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A Look at the History of Expansions - Part Thirteen

A Look at the History of Expansions the Series

Previous Entry: Revelations II

The Summer of 2007 was a quiet one. Summer is vacation time in Iceland and the CCP offices filtered out various, media focused information for E-ON and  Eve TV. It was not until the second week of August before things picked up.

Revelations II was part two of a three part expansion arc. The third part, Revelations III, would become known as Eve Online: Trinity. CCP is about to undertake a project of huge, internal magnitude. They are updating Eve's graphics to the Trinity Engine.


Faction Warfare is still on the horizon. CCP has been waving it around for a while not but they have not released anything they are pleased with. However, a battle that CCP has started to wage is the one with mineral compression. The introduction of the Rorqual was to help solve the problem of minerals being turned into items of smaller volume, transported, and then reprocessed.
These changes slated for kali 3.0 will cause many null-sec dwellers to have to alter their current operations where they have established such around use of mineral compression and you rightly need as much time as possible to adapt.
The introduction of the Rorqual was to help solve the problem of minerals being turned into items of smaller volume, transported, and then reprocessed. Also, in terms of industry, science and invention skill books are being seeded on the market due to disproportionate supply and demand pushing smaller groups of out.

CCP is also nipping the problem of corpse bumping in the bud. It seems that people slaughter innocents and throw their bodies into space to tangle up spaceships. Ships will no longer bump off of dead bodies but will just plow right through them.

There is general rebalancing across the heavy assault cruisers. Heavy Assault Missiles are getting bumped up to a 20k range. We all remember back when it was 15k, right? Plus, Damnations are to damn fragile for a command ship. This is being changed.

The first economy dev blog is published. Sadly, the graphics are not loaded but there is still plenty of numbers in there to drown in. Eve is enjoying a period of regular, small patches. It is during one of these patches that giving reps (repairs) to criminal NPCs. The Macintosh and Linux clients are also released.

It is September and the next expansion is only two months away. A general summary of what is coming up is released. The tech 2 ship class we currently know as Marauders was code named 'Violators'. They are going to be released in the next expansion. This is also the introduction of BlackOps battleships and covert jump bridges. Heavy interdictors are also going to be released.

More missions are coming. They are also going to tweak overheating so that an offline module will absorb heat. Boosters are also getting some attention. a Few more clouds and a few legal types are being added. Bombers are also being tweaked so that they are not sitting inside of the bombs blast radius.
Better kill-mail system
The aim of the review is to overhaul the killmail system, shifting it to a kill log available in the character sheet as a standard table, thus allowing a rich format view while keeping the current classic text format. The main benefit being the kill records are always persisted and won't fill your evemail inbox. All participants will be recorded and shown (no longer truncated at 20), NPC final blows (where NPC fired the death shot) will be shown and the kill log will update the highest damaging player as the recipient of the log update. Rigs and dropped items will be included alongside destroyed items.
The improvements to the kill mail system receive their own Dev Blog. It seems that many kill mails went missing during this time because they went to NPCs. There were also limits on the number of participants the mail saved. Oh yeah, they are also not going to be mails anymore. Instead, they will be viewable under your character sheet. Remember, they cannot yet be linked. That will be a future dream.

What is not coming in November will be Faction Warfare. CCP Ginger writes a dev blog explaining why CCP is not yet implementing Faction Warfare and what CCP's concept for it is.
Here is our vision, we want to promote small gang warfare, we want to create more accessible PvP and we want to create the feeling of the factions finally going to war. However, the system is not going to force or restrict people to fight this way. We are simply aiming for a design which encourages, rewards and makes it more viable to achieve objectives with a small gang as opposed to a large fleet. Of course there won't be anything stopping people from bringing large fleets if they so wish.
There is also a link to the old Faction Warfare Features and Ideas post started by CCP.


It is October and the expansion is on the horizon. The next economic dev blog comes out and focuses on production of spaceships. A quarterly report is promised before the next Fanfest. CCP also announces its acquisition of White Wolf Enterprises. CCP is thinking about Ambulation and during this time they also float out the idea of a tactical map.

Invention is getting a bit of love. It has received several levels of refinement since its release. As well as the earlier stated skillbook seeding CCP is playing with the random number generator. It seems that it was a bit more random than what we enjoy today.
Solving Multiple Outcomes
With invention, there can be more than one possible outcome, this leading to a random chance of a Tech II variant being produced. An example of this is trying to invent with a Rifter blueprint copy, your possible Tech II variations are the Wolf and Jaguar. Currently, if you attempt an invention job, the possible output (shown in the Jobs tab of the Science & Industry interface) is randomly picked.
CCP will be giving inventors an output box so that they can choose to make enough Jaguar's to fly the skies. Invention is receiving a lot of attention this time.

Trinity is well on its way. CCP releases a dev blog explaining the client change that will come with Trinity, the next expansion. They also release a Dev Blog explaining that they need to nerf capitals.
I'm posting here now because the last few days we've been looking at the way capital and supercapital ships are functioning on Tranquility, and to be honest we‘re a little concerned with the direction it‘s taking.
What we want is pretty basic: We want to make fighter wielding capital ships more reliant on their support fleet and less of a direct über deathbringer.
It seems that Eve's players did not like the upcoming nerf of their beautiful uber deathbringers. Another Dev Blog was released to update people on CCP's goals for carriers and to ask that all death threats include the entire team. They do enjoy being inclusive.
No ship in EVE should be the “end game” vessel, but that's what we feel we've got now. There are more than 10,000 Carriers in play, a vessel which can be everything you want it to be (which is part of the problem) without having to fit for the occasion. We don’t want to see either of these ships ripping apart everything that gets in their way, no matter the size. Carrier and Motherships were designed to be a combined effort among corporation members where they rely on the group, and be pretty much defenseless against small ship classes without support.
Electronic Attack Ships, Heavy Interdictors, Black Ops and Marauders are a go. While Violators might be a lovely.

Fanfest is in November (my god how cold was that?) and the Quarterly report is released. Trinity is right around the corner. The CSM, until this point has been handpicked by CCP. They will now be voted into office by the player population.

Trinity is going to bring scripts for modules. Corporation recruitment advertisements are also introduced.

It is December of 2007. The third Economic Dev Blog is released and it is about corporation statistics. Trinity will be released in a few days and with that will come a new realm of complications, excitement, and history for Eve Online.

Coming next: Eve Online - Trinity


Resources:
Eve Online 2007 Dev Blogs
Eve Online Patch Notes
Eve History Wiki

Comments

  1. I greatly enjoy these history pieces. That we still argue about so many of the same things (‘end game’ ship nerfs, mineral compression squabbles) is astounding, if a little demoralizing. I do have one major complaint however. This . . . this, is not acceptable:
    CCP is also nipping the problem of corpse bumping in the bud. It seems that people slaughter innocents and throw their bodies into space to tangle up spaceships. Ships will no longer bump off of dead bodies but will just plow right through them.

    The spit take you produced (‘twas drinking my morning coffee while reading) nearly destroyed my keyboard. Fortunately only a little spittle landed there but the mouse, oooh the poor mouse . . .

    ReplyDelete
  2. A little demoralizing indeed. Although there has been progress. The compression thing, for example, has been firmly nailed, although it is demoralizing that it took them until Crius. They did not have to do a full industrial revamp to simply chop the return from reprocessing modules by 0.5. How hard should that have been?

    I also loved the bit about corpse bumping.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think that we will find the course of projects changing soon. We are now heading into the fifth year.

      Delete

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