Friday Bullet Points Once Again from Space

It is Friday and there are a few EVE Online items I want to bring up but that don’t quite merit a full post at this time.  Not included in this is the September Monthly Economic Report, which I’ll get to on Monday.  That I can string out into 1,500 words easy.  Meanwhile, CCP it trying to outdo me with their own Community Beat post today.

• Introducing Quasar

CCP posted a dev blog this week titled Introducing Quasar, which is a look at the changes CCP has made, and further changes that they are contemplating, to improve server performance of EVE Online by getting around Python’s Global Interpreter Lock that keeps the game running on a single thread.  Basically, if you take some housekeeping items off of the server’s to-do list, like skill plans, there is more bandwidth to track ships in space.  As put in the post the goals are to “dodge the GIL and clear the table for moar lasers.”

There is some additional insight into this over at TNG.

• Totality Day Celebration

Come October 13th it will have been a year since the Triglavian Collective took the 27 systems they had conquered from the four empires and disconnected them from the previous gate network to for the new region of Pochven.  (Which, among other things changed the shape of travel in empire space with the removal of Niarja.)

So… time for an anniversary celebration I guess?  CCP thinks so and has some events planned according to this dev blog.

The Triglavians are still behind the other empires of New Eden as they don’t seem ready to offer login rewards for their event.  Maybe contact with the other empires will lead them to this technology at a later date.

• Faction Warfare Report

Faction Warfare is often mentioned as one of the neglected aspects of low sec space in New Eden.  You don’t hear much about it unless somebody is complaining that it is broken… or noting CCP’s neglect.  But a group of Gallente pilots have started up a podcast, the Federation Frontline Report, to give some insight into that aspect of EVE Online.  They also have a guest post up on INN about their efforts and what Faction Warfare is.

• SSO Endpoint Deprecation

For those who use the CCP APIs for various things, they are deprecating the old security authorization token interface, so if you are connecting to the using ESI or using the EVE SSO for user authentication, you need to update to the v2 versions of the API by November 1st.  Details are available in a third party developer blog post.

• Mega Skill Point Packages

There was a post over in r/eve this week from a player with an account that had been dormant since 2010 who received an offer from CCP to buy 50 million skill points for the low low price of $999.99.  Another user reported an offer for 12.9 million skill points for 229.99 GBP.

I didn’t get an offer, but I dug around in an account that was last Omega maybe three years ago and found I had a special offer for 8.1 million skill points for $199.

Skill Point Offer

I am sure we could find a few other data points and figure out how many skill points you get offered based on how long your account has been dormant.

• Monocle Offer

It has been a little over a decade since the Incarna expansion, which got the player base to explode over a variety of issues.  Often referred to as the “summer of rage,” the name that stuck for a lot of people outside of the game was “monocle-gate.”  I covered the anniversary in a post earlier this year, including the fallout, resolution, and how things went forward from there.  But monocles became the symbol due to a pricey eye piece that was added to the in-game store with the expansion.

While the monocle stuck around long after things simmered down, it remained a trigger for some, which is why it was a bit of a surprise to find CCP offering special monocles again in the in-store ten years down the road.

Monocular times are here again

I can’t tell if this is CCP just looking for some new cosmetic item to sell or if they’re just trolling us a decade after their first monocle.  And the monocles are only available until downtime on October 14th, so they’re trying to push the FOMO button as well… if anybody has any actual fear of missing out on a monocle I guess.

• New Player Experience Explored

Shintar sent this video to me, so credit to her.  CCP apparently went out looking for streamers who had never played EVE Online to go through the recently revamped new player experience and give their response.  They were supposed to go in without reading up or getting external help and just let the game guide them.  Preach Gaming took on the challenge and put together a video about the experience.

It is kind of fun to watch as somebody who knows the answers.  There are a few places where I don’t know how he ended up with a particular idea, but otherwise it seemed to go pretty well.  Something that will come as a surprised to exactly nobody is that the problems began when he hit the now very out of date career agents, but I remain impressed that he figured out how to use probes and scan something down in under two hours with no external help.

