Clone Management Becomes Easier in EVE Online

Last week CCP mentioned a series of quality of life updates planned for today’s patch update.  The patch notes from this morning indicate that we got them.  So what did we get?

Tragedy tomorrow, Quality tonight

Clone Management!

The big fat hairy deal with this update for a lot of us in null sec is the change to clones, clone storage, and clone management.  Per the patch notes:

• Enabled multiple jump clones in the same location. Jumping or installing new clones will no longer override the existing ones.
• The “Install Clone” banner in the Jump Clones tab in the Character Sheet is now always visible.
• The “Install Clone” banner now states how many jump clones you have installed in your current location.
• Activating a jump clone no longer close your inventory windows.

Not only can you have multiple clones in a single station, but they have also done away with the accidental “oops, I destroyed my implant clone by mistake when I clone jumped” issue that has plagued many of us over the years.  The first thing I did was go out and consolidate a few clones I had in different structures in 1DQ1-A into the main Keepstar.

Clones in a single station

My expectations were so low that I was even surprised to find that the names you give your clones persist through jumps back and forth.  The Nosy Gamer reports that these changes apply to NPC stations as well.  Clone management for the masses!

Between this and the red dot change from last week, I’m starting to wonder what is going on at CCP.  It is unlike them to have two big wins so close together.  Now I just need a new skill that gives me another five jump clones and I’ll be set.

ECM Burst Jammers

From the patch notes:

• Fitting a burst jammer now disallows interdiction nullification.

This will make ECM burst interceptors “less oppressive” according to the dev post.  Nobody likes being on the receiving end of ECM burst interceptors… or ECM in general… and CCP has been nerfing ECM for ages now.  They listen to complaints about things that keep ships from blowing up I guess.

There is, of course, a thread of paranoia in Goonswarm about this change.  We were not the first to use ECM burst interceptors, but we picked them up and ran with them after being oppressed by them.  And, in the current war, Globby from ElitistOps ran many ECM Burst fleets and became known for them, as our foes in PAPI complained vehemently about him, which led to propaganda about him.

The legend of Globby

I went on a few of those ops and, I will say, he is a really a fun person to fly with.  He also reimbursed one of my interceptor losses out of his own pocket when the SRP person didn’t like the fit we were using.  So pour one out for Globby, though I am sure he will find a new path.

This change also his “chemo” fits, smart bombing strategic cruisers using the interdiction nullification subsystem.  They have traditionally fit ECM bursts to help them shed tackle, since their align time to warp out is a lot slower than an interceptor.  We will see how the change impacts that doctrine.

Target Spectrum Breaker changed to Signature Radius Suppressor

This battleship only module has been changed to give a bonus to signature radius, with an accompanying skill that improves the duration

• Reworked the Target Spectrum Breaker [and renamed it to Signature Radius Suppressor] to now grant a small bonus to signature radius passively that can be activated for a short burst of extreme signature reduction.
• Target Breaker Amplification skill name changed to Signature Masking.
  • Increases duration time of Signature Radius Suppressor active mode by 5% per level.

The in-game description for the module now reads:

This device uses a variety of emissions suppression and masking methods to reduce the overall signature radius of a ship observable by enemy sensors and represented in targeting computer algorithms. Signature radius suppression has the advantage of increasing the time to lock of enemy targeting sensors, while also reducing incoming damage from almost all weapon systems by confounding enemy firing solutions and proximity detonators.

This device operates in both passive and active modes, providing a small benefit through passive emissions reduction and a dramatically enhanced benefit in active masking mode.

This could make battleships move viable in combat as, if used at the right time, could reduce the effects of stealth bomber attacks.  Right now Heavy Assault Cruisers still rule the roost, even after their recent nerf, due to their speed and sig radius, which makes them unlikely to suffer from bombers.

Wormhole Changes

There have also been some updates to wormholes, which I honestly do not understand.  But they seem meaningful for the residents.  I hope their quality of life is generally improved and not torn apart by unintended consequences or collateral damage.

• Medium wormholes maximum jump mass increased from 20m to 62m.
• Large wormholes maximum jump mass increased from 300m to 375m.
• Extra Large wormholes maximum jump mass increased from 1.35b/1.8b to 2b.
• Reduced the frequency of wandering connections between high-class wormholes by 50%.

And so it goes.  The patch notes are available and the updates have been deployed.

