Fanfest - Day 1 and Wednesday Night

Wednesday finished off with the traditional #tweetfleet meet. A host of players and Devs drank and chatted about internet spaceships. I can recall meeting Hans, Ali, Druur, CCP Falcon, CCP Affinity, Baghi, Sindell plus others where my vodka soaked brain is now letting me down. Oh and I do recall and being molested by someone who thought I was Two Step!

So onto Wednesday. A long shower, big breakfast and some English Breakfast Tea and I was ready to face the Harpa! Met up with S810 and Misty who had cosplayed as S810's in game character. So, if S810 Jr's girlfriend is cosplaying his own toon....? Mmmmmm?

First roundtable was a mistake. Assuming Tech Art was art about Eve tech was a whoopsie. It was the technology behind the art team. Lots of talk of validation and authoring software, black files, red files. They had a nice spinny wheel and there was a dance of for those of us who didn't know what the frack was going on!

Next up was the community panel (couple of dodgy Amarr by the door!) with lots of discussions on fansites, player meets and live events. As a panel session it was mostly player questions on the topic. Although a few people wanted to ask questions about future game plans? Guys "Community panel".

After that we went to ship balancing. First section was a recap on what we already knew regarding pirate faction ships. The it got interesting...

Retriever and Mackinaw dominate far too much. Convector and Hulk aren't used much so they are getting their bonuses tweaked and a new mining laser range bonus.

Mining laser crystals are going to be reduced in size as they are too large. Skiff is being buffed and will make an excellent Battle Skiff with bonus to drone damage and speed (to also help with bumpers).

Drones we know are getting rebalanced. But extra to what we've been told so far, drone orbiting rangers are to be increased. The largest orbits will belong to the Caldari and Amarr so they will have the best tracking in the summer expansion. This will help even further to draw them out of the "meh" bracket of drones.

The Phoenix dreadnought is to be rebalanced along with Citadel torpedoes with the idea to make it useful!!!

Then we got a look at this years Alliance Tournament ships. Yeah.... OP is not the phrase!

Other ships to be rebalanced are:-

• Orca and Rorqual (encouraged into belts not sat at POS)
• Stealth Bombers
• Recons
• T3's and Subs

Then we got onto modules. Basically what they are doing is looking at meta levels and removing them. Named modules will be T1 with a "better" characteristic. So for guns there may be four named meta versions one with better fitting, one with better tracking, one with better cap usage and one with better optimal. Could make fitting T1 a lot more interesting. Also did someone say player built named meta items?

After that I went to an art demo which was rather interesting but not much I can say about it!

 

Before finally the Eve Valkyrie Keynote! Its almost there and built in the Unreal 4 engine. Immortal fighter pilots originally from Guristas but going alone (sounds familiar!). Amarr/Caldari blended to create...

Three ship roles. Fighter, heavy and support. Each has two primary weapons (guns and missiles) and two support roles such as lasers that shoot down incoming missiles and the ability to project a hologram of your ship to confuse enemy pilots.

You can upgrade your ship, your load-outs, your pilot and your ground crew to progress. Load-outs make your ship better in some areas but that is balanced with nerfs in others. Your load-outs do not make your ship better overall, just specialise its roll.

There will be different 'turfs' such as wreckage field, dust cloud and open space which will be better suited for certain ship types.

I'll cover more on Saturday on Eve : Valkyrie. For now, a NSFW video by the star and voice actor of the main character of Eve : Valkyrie. Did I say NSFW language incoming? Props to CCP for making this a slight piss-take of the language used in her most famous role :o)

Oh for fracks sake. Fracking Blogger won't fracking insert the fracking YouTube video. Frack it, link here.

2014 Fanfest blog posts:-
http://sandciderandspaceships.blogspot.com/2014/04/fanfest-monument-unveiling.html
http://sandciderandspaceships.blogspot.com/2014/04/thats-right-im-in-iceland-eve-monument.html