I had to figure out where the game actually stored them, which was a bit more challenging.

I pottered around a bit with the UI.  I like that you can move almost every piece of it at need, though it does seem crowded in that resolution.  Still, it is better than 1999 EverQuest with its little square window view of the world in the middle of the UI.

I tried equipping the two melee weapons in my inventory and then attacking one of the many malfunctioning cleaning robots in the area, the obvious newbie fodder, but that did not go well and I died.

I then swapped to the two pistols they gave me and plinked away at a cleaning robot at range, which went better.  It was still a near run thing, but I lived and managed my first kill.  Something seemed amiss though, so I started digging through the skills.  This does seem to be a skill based game and there are lots of skills.

Skills to pay the bills… and kill the mobs…

I put points into ranged weapons and some defensive items.  I wasn’t sure how useful some skills would be, but I had a lot of skill points, so why not spend them?

Ducking explosions and thrown objects seems like an odd combo

With some shooting skill I was able to shoot up malfunctioning cleaning robots with abandon, boosting myself up quickly to level two.  I moved on a bit and took out a few more and a garbage flea, which got me up to level three.  High on that success I went after bigger game.

My attempts to take on the Cleanmeister Intelligence Robot… is that a named boss NPC… however did not go well.

The war on automation continues

I pulled back and the Cleanmeister let me go.  I settled down to rest and heal in the time honored tradition of the era, only to walk away from my desk then come back to find another garbage flea, no doubt avenging a fallen comrade, had slain me.  Oh well.

That was enough of a preview, so I logged out. (Though I did go back in later to take a few of these screen shots.)  While the summary sounds like I spent about five minutes with the game, that all transpired over the course of a few hours.

It was an interesting glimpse back into the past and, while I am sure Funcom has updated a lot since the game launched, it still feels very much like a game of its era.

At this point I am not saying that Anarchy Online will be my eventual pick to play seriously for a at least a month later this year, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.

Meanwhile, if you want to read about another game from my list, Jeromai has an excellent post up about a return to A Tale in the Desert.  Another game that looks to be still a part of the time from which it came.

Falling Back in Catch

CCP is going to try to fix the 4-07 system in 10 minutes. You will be booted. get safe

-Ping from last night

I had the flu… or a cold… or whatever the mucus based eldritch horror that was going around the office was… last week and through the weekend which, among other things, altered my video game activities.  So while there has been a war going on in Catch, of which I wrote previously, I haven’t had the wherewithal to go out on fleet ops.  Instead I have been playing things that are… interruptible… or which at least don’t require a three hour window of time.

I think I spent most of Saturday either napping or slumped sideways at my computer playing Minecraft and listening to an audio book, and that was done in part just to be upright so things would drain.

But the war has gone on without me.  Over at The Nosy Gamer there have been some regular updates as to changes in sovereignty and such, mostly collected under the Winter War 2017 tag.  Stuff has happened, including some awkward stuff.

As noted in a post over at Imperium News, a tackle on a TEST Leviathan was offset when an Imperium Ragnarok pilot hit “jump” instead of “bridge,” the classic bridging titan screw up, giving both sides a titan kill for the evening.

Picture source: unknown

The evening’s fun was further complicated when Imperium forces went to extract their capital forces only to find that Against All Authorities, an absentee (and long standing anti-Goon) part of the Stainwagon Coalition, had put up a cyno jamming array in HY-RWO, a system which we had been using as a waypoint for capital operations.  We had to pile in some dreadnoughts to blow up this new bit of system infrastructure as we couldn’t get anybody from AAA to respond.

This led to a quick fireside chat yesterday where The Mittani explained the situation and that our response was going to be to pull back away from AAA’s territory and back towards Querious to cover the approaches there.  The whole thing was summed up in a modified piece of a comic from The Oatmeal which even The Mittani tweeted out as a representation of what happened.

Nope!

We were no longer going to stage in central Catch and AAA could lose all their space.  Capitals would fall back to the gates of Qeurious while subcaps would be heading home.  So when I was finally feeling well enough for fleet ops again it was time to pack up my subcaps and head back to Delve.

So it was time to get myself setup for the return.  I had three ships to move and only two pilots.

Asher solved the extra ship problem by offering up space in his titan to Reavers, so I was able to hand over the Cerberus for him to carry back.  He also carried it out for me and I never actually flew it during the deployment.

The Cerb secured, I got myself setup in the Guradian I had in EX6-AO, loaded it up with anything I left in the citadel, and then logged in my alt so he could fly my Scimitar back with the move op fleet.

Only I had forgotten that he had not set his death clone of EX6, so when he got blown up back at the Fortizar battle in F4R2-Q, he ended up back in Delve.  I hadn’t bothered to get him back out to Catch and now the move op was about an hour away.  It was time to get him moving.  But how to get him out there without ending up with yet another ship to move back and without building up too much jump fatigue?

I realized that he still had a Clownshoe fit Sigil, the Amarr industrial we were using (along with the Nereus) as very annoying entosis ships back during the Casino War.  The Sigil warps fast, has a huge tank with a lot of passive regen in the Clownshoe fit, and would reduce any jump fatigue by 90%.  So I stripped out any excess modules and cargo, including the entosis module and all the stront, and headed off to the system with the jump bridge.

The Sigil proved its worth as I managed to get past a Pandemic Legion gate camp in T5ZI-S consisting of a Taranis, a Sabre, and a Kirin, along with several drag bubbles, that I managed to blunder into and escape from… though I am not sure if that is an endorsement of the Sigil or a rebuke of the gate camp’s competence.  They chased me to the jump bridge system but I kept out of their reach.

