Teasing the Rorqual Changes to Come

Yes I'm a little behind with this news but a few recent conversations reminded me to post this.

Within the details of Day 2 for FanFest 2016 was this little gem:

The Rorqual will be rebalanced later this year. It will receive AoE links, a defensive superweapon, and brand new, powerful excavator superdrones. Details and further information can be expected later this year.

Area of Effect links, A defensive SUPERWEAPON and Superdrones, Awesome. The Super drones do look fantastic and I've also seen/heard mention of being able to use the Rorqual as a Jump Bridge but no matter how much I search my log files and my internet history I cannot find corroboration so I can't say more than that.

Still have six Rorquals, hopefully I'll be able to sell five in a few months when these changes go live. :)

*UPDATE*

Seems the Rorqual change(s) have been pushed further again. Annoying but I'd much rather they spent the time getting things almost perfect or working first time rather than have to suffer through patch after patch.

Still, bugger.

The (two) billion ISK whale

His Story

 

When I started playing it was the Arbitrator that I wanted to fly, I loved the look of the ship and the drone bay on the ship appealed to me, after all I could picture drones flying in/out of there.

 

Next it was the Orca, I can remember buying an Orca for 800m ISK in 2010 but having to leave it for two weeks because I had no characters who could fly it. The ship was a beautiful sight and really helped me when I started my mining empire and continues to serve me now as a short trip bulk hauler or a general support vessel.

 

 

Then in 2012 I was in need of a capital sized support vessel for my mining operations (now in Providence). There was only one choice and that was the Rorqual, instead of buying off the market I actually mined and produced ship myself in a low sec location and once finished I fit her and jumped to her new null sec home.

 

The Rorqual

 

The Rorqual was unique, at the time, in that she could compress ore and ice (using the Industrial Core) to make it smaller and thus easier to transport AND she transformed into a structure like ship. Fit out with Cargo rigs and cargo expanders you could fit 137,000m3 into the cargo hold, 50,000m3 into the Fleet Hanger and a truly massive 250,000m3 into the Ore/Ice hold.

 

 

The Rorqual could also fit the Clone Vat bay, a Titan is the only other ship that can fit this, and it allows pilots to create a clone in the Rorqual that can then be "jumped to" at any time, but only once. the clone would be removed from the Rorqual and put in space but you could not redock with the Rorqual and then use it again later.

 

The idea is solid, imagine being able to clone jump to a Rorqual, participate in a large scale mining operation and then clone jump back. No need to have clones near to the Rorqual, you just jump to it and then grab a ship from the massive Ship Maintenance Hanger and start mining.

 

Alas it never worked like this, the Rorqual was unfortunately relegated to being a off grid booster and Ore/Ice compression service. Rarely did they leave the safety of a POS and rarely were they fit to survive in space, let alone under attack. I do remember, during the invasion of KBP7-G by PL in ~2011 that a Rorqual was used by PL to setup a staging tower, supported by their sub-capital fleet.

 

Aside from that I've never seen a Rorqual outside of a POS that hasn't been picking up Ore/Ice or is moving back/forth to station. There have been "Battle Rorqual" fits and I recall there is a player who excels at using one, but it's very rare to see a Rorqual outside of a POS.

 

The Future

 

Since the introduction of the shorter development cycles for releases the Rorqual has found itself in limbo. Ore/Ice Compression has been made available to all via Station Services so you no longer need to do this, and consume Heavy Water, in the Rorqual. Clone Vat usage has been viable but the recent change to Jump Clones nerfs this as well now.

 

The Rorqual really is a ship without purpose, sure it can still be used for mining and the bonus you get for activating the Industrial Core when boosting is worth using the ship but having this as the ONLY benefit really puts a question to the viability to the Rorqual.

 

CCP did say, many months ago, in a post that the Rorqual was going to be "fixed" but they could not do anything until other changes in game and the "back-end" were complete. I can't remember where I read that, but I'm pretty sure it was on the official forums by CCP Fozzie... but I could be wrong about that but I know what the message said just not where I read it or who posted it.

