What you missed this week

Hey there, and welcome to this week’s roundup. The community’s been a bee-hive of activity over the past seven days, some good and some bad, but all interesting, so grab yourself a drink, set your recliner to ‘lazy’ and let’s check out what happened this week.

Following CSM news, we have Bobmon, freshly-former Chief Editor of EN24 and with an Eve-CV as long as my arm, announcing his candidacy for CSM XII. Having already served a term as CSM XI, he has some CSM experience under his belt, and surprisingly, he still wants to do it. It’s somewhat surprising to see but it’s nice that the CSM has shaken off some of the ‘bad flak’ it has previously held. Oftentimes people would leave disillusioned and would not want another term, but whether this change is because of the people involved in CSM XI specifically or because CCP itself has behaved differently during what appeared to be the most successful CSM term in the last few years, is difficult to tell. 

The biggest bit of news this week was an accidental redo of the T20 BPO scandal almost a decade ago. In short, due to things and stuff, blowing up a Citadel/EC would have spawned T2 BPOs instead of the copies used in jobs. CCP quickly labeled this an exploit and has set out on a crusade to redeem them. While i’m sure they can be tracked in one shape or another, this bug can’t have been new. I wonder how many T2 BPOs slipped under the radar since Citadel’s introduction. This gave rise to new discussions of why CCP doesn’t just outright remove the items from the game, even the original T20 ‘randomly’ shared BPOs. Oddly, everyone seemed to be pro, even owners of exisiting T20’s.

But this wasn’t the biggest slip-up this week. The 119.1 update which was deployed on the 10th, was rolled back not long after entire server nodes went haywire and started unceremoniously imploding, crashing TQ to a standstill. It eventually was redeployed on the 12th during an extended downtime, like the downtimes of old, where I only assume it was ran through extensive testing. Eventually, everything was fine, and we got new features, or more to the point, removal of new features, such as the Aura targetting/cargo opening motherly advice when out of range, as well as the more important fact of ESSes now needing to be outside of 1000km of any Citadel or EC. 

All of this seemed to bubble up into some of the most vicious, exacting, excoriating and pressuring threads of support for fixing existing bugs and issues. It also spun up a lot of QoL improvements and hotfixes, almost back to back over the week. It’s really fair to say that the community really had enough of the tiny niggles. CCP has set aside a good deal of time over  the November release for bug fixing, but there isn’t really too much that’s coming out of it. At the very least, not any bugs that were old, but mostly newly introduced ones. I don’t know how much we still have left of that bug fixing period, but i would assume that by February/March they’ll be back on the roadmap for the finishing of Drilling Platforms, which are still aimed for fall, just saying.

Speaking of citadels, life moves on for them, the cycle of creation and destruction, with the first Sotiyo in Eve exploding over this past week, previously owned by Absolute Trading. Here’s what it looked like.

For users of Siggy, this past week has been quite stressful, with it going down quite often and suffering from freezes and crashes. As a wormhole tracker, a vital link for the ability to work in wormholes, as well as the single paid-for tracker, Siggy has caused multiple entities using it to recoil and think about their options, or at the very least, to participate in the outrage. While the issue apparently got fixed, it just underscored how vital the service is.

Moving on to null-space-shenanigans, the Winte— you know what, fuck this, i’m writing it and imma gonna call it the ScootyDooty War because having yet another coalition-level engagement called ‘The Winter War’ is just downright boring. So, in a new push in the ScootyDooty War, we had Tactical Supremacy and Dangerous Voltage defending a Fortizar, coming out of another wave of battering, with Rattlers and cap support faced down by a combined StainSwarm fleet of Proteii and Rattlers, which ended in the Fortizar getting reinforced in its final timer. 

This wasn’t the last or even the most important engagement this week for the ScootyDooty War, with just a day later, in 36N-HZ, two titans dropping, one from Goonswarm and another from TEST during the latter’s transport from a Citadel to a POS. The system had been busy and contested by both sides and the pilot was apparently caught in a bubble off their POS. Embaressing. Well, everyone went insane over comms and eventually fleets moved to jump into the target system. In an age old example that ‘mistakes happen’ and a classic Eve blooper, a Goonswarm titan pushed jump instead of bridge for its fleet. Embaressing #2.

In short, both sides had their opponent’s titans tackled in system, with dreadnaughts, FAXes and various fleets getting dropped and clashing, both sides summing up to hit 1100 players, TiDi-ing the poor un-reinforced node. The battle was pretty neck and neck and even at the end of the day with both eventually losing their titans as well as about the same numbers of caps and subcaps. #alreadyreplaced. Read the full skinny about it in EN24’s article here.

In the bigger picture, there have been frictions between GS and SW, including in the previously mentioned battle, with mentions of cyno inhibitors and Citadels sold to the other side as well as mismanaged diplomacy. A root cause may just  be that SW is apparently putting up less of a fight than it was expected to, and mismanaged expectations might have lead to this breach of trust between GS and SW. Apparently they’re going a bit astray from the concept of a ‘coalition’, with reddit picking up on the subtleties. Goonswarm also has been heard that it has moved its super assets back, leaving just expandable assets for the fight, and that with the future concept of a fight over SW’s staging that’s right now in its final reinforcemement timer, with no bridge support. I’ll let Jin’taan talk you through the situation in depth.