Anyway, that is what was on my list.

Some Quiet Mining

With the announcement of the mining redistribution plan… mineral starvation round two… and the subsequent spike in mineral and ore prices, a bunch of people have been rediscovering asteroid mining.  At some point this month CCP will release the update and resource gathering will change, radically in some ways, as asteroid yields are adjusted and minerals are allocated to specific regions of space.  Each region will get its own exclusives, which will be:

• Hisec – Tritanium
• Lowsec – Isogen and Nocxium (sort of, see below)
• Nullsec – Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Wormholes – nothing

If you want tritanium you will need to mine in high sec space and so on.  Sort of.

There are also explicit mineral exclusions per region, which are planned to be:

• Hisec – No Isogen, Nocxium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Lowsec – No Tritanium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite
• Nullsec – No Tritanium and Nocxium (except in anomalies)
• Wormholes – No Tritanium, Nocxium, and Morphite

Much has been said about this plan, and I’ll supply some links at the end of the post if that interests you.  But this post is more about the immediate response to the plan, which has been “quick, go mine some of this stuff before it is all gone!”

I got out an alt I had not used in quite a while that had a Procurer mining barge set to go in Amarr and set to mining in high sec.

Out in the belts again

It has been a long time since I mine in high sec.  There was a whole segment of my EVE Online career training up mining, starting in an Osprey and eventually graduating the the Hulk, the apex exhumer of its time.

My Hulk back in late 2007

I set out and found a system not too far from Amarr with an Athanor setup for public use, so I could reprocess ore cheaply, and had a security rating that meant some decent asteroids to choose from.

I initially set out to just scoop veldspar, but then figured that tritanium would still be the high sec thing after the change.  So I set my sites on pyroxeres, an ore that contains a bit of nocxium, the soon to be exclusive to low sec mineral that seems to have more people worried than any other element.  The price of that more that doubled when the dev blog came out and, even though it has settled down some, it remains pricier than before.  I figured laying in a supply of that might be a hedge against the future.  We shall see.

Locked on to some rocks

I had forgotten how peaceful mining in high sec can be.  You just have to keep an eye on your mining lasers to make sure they are still cycling on something and that your ore hold hasn’t filled up yet.  It is quite conducive to listing to a podcast or an audio book or writing a blog post or editing screen shots.  The wide screen monitor I am working with right now makes it all the easier as I can have something else up front while the game client pokes out to the side revealing enough information at a glace to know what is going on.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I didn’t do much in the war last week.  I spent some of the time sitting around mining instead.

Of course, I am not alone out there.  The annoying NPC miners show up in my belt every so often and start stealing the ore I wanted to mine.  But you can’t do much about them.  Another fine CCP feature.

And then there are the bots.  I see them every day.  Some days they are doing better than others.  My first day out they seemed to be having a problem as they all clumped up on the Raitaru where they seemed to live.

High sec mining bots tripping over each other to get to the belts

They are mostly annoying because they go mine for a bit, picking at this rock then that, after which they warp off, unload, and land on another belt, leaving a bunch of half chewed rocks in their wake.  That can be a pisser.  I should probably take off a bit of the tank on the Procurer… I have it fit to mine in null sec… and put an ore scanner on it.

But it has been kind of nice doing a bit of mining again.  It will never be a serious vocation for me again, but a bit of ore is okay now and then.

As for posts about the Resource Distribution plan, here you go:

• The Nosy Gamer
• Dunk Dinkle
• Evehermit
• Yadot
• INN (shit show post)
• INN (Bad money after bad post)
• INN (CCP trust post)
• INN (transcript of the developer live stream)
• The Meta Show (cross faction discussion of the changes)

Further Structure Bashing in Cache

Asher got us together again for another structure, this time an Astrahus timer, the timer that TEST had set while we were out bashing that tower a couple days before.  Being a final timer that might see the structure destroyed, the thought was that the locals might form up and defend leading to a fight.  And if they didn’t fight… well.. structure kill mail.

