Last Chance to Vote in the CSM16 Elections

The polls will remain open for the CSM16 election until downtime, 11:00 UTC, June 15th, which gives you a little more that a day to get your vote in from the time this post goes live.  For instructions on how to vote please visit the CCP dev blog on the election.

CSM16 election are under way

As I have noted… pretty much constantly since the idea was announced… the Council of Stellar Management is not the best way to pick a player advisory group, but it is the method we have available to us, so you should take a bit of time to vote.  And it is better than what most MMORPGs have.

I suppose it says something about EVE Online that people can be known well enough in the game for CCP to be able to hold elections.  Imagine this sort of thing in WoW or any other game that is chopped up into servers, separated by regions, and offers content that caps out at maybe 40 people.  Then again, I assure you that if you went up to a random player in high sec and mentioned the most famous player in New Eden, whoever you felt that was, the likely response would be, “Who?”

Anyway, if you don’t know who to vote for CCP has a candidate page.  I also wrote up a post about the candidates where I tried to sort them out into different categories.  There is a good table of candidates over in r/eve, which includes the important “cat ears” support column.  And, if you want to see how others are voting, there is a post about the various bloc ballots at The Nosy Gamer.

All said, time is running out.  Go vote now if you have not done so already.  No candidate is going to be able to make CCP do anything, which we have proven 15 times over at this point, but you might be picking the person who can talk CCP off the ledge of some game breaking idea.

EQ Aradune Server and Trading One Problem for Another

I almost wrote a post this past week about how queue times had disappeared from the EverQuest Aradune server.  After all, that was the problem when it launched late last month, the problem that Daybreak was focused on addressing.

Nostalgia is live

Unfortunately, in opening up the server to allow more people to get into the game led to different problems.  Something is always the bottleneck, so when you fix one you often end up finding the next one.

In this case, people could log into the game, but moving between zones began to take as much as 15 minutes at times and often simply led to the game client getting disconnected or crashing.  Tipa declared her Aradune adventures over based on this state of the game.

The cure seeming worse than the disease, Daybreak announced that they were rolling back the population cap increase and would be working on server stability.

We wanted to update players on Aradune with some changes made recently. Since launch we have been working on solving the issues with server performance that has affected game play for many of you. In the interim we have reduced the server capacity slightly as a short term fix. Disconnects while zoning have been greatly reduced, and some of the sources of crashes while zoning will be addressed in the upcoming June update.

While the server is at a reduced capacity it is likely that you might see a queue during peak times, we know this can be frustrating and thank you for your patience while we continue to work on the outstanding issues.

So the server is back to queues again.  Those are more palatable than problems once you are in the game.  Tipa even suggested that she might return to Aradune, since queues were at least a consistent issue to deal with.

Darkpaw Games studio head Jenn Chan also put out a note to the EQ community (and the EQ2 community as well) last week about the problems that had hit their games last month when they did the server merges and add the new servers.  Players of both games got something for the problems.

So it goes.

On the bright side, being too popular to handle all the people who want to play on a new server is a good problem for a 21 year old game to have.

Waiting for Flying and Leveling Up

We have slowly been getting bits and pieces of information about the World of Warcraft 8.2 Rise of Azshara patch.  Blizzard has released some info of its own accord while a lot more has been data mined from content on the public test realm.

The 8.2 update splash screen

What hasn’t come out way is an actual date for the patch.  I was hoping we would see it this month, but we’re almost to the mid-point already without a word.  To my mind June works well because we haven’t had a big drop in a while, it coincides with the tail end of the six month period that Blizzard locked a bunch of people into with that special mount offer, and it is far enough out in front of the late August release of WoW Classic that some of us can get in there, get flying, and be ready to swap to the old school.

However, what I think doesn’t necessarily mean anything down in Irvine.  Blizzard will move at its own pace, which is both a luxury it enjoys as well as being a bit of a curse.

While we have been waiting I have finished up all of the prerequisites for unlocking flying.  I am exalted with everybody, the ilevel on my main is high enough that mobs in the world are easy again.  I am well over that hump.  Feeling done there, I am on to some alts.  I think all of my level 110s are at least 111 now due to various activities, but I went all in with my hunter, traditionally my main alt, and got him up to the level cap.

