So How Is Odyssey Doing?

Back in February I did a post in which I used Eve Offline's charts to evaluate if the Retribution expansion was doing well or not based on Peak Current Users numbers after two months in. I wrote: 

Based on the weekly averages of the peak logged in accounts, Eve has not been as busy since the launch and heydays of Incursions in early 2011. I feel that this is primarily attributed to the improvements in ship balancing done by Team Game of Drones which has allowed a rebirth of cheaper ship fleet doctrines that can compete better with higher end battlecruiser, Tech II cruiser, and Tech III cruiser setups. Coupled with the excitement of the new features like bounty hunting and new ships and UI enhancements, things look good for Eve.. right now.
Next summer's patch is crucial.

So how does Odyssey look in comparison?

 A large drop off in the averages that pretty much has negated all the gains that Retribution had made. This is a vast disappointment and indicative that the "features" in Odyssey were lacking in "awesomeness" to draw the players in and keep them around. And the features that were added were mainly iterations on existing content and still need more work, like the new exploration hacking minigame, for example, could use more depth and function.

Personally I thought Odyssey was a decent expansion but we appear to want a combination of iteration on existing features and large new content expansions. Odyssey 1.1 was a good step, but more is needed. The malaise in null sec especially needs to be addressed somehow too.

HACing Around

So, Odyssey 1.1 deployed today and overall I'm not overly excited for it.

What I mean to say is I liked a lot of the changes included in the patch and I'm curious about the applications of the new HACs, Command Ships, nosferatu and repper changes; but overall its not going to change much for me.

One of the major downsides of Faction Warfare for me is that there is not much call for flying bigger tech 2 ships. You see Assault Frigs and Interceptors, but beyond that the violent and sudden nature of low sec combined with the decent cost effectiveness of Tech 1 cruisers after the rebalance dictates that most fleets call for Vexors over Ishtars and Caracals over Cerberuses.

Now, the HACs have been updated for the Tiericide initiative and they may see more use in the Faction Warfare meta, especially since they can enter the same plexes as their Tech I predecessors can. But as long as the cost of the hull for these ships is more than ten times as much I suspect they will continue to be fringe players overall.

That being said, here are the ships I'm most excited about.

Cerberus

HAM Cerberus

The thought of having Heavy Assault Missiles that fly out out over 40km makes me a little giddy. This ship is a straight up skirmisher meant to run away while heaving missiles to the aft as she goes. Probably some better fits with Heavy Launchers but I like the "ouch" factor that the shorter ranged missiles present.

Ishtar

Ishtar

 The Ishtar is the main reason I started training Gallente all those years ago in the first place. The flexibility of a massive drone bay like the Dominix in a smalled and harder form? Yes please! The changes in this patch have only increased the drone applications of this ship and I'm so glad I already have one in the hanger.

No, its not fast, but when it catches something in the double webs it doesn't have to be. God help you if you have to try and run away though.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at the command ships and see what appeals there.

How To: Eve's New Launcher

I've read and heard about a lot of people not liking the new launcher and after I figured out the optimal way to use it I like it. It's easier to switch characters than ever before. Let me show you how.

1) Open the launcher and click the Auto Play checkbox in the bottom right corner.

2) In the settings on the Start Up tab, make sure you uncheck the box for closing Eve Launcher after starting.

3) Log in and it will auto-launch the client. Select your character, start playing.

4) Meanwhile, the launcher is waiting patiently behind the scenes for you.

5) If you want to be another character on the same account, just close the client and hit PLAY on the launcher. You are still logged in! If you want to launch a second client, just switch to launcher and click the "Switch Account" link, enter username and password and hit enter and BOOM! New client launches.

Easy mode.

Odyssey Thoughts

So I've had two good play sessions in Odyssey now, doing my PvP thing and I want to put out there my impressions so far.

Tags4Sec

I personally have not gone looking for tags either in belts or on market but it nice to know the option is out there. I hear its put some people into the belts in low sec which is good as they have been ignored for a long time. Last night on comms one guy was commenting on how he spent a lot of ISK to get his sec status back up but in a few short ops had come back down to about -5 again. So I guess the tags are really only if you have too much ISK or plan to stay positive sec status. For me, I like the PvP opportunities my -9.8 gets me.

New Ships

I have yet to see the new Battlecruisers in space, but I did sell three Navy Brutix BPCs to pad my wallet. This one will take a long time to tell if it makes a huge splash or not.

Rebalanced Ships

The Tiericide initiative has breathed some new life into battleship theorycrafting but in low sec at least is has not translated to more battleships in space. Faction cruisers on the other hand, especially Navy Vexors, have become very popular and the fleet I was in last night was made up primarily of Navy Vexors and Navy Augorors, and we attacked a fleet with Navy Ospreys. Bizarre to this old timer.

Probing / New Hacking Minigame

Haven't tried it yet.

New Jump Effect

Nice but has faded into background noise for me now. This is a good thing as you don't want something you are going to be doing 40-50 times a session to become jarring or annoying.

Discovery Scanner

Like the jump effect, I don't even notice the anoms and sigs anymore when I jump into a system unless I'm looking for a plex in particular. When I try exploring I will have more feedback.

Radial Menus

This for me has been a big win. I set it up on my left click mouse button with medium delay and I use it a lot when selecting things in the overview. Its very handy with the sliding function for quickly selecting different ranges for orbiting. More like this please!

Resource Rebalancing

It is ostensibly the reason for the big war in Fountain between Goon-led CFC and TEST Alliance but I have not experienced any other impacts locally in low sec yet.

* * * * *

Big lesson from this post: I need to try probing and the new minigame.

