Patches And Compensation And PLEX, Oh My!

CCP certainly packed a lot of news into the past week. The big news was yesterday's mini-patch, with content from Team Talos. While the changes don't affect me directly, I understand a lot of players are excited about at least one of them.

The first was a change to High Angle Weapons (HAW). First, titans can no longer fit the weapons. CCP also updated the HAW and Siege Module attributes to simplify the maths. Reading between the lines, I believe the changes also reduced HAW damage for dreadnaughts not in siege mode, but perhaps I'm too cynical.

The second change is the return of the yeet filaments. A popular feature during the last Christmas event, the filaments that allow 5, 10, and 25 ship gangs to randomly pop up anywhere in null sec are back as "Needlejack filaments". CCP did not go as hog wild with the latest edition of magical travel as I feared. The 5-ship transport filaments are found in data sites while blueprint copies for the 15-ship filaments were added to the ORE loyalty point store. The developers are reserving the bigger 25-ship filaments for use during in-game events.

An interesting bug fix involved a case where red dots were not showing up properly. I'll give CCP a thumbs up, because as irritating as those red dots are, notifying someone they have new PLEX is a legitimate excuse for throwing up an attention getting flag.

Also yesterday, CCP held a mass test session on the Singularity test shard. The feature tested was the Frigate Escape Bay the developers are adding to battleships in late March (probably the week of 23 March). One of the questions I have about the feature is how it will affect server performance in big fleet fights. Hopefully the test ran okay.

Now we start to move outside game play with news about the depreciation of the 32-bit client. Depreciation is just a fancy term for "the shit don't work no more, now go away." CCP explained some of the benefits of switching exclusively to the 64-bit client:

The move to a single 64-bit client will reduce the development time associated with maintaining two clients, while allowing further investment into the technical infrastructure of EVE Online.

On the botting front, the newer bots were already running on 64-bit clients, but some of the old, free bots with little to no developer support are now dead.

On Monday, CCP announced compensation to players for the DDoS attacks experienced at the beginning of February.

As compensation for the playing time lost as a result of the recent DDoS attacks, you will be given the Capsuleer Fortitude Reward. Alpha Capsuleers will receive 100,000 Skill Points as a login reward, and Omega Capsuleers will receive the same Alpha reward, plus 250,000 more to bring their total to 350,000 Skill Points.

You can claim your Capsuleer Fortitude Reward between Monday 24 February downtime and Monday 9 March downtime.

I'll admit that since the DDoS attacks in which I was stuck in a station in Rens, I've barely played EVE. The red dots just got on my nerves. But as I near the end of the content of the base content of Final Fantasy XIV, I'm starting to get an itch to fly in space again. If only to see just how much the asteroid belts in low sec were nerfed.

Finally, we have news about PLEX. The first is a a typical end of month sale running until 3 March. But the reason for mentioning the sale is that PLEX are no longer accepted as payment for character transfers. CCP has long stated on its support page that using the character transfer system required a credit card transaction, but apparently the company has started to enforce the rule. I'm not sure the forums were the best place to make the announcement, although at least CCP made the news a pinned post in the Character Bazaar section.

This past week was a pretty eventful one for CCP and EVE Online. A patch nerfing titans and incentivizing the use of battleships, a mass test on Singularity, depreciating the 32-bit client, handing out compensation for DDoS attacks, and changing the character transfer process. CCP gave the talking heads a few things to talk about on this weekends shows.