My Post Crius Review

Good. With a capital G.

That sums it up succinctly. 

General Feedback

I was accosted (in a nice way) by a friend this morning when I logged in to do some skill queue updates before work and he had nothing but good things to say about the new Industry UI and the lessening of the "click-fest" we used to have.

Lorna has also said the same to me, and I'm sure there will be a blog post on it from her in the very near future.

Holding Pattern

I haven't really done any industry work since the day before Crius was deployed because I'd identified some bottlenecks that would arise and the market would be in a state of flux due to changes to blueprints. 

Fortunately I planned ahead and have about 8 weeks stock of modules on hand and another three and half weeks of moon goo for my towers. This will allow me to remain afloat whilst still meeting my commitments and leaving me some "play money".

I do have a "strategic reserve" in the form of PLEX but I do not wish to cash any of these in as they are my long term ISK store but also a valuable bank of game-time should I have any ISK poor months and I'm unable to buy fresh PLEX to fund my accounts.

I'm still watching the market and starting to plan when I'll be starting industry again, I have plans forming for new ventures alongside my existing ones.

All The Small Things

Every time something new comes from CCP there are the major features and the minor features. Of course the major features get the most press and feedback but the minor stuff really can be just as good but, like the black sheep, it's often ignored.

There's a small change currently on SiSi and it's to do with the Show Info window for Minerals and Ice Products.

Tranquility

Currently if you were to click Show Info on a piece of Tritanium you would see this:

It's broadly the same for Hydrogen Isotopes:

Not overly helpful, contains the barest of details but doesn't include information on where you can find Tritanium (other than the market) or Hydrogen (in "ice in Minmatar space"). 

In short, there is room for improvement.

Singularity

Checking SiSi (best place to see new changes before they go live) and the same Show Info yields the following:

Wow. 

What a change, it looks much nicer but also has a lot more information that is actually useful for the player. 

I can remember starting off in EVE Online and having to use the ORE Calculators and Mining Guides in order to know what was in each type of ore so I could know what I should mine to get what I was after. This way you know what to search for without having to refer to a third party table.

End of Racial Ice Locations?

One thing of note is could the text for where to find isotopes indicate an end to regional clustering of ice? The text doesn't say "found in Minmatar null sec space", and nor does the text for the other racial isotopes.

It could be generic text, probably it is, but could it indicate a change in ice distribution in the future?

Change to scanning in Crius?

I was browsing the "unofficial patch notes" at EVE Manufacturing and came across a really interesting on related to scanning that I had heard nothing of until now.

There are a few different scanning modules/rigs that can be fitted to ships including a the following passive mid slot modules:

• Scan Acquisition Array
• Scan Pinpointing Array
• Scan Rangefinding Array

These improve scan time/deviation and strength passively, meaning that you don't have to activate them and can scan in relative safety cloaked.

However in Crius this will be changing and these modules will change from passive to active, meaning that they will no longer function whilst cloaked.

This change has been implemented to

combat the over effectiveness of combat scanning by adding a risk reward element allowing faster scanning by risking uncloaking your ship.

which I can understand and does make sense but it is sure to make a lot of people unhappy, if it does make it into the Crius release (which I've not been able to confirm)

Jump Drive and Isotope changes are coming

In just over two weeks Crius will be deployed and with that a whole raft of changes to industry, star bases and one major change to jump fuel usage for capital ships.

Stimulation

CCP are trying to stimulate the isotope market and keep prices steady due to changes made in Kronos that could have seen a significant drop in the number of player star bases being operated. 

In order to stimulate the market there really needs to be something that will take over the need for the isotopes that previously would have been used in POS fuels. CCP have decided to change jump drives (and jump portals) and make them consume 50% more isotopes on use.

It's a bold change and one that has had plenty of comments in the official forum thread and it turns out that one of the comments was such a good idea that CCP have implemented it as part of the changes.

The changes coming will be as follows:

• 50% increase in fuel usage by all jump drives and jump portals
• 33% decrease in isotope volume from 0.15m3 to 0.10m3

The latter change is especially good against the first as without it it was probable that some multiple jump courses could require refueling stops but this means that you'll be able to carry more 33% isotopes without changing fuel bay.

Costs

I've calculated the costs for fuel usage in Kronos and post-Crius and come up with the following based on the following isotope costs:

Isotope cost as of 7th July 2014

Highlighted in red isotope quantities that exceed the ship fuel bay size

It's clear from this that any pilot not trained to at least Jump Fuel Conservation IV is going to seriously cut into any profits or rewards for jumping. 

Fuel costs are definitely going up but the reduction in isotope volume will mean most pilots will be able to continue without the need for refueling points. Only really low skilled pilots will have an issue and realistically I don't think this is an issue as any jump freighter pilot will be trained to have all jump skills to V.

How This Affects Me

Not a huge amount but for me my costs will increase by 11m per round trip.

It looks like I'll be increasing my shipping prices for Corp/Alliance/Friends. My current price per m3 almost covered the increased costs but not quite so I'm going to increase my shipping prices by 10% per m3 to cover this and still jump "at a profit".

Post Crius

What will happen post-Crius will be interesting. Will we see a reduction in isotope costs or will they stay pretty much unchanged.

I think the latter is most likely, isotope usage will increase over time but people will have stockpiled before hand to ensure that they have stable costs, at least until they use what they have stockpiled, and the convenience of a supply to last any further fluctuations. 

Personally I've bought enough to survive a couple of months worth of normal usage and I know friend who are/have done the same. It's good planning to have stockpiles for situations like this.

One Wish

Changes to Ice mining and certain events have certainly fluctuated pricing over the years I've been in game but the one thing that really makes no sense to me is the limit that isotopes can only be mined in the racial area that they are used by.

i.e. Helium can only be mined in Amarr and aligned regions, Oxygen in Gallente/aligned regions and so on

I'd like to see this change and instead all ice belts should provide a good mix of different types instead of just the one. 

Imagine warping to an ice anomaly and seeing not just Dark Glitter or Glacial Mass but maybe a group of Clear Icicle or Blue Ice. Certainly limit the amount of non-local/region racial ice that appears but start making it appear everywhere and maybe that will also stimulate the market as there would be more supplied from all over New Eden and not just certain regional places.

Moon Mining comes to 0.4

CCP Greyscale has sneaked something into the coming Crius release, and it's a long overdue change:

We changed a >= to a > so the code does what the authoring was always assuming it did. I just fixed the display text for the attributes this afternoon to reflect this, but the code should already be in place.

What this means is that moon mining can now take place in 0.4 systems and lower instead of 0.3 systems and lower as is currently the case. 

Looks like a simple logic change has finally happened, well overdue and I can see a lot of 0.4 systems will be getting an audit of their moons.

Thanks to Serpentine's EVE for the heads up on this change.