Lowsec also had some fun in Huola, as did Provibloc in multiple engagements this week, but you can read all about them in EN24’s weekly roundup of battles.

In a recently leaked SOTA, Escalating Entropy declared that they would be moving to “kick INIT out of Syndicate,” rather than fight Snuff (as many had anticipated), or turn their backs on ally Shadow Cartel. Hours later INIT “leaked” a very, very similar (fake) SOTA of their own, announcing that they would “kick EE out of Placid.” Many upvotes happened. In any case, the EE campaign in Syndicate should be interesting, it really puts the alliance to the test as INIT are a formidable opponent.

Closing up, I’d like to also plug a brand new Eve Online podcast in Spanish, for the Spanish players in Eve, called Palabra de Bob. They keep a tight ship, with each of them running about an hour and also has a listing of subjects talked about in each podcast. I’m keen to support more national/country specific content since it can serve as a lot easier social crutch to get people involved than trying to figure out Finns speaking English in their bloody accent. 🙂 
 

This week’s has had few pieces done, but they were meaty. We start off with this slightly NSFW Machariel-tattoo-focused 3D render from our very own Niden.

And we’re going to quickly switch it up to this mock-up of what a user from the Eve Facebook page envisions to be the far-flung-future of in-game ship customisation:

Perception can be very important, but it’s only a subset of being aware of your surroundings and the world you live in. For some people, the most in-your-face elements can be just tiny specks that fly under their radar. But it can’t be denied, that for those with the eyes to see them, advantages present themselves even in barren wastelands. Likewise, sometimes the things you see are of no consequence, and it’s an art in itself to discard meaningless information.

What you don’t see can be as important as what you do see.

Switching it up from previous weeks, we’re going to be looking at something smaller than a Rorqual. Not much smaller, but something harkening to the age when Rorquals were as niche as niche can be. The Nestor. Here we see it flown under poor management, luckily taken out of its misery by two dudes in Stratioses.

Shaking things up, sometimes the rek itself isn’t in the fit, but in the inadequacy of even flying it. These are just a few examples. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Starting off this week’s of video watching, we’re going with this trippy CCP-made video of how their code repository changed and modified over the years.

Incrementally, starting from small stuff, we have Wrekku Twotime showing us some cool fights in his Crucifier Navy Issue in the FW battlefields:

Moving up directly to battleships we have Rediroriad Asdorad after he finally pushed himself to fly a Megathron:

Following his example, Baird Wesson flies Scorpions and Ravens like no one’s business:

Adhocracy shows us how to dunk dreads in wormholes with style in their video:

And last but not least, if you thought we had too little mass fleet combat, we have Niden live-taping a gargantuan fight in Melmaniel between too many people to list:

CCP has shown restraint as well as boldness in pushing their vision in the last year or two. They forged ahead with items that were controversial in the same vein as they did with stuff that was well-received, speaking here of skill injectors and Alpha clones. But one decision was bold, yet also fantastically restrained at the same time. It was like they expected a wall of hate, bile and spit which never came.

The idea and subsequent decision flopped on our doorstep and most of us were completely unphased, and maybe a little grateful. However, a particular section of the community completely decried it and provided the wall of bile, just that CCP was on the other side of it, surprisingly. 

I’ll stop talking in tongues now. I’m talking about asset safety.

From the people that dared to push Phoebe, even if half-heartedly leaving logistics untouched, which dared to push Aegis sov, from the same people we got handed something that was akin to a golden handle on a toilet flushing mechanism. Unnecessary and gratuitous.

The wormhole corporations pushed very hard, and had asset safety removed from wormholes, but nullsec/lowsec groups took it as a blessing. They could now have complete asset safety anywhere in k-space New Eden where they choose to plop down a Citadel, under the umbrella of some petty ISK taxes. 

Amusingly enough, what prompted this new personal outrage at the system hasn’t been some number of titans getting moved to another Keepstar in the same system for free or military assets getting safely relocated to an NPC station, but at a highsec Citadel, throwing over 1.2 trillion in PLEX and skill injectors into the asset safety, instead of having them dropped down the 50% loot fairy spread.

But it’s too late now. People have gotten used to it and any change WILL be met with the mentioned wall of bile. A feature that should have never been envisioned, let alone implemented, as liberally as it is. 

~Cosmo

Thank you for reading this edition of ‘What you missed this week’. If you think we missed something, share it in the comments section, i’m sure a lot of people still want to check out more things. Also please leave any suggestions and ideas you may have in the comments as well, and as always, if you enjoy the work we’re doing here, please toss a nickle or an iskcent into our real or virtual wallets to keep this going with the same aplomb and quality.

PS: Cooking waffles with eggs.