Tistann to level 120

I leveled him up the straightforward way, through the quest content in the expansion.  And, as with my first run through that, there clearly hit a point around level 118 where the mobs out in world were clearly getting a lot tougher relative to my own power.  Up until that point just upgrading with the gear awarded by quests was enough to keep me feeling viable, but then there is that jump for the NPCs and suddenly one add is a disaster and you wonder if something has gone really wrong with your play style.

But it isn’t you, it is the game.  I still don’t know why Blizz thinks this is a good idea, but there it is.

I did start lining up some upgrade gear for level cap as I went along.  As it turns out leather working now yields a ranged weapon, and my hunter does skinning and leather working, so I was ready to go with that.

I made myself useful gear in WoW?!?!

Fortunately the hunter class, at least in beast mastery, is somewhat resilient to bad situations.  You can always sacrifice your pet and run away or feign death.  You do spend a lot of time healing your pets… and I oddly found my tanking pets harder to keep alive than my DPS pets… but you can power through.

Once up to level 120 I was able to start gearing him up via world quests and he is pretty much over the hump and back to feeling a bit more powerful in the world.

Such is not the case with my feral druid.

As I mentioned in a past post, my druid was my first alt to 120, and I did that entirely via pet battles.  That was a mistake.

I decided to see if I could get some world quests done with the druid and, as it turns out, being level 120 with all your 110 gear is not at all viable.  Running around in cat form makes you a bit squishy to start with, but this made even single NPCs a dodgy proposition.

Of course, I figured it could just be me.  I read up on Icy Veins, got an addon to help with my combat rotation, and I still managed to die horrible way too often.  Gear upgrades via my hunter did not tip the balance.  My druid is stuck at the bottom of an ilevel hill and working my way out of it feels like more effort than I want to expend.  It could still just be me being bad, but I have leveled him up normally in the past.

However, he might just be a pet battle character from now on.

I do have a couple of tougher alts, a DK and a warrior, that might be options.  But I am not sure I am feeling it for leveling up again at the moment.  Knowing that hill is waiting for me around level 118 is a disincentive to dig into that again.

Summer Movie League – Hotel Arsonist

Week two of the Summer Fantasy Movie League and we get to see how the first eagerly awaited title of the season came along.

It was an interesting mix this week with a variety of anchor choices both old and new to choose from.  The lineup looked like this:

Ocean's 8               $626
Hereditary              $219
Solo                    $218
Deadpool 2              $201
Hotel Artemis           $138
Avengers: Infinity War  $93
Adrift                  $89
Book Club               $67
Upgrade                 $32
Life of the Party       $31
Breaking In             $24
Overboard               $16
A Quiet Place           $16
Action Point            $15
RBG                     $11

Ocean’s 8 was the big new title for the week, and while not expected to be a blockbuster, it was clearly set to top the week.

After that there was a range of options from the new slow burn horror film Hereditary, to multi-week retreads Deadpool 2 and Solo, to Hotel Artemis… which is referenced in this week’s title.

Yeah, things did not go well for Hotel Artemis this week.  While priced to exceed The Avengers it in fact was much closer to Upgrade in value when the final numbers, making it about $80 over priced.

Fortunately for me, I was in no way tempted by Hotel Artemis.  Likewise I was down on Solo as well.  That was not going to be my anchor.  Instead I was juggling around options with Ocean’s 8, Hereditary, and Deadpool 2 looking for the right mix.

As I said in last week’s post, for the Monday Hot Takes league I was in on Hereditary largely due to Liore’s enthusiasm for it.  However, as the week went on my enthusiasm for the title waned and I was weighing Ocean’s 8 versus Deadpool 2.  Eventually I split the difference, and for the TAGN league I anchored on Deadpool 2 while I used an Ocean’s 8 lineup in another league.

With three screens of Deadpool 2 I had enough room for four screens of The Avengers and one of Breaking In.  That was my choice.

Summer Movie League – My Week One Pick

And then the perfect pick ended up being anchored on Solo.

Not that my lineup was horrible.  Without bonuses it was the 7th best lineup possible.  But Solo was the anchor for the top lineup, which was 2x Solo and 6x The Avengers, both with and without bonuses.

