The Nuggets Of Rubicon

We've been living with Rubicon for about a week now and it's a difficult expansion to describe.  The best I can do is on the surface it's very light on "expansion" but if you drill down a little deeper it does have some gems.

The warp changes, as outlined here, are pretty awesome.  Sit at a gate and watch the various ships warp in.  Instantly you can pick the mass differences as they leave warp.  Freighters come in slow and eventually come to a stop.  Interceptors seem like they're still in warp and then just stop right at the gate, like a hyperactive kitten that's just seen something it doesn't like, and then they're off again, zooming away!  In the day after Rubicon was released, once the launcher issues were overcome, the local system entirely consisted of twelve guys racing around in their interceptors laughing their heads off.

It was quite amusing.

The warp changes also help game immersion as now the mass of a ship matters while entering and leaving warp, it makes the Eve Online universe more visually believable.

Another addition that came along with Rubicon is the login character screen.  Not something that adds to game play but this feature is top of the list when I've asked others about Rubicon features they like.

Marauders seem pretty cool but some fittings evolution will happen over the coming weeks and months until we reach some seriously tough ships.

Finally the changing of the confusing certificates system to the mastery system seems to be working very well.  Essentially you just find the module or ship you want to improve, view the mastery tab, see what has to be trained to move in rank from level I to level V and that is it.  Simple!

The rest of Rubicon has not grabbed my attention very much at this stage.  The only new deployable module I can see being useful is the portable cyno jammer.  The Sisters Of Eve (SOE) ships are very over powered and will be nerfed in the future, thankfully the typical CCP haste will be applied so those pilots have a fair bit of time yet.

I look forward to the yet to be described Rubicon 1.1 and now the Summer (my Winter) expansion a very long eight months away.

Rubicon Is Tonight!

This is mostly a place holder for the Rubicon expansion due this evening.

I will go through the items once the expansion has landed as quite frankly, I couldn't be bothered at the moment.

Rubicon, while having some interesting parts like the Cyno Inhibitor, is quite light to be called an expansion.

Yeah, yeah I know, it's a building block, a foundation expansion.

I still feel rather let down.

URL for patch notes > http://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-rubicon

The Corp Of The Dead

Doomheim Logo

Some corps in Eve Online are better known than others.  A corp that was increasing in size by 265 members every day should be on the RADAR of everybody you would think?

However this corp is different, it's called Doomheim, and if you're there, you are dead.

When a character in Eve Online is biomassed CCP transfer that character into a holding corp for the dead.

Doomheim, as of the time of writing, has 705,050 members and is increasing by 1,856 per week.

Players are bio-massing  nearly two thousand characters every week for one reason or another.

If you want to see this corp in game do a search for Kuro Aikonen or Zz Smash.

They along with over seven hundred thousand others are permanent members of Doomheim.

Or are they?

If CCP can move somebody into Doomheim upon a biomass they could probably be moved back into an active corp.  I have no idea if this has actually happened, and I don't think CCP would share that sort of information, but it is possible that character death may not be forever.

Some members of Doomheim

GD 141113

A longer GD read again this week, also some comments about the four new deployable modules that are coming with Rubicon.

Everything Is Moving!

No audio post this week as my voice has finally succumbed to the latest loogie going around here.

What I would love to see in Eve Online, and it would really add to the game play but it certainly would improve the immersion, is orbital mechanics.

I'm not talking about some guy in overalls trying to charge you far too much for a grease and oil change but the following.

POS's and Stations orbit moons.

Moons orbit planets.

Asteroids, gas clouds, etc orbit the sun or a planet.

Planets orbit the sun/s.

The suns move with the rest of the galaxy arm in orbit around the probable black hole in the middle.

That last one may take a while to see a change.

The result would be visually stunning as instead of a static playing field the various objects would move and not quite be where they were last time.

How cool would that be!