Seeking the Hydrocane

We returned to Gnomeregan few times, back when we were doing Gnomeregan, in search of a couple of specific drops.  Moronae, for example, wanted the Manual Crowd Pummeler drop from the Crowd Pummeler 9-60.

Moronae with the Manual Crowd Pummeler

Having moved some levels beyond Gnomer, I figured I wouldn’t be going back.  But then I wanted to wrap up some of the Mirage Raceway and Stranglethorn Vale quests, which include a couple of underwater runs in the Vile Reef off the coast.

I gave it a try with Tistann, but the time limit for being under water was pretty restrictive.  WoW Classic is hard mode these days when compared to retail.  I thought, perhaps, I could work around the underwater issue with water breathing.  Warlocks have the spell, but I didn’t have one handy to keep it on me.  Water breathing potions are a thing, but I was not inclined to waste cash at the auction house buying them.  But I remembered that the first real boss in Gnomeregan dropped the Hyrdrocane, a staff with water breathing as an attribute.

The Hydrocane

All I would have to do is run into Gnomeregan, get to the Viscous Fallout, that first real boss, slay it, and loot.  The odds were not bad for the drop and Skronk had been talking about rogues sneaking in to farm the Viscous Fallout for the dagger drop.  So in I went.

It isn’t too far into the instance even.  You just zone in and run to the edge of the of the pit in the Hall of Crafters.  It is visible from the entrance.  Just watch for the mob that runs past that spot… though he is non-elite… and even if he was elite, you’re here to kill a boss so you had better be able to take on a single elite.

Gnomeregan Map segment from Retail WoW

From there you just jump from the ledge onto a big gear down below.  The fall knocks you down to about half health, but that isn’t so bad.

You can see the top of the gear from here

The Viscous Fallout wanders around down there.

A picture from later in the story, but you get the idea

You just get him alone, easy enough, and take him down.  My first run in went very smoothly.

Unfortunately, he dropped the Acidic Walkers instead of the Hydrocane.  And then I had to get back out.

I could, of course, stone out.  But that is a once-per-hour thing.  I decided to see if I could just blast my way out.  Rogues have stealth to solve this problem, but a hunter with a pet… you are not very stealthy and your pet is bouncing around a bit so you cannot slip past mobs.

So I tried to do a runner and died.  Even gray elite can bring you down if there are enough of them.  So I ran back to the instance, revived, then stepped out again to reset the instance.  Once reset, I ran back in and did it again.

With the same result.  Acidic Walkers.

So I fought my way out more slowly this time.  It took a bit, but I got out safely, reset the instance, and did it again.  Acidic Walkers again.

Finally, on the sixth try I got the Hydrocane.  I had already trained staves on Tistann, so I could wield it, I just needed to run on back to the Vile Reef to finish things off.  Worked like a champ, especially since I didn’t have to fight with it, taking on the murlocs at range with my gun.

Later I had Viniki with the same set of quests.  Again, I figured the Hydrocane would be a good choice.  I had even learned a thing or two from my first runs.  Also, being small and without a pet wandering around him, he was able to bypass a lot of the mobs, and simply absorb hits from others being a warrior and all.

Viniki slips past the troggs with ease

It was a good thing that I learned a few thing, as it took even more tries this time around.  Viniki had four Acidic Walkers and two daggers drop before he got the Hydrocane.

Hydrocane in the loot finally

From that set of runs I learned that if you try to reset an instance more than instances more than five times in an hour the game will stop you and make you wait for a while.  Ah well.

And then he had to go train staves and skill it up because to use it under water he would have to equip it as his weapon.  There was some work in that, but it ended up doing the job.

So when Wilhelm, my paladin was at level 38 and looking at the Vile Reef quests my mind immediately went to the Hydrocane.  I figured he could manage getting in at level 38, so I flew him to Ironforge and ran out to Gnomer for another run.

Like Viniki, he was able to slip past the troggs on the way in by running up the rail outside the instance.  Once in, he went to the edge of the pit and jumped in.  The Viscous Fallout rolled by him and he took it down and, on the first try, he got the Hydrocane!  Mission accomplished.  No need to worry about sneaking out, he could just stone home.

Once he recalled back to Stromwind I ran over to the weapon trainer.  I needed to train up staves and get Wil working on skilling that up, when I tumbled over a fact I should have remembered.  Paladins cannot train staves.

I don’t know why.

As I complained to Skronk in chat, a paladin can train polearms.  Those are pretty much sticks with a blade attached to the end.  Wil’s weapon even then was a polearm.  And a stave is pretty much a stick without the blade bit.  But I guess paladins need that sharp bit to get things done.