That left the scores for the week looking like this:

1. Goat Water Picture Palace – $74,929,344
2. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $72,843,102
3. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $72,531,960
4. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $70,582,538
5. I HAS BAD TASTE – $67,754,584
6. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $67,524,560
7. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $67,243,494
8. Too Orangey For Crows – $66,626,858
9. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $65,429,411
10. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $65,429,411
11. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $64,018,260
12. Bean Movie Burrito – $62,986,713
13. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $62,969,256
14. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $62,969,256
15. Kraut Screens – $62,896,688
16. grannanj’s Cineplex – $56,064,376
17. aria82’s Cineplex – $55,104,817
18. JHW’s Cineplex – $27,370,850
19. Joanie’s Joint – $23,682,815
20. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre – $21,856,990 (did not copy picks)
21. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $20,978,053 (did not pick)
22. DumCheese’s Cineplex – $10,480,818 (did not pick)

Goat got the perfect pick which, even without bonuses put him at the top of the list for the week, while my 7th best got me into second.

The top half of the list was a mix of picks anchored on Solo, Hereditary, Deadpool 2, and Ocean’s 8.  The pricing on those was good enough to keep a variety of picks competitive in the no bonuses game.

Hotel Artemis however.  Joanie’s Joint was all in on Hotel Artemis and paid the price.  A tough week for Jodie Foster fans.

And then there is DumCheese.  At first glance I thought he picked this week, his lineup being 2x Upgrade and 6x Action Point.  It took me a bit to realize that this was his pick from last week which had rolled over.  It just looked different because last week Action Point was the anchor while this week it had been devalued so much that Upgrade was worth more.  Strange days.

So into the second week the overall lineup looks like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $145,366,336
2. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $143,454,008
3. Goat Water Picture Palace – $137,953,188
4. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $137,479,475
5. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $134,307,401
6. Too Orangey For Crows – $133,531,136
7. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $132,363,247
8. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $130,537,531
9. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $128,707,980
10. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $126,171,761
11. Kraut Screens – $126,047,334
12. Bean Movie Burrito – $125,552,918
13. I HAS BAD TASTE – $125,226,763
14. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $122,328,210
15. aria82’s Cineplex – $121,483,595
16. grannanj’s Cineplex – $118,611,195
17. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $111,168,339
18. Joanie’s Joint – $85,803,863
19. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre – $78,851,830
20. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $76,087,549
21. JHW’s Cineplex – $69,480,658
22. DumCheese’s Cineplex – $34,163,612

I have managed to hold on to first place… so still rigged… but the gap between me and the the middle of the pack is only $20 million, something a big week could make disappear with the right (or wrong) picks.  And speaking of big weeks, we are finally getting one.  Week three has a blockbuster anchor showing up, with the options as:

Incredibles 2 FRI       $521
Incredibles 2 SAT       $427
Incredibles 2 SUN       $350
Ocean's 8               $201
Tag                     $145
Solo                    $89
Deadpool 2              $78
Superfly                $71
Hereditary              $62
Avengers: Infinity War  $48 
Adrift                  $26
Book Club               $25
Hotel Artemis           $13
Upgrade                 $11
Life of the Party       $11

The Incredibles 2 is on the scene and split across three days as it is expected to bring in… more than Solo did on its opening weekend. Also new on the scene are Tag and Superfly.

All of that meant somebody had to get dropped, and so we say farewell for now to Breaking In, Overboard, A Quiet Place, Action Point, and RBG.

As for what to pick… well, as I have said in the past, if the pricing was perfect just spending your full $1000 budget would be enough.  But we know pricing is imperfect, some times comically so.

For this weekend you have to be at least seriously considering a lineup anchored on one day, if not two, of The Incredibles 2.  The long range forecast puts it at about $140 million for the weekend, with the FML split at 40%/33%/27% for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  So that could be $56 million for Friday, $46 million for Saturday, and about $38 million for Sunday.  But the forecast is imperfect and the split is imperfect, and the prediction for all the other features are imperfect.  It could hit $150 million and be heavy on Saturday because it is a kids film.

Your other anchor options are Ocean’s 8, which is probably good for about $20 million, and Tag, which looks awful (as do a lot of movies these days, but I’m a grumpy old man on that front) with had a forecast of $13 million last week.

Then there is a lot of expensive filler.  The new Superfly, a remake of the famed 70s blacksploitation flick, second to Shaft in my mind, but still a thing in its day, which looks to be good for $8 million, and is cheaper than Solo or Deadpool 2, which I gather FML thinks are both going to have a gentle drop this week.

