A Not-So-Stealth Nerf, Login Events, And The 64-Bit Client

Thursday morning I thought about sending out a smart-ass tweet. I was going to ask whether CCP was happy with all the changes that drove activity to high security space over the last 6-7 months. But I thought better of the tweet. Good thing too, as CCP put an answer in the updated patch notes.

The respawn rates and loot chances for the Emerging Conduits have been adjusted

Hearing about the change, I went ahead and ran two sites last night. The respawn time was 10 minutes. The first site handed out about the same amount of loot as I usually expect. The second site only had 3.3 million ISK in loot. I still received the 4.5 million ISK bounty.

I can see where people who multi-boxed with 5 accounts and just blitzed the sites might complain. Each site not run each hour means a reduction of 22.5 million ISK a pop. But I don't play that way. Instead of using a mobile tractor unit to gather up all the wrecks in one place, then going to site to site for an hour before returning to salvage the wrecks, I'll just go ahead and salvage while I wait for the next site to spawn. I didn't try, but the mining should still be good.

I originally read about the change on the EVE Online sub-reddit and the post stated the respawn time was 30 minutes. Another reason for not trusting r/eve. Check out the facts in-game before picking up a pitchfork.

UPDATE: CCP Sledgehammer issued an explanation for the change on the official EVE Online forums:

The design intent behind these sites when they were originally introduced was to provide a taste of Invasion content to those that aren’t necessarily able to take part in Invasions proper, namely aimed at newer players, the hope being that they would team up and tackle the content together.

This meant creating a piece of content that was widely available and easy to access, hence the 1 min respawn and HS-wide distribution.

These goals were satisfied but I will be the first to admit that I did not anticipate the subsequent snowballing of botting and min-maxing that started to happen over December and January.

The numbers that we started to see in that period became cause for great concern and a decision was made to space out their respawn timer more and tweak the survey database drop rate.

I understand that people have issue with this but given how the consumption of this content evolved past the initial goal satisfaction, they were a huge problem.

In other news, CCP is holding another bonus skill point weekend. Alpha accounts receive 25,000 points each day between downtime on the 24th and downtime on the 27th for a possible total of 75,000 points. Omega accounts receive an additional 175,000 points for logging in all three days, making a paying account's total 250,000 for the weekend.

Following the bonus skill weekend, Skilling Spree is back. The event runs daily and up to 50,000 skill points depending on the randomly selected challenge of the day. Skilling Spree runs from 28 January to 2 March.

Finally, CCP announced today the sunsetting of the 32-bit client on Wednesday, 26 February. In addition to requiring all EVE players use computers running a 64-bit operating system, CCP is raising the minimum required memory up to 4GB and increasing the space requirements by 23 GB to match the game content added during the last year.