Price As A Balancing Factor

One of the hardest lessons game developers at CCP had to learn was that in the long run price of something is not an adequate property to maintaining balance. We saw this with super capitals, nano-snake setups, Tech II versus Tech I, and Tech I tiers.

The base faulty argument is this:

If something performs significantly better than all other options but costs several magnitudes greater than them then its ok: the cost factor will prevent it from becoming too prevalent and dominating.

But ultimately what happens is players find the min-max solution that is better than all other options, it becomes known as those first adopters start to use it successfully, and in order to compete players are essentially forced to move to the optimal solution or be at a competitive disadvantage. The price of the optimal solution, regardless of how high, is merely subsumed as a cost of playing the game. The alternative is to not compete either by doing something else in Eve or quitting altogether.

The Tiericide initiative undertaken by CCP has the goal of addressing the most egregious example of the flawed reasoning and has done so admirably by balancing ships into roles per class and thus giving new life to ships that were not at the optimal point of the min-max graph.

Then the initiative hit the Battleship tier.

If the tiers could be said to have worked in any class it would have to be the Battleships. All twelve of the basic battleships saw use mainly because, due to their large size, there was enough variation in properties such as speed, tank, damage projection, fittings, weapon types, prices, etc that they were already slotted into roles. Yes, a Hyperion could do a lot of damage but the Megathron had a better slot layout. The Rokh had a better tank but the Raven had variable damage type and the Scorpion had EWar bonuses.

So faced with this situation almost no changes to implement the tiericide on the battleships was going to be received universally well as what happened mostly with frigates and cruisers. One of the biggest outcomes of the initiative is that ship prices for battleships will increase on average by 40 million ISK:

Let me give you the 'what' first, then the 'why':
The AVERAGE build cost of a battleship is going up by around 40mil
Former tier 3 prices will not change substantially, and so the majority of the change in cost is carried by the former tier 1 and 2s.
Prices will be differentiated slightly by role ('attack' and 'disruption' being a bit cheaper than 'combat')

If you had been smart a few months and had some liquid ISK, you could have predicted something like this, bought up a whack of Dominixes and Armageddons, and made a whack of money on selling them after the expansion lands.

Regardless, in the long run the tiericide / rolification of battleships will be good for the game as it will be easier to balanace ships within a class and a role as opposed to a tier. For the short term, expect things to get a little bumpy.

An Economy On the Rocks

So let's talk about ice. Specifically, ice in Odyssey.

At Fanfest CCP Fozzie released a dev blog describing what the plans are for resource balancing in the brave new expansion, and the part about ice mining has this to say:

Next we turn our attention to mining of a cooler kind. Ice mining provides the materials used to fuel New Eden’s thousands of Starbases, and the movements of massive capital fleets across the stars. These materials play a crucial role in EVE’s economy, but the mechanics around ice harvesting have not created a dynamic or interesting feature until now. New Eden currently enjoys a massive oversupply of ice, which stifles competition and emergent gameplay with the notable exception of a few specific organized ice interdictions performed by some very ambitious players. At current levels of ice product usage, all of the ice needed for the entire game could be provided by only four ice belts (one of each ice type). We at CCP want ice harvesting to be a lucrative activity that encourages players to relocate and compete for a piece of the pie. However we also must be careful not to cause the price of isotopes to rise beyond the means of most Starbase operators. We put a lot of thought into how we would walk this tightrope, and we believe we have found a strong solution.

 To summarize the changes:
- ice belts being removed, replaced by ice anomalies in the same system (with some exceptions)
- reducing the cycle time of all ice harvesters by 50%

The goal is apparently this:

The amount of ice found in these sites will be tuned to ensure that most, but not all, of the ice needs of the New Eden cluster can be provided by high security belts. At our current numbers, the maximum supply of ice from highsec (assuming that each belt is mined out completely five times a day) would provide approximately 80% of the game's ice needs, ensuring that at least some of the ice mining must be undertaken in lower security space. For context, this means that highsec will still be a large exporter of ice products, being able to generate eight times the volume of isotopes used by highsec control towers.

Does current ice production from high sec meet all of the cluster's ice needs? I think it must since they are trying to adjust it to make it necessary to ice mine in null sec and low sec. Certainly ice rocks in static belts that have infinite ice would suggest its capable of doing so, and in that case we can talk about the effects of this change.

Prediction #1 - Supply of Ice will go Down

Even if low sec and null sec mining ops start happening to cover the shortfall of current needs, it will probably not be enough as AFK ice mining is pretty much been nerfed into the ground. Humans will need to be involved more often so ice mining pilots will be active less often and thus unable to generate as much ice per pilot over a day than before.

Prediction #2 - Ice Product Prices will Rise

As supply drops, prices will rise, probably with a spike right around Odyssey's deployment and then stabilizing at a higher average price overall in the long term.

Prediction #3 - Demand will Drop

While demand for Liquid Ozone will remain pretty much static due to its price inelasticity (i.e. jump freighters and capitals will continue to operate much the same as before despite price increases due to the insignificant cost of using the fuel compared to operating the vessel overall), a lot of POS owners may find that the profit margins of their operations may evaporate under the increased fuel prices (since the cost of running a POS is super-significant to its operation!). More than a few POSes all over New Eden will probably be torn down, especially in high sec.

Prediction #4 - Demand will Level Off with High Sec Providing 95% of the Ice

I think we'll see POS operations and ice prices dictate event such that high sec ends up providing most if not all of the ice the cluster needs, with some operations in null sec where alliances can control access and security, but no operations in low sec.

Prediction #5 - Ice Mining will have fewer Pilots

But those pilots will make more ISK per hour since the cycle times are increased and prices are higher.