And at the cheap end there is competing filler.  In the dollar difference race between Adrift and Book Club I might take Book Club, while in the low end race between Hotel Artemis, Upgrade, and Life of the Party, I’d probably take Upgrade over Life of the Party, but Hotel Artemis might be correctly priced this week after last week’s debacle.

My Monday Hot Takes league pick this week is 2x Incredibles SAT, 1x Deadpool 2, 5x Hotel Artemis., which leaves me $3 to spare.  We’ll see if I change my mind on that before Thursday morning rolls around.

Go make your picks!  The league locks in less than 24 hours after this post goes live.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Two

Week two of our Blogger Fantasy Movie League seemed to present us with two possible paths forward.

The lineup for the week looked to pit the first week’s champion, Wonder Woman, against a new contender for the box office crown, The Mummy.  The choices and prices presented to us were as follows: (Last week’s post mostly explains how this all works)

Wonder Woman              $613
The Mummy                 $526
Captain Underpants        $198
Pirates                   $143
It Comes At Night         $150
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $70
Baywatch                  $60
Megan Leavey              $59
Everything, Everything    $28
Alien Covenant            $26
My Cousin Rachel          $15
Snatched                  $9
Best of the Rest          $9
Diary of a Wimpy Kid      $8
King Arthur               $7

And then the first reviews and the Thursday night numbers hit and it became pretty clear that The Mummy was going to do well, but not well enough to defeat Wonder Woman.  Only one person bet on The Mummy, and Braxwolf’s decision to back Tom Cruise explains his low ranking in this week’s tally.

So the real question of the week was what should the other seven screens show once you had booked Wonder Woman.

It looked like Liore, the founder of the event and the practiced ringer who will no doubt be the overall winner at the end of the 13th week, opted to put Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on five screens, with My Cousin Rachel on the remaining two, a selection that on the Saturday estimates looked to push her way out in front of the rest of us.  At that point GotG2 looked to have the best cost/performance ratio, which gets you some bonus income for each screen showing it.

My own picks were Wonder Woman, Pirates of the Caribbean on two screens, Everything Everything on two screens, and My Cousin Rachel on three screens, a lineup that spent my entire $1,000 weekly budget. (I setup a spreadsheet to figure out how to spend my whole budget under the theory that the cost reflects the estimated performance.)

My picks and their yields

The Sunday estimates came out and reeled Liore a ways back towards the pack as Wonder Woman was beating projections and took over the cost/performance crown, spreading the wealth to the rest of us who went with that pick.

Then the final results came in and the optimum result was clear.  Liore missed it by failing to pick the right two addon films after GotG.

Week Two’s Perfect Pick

But the win for the week went to Liore all the same, with the rankings for the week as follows:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $94,019,519
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $88,088,986
3. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $86,983,478
4. Ocho’s Octoplex – $86,379,050
5. Void’s Awesomeplex – $85,978,667
6. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $85,672,860
7. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $84,507,305
8. Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $82,465,146
9. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $64,527,776
10. Bel’s House of Horrors – $63,772,205
11. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $43,155,933

Liore was out in front by a fair margin, followed again by a fairly tight pack of people who picked Wonder Woman and filled out their full lineup.

Trailing behind was Braxwolf, who dared pick The Mummy for his anchor, Belghast, who left three screens empty (which costs $2 million per screen), and Syl, who did not have time to fill our her picks so her picks from the previous week rolled forward.

That leaves the overall rankings after two weeks as:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $239,380,552
2. Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $207,556,000
3. Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $205,508,040
4. Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $207,478,373
5. Ocho’s Octoplex – $203,601,637
6. Clockwork’s Cinesplosion – $202,374,647
7. Void’s Awesomeplex – $191,703,673
8. Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $186,105,300
9. Bel’s House of Horrors – $185,218,055
10. Murf’s Matinee Mania – $163,222,265
11. Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $129,272,381

Liore remains solidly out in front, nearly $22 million ahead of the nearest member of the main pack.  There are still 11 weeks left to go, so it is possible somebody might catch her, but she would have to really miss a major pick some week.

