Friday - Presentations, Round Tables, Eve Keynote
and Pub Crawl with a Dev!
(I've thought about timing and hangover probability. I'm splitting day 2 into two posts. Here is the day time activities and expect a report on the pub crawl tomorrow morning!)
After the ever so slightly disappointing Charity Dinner I woke up with minimal hangover which is surprising as red wine usually hits me hard! Anyway onto Day 2!
On my way in I was pointed and webbed by the 20 Minuters and got a nice bottle of drink from @akley!
First up I checked out the alliance tournament. Was interesting watching them fit their ships. I'm no fitting god but I know only real men hull tank. Watch someone put a hull repper on a Vengeance along with shield rig and an armour tank made me a sad panda.
Watching him die horribly every time made me even sadder. Strangely the hull repper didn't work on the Vengeance!
I left that to attend the Faction War round table. The bloody farmers were out in force and they were a big topic. Warp core stabs and cloaking Daredevils were talked about extensively. CCP may change the rats to make warp core stabs a poor choice!
Another good thing was button counters slowly resetting so those bouncing from plex to plex whilst being chased would lose their "hard earnt" work to that point.
Large plex spawning is not working as intended. There is a bug that needs to be squashed, but first needs to be found.
CCP want to split militia and allied militia in the overview so you can shoot your allied militia if you want.
The bug where friendly rats shoot you is a bug! Needs fixing.
Talked about giving neuts a suspect flag if they enter a plex. Good idea!
CCP want to iterate further on system control and benefits for having high upgrade levels.
All good stuff but as expected FW is not going to get any significant developer resources for the foreseeable future.
Next up was live events.
The events over the last 6 months were a test bed to gauge community reaction. All went well so expect more!
CCP are looking to do more to support player driven events and are looking at a pack and website to help people create local events. CCP support will be determined by size of event and distance. So don't expect Hilmar and Guard to come and see you and 4 of your mates in the Australian outback!
Hoping to expand to other timezones for in game events but basically requires Dev's in Iceland to be in the office so GMT is currently still favourite I'm afraid!
Final roundtable before the Eve keynote was the fiction round table which of cause I went to.
My god, some people know their fiction. Big discussions on soft cloning and where a certain mission in the game has a story that conflicts with CCP canon! CCP has no official stance on the topic of soft cloning atm! Other bits and pieces....
- Jove/Sleeper story line currently not a priority.
- They want Faction War to effect the storyline but a lot of it is already written so cannot have a massive impact. Mostly on side-line stories.
- Fiction follows game design, game design does not follow the fiction.
- Tibus Heth is mad, bro!
- Someone asked for more back story on races including architecture and music and the like.
- CCP has a 'Fact Database' to try and ensure geeky consistency.
- Sansha - CCP are aware that storyline is paused, they are also aware the longer they leave it the more unbelievable it gets. Not on immediate radar.
- Yes there Amarr have been quiet and the story with the Theology Council needs closing. Amarr to be 'front and centre' of fiction soon (tm).
- Someone was upset that a lot of the fiction allows roleplayers knowledge that they shouldn't have. CCP do not agree it should be 3rd person writing to stop this.
Then it was.....
We started off with an excellent presentation on the history of Eve back from the late 1990's. Wow it was a rocky road to get here!
The CCP Uniflex took us through last year. You know all about 2012 right? OK I'll skip onto Soundwave and Seagull talking about Odyssey!
Apparently outposts are getting manufacturing buffs, 20 ships rebalanced, roid mining and moon mining getting more changes...... but no details! wtf? Oh wait two Dev blogs just got released
here and
here detailing that and T2 production changes.
Ice is being moved into anomalies which will need to be scanned and will respawn 4 hours after depleting.
The right click menu in space is becoming a round thingy.
Then we moved onto stargates. OMG NERD BONER!!!!! Great new stargate graphics and a cinematic for you moving many lightyears. No more blank black screen when jumping!
That is awesomesauce!
Internal station hangers have been made awesome too as previously reported
here and there are flashing warning lights and strobes when you click undock!
New turret sounds!
Capital sized rigs!
Apoc redesigned!
New ship sounds!
New pod and death transitions!
New Navy BC.... which we know about.
New Exporation Agents.
Tags4Sec (see yesterdays blog post)
New probing including launching 7 probes at one, new probing modules, preset probe layouts and a new system scanner, hacking and archaeology sites now data and relic sites, no more cans at these sites - now ship wrecks and structures to investigate! Hacking has a mini-game to unlock the structure or wreck and then it spews out the contents and you have to rush to collect as much as possible before they vanish!
Soundwave undocked to give us a quick tour. All looked great. Here is the tunnel you travel down after activating a stargate!
Nice! Finally Seagull gave us some hints at what is coming in the future. The theme is Space Colonisation and gave us some slides with a few clues.
Corp/Aliance logo's on ships?
Manufacturing
A 'home' in space.
WHAT THE FECK??? PLAYERS BUILDING STARGATES????
Hilmar finished off with some atmospheric flight shots but no details if this is pie in the sky or planned.
Wow. I managed to blog this in record time. Now need to get ready for the pub crawl!
PEACE!
