EVE Online extended Thursday downtime to bring numerous fixes to game

by James Egan May 13th 2009 at 3:00PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, Forums, Game mechanics, Patches, Server downtime

CCP Games has announced that EVE Online will be patched to Apocrypha 1.2 on Thursday, May 14, and will require extended server downtime. Downtime is expected to last from 05:00 GMT to 12:00 GMT. The game's official forums will be unavailable for at least part of the downtime, CCP states.

The sheer number of changes being made to EVE Online with this patch -- some minor, others major -- is beyond the scope of this post. However, there are a few significant aspects of Apocrypha 1.2 we'd like to point out for our readers:

Covert ops pilots, beware, as the "microwarpdrive and cloak trick" is being nerfed. (In the past, a pilot could emerge from a stargate, pulse engines and then activate the cloaking device, using that momentum to escape gate camps and warp away stealthed.) The patch notes read: "If a ship cloaks, all active modules that modify attributes, such as ECM, will stop immediately and the icons showing the effect will disappear."

CCP has added another layer of defense against contract scams that's worth pointing out: "Contracts will now display the cost of an item in words (hundreds, thousands, millions) even if the figure is not a round number. For example, a contract for an Invulnerability Field II at 200.999.999 ISK will be displayed in word form also as 200.99 Million, much the same as if it were a round number."

It's such a small change but one that could make a huge difference provided players aren't complete vegetables and click 'accept' on contracts without reading. Certainly the scams will still exist in EVE, particularly in Jita local, but at the very least players will note that a contract price they're about to accept is in the billions rather than millions. All in all, tomorrow should be a sad day for contract scammers but we suspect they'll still carry on -- this is EVE and there will always be an abundance of people who still don't read the contracts they accept. For the rest of us, this long-awaited change should eliminate some frustration and further separate EVE's true con artists from those who profit from clerical oversights.

Agility and scan resolution boosts on some ships will go into effect on Thursday. CCP states: "The agility and the scan resolution of some ship classes has been adjusted to allow them to have a better chance of locking ships of their own size before they got to warp." Further details from the developers can be found in this thread on agility changes.

Players skilled up for Minmatar dreadnaughts should note that the Naglfar's attributes have been changed substantially: "The Naglfar has been overhauled to bring it in line with other Dreadnaughts. The Naglfar will now receive an additional mid slot along with a further 150 CPU. The powergrid has been reduced to 560,000 (-65,000). A new damage bonus has been added which will give the ship an additional 7.5% damage to projectile turrets per Minmatar Dreadnaught skill level. The bonus to citadel torpedo damage has been removed; however, the velocity of citadel torpedoes has been increased to 2.750 m/s while the flight time has been decreased to 25 seconds."

These are just a few highlights of the changes which are already being discussed by the game's playerbase on the forums. As always, updated info will appear in green text in the patch notes and with the extended downtime, players will have plenty of time to catch up on the numerous fixes and changes coming to EVE Online in Apocrypha 1.2.

Tags: apocrypha, ccp-games, cloak, cloaking, contracts, dreadnaught, dreadnaughts, eve, eve-online, forums, game-mechanics, naglfar, nerf, patch, patch-notes, patches, scams, sci-fi, server-downtime

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Sam said on 6:44PM 5-13-2009

Lawl, buffing the Naglfar...'bout time.

SgtBaker said on 1:18AM 5-14-2009

I'm not sure I agree with this buffing of Gate Camping, it's already very powerful mechanic as it is.

Removing the possibility of the "MWD trick" affects small groups that do fast hit-and-run type skirmish warfare.

Having "uncatchable" Battleships rolling around lowsec is of course a bad thing and that needs to be fixed, but doing it this way splashes a bit too much collateral damage about in my opinion.

Now Black Ops seems to be pretty much only way to do skirmish - and I suppose that's why they buffed it up last patch -- but the skills and ISK required for Black Ops and Covert Cyno are not really very newbie friendly... and the chances that your Covert Cyno ship dies in fire at a gate camp have also increased ..

jagdpanther said on 1:28PM 5-14-2009

http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1071925&page=2

According the CCP Chronotis, the MWD + Cloak trick is being hotfixed back in.

sajt said on 2:16AM 5-14-2009

What are you talking about SgtBaker?

I've rarely seen whole gangs try and use the MWD-cloak trick, mostly because fitting a cloak on any non-covert ops ship will just gimp it. Covert ops fleets were rarely seen because of their cost and the fact that they had problems with delivering enough DPS to the table, something that stealthbombers now have solved. In fact, covert ops fleets are more viable now than ever before.

As for being uncatchable in lowsec you still pretty much are in a frigate or force recon, just watch out for smartbomb camps. In a semi-sized gang there will be few camps that are able to take you on anyway, should they be able to point you.

In a 0.0 camp you'll actually have to do a bit of piloting now in order to get out safely, or heck, pherhaps it's time to use that black ops for once in your life.

SgtBaker said on 2:56PM 5-14-2009

I'm talking about things like Vagabond with a cloak. Things that go flap in the night.

Kaamos said on 2:28AM 5-14-2009

I bought the retail, and basically gave up on it permanentally after having it active for 3 months....

sigh...

/waits in line for Jumpgate Evolution

blipmusic said on 6:46AM 5-14-2009

With the scamming "nerf" coming the chat channels will hopefully be somewhat more useable.

It isn't the scamming itself that is bad (sometimes uncreative, perhaps). I find scamming to be an interesting part of EVE.

It was the copious *spamming* of all chat channels with dull contract scams all using the same "spot the commas" system... The ISK spammers are enough. Lately the comma contract is a more common spam than those from the ISK sellers in my experience. There are easy way not to get scammed that way, but the problem still stands: some chat channels I'm in are like Jita local because of the contract scam bot-spamming.

If things get so bad that chat channels become unusable (besides Jita, but that one will never change), things need to be looked over. Period. There will be usual complaints that "EVE is becoming WOW" etc... No offense meant, that's just the usual crappy argument crybabies use for *any* change in EVE, be it 'carebears', scammers, PVE-players, PVP-players who do the complaining. Not many live by the rule they preach to others - "adapt or die" - when there's a change not affecting *their* play style.

Some changes are necessary to keep the game going. This might actually be on of those changes.

Of course scamming will continue, hopefully a bit more inventive from now on.