 

Citadels are coming, other changes are happening but still word on the fate of the Rorqual is non-existent.

 

Come of CCP, please give us an update on the fate of the Rorqual.

*Bing* - Proposed Invention and Reverse Engineering changes

Another week, another devblog to review. This time details on changes to Invention and Reverse Engineering that did not make it into Crius.

Summary

First the really bad news, this will not be released in Oceanus or any time soon. These changes are being worked on now and have no release date.

Proposed changes are good, simplification of Invention and Reverse Engineering process and skills required mean it will be easier to get into and, I hate to use this analogy but it fits, level the playing field for all players new or veteran.

A change to the base success change also could, long term, see more T2 ships being available on the market or as blueprint copies. But the best change of all is that inventing will be changed so that only a single run is needed of a blueprint, meaning maximum run copies will yield multiple copies instead of one.

Skill Changes

Skill/item requirements for Invention will be changing. In their investigation CCP found that Electronic Engineering and Mechanical Engineering skills and data cores were being overused whilst some Racial Encryption Skills were not as intuitively used as they could. 

As a result a number of ships, modules and ammunitions are having their required skills and/or racial skills changed:

Changes to skills for invention

Skills required for Tech 2 manufacturing are also receiving a major change with the "construction" skills needed being changed to 1 instead of 4 or 5 they are now and as compensation for those who have trained this each extra level will yield a construction Time Efficiency reduction.

Invention and Reverse Engineering Merge

Comparing the two is confusing but they have almost the exact same look and feel. CCP decided that based on feedback and usage these two separate entities should be merged and just called Invention. In short Invention will be the future activity to describe the industrial activity that will yield advanced blueprints regardless of Tech level.

Using a Tech I blueprint will result in a Tech II blueprint copy or using an Ancient Relic will result in a Tech III blueprint copy.

Data cores and Decrypters will still play a part in the process, with Decrypters being expanded to affect Tech III blueprints, but Data Interfaces are going to be removed the game (yes!) and Meta items will no longer influence the quality of a blueprint.

Teams, much like in manufacturing, are being expanded to include invention and will function much the same but their bonuses will apply only to Invention.

Invention Outcomes

By far the most interesting changes (to me) is the introduction of the outcome gradient for Invention and the tweaking to the base success chance for all blueprints.

Rather than the binary style Success/Failure only indicator these changes will now see each Invention job have one of eight possible outcomes (four each of Success/Failure). Each has a benefit either in the end result:

• Success has a change of improving the base ME/TE) 
• Failure has a chance of a % of the data cores used being being returned

The new outcomes are as follows:

• Success (exceptional): yields a ME 2 and TE 3 bonus to the outcome
• Success (great): yields a ME 1 and TE 2 bonus to the outcome
• Success (good): yields a TE 1 bonus to the outcome
• Success (standard): basic unmodified outcome
• Failure (standard): 50% of datacores returned
• Failure (poor): 25% of datacores returned
• Failure (terrible): 10% of datacores returned
• Failure (critical): no datacores returned

The probability that one of the new Success/Failures occurs is as follows:

The new outcome gradient of eight is an excellent change, no more do we have "success or failure" only but now we see a tangible benefit to success (increased ME/TE) but also a form of compensation in data cores being returned if we fail.

Base Success Chance

CCP are changing the base success chance for item types, not so much to compensate or restrict what is available but it should see a base chance increase of 5% for all invention.