So he ran out to Vile Reef and did the quests the hard way, holding his breath, diving down, then rushing back up to the surface.  It didn’t take too long.  Less time that it would have taken to do eight runs at the Viscous Fallout most likely, as I had done with Viniki.  But it is still nice to have the water breathing on hand, just in case.

And I was able to stop Skronk from wasting his time trying to get the Hydrocane with his pally.  Or anymore time.  He’s already gone zero for four trying to get it as a drop.  Lessons learned.

I was thinking about Alioto, my druid, who might be doing those quests some day soon.  With cat form he could stealth on out of Gnomer.  But druids also have aquatic form, so maybe he won’t need it.

Wintergrasp Briefly

World of Warcraft 8.1.5, the so-called Tide of Vengeance patch, brought in a pile of new things and some odd changes to things to which we had grown  accustomed.

Wait, how do I get to WotLK Dalaran now?

But for me the best item on the list was the return of Wintergrasp.

Not that Wintergrasp hasn’t been lingering around all this time.  One of the staples of the Wrath of the Lich King, and something that help keep me subscribed and playing for the full length of that expansion, it fell behind the times as further expansions showed up.  I tried it a couple of times during Cataclysm, but a five player match just isn’t that exciting.

So Blizzard, clearly embracing nostalgia and content recycling, reworked Wintergrasp as a 40 vs. 40 battleground in the current rotation.  And, for the first week, it was awesome.

It was awesome in part because it was great fun to go back to my old favorite battleground and fight over towers and the keep.

Battle at the walls of the keep

It was also awesome because it was the featured brawl of the week on its return, which meant instances of it kept popping regularly.  I could queue for under five minutes and get in again and again.

It was the return of a classic.  I had forgotten bits and pieces, but playing through it brought back a lot of great memories.  Even with a smaller population in the battle it still played out the same way I recalled.

A post I wrote in late 2010 about the strategy of Wintergrasp still applies to the battleground today.  Discipline and concentration of force wins, being scattered about and attacking where ever strikes you at the moment doesn’t get you very far.

This is not the path to success

It was great fun for a week.

And then Wintergrasp was no longer the highlighted brawl of the week.  At that point, when I went to queue up for it on a weeknight the queue to get enough people turned into a long wait.  An instance won’t pop until it has 40 vs 40, and it people queue for a random battleground they get pulled into others before Wintergrasp is ready.

Still, I was able to binge on Wintergrasp for a week.  That was pretty fun.  It will get its turn on the front page again I am sure.  And I can always queue up and just be patient while I run some world quests if I am dying for a match.

In Which I am Against Instanced Content for Once

Out of the blue SynCaine suddenly decided that he had the solution to the big null sec battle problem in EVE Online.  Having seen instanced PvP battles in Life is Feudal, he felt the need to propose null sec fights like the “million dollar battle” of some weeks back be instanced as well.

My experience from that battle

He was engaged with the idea sufficiently to post a second time about it to say how wonderful it would be because it would lead to more good press about the game, since big battles and bad people are about all that gets EVE Online in the news.

And I couldn’t disagree more with the idea of instance battles in New Eden.

I am, of course, a proponent of instancing in many cases.  I think instanced dungeons and raids are part of the formula that made World of Warcraft the success it has been and remains.

The whole open world dungeon thing came from the MUD days, when communities were small and social pressure could keep people from screwing around with zone runs.  Mostly.  I still remember in TorilMUD at its peak the devs having to essentially set up rules as to who had “dibs” on a given zone.  That was during a time when the player base could maybe support four or five correctly staffed zone groups (16 players each) and so there was some competition for the prime zones.  In the end though there was no need to instance.

That changed with EverQuest and the MMORPGs that followed in its wake.  I hear people talking about ideas like “server communities” being a thing and social pressure working in Norrath back in the day, but I was there and I don’t believe it.  Dunbar’s Number gives lie to the idea that you could “know” your server “community” of several thousand people.

EverQuest had the open dungeon thing for a while, but eventually went to instancing of some dungeon content in 2003 with the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion.  That, of course, killed EverQuest, sending it into immediate decline.

Oh, wait, no… EverQuest actually hit its peak after that and only went into decline when World of Warcraft showed up having essentially copied EverQuest while removing much of the suck.

