The first night of Crucible

So, I picked up the new Tornado BPO.  Just as I expected it was around 600mil.  650mil to be exact.  But that was hardly surprising based on the prices of existing BPOs  Baked my first one and flew it to market.  Put it up for over 200% mineral costs and it went in seconds.  Those who were more prepared are making a first day killing as these things are selling like hotcakes.  Holly cow.  Does anyone remember the short term impact of the Noctis on mineral prices?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  It was almost like there was a major war or something and the fleet replacement purchase orders had come through.

Yep that new font is going to take a bit of getting used to but it'll work.  Being able to tell the difference between certain letters like D and 0 is a nice feature to have (only took you like 7 years...).

They still messed up my plans to make fuel pellets but apparently this morning's patch to the patch will fix that.  Yay!

The Economic side is still reeling from the changes to the taxing structure.  I'm not surprised they did the change. The previous taxes were based just about strictly on the volume of the goods.  Now they are based on values pinned to market prices in November 2011.  Honestly they just cut into profit margins.  This is definitely by design.  Need for those new gantries to have value.  This shocked the less observant.  Big surprise there.  I think this is more of a case of the grognards being grognards than anything else.  It's the sort of bitching that CCP can safely ignore.  And it does introduce more isk sinks into the game.  Well played.

Production planets will need to plan their production out much more carefully.  You'll want to minimize the amount of import and export you're doing.  I suspect that P2 extraction planets will come in vogue again.  Interestingly if you look at the import export rates compared to the previous level's import export rates you'll see that once you get the product you want you're stuck using it's export tax.  P2's can be manufactured on single planets (there isn't one that can't be as I recall).  for P3's and above SOMETHING must change planets prior to manufacturing.  if you look at taxes on an item and compare those to taxes on the next lower level's item going into it, you'll notice that the lower down on the PI scale an item is the less taxes you will have payed overall if that's the item you ended up moving.  EXCEPT P0's.  Those are never worth getting out of the gravity well tax wise.

What this means.  I suspect there will be 2 types of extraction planets.  P1 types destined for the direct market of a P3/P4 manufacturing planet.  P2 planets are probably more inefficient total goods wise compared to P1 extraction planets but the end product will pay less taxes than if you'd moved the P1's from another planet to a production planet.  Expect end use P2's (those not destined to be made into P3's and P4's) to come from those planets.  For P3's and P4's you're probably better off shipping in all P1's to take advantage of the break in taxes afforded at the P1 level and then have a mix of processing nodes such that the end product you desire is attainable on planet.  I suspect this will concentrate the serious volume trade on the P1's and that PI goods that are not also end use goods will stay on planet as part of a manufacturing chain to keep import/export costs down.

You're going to say AHAH! what about Integrity Response Drones or Wetware Mainframes???  It still applies since you would have needed to move P3's and P3's can't be manufactured full chain on a single planet, so some thing (either P2 or P1) would have needed to pay taxes to make the P3.  Tough luck there.

The old gun icons are back.  Surprisingly it applied to all turrets including salvager and tractor beams.

One thing about the new nebula that is rather glaring.  You don't see any changes until you actually jump regions.  Since they are not preternaturally generated I can understand the need to do it this way.  But damn the region jumps are jarring.  Otherwise they are gloriously glorious.

As a mainly Minmatar pilot, I'm not getting the full effect of the V3'ing of the ships yet but I assume that will be on it's way for the next expansion (poor overworked art department - but they do excellent work).

It's too early to judge but so far this rather small expansion (they got this done in only 6-8 weeks for crying out loud, there were what? 20+ weeks between the summer and now?) seems like it will be judged as a mildly successful one.  We'll need to see if they can actually deliver an expansion worthy of the name for the next summer's expansion.

edit: gah! typos... sorry about that for any early readers

pps: if it looks like I spent a lot of time with a spreadsheet while flying around - the answer is yes I did.