The change also, finally, formally documents what chance when inventing rigs, capital ships (for the future perhaps) and sets all Mining Barges in the same chance tier:

Old Base Chance

40% - Modules and Ammo

30% - Frigates, destroyers, Freighters and Skiff

25% - Cruisers, Industrials and Mackinaw

20% - Battlecruisers, Battleships and Hulk

New Base Chance

40% - All modules, rigs and ammo

35% - Frigates and Destroyers

30% - Cruisers, battlecruisers, Mining Barges, Industrials and Ore Industrial

25% - All battleships, Industrial Command Ship

20% - Capital and Capital industrial ships

Roughly a 5% base chance increase for ships may not seem a lot but spread out over 200 attempts its a good increase of about 10 over the old base.

Multiple Invention Runs

Invention is seeing a major change in how blueprints are consumed with the process now using only a single run of a blueprint copy instead of the whole blueprint copy. This, wonderfully, opens up a future change to allow Invention to be semi-automated and no longer require manual input after each Invention attempt.

Imagine being able to kick off an invention run on a 100 run copy of a module and return a week or two later to see 40 Tech 2 variants and a heap of returned data cores from the run rather than having to check after each individual run.

This is a great change that should do a lot to make invention less cumbersome and more useful, all the changes since Crius to industry have been good in the UI/behaviour columns and its excellent to see this continuing.

In Summary

Read the devblog, it has lots more pictures and explains in more depth what the proposed changes are. The changes ARE going to be good, it may well see an influx of people who will now give invention a proper try instead of seeing the skill requirements as a barrier and not bothering.

Looking forward to seeing this evolve with user feedback and see how it changes but the announced content is enough to make me quite excited at Invention for the future.

New Space

It's been rumoured for while and has finally been confirmed that CCP will be opening new space within New Eden for settlement.

 

This is excellent news as it gives people a new location to move to or visit along with all the surprises and goodies that will no doubt be available. As if that wasn't enough there is a lot of talk of player created star-gates allowing players to control routes allowing them to lead the expansion and not rely on CCP (read: CONCORD) opening up the space lanes.

 

 

Most people I've spoken to or have read blog/forums posts by seem to be very positive to this news. It's hard not to be, it could be quite the expansion should CCP introduce it with new features and ships however there are those people who have quite valid concerns about any new space being "open" for a few minutes until one of the larger alliances suddenly moves a large fleet in and takes over.

 

I'd urge, strongly, CCP to look at this ability as the perfect opportunity to shake things up and open the game up to new and different playing styles. Remove some of the familiar and replace it with something that requires all players to relearn how things work and to have to adapt rather than fall back to the familiar and 'safe'.

 

Any new space needs to be open for all, not just large entities that have the people and assets to defend/attack but the small corporations or one-person-bands. We need EVE to embrace these people and give them something rather than allowing the large alliances to vacuum up whatever they want with little to no resistance.

 

Increasing Industrial Capacity

Manufacturing and Research Slots

 

With maximum skills you can only have 11 Research and 11 Manufacturing slots and these can disappear very quickly especially if you move into advanced manufacturing/research (e.g. Capital ships or T3 systems/ships).

 

The limit is annoying even for T1 items, they consume research/production little time compared to other items that you're usually able to do more with them in a day. Problem is we can't be at the keyboard 23/7 and so slots are lost due to pending jobs or, in public stations, slots are lost to others.

 

Adding a couple of new skills, much like trade skills, that adds extra slots would be the best way of adding this. Making the skills time intensive and not something that can be trained in a few hours is how I'd implement it.

 

e.g.

 

Industrial Management (6x) - adds additional 2 manufacturing slots per level

Planetary Industrial Management (8x) - adds additional 5 manufacturing slots per level

 

Research Professor (6x) - adds additional 2 research slots per level

Einstein Fellow (8x) - adds additional 5 research slots per level

 

Everyone comes out of this better, industry types get more slots to do work in, production (potentially) increases as more can be made/researched and the market gains more product.

 

 

Alliance Marketplace continued

NOTE: I've previously covered the idea, albeit briefly, for an Alliance Marketplace here.

