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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Dominion: Kicking it When Its Down

I've seen a lot of angst and anger over the next Eve Expansion Dominion lately on blogs and forums. A lot of people kicking it and saying "whatever" or "worst expansion ever" mostly in response to the twin debacles of initial sovereignty costs and the mothership changes.

So I figured being a dyed-in-the-wool Eve fanboy I'd list the big features of Dominion and weigh in on them to put everything in persepective.

No Mothership Changes - Makes me sad panda. Whether you're talking about the first edition supercarriers with massive waves of fighter bombers or the Nohz edition with affordable cost and docking privs, I supported anything to make this class more prevalent. I have hope they will address this in the near future.

Sovereignty Changes - Massive overhaul of the core 0.0 political mechanic moving away from Dickstars and POS spam. Good. System upgrades. Good. Massive logistic networks costing lots of ISK. Good.

R64 Moon Goo Nerf - I think they didn't go far enough personally but I look forward to any loosening of single point static income sources.

Planet and Moon graphic overhaul - Take a good hard long look at Eve of 2004-2005 and then compare to Eve of Dominion. Ships, stations, asteroids, and now planets. Eve looks amazing and I can't think of another MMO that started in 2003 or thereabouts that has made the effort to upgrade their graphics like Eve has. Brilliant.

New Navy Battleships - Navy Dominix? Yes please! Navy Armageddon? DROOL! Navy Scorpion? Meh. new rare ships is always a treat. Not to mention some other navy ships getting rebalanced.

Rebalanced Pirate Faction Ships - Huge overhaul to make the pirate faction ships cool again like the Sanshas Nightmare and its ilk. Good stuff.

Pirate Speedboat Missions - More variety to PvE is a good thing and I know a lot of people are looking forward to working for the pirates even more.

Titan Doomsday Device Rebalancing - The proliferation of Titans means that the DDD needs a change. I look forward to seeing killmails of carriers and dreads killed by the new version.

Capital Ship Weapons Rebalancing - Good stuff and appears well thought out to my untrained eye.

New Email Client - *Angels Singing* Can't wait.

Moondoggie akak new in game browser - Oh hell yes. That is a must have for me.

Projectile weapon balancing - having almost no familiarity with projectiles I can only guess if its good or not, but at least they are looking at it and trying to improve them.

Conclusion:

Dominion is huge in terms of changes, from politics to quality of life. There is a lot of good in there its just not big and flashy in one area like Apocrypha was with the wormholes or Empyrean Age with factional warfare.

Keep up the good work CCP, and work on improving your conversation with the playerbase over changes. That's your weakness at the moment.
Posted: 9:07 AM
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13 comments:

  1. People tend to focus so heavily on the bad they forget the good. Yes, motherships are still going to suck, but from what I hear they already do, so big deal in the end :\

    All the good changes have me counting down the days though, there is just soooooo much nice things coming.
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  2. I agree with you Kirith in regards to the overall expansion being 1outstanding IMO. The planet visuals alone will make Eve seem like a new MMO.

    It is too bad CCP botched pretty badly the Sov & MoM Cap ship releases. The communication was poor, the player response overwhelmingly negative, and CCP's intransigence bordering on sometimes even being flippant execerbated the overall negativity.

    If they had communicated more and even decided to simply delay the sov/cap ship changes even for a few weeks while releasing all the other outstanding features they worked so hard on - I think the release wouldn't have been so tarnished as it is now.

    I've been a bit surprised at my own anger - although I have to admit, initially I was more - well this is curious why are you doing this CCP, what about these problems? But when the 2nd dev blog his - with glaring misstatements by Nozh, and then the failed response to an outraged playerbase - but even worse heavy censorship - I became one of those among the quite upset player base.

    I ain't cancelling my Eve account any time soon, and maybe we're all making mountains out of molehills - we'll soon find out.

    Cheers.
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  3. Couldn't care less about the sov or mothership changes but I guess that's part of living in lowsec :)

    The updated navy/pirate ships and new email client are what I'm really looking forward to.
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  4. Email... graphics... browser... planetary data (*astronomy geek alert*)... projectile weapons... pirate faction standings fix... Fleet Typhoon... YES PLZ.

    Okay, this doesn't become my favorite expansion or anything. Apocrypha still holds that for me, I think, and even Empyrean Age (for all its faults) did pretty well. Still, it's no Quantum Lies or whatever.
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  6. Also, I hate when I post with the wrong profile. >.< (Casiella == Kyle. No secret, just annoying.)
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  7. Most of the crying and whining I've heard/read about Dominion is about things that the majority of the player base has either no access to, or no interest in. They could make the super caps pink with green polka dots and I still wouldn't care. But when the Power Block pilots start crying, the rivers of tears jump out of their beds.

    With all the good things that Dominion will bring I don't see any reason to cry or whine. The game just keeps getting better a little bit at a time. You did forget an important thing in your post Kirith: the new fleet tool. Everyone will have to deal with the change for a little while, but personally I think fleet will be easier to manage.
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  8. Moondoggie: Awesome, finally a decent in-game browser

    Planet Graphics Upgrade: Cool, looks a lot more dynamic (Moving clouds yay :P)

    Titan DD Changes: Bleh, I liked the old AoE kind of effect, the new graphics are cool but I'd prefer the AoE.

    Sov Changes: The upgrade system is good but the costs might prevent smaller corps from getting decently upgraded null-sec systems.

    And well the other changes aren't really of any interest for me atm.
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  9. Dominion is full of win. The people bitching about Sov changes are the ones who control massive amounts of space they never see and don't use. while the initial costs look bad, when you actually upgrade and use your space it starts to look less daunting. being a new transplant to 0.0, i have done a little POS bashing anh find it to be boring and dreadful. how anyone can want to keep up the status quo is beyond me.

    @theelitist stripping AoE from the DD is balancing. think about fleets anymore, you have to tank for a DDD and then try to squeeze on the fun stuff. this will definitely make it more fun to fly in large fleet battles since you can play with your fittings.
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  10. @grimmlock: Hmm, yeh it gives more fleet battle fun compared to the old DD I guess. and for the costs everyone was complaining about them saying they'd make it harder for newbs in null-sec, but I've got no experience in this so I just assumed they were right.

    Let's finish with one of the latest quotes I've learned: Assumption is the reason of the greatest fuckups
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  11. Ehm, Mother of all fuck-ups*
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  12. I rather like everything from Dominion, and I'm also sad that they're not going with the initial mothership changes, because those sounded great.

    I think Myrh has the right of it. Also, the Eve-O forums are a notorious soup of primordial troll-spam: a lot of the complaints are utterly unhelpful comments about how bad X sucks. You have to sift hard through the sludge to find actual constructive feedback with reasoning, examples and suggestions -- a rare and beautiful thing that makes devs very happy.
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  13. If you think CCP has a weakness in listening to the player base then you perhaps have not played any other game ever made. Not only does CCP host their own forums, but supports third party heavily. In-Game browser? What other game can boast expansions that are not paid for on top of the subscription costs. Usually updates add extra content, but CCP constantly adds and modifies previous content for balancing.
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