We logged in, once again totaling less that 30 ships, swapped out our cloaks and formed up to travel to M-MCP8, where we sat on the P7-45V gate.  The latter is Vindictive’s staging, so we hoped to catch some people passing through.

On the gate, bubble up

We did catch a Fraternity Dominix on the gate, and a couple other minor target.  The Domi seemed like a good sign, that maybe Vindictive would be getting some support from their Winter Coalition allies, since they were not leaving the coalition until the end of the month.

They would need some help and somebody else we caught in our bubble was Seddow, the FC of the Legacy Coalition Loki fleet that mauled the Vindictive Machariel fleet while we were shooting that POS tower.  We were asked not to shoot him.

So it seemed like they would be coming back to finish off the Astrahus.  They set the timer, so why wouldn’t they?

Our eyes on the Vindictive staging Keepstar was reporting various activity and even a titan up and perhaps ready to bridge a defense fleet in on the Astrahus.  They had a couple of force recons, the only viable cyno ships these days, hanging about.  Asher even had us drop our mobile depots in safe spots in the system in case things went against us and we had to either reload drones from cargo or get our cloaks on and hide.

However, for all the activity, not much happened.  When the timer ran down on the Astrahus we started shooting it, waiting for something to drop.  But nothing did.  Instead, a gunner in the Astrahus took shots at us, neuted us, hit us with tracking disruptors, and generally tried to make our time hitting the structure as taxing as possible.

Another bomb from the Astrahus goes off

The gunner did manage to kill off some drones, something of an annoyance to a group with a long supply line back to Delve, but did not slow down the inevitable all that much.  Legacy showed up with their Lokis again as expected.

Legacy Lokis join the shoot

Then final outcome was determined, the Astrahus exploded.

Another Upwell structure destroyed

We scooped our mobile depots and formed back up.

Then it was over to P7-45V, where an Athanor was also in its final timer.  There was no defense put up there either, so another structure kill mail was shared between us and the Legacy Loki fleet.

Athanor brews up

After that it was back to our staging system and our safe spots, cloaks once again fitted and running, waiting for our safe log off timers to run down so we could leave space safely.  Another night in Cache.

The October Update Expands the Triglavian Invasion of New Eden

We are into October and it is time for another update to EVE Online.  Probably the biggest thing on the agenda for the patch is a new stage to the Triglavian invasion.

The Triglavian Menace Continues

There isn’t much in the way of details however, with the only line about it being:

The Triglavian Collective has been spotted deploying what appear to be system-altering structures across invaded locations.

What these structures are and how they may be altering systems remains to be discovered.  Let’s just hope that CCP can keep them out of the new player starter systems this time around.

There are also a new Triglavian implants with the mid-grade Mimesis set being introduced.  The low grade set came in with last month’s update.  These are available at LP store at DED stations.

CCP has modified the market so that players do not need to manually repackage items in order to list them on the market.  If a player attempts to list an item now it will be automatically repackaged.  Given that what can be listed on the market and the state it needs to be in (repaired and repackaged) has always been a bit of a pain, this is probably a good change.

The UI has been updated so that players can distinguish between the different cyno types that were introduced with the September update.

Another item from the September update that has seen some revision is the tutorial part of the new player experience.  Given that the recent CSM Summit Minutes indicated that CCP would be putting 80% of dev resources on new player retention, I suppose the only surprise here is that there were not more changes.

The tutorial got the following changes:

• Improvements made to the text Aura displays throughout the Tutorial.
• Added shortcuts to the Tutorial Instructions.
• Improved the flow for claiming rewards during the Tutorial.
• Removed the civilian mining laser from the starter corvettes (not other versions of the corvettes) to help new players.
• Improved the hiding behavior for the Aura Conversation window
• Updated the rewards to the tutorial to be ISK, modules, or ammunition.

In addition there was a wave of UI changes to various aspects of the game that very much feel like an attempt to make the UI less obstinate in the face of player needs.  Whether or not the notoriously balky interface that has seemed at times to almost resent telling you what you need to know can be improved enough to keep it from scaring off or scarring new players remains to be seen.  I have heard the phrase “lipstick on a pig” bandied about, but CCP isn’t done yet.