Now we are looking towards week three, the lineup for which is:

Cars 3                    $719
Wonder Woman              $478
All Eyez On Me            $327
Rough Night               $243
The Mummy                 $167
47 Meters Down            $105
Captain Underpants        $78
Pirates                   $71
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 $60
It Comes At Night         $34
The Book of Henry         $31
Baywatch                  $29
Megan Leavey              $25
Alien Covenant            $11
Everything, Everything    $10

Cars 3 looks to be the most likely anchor for a winning line up this week.  The trick remains what other titles best supplement that pick.  Or maybe Wonder Woman with some other picks will remain the better choice.  We shall see.

The June 2017 Update Brings Null Sec Nerfs to New Eden

Again, I do wish that CCP would pick a naming convention for these updates and stick with it.  This should be YC119.6, or maybe YC119.5, except that was last month, but now we’re just going to toss that and go with the month and year.  Points for clarity, but it took a while to get here and I have my doubts that they will stick to it at this point.

YC119.6 if you prefer

I mean, look at the list of the updates so far in 2017 and tell me what the pattern is.

No more than two in a row alike

That minor gripe aside, now to the things in the update that are setting Reddit on fire.

First there is the next round of Rorqual and mining nerfs which came up back on the first of the month.  Excavator drones for Rorquals will be hit as follows:

• About 9% less yield for Ore Excavators
• 12.5% lower speed for Ore Excavators
• About 11% longer cycle time for Ice Excavators
• 10% lower speed for Ice Excavators

Meanwhile, the mining anomalies, where Rorquals harvest, will now have respawn delays as follows:

• 20 minutes for the Small Asteroid Cluster
• 1 hour for the Medium Asteroid Cluster
• 2 hours for the Large Asteroid Cluster variants
• 4 hours for the Enormous Asteroid Cluster variants
• 5 hours for the Colossal Asteroid Cluster variants

The anom changes will keep Rorquals from being able to continually harvest in colossal clusters in a single system without interruption.  It will also mean that people in later time zones might be left in the lurch waiting for respawns.

Meanwhile, in an effort to put a lid on the expansion of the money supply, Friday CCP announced they would be nerfing fighters in order to reduce the efficiency of super ratting.

This is the one that really lit up Reddit and required the moderators to create a single threadnought as new threads were spawning repeatedly.  There the threats to rage quit were rife while the only CCP response came from CCP Quant, who does the monthly economic reports, who seemed keen to follow the CCP strategy of increasing overall drama by opening with this:

What we have here is literally the top 1% of the top 1% screaming their lungs out over these nerfs, while trying to convince the rest of the player-base to think that CCP is ruining the game for everyone. What we are really doing is keeping it from becoming yet another hyper inflated virtual economy at the cost of pissing off a particular group of players. Prior to this patch, a relatively small group of players were making the same amount of isk in npc bounties as the entire player-base did a year ago.

His statement proved the danger of carelessly throwing around numbers in front of an audience of internet spaceship nerds.  He had to back away from his claim that people were making 260 million ISK ticks (a tick is 20 minutes of time) while the “top 1% of the top 1%” has to be such a vanishingly small number… maybe 50 people if you think half a million play on Tranquility, and it would amaze me to find that there were that many people playing… that he was wrecking what I believe was his point… /r/eve doesn’t represent the whole population of New Eden… with a distracting statement.

This surge of push back on the plans… some of which coalesced around the idea of balancing PvE on the back of PvP, ever a hot button topic… caused CCP to spend the weekend reflecting on the whole thing.  They came back yesterday with some revised changes.  The plan is:

• Light Fighters (Space Superiority): No Change
• Light Fighters (Attack): 10% reduction to Basic Attack and Heavy Rocket Salvo damage (was 20%)
• Support Fighters: No Change
• Heavy Fighters (Heavy Attack): No Change (was 10% reduction to Basic Attack and Torpedo Salvo damage)
• Heavy Fighters (Long Range Attack): 20% reduction to Basic Attack damage (was 30%)
• Heavy Fighters (Shadow): No Change
• NPC Fighter Aggression: No Change (was +15%)
• We are working on changes to Anomalies that will reduce the effectiveness of Carriers and Supercarriers. These changes will be announced at a later date.

