Eve Online Receives Some Vampire Love

Players in Eve Online finally found a reason to like CCP's World of Darkness project as four devs from Atlanta switched gears from working on vampires to improving an internet spaceship game for three weeks.  The resulting dev blog is getting rave reviews as the temporary Team Papercuts worked from Team BFF's Thousand Papercuts list improving the quality of life in New Eden greatly.  As nice as the UI and inventory changes are, this is my favorite part of the dev blog:

"We also added an improved Jump command so that it behaved more like the Dock command. Currently, when you hit Dock, it will warp to or, approach the station you’re docking at, before finally docking to once you’re in the appropriate range. The same idea now applies to Jump, where you will Warp (or Approach) if you’re too far away to interact with the gate, and then jump through once you get there. The task asked for the same functionality for Acceleration Gates and Wormholes. Being a player myself, I instantly noticed the next logical step for a feature of this type… so I just kind of… did it. In addition to Dock, Jump, Activate Acceleration Gate, and Enter Wormhole you can also now request to Open Cargo, Scoop to Drone Bay, Scoop to Cargo Bay, Scoop to Ship Maintenance Bay and you’ll attempt to get to the correct range and do the action.

"You’ll also find a couple of drone improvements on the way. Nothing is worse than warping off to find that you’ve forgotten your precious drones. Well, fret no more! You can now reconnect to lost or abandoned drones that have been left behind as long as you’re still in the ship that launched them. Right clicking on your ships right-click menu, you’ll now find a command to Reconnect to Lost Drones. Alternately, if you like keyboard shortcuts, you can map a key to this as well. In order to prevent this from being completely abused and used for evil, you’ll only be able to reconnect once a minute (this time is subject to change) and if you have more drones around than you have the ability to control at once, you get no say over which ones will come back under your control… so when you’re attempting to reconnect, make it count!

"You’ll also find that when your ship is forced to make an emergency warp, your drones will attempt to return to the drone bay before you take off. Hopefully this can save you a few drones when your cat walks across the power strip."

I'm really looking forward to Crucible, although I haven't drunk enough Kool-Aid to keep me from putting some long skills in my skills queue for the 29th.