Tyrannis

Tyrannis was announced on Feb 19th. You may all have been wondering if my lack of posting about it has anything to do with my burnout. The answer is nope, it has to do with the lack of details that were not covered prior to that post by CCP t0rfifrans.

The summary (can't really call it details yet can we) that was posted matches pretty solidly 1 for 1 with what was announced at fanfest. So this is the promised summer expansion. Based on the position of the T3 frigates and modules in the fanfest presentation and the Jovians and what not, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even if we get some bug fixes and some more balancing changes, what is listed there is pretty much going to be what we're going to get. I've been holding off commenting pending the subsequent dev blogs with more meat.

Now lets take a look at the wish list:

• Incarna
• Formation flying
• Improving low sec
• More wormhole stuff
• More faction warfare stuff

If you were looking for any of these, you're going to be severely disappointed.

• Planetary flight

It looks, from CCP Oveur's comments at fanfest that feature this got moved to DUST 514. So we're probably not going to get it for EVE proper.

And then of course there are the perennial irritants:

• 4th bonus on assault frigates
• Fixing the cov-ops cyno problem for T3 cov-ops subsystem (think that's still there)
• Fixing black-ops (they need fuel bays in the worst way and they need them to be plentiful).
• Fixing large fleet lag.
• Fixing rocket explosion velocity
• Fixing POS missile launchers (omg they should be fixed I think the problem here is the missiles they chuck have their explosion speeds based on the raw missile value, but these values are balanced to be workable once player skills affect them - brilliant balancing skillz there).
• The corp/alliance interface needs some love (hell we'd settle for an offhand acknowledgment).
• Resource balancing would be nice (and if you don't want to balance it at least make it targetable).

As great as the industrial system is in EVE there is still much that could be done to improve it enormously. But due to the concentration of PvP by the devs it languishes behind the PvP content quite a bit. It's too bad in a way. The horrible part is when you realize that it's light years ahead of any other MMO's crafting system. At least they've left themselves with plenty of improvement room should a competitor come along.

Out of the most recent dev blog however there is one good piece of improvement coming along:

Well, in the process of implementing the new standings system, it has been determined that it's easier to rewrite Alliance standings than make the old system play nice with the new Contacts system. As a convenient side-effect of this, Alliance standings will now be used whenever stations or starbases make a standings check. This, we hope, should make managing these things much easier in most scenarios.
- CCP Grayscale

All I have to say is "Oh thank fucking god!". It's not so bad when you have an alliance with a short list of corporations but managing this when you have at least 8 different corporations with POSes is a nightmare (and has resulted in friendly kills).

In the end however, this is looking like a "we're putting in infrastructure" expansion. Nothing individually interesting, but putting the blocks in place for future developments. In some ways it's disappointing. In other it's good, at least we get things instead of having an expansion only every year and a half. The disjoint happens when people start to expect Cataclysm level expansions every 6 months. I prefer having regular expansions who's scope is not so large. The price is that features can take quite a while before we see them after they've been announced.

Side comment: To the idiots who are complaining that the art departement should be working on the lag issue: ARE YOU GUY TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE IDIOTS? Friggen trolls.