They also added in some data, which people had been asking for, to support these nerfs.  For the first five days in June 10.6 trillion ISK was rewarded from bounties, with the top three recipient classes being:

• 22.3% (2.3T) of the ISK was generated by 1.4% of characters earning bounties, using Supercarriers
• 24.2% (2.6T) of the ISK was generated by 4.8% of characters earning bounties, using Carriers
• 19.1% (2T) of the ISK was generated by 16.6% of characters earning bounties, using T1 Cruisers

So 46.5% of the bounties paid out went to just 6.2% of the players awarded bounties.

That certainly sounds out of balance to me.  But I didn’t put down 20 billion ISK to buy a supercarrier when it became clear that running anomalies in them was the most efficient way to collect bounties… something that was pretty clear about six months back.  I still potter about in my Ishtar making the same amount of ISK per tick as I was five years ago.

Anyway, we shall see if this puts any sort of damper on the ever increasing money supply in New Eden or if CCP has to go further.

And then the third nerf, pirate faction battleship blue prints will drop less frequently now as part of an effort to reign in the proliferation of these hulls in New Eden.

I guess when a cheapskate like me who only rats in an Ishtar, thus deprived of dank super ticks, has a Machariel for fleet ops, it might be a sign.  Once such hulls were reserved for big spenders and the elite who would fit them with officer mods and fly them with expensive implants.  Now even the Imperium, ever conscious of the budget constraints of their rank and file, has a Machariel doctrine with Bhalgorns in the mix, several groups run Nightmare doctrines, and ratters everywhere… if not in supercarriers… use Rattlesnakes.

So this month CCP is trying to throttle the supply of blueprints, though the stockpiles of them in New Eden are huge, while next month they will be increasing the material requirements of the blueprints in order to make them more expensive.

None of which bothers me all that much.  I tend to be a fatalist, taking the game as it comes as opposed to wanting it to be something that it no longer is.  But all the more so, I fly for the Imperium, which tends to be the very pragmatic in its approach to the game, optimizing the mechanics as they change.  This will mean changes for us, but since it will mean changes for everybody else in null sec as well, we just have to handle them more efficiently than our foes.

Controversies aside, there are some other things in today’s update.

There is a new Rogue Swarm event going on from now through the 27th of the month.  Akin to past such events, rogue drone sites will be all over New Eden and will drop a variety of prizes including skill training accelerators and PLEX.

The defenders of the Blood Raiders Shipyards have been changed, presumably to plug the hole in their defense exposed by a force of T1 Punisher frigates. (Also exploitable by fighters, which are frigate sized.)

In addition, the drops from a destroyed Blood Raiders Shipyard will now come in an armored cache that will require an industrial ship to haul off to a station or citadel before it can be opened.  This will keep unstoppable interceptors from dashing in at the kill and stealing the loot.  The tale of this is over at INN.

There is a new color blind mode that allows players to adjust the UI to make things more visible relative to their own needs.

The Sin black ops battleship along with the Vexor and Ishtar are getting graphical updates.

The Vexor doesn’t actually look that different to me…

How fleets can be structured has changed.  While the same total cap applies, squads and wings are now flexible in size.  Additionally, who gets to be fleet boss when the FC dies should now be more consistent.  The watchlist will now show ship icons and double-clicking on people in your watchlist will no longer bring up their character info screen.

There are some additional update along with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, most of which can be found in the Patch Notes and on the Updates page.  Otherwise the update has been deployed.

One thing that is missing from this update however is music.  The tradition of a song to accompany ever single expansion or update has been broken.  If you want to be outraged and start an angry thread on Reddit and shoot the monument in Jita, do it because you want more music!

We will have to make due with the sound track from the Birth of a Capsuleer video instead.

 

Not Enough Nagas

One of the recent changes in The Imperium, announced publicly on the Meta Show this past weekend, is a plan to run a number of fleet ops at standard times every night, each one having a regular doctrine and mission.  I strongly suspect that this is to boost participation in fleets by allowing people to plan their time in advance, as opposed to waiting for a Jabber ping to show up (or not show up) when you have some free time and are able to play.

As it turns out, this totally works for me, as one of the standard op times is 02:00 EVE time (UTC), which translates to 7pm local time here in California.  As an early riser (the alarm goes off at 5:30 am for me) 7pm is about the point in the evening when I have enough time left to commit to one more hour-or-more thing before starting to wrap things up and head to bed.

