Scattered Musings

Been a while since I've done a comment piece. I do keep reading blogs and other EVE sources of information.

Goonswarm

Ok, I'm Canadian, and I'm usually fairly polite. But. Go read the following link. Linkage. Done? KK, I must ask the following question of The Mittani: "Butthurt much?", cuz man I've seen less whine from a carebear getting suicide ganked two days in a row.

Dominion Issues

The generic issue with Dominion is not the cost of sovereignty, although certain alliances are having a hard time adapting to it, the big issue is the asymmetrical lag that has been plaguing large battles lately. I've been following the "ships lost" in Providence and other regions quite a bit lately and the fleet fights are just as big as before Dominion. Here I suspect we're seeing the after effects of the "Corefication" of the eve server code. Don't forget that one of the things CCP is doing is ripping apart the EVE server code, finding the parts of it that were not EVE specific, isolating them for use in other projects and re-locating the EVE specific parts on top of the new skeleton. This will pay long term dividends for CCP as it will allow them to leverage their technology. The problem from our (the player point of view) is that Dominion is effectively version 1.0 of this technology. It's going to take the next two expansions to iron out the bug introduced by this change. The good news of course is that most areas of code are at least getting a good scrubbing at the low level even if it doesn't show at the interface level yet.

As far as large fleet battles/campaigns go, The deaths in the last 24h of dotlan statistic is very interesting I'd love to compare statistics of each downtime to downtime period for the 6 months prior to dominion compared to the most recent data post-Dominion. It doesn't look like the numbers of ships lost is any less than it used to be. They are spread out over more time and there's a lot less of sudden "titan spikes" than their used to be. I get the feeling that campaigns will become much more morale dependent than before. To a certain extent it's almost like trench warfare. In that you see a lot of ship death in a few key systems. Then suddenly something or someone not directly related to the military side breaks and you see a mad scramble for the areas where the break occurred. It looks very much like the sort of situations towards the end of world war 1 where both sides had pounded on each other for so long, when one side suddenly had to deal with a success, they were unable to fully exploit it since their logistics weren't ready for the sudden victory.

As far as alliances controlling large swaths of territory, as far as I can see [.-A-.], Atlas, [IT], heck even [TCF] seem to be able to control their territory quite well and within budget. I am highly amused that one of my predictions for the sovereignty changes is turning out to be dead on the money. The one were large alliances would let sov drop in systems near their territory but not necessarily abandon control of said space. The most recent provi-block war was the direct result of this. [.-A-.] let sov drop in some systems in northern catch but still considered them part of their territory. A Proviblock holder assumed this implied that they no longer wished to control said systems and decided that they didn't need to do any diplomatic dance before moving in. This turned out to be slightly shortsighted on their part, as [.-A-.] then proceeded to eject them and push the point home most forcefully that even without sovereignty these systems came under their sphere of influence.

Some alliances seem to be having sov bill issues. I suspect that the ones having trouble are the ones with relatively weak logistical/industrial arms. That doesn't cover the Goonplosion since as I understand their logistical capacity should have been there. Sounds more like a "we didn't want that sov anyway" type of fail cascade. It sounds like The Mittani is trying to spin-doctor things for the common goon in order to make the lack of sov objectives more palpable. "CCP has made 0.0 sovholding pointless so we're going to be an NPC 0.0 alliance instead and simply abandon all the objectives of the last 3 years work". I also thing their name change will have long term negative impact on their propaganda efforts.

Tyrannis

This should be very interesting. I'm left wondering about what we'll see in the way of additional development and the impact it will have on the economy of EVE. The doom and gloom guys are out in force. I have yet to see any impact CCP has had on the EVE economy that has ended in doom yet. If anything CCP does not have enough confidence in the EVE market to absorb system design changes. They keep doing things by half measures when the economy is impacted. We'll have to see as the forthcoming dev blogs show up over the next 3 months or so.