My own favorite item from the patch notes was a fix to a situation where mobile tractor units were causing scooped items to go missing:

Mobile Tractor Units would occasionally not eject their contents when being scooped from space, leading to the apparent loss of some items. (This was caused by the MTU being too greedy and scooping back up its own jet-can at the same time as a ship is picking up the MTU!) The auto-looter behavior will now shut down earlier during the scoop-to-ship process.

As I have been known to say, timing is everything.

There are, as always, lots of other small fixes and tweaks in the update.  You can find details in the patch notes  No updates page entry for this patch (so far).  Word is that the update has been deployed successfully.

Through the Withered Lands

The trick with returning to EverQuest II is generally finding some task or zone I can get into, something that will keep me going for a bit.  It doesn’t have to be the latest content… as noted, I am not sure I could even find that… but something at about the right level.

As I said in last week’s post, I went with Bhagpuss’ suggestion and started out on the Days of Summer quest.  That gave me a couple days of wandering Norrath and, as it turned out, having to find and roam through some of the later expansions as part of the 2017 series of quests also brought me to some content that looked about right.

Somewhere pretty… not sure which expansion

The goal was to get my level 96 berserker into something and get him closer to level 100.  And as I went through various zones I spotted one that looked about right as a starter.  I jotted down the name as I flew through it to get the update for the summer quest.  It was The Withered Lands.

Getting the last bit for the Days of Summer quest

However, when I had finished up the Days of Summer quests and decided to go find it again with Sigwerd, my berserker, that left me wondering where it was.  I had the name, but in the whirlwind tour of Norrath I had misplaced the where.  It doesn’t appear on the big travel map.

Oh the places you’ll go in Norrath

As it turns out it is a zone from the Destiny of Velious expansion, which is from 2011, so I am still seven years behind on expansions.  You have to first travel to The Great Divide and, from the bell there hop over to the New Combine flight point.  However, there is another flight point in between you and that, so I ended up trying to wrong flight point a couple of times before I got that settled.

From the correct flight point it is a quick flight/zone transition to the zone.

The zone itself it is very linear, consisting of a long, bending canyon.

Welcome to the Withered Lands

There are two flight points in the zone, but both are only to move to other locations.  My little red arrow is where you land while the second flight point… the little set of angel wings… is the far end of the zone and the quest chains that guide you through it.

In between are a some quest hubs, done in the classical fashion where you go grab half a dozen or so quests and run out to slay or explore until you’re all done, then you run back for the big set of turn ins.

There is fast travel… or at least hands free travel, it isn’t all that fast… between the quest hubs.  Each of them has a stable stop so you can take a horse between them.

The stable stops along the way

If you have a flying mount you can move about the zone over most of the mobs.  However, there is an unassailable mob flying around the zone that will knock you out of the sky as it passes by.  When that happens you’re down in the mud and cutting your way through the locals.  So sometimes it is better to just take the horse and let the locals look on as you pass.

Can touch me on this mount!

The quests are fairly standard.  EQII does a reasonable job marking where you need to go on the mini-map, though I sometimes feel that has released the quest writers from ever feeling the need to give you a hint as to where you might need to go.  There were a few quests that involved scouting a location that was deep in a cave complex, but the only hint you got was a blue mark on the map.

And, of course, there are the usual comical oddities that come with quests and interacting with the locals.

So there are two of you now?

The zone started out a little bit below me in level.  But that was fine as it let me get back into the swing of things without having to worry too much about fighting and correct use of my combat skills.  I wasn’t one-shotting things with auto-attack, but mobs went down pretty quickly.  As I went further though, the mobs started to catch up a bit in level.  But I leveled up as well, so the experience wasn’t too bad.

As I got to the last quest hub, Alivan, I got the achievement for exploring the zone.

Been there achievement

I don’t know what it is about achievements in EQII, but they don’t motivate me the way they do in WoW, or even Rift.  I don’t know why that is.  Maybe it is because they showed up so late in the life of the game that I don’t think about them.  I am always happy when I get an achievement in WoW, even the dumb ones, but in EQII my response is always a bit of a blank look.