Subscriptions – 150K to 1 million

So instancing PvE content like dungeons is fine in my book and solves a lot of problems, problems that kept coming up in the EverQuest retro servers until they went back and instanced some of the old raids as well.  Instancing wins in PvE.

Instancing in PvP though… that is a different beast altogether.

I mean, I guess it is okay for battleground and similar “match” based competitions where what you are doing is essentially outside of the game.  I wouldn’t suggest that something like the Alliance Tournament ought to take place live in New Eden with the rest of us.  The temptation to third party on it would be irresistible.

But the Alliance Tournament isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  PC Gamer isn’t putting up headlines about the winners or commenting on ship compositions.  It is, like many things in EVE Online, something that a niche group is into and the majority of the game barely notices.

And you could say that about big null sec battles as well.  As Neville Smit pointed out at a point in the past, 85% of the game doesn’t play in null sec, or didn’t when those numbers were pulled.  The difference is that big null sec battles are one of the places where EVE Online stands out from other games, something that does get PC Gamer and the like to write about.

My gut reaction to the idea that CCP should instance big battles is that the whole idea breaks the core philosophy of the game, that everything that happens in the game happens IN the game.  There is supposed to be no magic in New Eden.  No transport fairy moves you ships or modules or ore around, you have to schlep it yourself or pay somebody to move it.  When you lose a ship you have to go get a new one, you don’t just respawn with one. (Okay, rookies ships get handed to you, but within the context of the game it has a reason.)  And when you are out doing something, mining, hauling, running a mission, or shooting somebody’s ship, somebody else can show up and start shooting at you.

When you undock in New Eden, you are taking a risk.  That is part of the deal.

So the idea that you can undock and have a battle over an objective in null sec and are able to keep it private by locking out interlopers just breaks the game in my book.

I’ll grant that is just an opinion.

The Dude has be covered

I would even suggest that CCP would agree with that opinion.  But that doesn’t make it a concrete absolute in the universe.  So I won’t just stomp my feet and say “It’s wrong!”  There are other arguments against the idea.

The first is, of course, how would CCP even implement such a thing?  Saying that they should just instance those fights is like a line item from the product manager.  They drop that turd on your desk and leave you to figure out how to deal with it.

I won’t play the Blizzard “impossible” card, as they are wont to do, but this isn’t an easy change.  You have to setup an instanced battle via some automatic procedure that needs to happen for a specific set of circumstances (e.g. Keepstar final timer), which can successfully limit participation in the eventual battle to exactly the right number of exactly the right people, and doesn’t have an obvious exploit.

While it is an interesting topic to game out the options for… and there are many, from what objectives should trigger such battles, to whether or not the battles should be the same size for all objectives or scale based on the objective (or maybe scale based on the defender’s size?), to choosing between absolute number of ships (bring 1,000 titans!) or some sort of point system, who gets to fight and how they get flagged and who won’t get flagged, how does the structure itself figure in the calculations, whether reinforcements are allowed ever or never, how big is the battlefield, if there are other structures on grid in the system are they on grid in the battle, and probably many more that haven’t come to mind.  And each of these has to be explored to see how it will change group behaviors and whether or not there is an “I win” option for somebody.

Somebody will come along and say, “Just do x, y, and z” and think they’re done because there isn’t an obvious exploit in their vague statement.  But they are kidding themselves.  They are not done, not by a long shot.  You aren’t done until you work out the details, all the details, and then have gamed them out with enough scenarios to have some confidence in them.  And then, as we have seen many times before, the players will have at it and spot things you never considered.

And whatever it is then has to go on top of the current software, follow the specific set of rules for the battle, and not disrupt the every day game.  This all adds up to an incredibly deep and complex project… and all the more so since I haven’t even considered what technical limitations may be faced… and it will need a lot of development resources dedicated to it that could be working on other items.

Is the issue important enough to warrant that?  Given the whole “85%” thing I mentioned before, I am going to guess there would many voices declaring against the idea.  I’m not sure that even the null sec voices would be in favor of it if it meant sacrificing development on other things.

Furthermore, should CCP actually decided to commit to this, does the desired end result come to pass?  Will this actually end up with EVE Online having more battles that will get press coverage?

Here is another problem.  The reason for doing this is to limit the number of players able to participate in a battle.  But part of the reason that EVE gets coverage is because of the huge number of players involved in such battles.  If we trade ugly 4000-6000 player battles with time dilation and lag and disconnections for nice smooth reliable 2000 player battles, is the new situation newsworthy?