 

I was idling in game last night on a secondary industry toon who happens to live in a null sec alliance. Alliance chat is sometimes interesting, mostly just people saying "hi" or asking, for me, uninteresting questions, occasionally they'll be something funny. Blink Off is the default for this channel, but last night I witnessed a conversation that once more got me thinking about an Alliance Marketplace.

 

However, like the real universe, there must be black/grey/special markets operating outside of the established marketplace. Yet at this time we cannot see them and there are markets like this that operate via mailing lists and contracts what I think we really need is an Alliance Only market that any alliance can operate and buy/sell to only their members.

 

Current Market

 

As it stands we have the market, it is public and as a result open to all. You can, subject to skills trained, buy/sell anywhere up to the distance of your current region. Anything you see on the market can be bought and you can sell anything that the market supports. You cannot prevent anyone buying or selling and taxes taken go into a sink.

 

Access to the marketplace is based on the region you are in and you can use a selector to limit what you see by region, system or station. You cannot see outside of the region you are in and there are additional filters that allow you to hide orders in the different classified space (high sec/low sec/null sec).

 

This makes sense in High Sec space, after all there must be an agency that maintains the beacons that transfer the data and makes sure they are all up to date. But head into Low Sec or Null Sec space and the further you go the more unbelievable it is. Of course localised markets make sense but the way they are now, just uniform and public isn't right and doesn't encourage null sec growth to what it could be.

 

Alliance Market

 

I see an Alliance Market operating exactly the same in terms of functionality and UI as the current market. Items in the normal market would appear in an alliance market, the buying/selling actions are the same the only things that would differ would be the following:

• Visibility

The Alliance Market would be visible and usable only by members of an Alliance. Like the current market it has limitations on visibility/buying/selling of items based on skills the only difference would be that people outside of the alliance would not know it exists. Item's listed only for alliance sale would never appear to an outsider.

 

The functionality within the UI for this would be 99% of current market, the only new functionality would be the filtering of results based on whether they are alliance only or not and any UI highlighting (exactly like the 'highlight own orders' that exists)

• Taxation

This is the only really new functionality and would allow the alliance to tax transactions much like the current market does only this would be 'in-addition' to any taxes normally paid. It should be up to the alliance how much is paid but a good starting amount would be 0.5% with an maximum limit of 5% per transaction.

 

Conclusion

 

The introduction of an Alliance Marketplace could have a significant impact on null sec alliances and their ability to maintain income but more importantly establish themselves not just in low sec but also null sec. New private trade hubs could be create and maintained without the concern of providing materiel to enemies who can buy and sell anywhere within their skill range.

 

I believe the Alliance Marketplace could be a significant step towards revitalising an area of EVE that is both clunky and oversaturated with players.

The Alliance Marketplace

Reading Alliance chat tonight and seeing one of the more experienced members, once again, saying

 

"yeah...as I said, CCP should finally implement an alliance marketplace"

 

I can't help but, again, nod my head in agreement, we really do need something alliance specific for the marketplace. Being able to sell items to your alliance without the need for contracts would really be useful and is the next logical step to setting up private regional markets based.

 

No longer would everyone be able to see and buy items at one price but it would allow players to set prices based on public purchase and another for the alliance. 

 

The Marketplace - all for one and one for all

 

Integration into the existing marketplace UI would be the best way to go, there should always be only one marketplace. Just change the appearance and how data is displayed to differentiate between different sales types as a result no new UI will be needed.

 

Order scope could be shown using a new variation of the "Show own orders" option that the market currently has to show Alliance only scoped items in a different colour. This would allow people to quickly and easily see Public and Alliance orders, decide which is better and buy that item.

 

 

 

Marauders - to PVP or not PVP

A recent blog to my list of reading is The Lazy Pilot. The author, Unforgiven Storm, writes well and obviously comes from somewhere where English is not the primary language. Not that doesn't stop him writing extremely well, I really do enjoy the blog.