While I am not going to commit to being in that fleet every night, if you want to shoot me, 02:00 in Saranen seems a good bet.

This fleet op is set to accompany an Astrahus citadel finishing up its build cycle and going into its initial vulnerability time, so as to incent our foes to show up as well.  We’re kind of looking for things to keep us busy during later US prime time I guess… attacking sovereignty is left up to Euro and Aus time zones… so we’re sacrificing a citadel nightly for the sake of entertainment and a chance to shoot some foes.

We also have a new doctrine, which we plan to use during that op, centered on the Naga battlecruiser with a long range sniping fit.  I am told it can hit out to 300km with optimal skills.

My Naga in the fleet

I was keen to try that out, having about optimum skills for this amongst my nearly 160 million skill points, and doubly so since Asher was going to be leading this fleet.  I got on early and bought a Naga off contract in anticipation.

It is a good thing I did so, as the remaining Naga contracts went quickly.  One of the problems with the doctrine is that the Naga is a specialized ship… a lightly tanked long range sniper battlecruiser that can fit battleship rail guns… that isn’t all that popular, so stock in Jita was limited and sold out quickly.

So, while production gets sorted out to meet demand, the doctrine has to run with both Nagas and artillery fit Hurricanes in order to fill out a fleet.  As you can see in the screen shot above, there were a lot of Hurricanes along for the ride.

The tactics are essentially the same as our hit and run Hurricane fleet.  We land on grid, align out, lock up the designated target and shoot, when they are about to go down we are already building up to warp out in order to limit our exposure.  We have done this a bunch of times in Hurricanes.

Landing in an asteroid belt as a turn-around point

The enemy knows this and has adapted as well.  The have their long range, beam fit Abaddons together with a screen of tacklers ready to burn into range where ever we land in order to grab a few of us before we can warp off.  Those so stuck get zapped in short order by the Abaddons.

So last night’s battle was largely between us and hostile tackle in Devoter heavy interdictors.  With the Hurricanes along, we had to land close enough for them to shoot, under 90km or so, which is a lot closer than the Nagas would generally want to land.

In some ways this was a boon for the Nagas.  We got to run scan resolution scripts in our sensor boosters and our shortest range, highest damage ammunition in our guns, so we could lock fast and hit hard.  The kill mails tell the tale in the regard.  As an example, with this kill mail you can see Nagas top the list for damage done.  I am at the top of the list and did three times as much damage as the top Hurricane, which had to fit lower damage, long range ammo.

Unfortunately, as noted, that put us within reach of enemy tackle, so on each run we were trading a Devoter for 3-6 Hurricanes.  Three is a sustainable trade, six is a losing deal.

We were probably lucky that they seemed to favor grabbing Hurricanes over Nagas.  Reshipping into another Hurricane was easy enough.  There were lots on contract.  And Hurricanes were both cheaper and doing less damage against the Nagas as individual ships.  But when I finally got tackled and blown up on a pass, I warped back to the station to find no Nagas left to buy.

I had a Hurricane handy though, so I refit that to meet fleet requirements and rejoined the fight, only to get potted again on the first pass.  Somebody opted to pod me which, since I had no implants, just got me back to the station faster.  Having lost two battlecruisers, I decided to head out again in a Crucifier in order to put range damps on the heavy interdictors, hoping to thwart their tackle attempts.

However, by that point the op was being wound down.  There were a couple more warps and then we docked up.  The ISK was was heavily slanted against us, with us losing almost 2.5 times in value compared to our foes per the battle report.

Helping weigh the balance against use was a group of smart bombing Rokhs that DBRB flew into the hostiles, an action that, if understood coms correctly, did not go as planned and yielded zero kills.

But the smart bombs looked pretty on the field

And, of course, the Astrahus was blown up as well, adding to the ISK count against us.

Still, it was a quick, fun, and exciting operation, and fellow TNT and Black Sheep Down pilot Zurvon Starr came out of it better than I did, getting on twice as many kill mails during the fight and earning two kill marks on his Naga, which survived.

Anyway, I applied for my SRP, which was in my account when I checked this morning, so I remain ISK rich and able to come back for the next fleet.  We shall see how the Naga situation plays out.  I will be sure to check in early to grab one before the contracts disappear.

I also suspect that we will have to adapt our own tactics as the enemy has adapted theirs.