Wormholes in Oceanus
Cilvius Sanctus
More Than Just Eye Candy
Might as well start with the changes that are directly wormhole related, the new wormhole nebulae and the new wormhole effects to indicate maximum allowable ship mass. Ok, so the nebulae change is mostly just eye candy but it is important eye candy. We don’t have station interiors to stare at all day, we see the nebulae in our home system for hours at a time so the prettier it looks the better. Nebulae also give you something interesting to look at while exploring from system to system. The wormhole effects is an interesting change that allows players to identify what shiptypes can pass through a wormhole at a glance. W-space to w-space connections have always given you an indication of the class of wormhole they lead to based on the color of the center of the wormhole, but newer members sometimes have difficulty with that and with determining ship limitations from that information. Now the wormhole will have a colored effect swirling off of it that can help show players what size of ships will be allowed to pass through. This might not seem like a needed change but with the addition of the new frigate wormholes it is a welcome addition. A frigate only wormhole can lead from any class of wormhole to any other class of wormhole so the color of the center of the wormhole won’t be a good indication of this. It is worth noting that the Show Info window will give you this information but it is definitely faster to get this information from visual cues rather than pulling up the Show Info window.Importing, Cloaking and Rebalancing
Oceanus is finally giving us the ability to import fittings from the clipboard. EFT warriors in all areas of space should rejoice at this news as it will no longer be necessary to export fittings from your client of choice and then import them into EVE. This should make sharing fits amongst members and grabbing fits from Fleet-up easier. If you haven’t seen the new cloaking effect it sure is pretty. It goes without saying that you spend a lot of time cloaked while living in w-space, so having a prettier effect to it is a welcome change. Say what you will about gameplay over graphics, the universe of EVE is beautiful and CCP has done a lot over the years to make it look better and better. If we all plan to spend so much time playing this game it doesn’t hurt to have it look great. Oceanus is finally bringing the start of the long-awaited Module Rebalancing. Tiericide for ships has been a big hit and the field of modules in EVE is full of things that never get used. There’s only a small group of modules getting rebalanced this time but it seems to lay a good groundwork for the future work on module tiericide. You can read more details on this round of changes here. Hopefully the remaining releases for this year (Phoebe on November 4th and Rhea on December 9th) will have even more module tiericide for us.To The Future
While this release isn’t a huge one for wormhole life it has a few things to look forward to. There are still two releases this year and hopefully the future will have even more in store for w-space. It is also worth noting that the dev blog detailing the Oceanus changes mentions that there will be talk of the coming null sec and sovereignty changes sometime in the near future. While those changes don’t affect wormhole life they will undoubtedly have a huge affect on EVE as a whole. Oceanus is live on TQ now, patch notes are here.About the author
Cilvius Sanctus
Cilvius enjoys being really slow at scanning down wormholes and targets, getting trapped on the wrong side of a collapsed wormhole, stalking neutral site runners while cloaked as a fleet forms up, and badgering members of his corporation and alliance to use the wormhole mapper site.