Once there I flew to the last system in Querious, parked the Sigil in the citadel there, installed a jump clone, and then docked up in the station in the system, which caused Pend Insurance to issue me an Ibis because I was docking in a station and had no ship available.  Free corvettes are still a thing you don’t get in citadels.

From there I flew the dozen jumps to EX6-AO successfully, avoiding a couple neutrals and a trio of CO2 interceptors, a Taranis, a Raptor, and another one I forget at the moment, one of which will come into play later in this narrative.

Happily at my destination, I docked up in the Fortizar, handed over the Scimitar to my alt, and waited for the move op to begin.

Once it got pinged I joined up.  Due to the usual confusion where at least 10% of any group never sees the ping or gets the instructions passed to them, the fleet filled up and there were lots of questions about moving caps.  That eventually led to us undocking and covering the gate to HY-RWO so a bunch of capitals could come to EX6 and either use the Fortizar there or jump to 4-07MU where another Fortizar was available.

Of course, it was about that time that a ping went out to indicate that there were problems in 4-07MU.  People in the Fortizar were having strange issues, couldn’t undock, had problems with modules, and other ailments.  Anybody jumping to the system was advised not to dock at the Fortizar, though tethering was okay, while people at the coalition level started trying to find somebody from CCP to look at the problem.  There was also a report on intel about TEST moving a capital fleet at about that time, an opportunity that passed because key people were stuck in the broken Fortizar.  Or so I heard.

After covering the caps, we moved off on our way back to Delve, out destination being 4-07MU.  That coincided with an update that CCP was going to bring 4-07MU down and back up again, which was broadcast as the ping at the top of this post.  Our estimated time of arrival at 4-07MU was going to coincide with that because or course it did.  Later The Mittani was on our coms and heard about that, among many other odd turns of event, and thought maybe we should give up on any current names and just call the whole thing “Murphy’s War” after the well known law that seems to govern, among other things, life in New Eden.

Otherwise though, it was a move op.  A slow move op, with battleships in tow, so we were limited to warping a 2.0 AU/sec, but a move op.  Jump through the gate, align to the next gate, wait for the fleet warp, do it all again.

The fleet ball warping yet again

But every op needs “that guy” who becomes the comedy star of the show.  It has been me on past occasions.  That night it was Parvulus Dei from the corp Into the Fray.

As we were moving along he called out on coms that he had made a mistake a jump or two back and had accidentally warp to the sun in his Rokh.  While there he reported that he had been tackled by a Probe, which is the Minmatar tech I scanning frigate.

Questions abounded about how he had managed this feat and Asher told him that since we had moved on he was on his own unless somebody in a small ship wanted to run back and save him.  We moved on our slow way while getting updates from him and from a couple of people who decided to run back and give him a hand.

After a chunk of time had passed… much more time that one would imagine would be needed to notice this… Parvulus Dei amended his status to indicate that he had, in fact, been tackled by a Taranis, a Gallente interceptor, and a considerably different ship in almost all regards.  This just made laughter and speculation swell on coms as people tried to figure out how one could mistake a Probe for a Taranis.  One guess was that he saw a combat probe on his overview, another was that the ship was named “Probe,” but I cannot recall if we ever got a definitive answer on this.

Help did reach him in time and the Probe-Taranis was blown up.  It turned out to be one of the CO2 interceptors I had seen coming out and had duly reported on the intel channel, complete with names and ship types, as being in that very system.  I don’t know what happened to the other two.

For the rest of the fleet there were ongoing jokes referencing Parvulus Dei and his side trip.  He caught up with us around the 4-07MU gate, where we had to wait as we did, in fact, arrive just as CCP took the system down.  Parvulus took this all very well and spoke up when somebody wanted to know who this had happened to and so on.  The only way to deal with being “that guy” is to just roll with it until it wears out.

Once we heard that the 4-07MU system was back up we did the prudent thing and just sent a couple of ships in to make sure it was working okay.

Hah hah!  No we didn’t, we shoved the whole 250 person fleet through the gate as soon as we possibly could before wondering whether or not that was really a good idea.

As it turned out, everything was fine.  We headed off to Querious and the jump bridge that would land us a couple of gates from home.  Along the way we drove off a gate camp with a few bubbles trying to catch people coming back solo.  After that we took the last gate, docked up in the Keepstar and called it “Op Success!”  Asher even gave us a PAP, which after getting 11 from him already this month seemed like a bit much, but maybe they hadn’t rained so generously on others.

Now I just have to go back and pick up that Sigil at some point.

YC119.1 Update Deployed Successfully

Changes were made and the update was deployed and the world kept on turning.

This time for sure!

That last bit is quite literally so, as you will find this item in the patch notes:

Astro-Oil has been diligently applied to the rotational axes of temperate planets, allowing them to once again rotate freely.

No doubt some new religious sect has spawned somewhere in Amarr space based on this and some new tract will include a passage similar to Joshua 10:13.

As I noted on Tuesday when the patch had to be rolled back, there isn’t much in the way of new features in the drop.  It is mostly fixes and adjustments, which is fine.  I doubt anybody is going to claim there are not things in New Eden that need fixing or adjustment.  The updates page adds in a couple of SKIN lines that will be available in the New Eden Store at a later date, including the Nova SKINs for Mordu’s Legion ships.

Hot Surface Warning Markings on Mordu’s Frying Pan

And then there is a song, because there is always a song.