Monday, March 26, 2012

Fanfest - Day 3

Ouch.... what day is it? Is it day? ***k me!


Unsurprisingly I was late for the start. I arrived to the Eve Movie Morning just to catch the last minute of Clear Skies III. Next video was a RnK carrier video. They are pretty awesome PvP'rs.

Next up was the war dec presentation. Some interesting stuff which is well covered here.

In summary:-

  • Wars last at least a week.
  • Defenders can surrender by offering ISK (then enforced 7 days of peace).
  • Defenders can hire mercs to join the war (attackers cannot)
  • New killmails and war report look like popular killboards
  • Cost is based on size of defending corp. 20m for 20 man corp plus 500,000 per member. Decing big corps will be expensive.
  • War avoidance loopholes closed. People who drop corp during a war are flagged on their character sheet!
  • War history on corp and characters info sheets
  • Mercenary market place so corps can offer their services to asssit defenders.


Hopefully this will create more fighting. I know it has led to more tears. The Q&A was full of them but props to CCP for sticking to risk vs reward. If you want to be immune to war decs join an NPC corp. Yes you won't have access to POS', yes the tax rate is high! But if you want greater rewards, you need to take greater risk!

Next up was the game design panel which was a long line of Dev's just answering questions from the players.


Plenty of obscure questions. Nothing really earth shattering to talk about! Sent a few messages on Twitter to find alternative entertainment and left early.

Met Seismic Stan of Freebooted/Blog Banter/Tech4News fame for a chat on a little thing we're going to be working on together. Was really interesting to brainstorm together. He had ideas, I had ideas but together they turned into great ideas. Looking forward to this!

Then it was time to venture out to get some food before "CCP Presents"


It was a fairly popular talk....


You really need to see the whole thing when it's uploaded to YouTube. However here are the key points...

Hans Jagerblitzen (who this blog has been campaigning for) won an alternative seat on the CSM.


The Future Vision of Eve is still the future vision of Eve

The new launcher will allow CCP to "insta patch" the client when small bugs are found rather than waiting.

We then saw what Eve would look like in DX11. Amazing was the word. A Sansh ship in an asteroid belt, amazing details and small roids bouncing off the shields (giving shield strike effects) and fracturing into smaller roids. It's going to take 5 man-years to do (a entire team for 1 year) and it was asked if we as the players wanted this. Generally it was a "Yes". I'm sat on the fence myself. Yes it looked awesome, but 5 man-years of development that could go on iterations? Mmmmmmmmm.

There is going to be a Faction War link in Dust514.


April 24th will see a small expansion released as a precursor to Inferno featuring Incursion iteration, rogue drone stuff and ship balancing.

Then a month or two later we get Inferno with:-

New war dec system
New modules (Micro jump drive, smart shielding, drone mods)
War UI Improvements
Faction War Iteration
New Inventory
New missile launchers with new effects
New module effects
Amarr V3 skinning
Minmatar V3 skinning
Sleeve tattoos for avatars
+ little things

Future stuff on the horizon -

Ring mining (moo goo?)


More ships and balancing (Frigs and cruisers better for new players, newer ships for vets)

After war, harvesting will be the theme for the next expansion and then industry.

Customisable POS' and outposts were mentioned.


Taking stuff away from NPC's and giving to players (station services?)

Make smuggling a viable profession and boost low-sec



Improve how the game is presented


Make meaningful Avatar gameplay (exploring ancient stations)


And then, of course it had to finish on a video....



There is much, much more that was presented, you'll need to watch the full two hours to know the lot!

So 2 hours later it was the party!

Permaband were awesome live. The crap mobile phone footage and sound doesn't do it justice (see bottom)!

In between sets I drank, spoke to Mandrill, Geddonz, Ned (aka CCP Manifest), Hilmar and various others who I have no recollection of their names! Got back to the hotel at 4am and had to try and upload the mobile phone content for the day before the paid internet ran out at 9am! Here it is, just dumped below....

Went to find food, saw this!








You can tell this guy feels lucky to have his picture taken with the author of this blog! 

W-BR puppy, Koratte and S810 jr









Oh did the video upload? Meh, it's pretty crap. Much better live

And that was it! Woke up at 10am and packed up, checked out for 12, had an hour reading Templar One (Thanks Sindel!) and jumped on bus. Uneventful flight back to UK, wife picks me up from Heathrow and drives me back to her parents where we have two days before back to the Middle East. She wants to see my blog. Oh shit! Now need a decent explanation for that photo of me on day 1 with Sindel! Better make it a good one otherwise I'll not be coming back next year, then again I probably will, just depends if I'm a divorcee or not!

Don't make me choose woman ;)


2 comments:

  1. HI, you said in your post "Cost is based on size of defending corp. 20m for 20 man corp plus 500,000 per member"

    Either you or I understood it wrong :P because what I understood is that the 20m base cost is for any size, not for a 20 man corp. A 20 man corp will be 20m + (500,00 * 20).

    Cheers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That wasn't clear above. Sorry, 20m is the minimum cost. A 1 man man corp is 20m, a 5 man corp 20m, a 20 man corp is 20m.

      After that it goes up 500,000 ISK per member. So a 21 man corp is 20.5m, 30 man corp 25m (20m + 500k*10) and a 120 man corp is 70m (20m+500k*100)

      Delete