Of course, in WoW achievements lead to things like unlocking flying, so maybe that helps.  I am not sure.

At Alivan the quest chain ends and you are essentially done with the zone.  You get a thank you from a big dragon and you’re set.

A job done, if not well done or done well

There is, however, that flight point Aliva.  It only has one stop, and that is Skyshrine: City of Dracur.

Having no other plans, I headed off for there.  Arriving, I found it to be one of those confusing mixes when it comes to difficulty that seems to be a specialty of EQII.

The main area itself is a hub in the midst of three city segments, each populated by heroic encounters.  Those, according to the help, are supposed to be set for groups of three players.  And, sure enough, after picking up some quests and wandering out into the city, I found those encounters to be difficult enough that if I got adds I was pretty much dead.

However, EQII has a solution when you need a small group, which is good because I saw nobody else in the zone the whole time I was there. (Probably not surprising for a zone from 2011.)  The solution are mercenaries.  I had forgotten about those until I died a couple of times and was pondering what to do.  I had a mystic for a mercenary who happily buffs and heals me when he is called up, not to mention kicking the crap out of any mob that looks at me sideways.

Me and my merc

But I didn’t always need him for heroic encounters.  There is a whole series of time travel quests, which I quite enjoyed, that send you off to various instanced bits of content, which is full of heroic encounters that I could easily handle solo.  So I dismissed my mercenary, if only to give the mobs half a chance and save the 20g every 30 minutes price.

There is an overly complex method of determining the difficulty of a mob that has to do with its level, whether or not it is flagged heroic, and the decorations around its name where the thickness of the frame, the barbs, and the up arrows all indicate… something.  More is more difficult, and the mob having a name is am additive as well.

Given all that, the level 100 heroic dragon mob in the screen shot above, which is named, has three up arrows, and a barbed frame thick enough to use as a sewer pipe, ought to be pretty tough.  Certainly tougher than the one in the screen shot below.

Looking on at Ovalis… also, the Halloween event turned my weapon into a shovel, of which I approve

Ovalis there is only level 98 after all, which made him my level at the time.  He looks more on par to this other named dragon, which I did solo without a blink. (Though, admittedly, he only has two up arrows, so he is easy according to the guide.)

Another named dragon… so many

However, the first dragon, which was early in the quest chain, went down so fast I barely had time to get that screen shot, while Ovalis was a different story altogether.

Ovalis is at the end of the quest chain and might be, for all I know, the last mob before you’re done.  I don’t know because I couldn’t finish him.  He was in an instance of heroic encounters that I was able to mow down solo.  But when I got to him he didn’t have much problem taking me out.  So I got out my mercenary and took another run at him, but he took the two of us out about as easily as he did just me.

It turns out that Ovalis is actually a boss fight, unlike all of the other named heroic, graphically festooned mobs I had run across up until then.  There is a run down of his fight on the wiki, but I wasn’t able to get through it on a few tries, so I started looking around at how to up my game.

I figured out that mercenaries can now be leveled up, which opens up equipment slots on them.  So I blew about two thirds of my hoarded Station Cash… Daybreak is probably tickled pink that I finally spent some of it after all these years… and boosted my merc up to level 10.

I then went off and crafted a full set of level appropriate armor for him.  Sigwerd is an armor smith, and I had be harvesting along the way, so that was easy enough.  I also managed to get his armor smithing skill to level 100 while I did that.

There were some other open slots for my mercenary, but those seemed to be for level 100 items, so were out of reach for me.   But otherwise as well equipped as I could make him, I headed back out to the Withered Lands and Skyshrine: City of Dracur, taking the various flight points and horse runs, to get back to Ovalis in order to challenge him once again.

And after all of that I was defeat yet again, just as easily as before.

So I am just shy of finishing the Withered Lands.  There isn’t much else to do in the zone, so I am off to find the next zone to try.  There is currently a boost to experience on the server, so I would like to get Sigwerd to level 100.

But overall the Withered Lands gave me a good solid chunk of content, which is all I am asking for really.