 

However a post a couple of days ago about proposed changes to Marauders has gotten him into a lather. I read the original post and thought he was being a little too ferment in his opposition to the changes proposed, I think that there are other T2 ships that should be done first but other than that didn't really have much to contribute.

 

I've since read the EVE Online forums 'threadnaught' and the follow-up post from Unforgiven Storm and I agree more than I did before. Are CCP trying to take a PvE ship and bolt on PvP abilities whilst providing some buff to PvE abilities, it would appear so. All under the heading of 'balancing'.

A pilot who can fly a Marauder really deserves something special, so make the Marauder special for the almost billion ISK the hull costs and as a reward for people who do train it.
 

Skills

Marauders are complex ships. I've been playing for three years and only in the last two months have I got two characters skills enough to inject the Marauders skill book. These ships are just one step shy of capital ships, in fact look at the skills required and most are what a capital pilot should have (and pre-Odyssey 1.0 would have had to have). Only the Capital Ships and Advanced Spaceship Command skills are missing!

 

I've just checked and to fly just the ship (no modules) a new character would require at least:

• 108d training for ship hull
• 75d for Tech 2 Large guns
• 60d for basic skills

That is not a short time nor something to be done on a whim, it's over a years solid training just there.
 

Ship Bonuses 

I can fly a Paladin I will use this as an example here but any changes should be applied to shield/armour regardless of the race.

I must say I'm underwhelmed by the Paladin's bonuses:

• Amarr Battleship Skill Bonus:
  5% bonus to capacitor capacity and 10% bonus to the velocity factor of stasis webifiers per level 
• Marauder Skill Bonus
  7.5% bonus to repair amount of armor repair systems and 5% bonus to large energy turret damage per level
• Role Bonus:
  100% bonus to energy weapon damage, 100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams

These really do need to be changed, anyone who fly's a Marauder will undoubtedly have a salvaging alt in a Noctis so do we really need that Role Bonus to tractor beams, I don't think we do. How about replacing it with a speed bonus or, as marauders are people who plunder, a increase in the already expansive cargo hold size to allow more loot or ammo to be carried?

 

The, updated, proposed changes remove the armour repair bonus and replace it with proper T2 resists but why can't we have both. Buff the resists to T2 and add the armour repair bonus? That will mean the ship can be used for PvE and be solid but also looks enticing for PvP use because it can be tanked well without having to add additional resistance modules instead of dps ones.

 

Drones

One thing I think needs addressing is the woeful drone support on Marauders. We're led to believe these ships "represent the cutting edge in today's warship technology" yet only the Kronos has 125m3 of drone space, enough for a full bay of either heavy or sentry drones but all can only field 75m3 worth.

 

What a travesty. I mean, these are cutting edge warships and drones are so prevalent in New Eden yet these ships appear to have had them tacked on as a "oh lets give them a few drones".

 

Let's change that and give all Marauders a minimum of 150m3 drone bay space and all have bandwidth for 125m3 (enough for 5 heavy/sentries). That would add nice dps to any engagement, PvE or PvP.

 

Bastion Module

I really wanted to laugh and point out the silliness of this module but the more I think about it the more I think it is a good idea and I disagree with Unforgiven Storm, we don't need a new class of ship that can fit in C1/C2 WH's to do the job of dreadnaught. T3's and battleships do a good enough job now for that, why complicate things with another specialised ship class.

 

To have a module that gives a similar effect to Marauders that the Siege module does means a lot of L4's that take 45 minutes or more to complete will see a drop in time to complete, thus increasing ISK/hr. After all it's all about the ISK per hour.

 

And if I'm getting more ISK per hour I'll no doubt add more bling to my ship, after all it's my ship and I can do that. Gankers be damned!
 

 

In Conclusion

I like changes, especially to ships I fly but the changes to Marauders need further work. I like the Bastion module but other changes seem to be giving with right hand but taking something with the left.

 

Why do we have to have things taken, they're proven and they work. Leave them be but add something new to the mix.