I am not sure they are.  Maybe you get one story about CCP testing their new battle architecture, but after that raw participation numbers are out the window.  There needs to be a lot of dead titans to make the news again.

And how does that change the null sec meta?  Currently in 0.0 space we are in a very egalitarian situation where line members get to show up en masse to fights.  If the seating is limited, who gets to show up and play?  Will leadership let in a Jackdaw fleet?  Or will it be a supers vs. supers battle where titans will eat all the capital and super carriers will take care of the sub caps,  so unless you fly one of those two you need not even apply?  Or will it just be titans with refits to handle sub caps and that is all?  Then there will be a push for 1,000 of the right titan fit optimally because in an even fight you have to find your edge somewhere.  And if you can’t compete in that game then you just lose the fight automatically to the few organizations that can.

I honestly think we’re better off with the current situation, as ugly as it is, where people pile on until the server breaks rather than having nice set battles in their own little space.  And I speak as somebody who knows full well what such ugly battles can be like.  I had my guns jammed at Z9PP-H before CCP fumbled the node, I was there all day for the big battle at 6VDT-H, I saw us kill the server at battles like HED-GP or KW-I6T, and I was even there at B-R5RB where access to the battle was being strictly controlled by the coalition lest we bring down the server yet again.

Battles like this are rare and as often as not are spontaneous affairs that may or may not fall within the instancing parameters.  CCP has better things on which to spend their limited resources. The results likely won’t be more headlines for the game.  And, frankly, if we play the N+1 game we get what we deserve, and I’m good with that.

Minecraft and Coming to the End of My Road

The end of the road is in sight, and I mean that literally rather than in some sort of gloomy metaphorical sense.  My long term project to build an overland route between the Forest Mansion I found last November and our central surface world rail network is about 90% complete.

In December I started on the road project to cover the 20km gap between the mansion and the nearest mine cart rail stop.

Status back in January. Oh, yeah, that is quite a ways

As of this week only about a 2km gap remains between my current forward location on the road and the nearest base and rail stop.

So much closer

The road has taken a while largely due to logistics.  Given an infinite supply of cobblestone in my bag, I could have completed the road in a few sittings.  Having to manage a limited inventory, finding or creating resupply points as the road moves forward, and having to deal with the day/night cycle and the hostiles that spawn after dark make for the challenge of the project.

Also, it allows me to indulge in one of my favorite tasks, which is base building.  In order to not totally bog down the road building effort I have tried to limit my major bases to NPC villages, desert temples, and the like so that I have some structures available to set up in.

A Desert Temple base on the road

Desert temples make good bases, so long as I have some wood on hand to make a few doors.  I go in and loot the treasure in the basement, then set off the explosive trap down there, running away before it blows.  That opens things up so I can mine cobblestone easily.

Villages however tend to tie me down for a while.  While showing up at one gives me shelter, the Minecraft algorithm for placing them seems to just drop them on the terrain rather haphazardly.

A desert village on the only hill in sight

This leads to me spending time “fixing” villages. After I have picked a house to setup in, placed a bed and some chests for storage and built a corral for horses, I can’t bring myself to move on until I level out the paths and make sure all the buildings are accessible.  Placement often leaves a few buried up past the doors so you cannot get in or out.

And once I am doing that I also light up the village with lots of torches, straighten up the pathways, and add a bunch of doors to get an iron golem to spawn to defend the villagers.  If the village is far enough from the previous portal, I put up another nether portal to connect to the nether transit hub and maybe build a tower to make the village more visible from a distance.

A fixed up village with portal and tower

So every village becomes a new side project.  I suppose I have a vision of them being used as bases by other people, though at the moment there is scant activity on our server aside from my own work.

I did try to expand my working hours by keeping more tamed wolves around me in order to fight off hostile spawns at night, to the point of breeding a pack.

Happy wolves looking to be fed, also an iron golem and the back of an auto-furnace

Wolves can be fragile however.  You have to keep them healed up by feeding them, and securing a supply of meat to feed them led to breeding a flock of sheep.  And still I was losing them pretty regularly.

Damn dog, I am busy over here with slimes!  Slain by a spider

That was all becoming a more effort than it was worth, so I gave up on any illusions about working through the night in order to keep pushing ahead rather than wasting time traveling back and forth from the nearest camp to sleep.

So progress has been made and the end is in sight.  At this point I think it might work best for me to head back to our core territory and build the road northward to link up with what I have build already.  That will give me the advantage of drawing from already established supplies.