A Whole New World

So I got home yesterday and logged on Vent. A lot of my corp mates were on and told me they were already logged into Eve. Cheers to CCP for actually being on time! On the downside, it was then I learned how enormous the download was for the patch. However, taking me back to the upside, my computer downloaded it faster than I've ever seen it go, averaging about 1.5mb/s. Go speedracer! Go! :) I think the actually installation of that patch took longer than it did to download. But finally, perhaps no more than 30 minutes after getting home, I was logging in.

At this point, after having gotten my first impressions of this new update, I have to say wow! The whole aspect of flying Tech 3 ships doesn't really interest me at this point, and the travels into wormhole space will come soon enough (still got a few more days of training on covert ops) but all in all this was a real visual desert. The planets, the asteroids, the various ship module effects, the warp bubble, the stargate jumps....I could keep going on and on. In some ways I really did feel like I was playing an entirely new game. All of the visual upgrades being absolutely a huge step up from previous graphics.

The new fitting screen - absolutely gorgeous. The ability to save fittings is a huge plus for the game as well as the skill queue which I think everybody is in agreement on. Seems if you have the role within the corp, you can save the fittings as well to share with the corp which is great when preparing for fleet ops. It would often take us forever to get everyone setup so the fleets are well structured, having to read off and wait for the other person to fit it.

Also, they made some changes to the way the notifications appear on your screen. Changes I feel make it SO much easier to track. I'm specifically referring to the weapon damage taken and given out. It's much easier to read as well as once I get used to the colors, I won't have to watch it so closely to know roughly how much damage I inflicted.

Okay, so negatives.

First, I honestly wasn't that entirely impressed with the visual look of the warp tunnel. The squiggly lines to me look a bit cartoonish. It's not really bad, just think it could have been made to look just a little better.

Second, whatever happened to all the stuff I'd been hearing about being able to readjust your attributes every 6 months? Seems either I was hearing it wrong or they made a last minute change and its now set to where you can only change them every 12 months. To me that renders that tool almost completely worthless. I mean seriously, 12 months of game time really is an extensively long period. I don't see it as a complete fail, but fairly close to it. Yes, I still used it of course. When I'd joined Eve, I knew absolutely nothing about what the attributes meant, what good where they and which ones would be more important to me than the others. So my attribute points where spread out almost completely even between all the attributes. By the time I'd gotten it all figured out, I'd gotten far enough into the game with this character, I just didn't feel like starting over completely. With the skill points readjusted, this will open up a whole new world of possibilities. It made a drastic change on my evemon plan times! Now it might actually be more feasible for me to train up a few decent combat skills with this character whereas before, doing so meant incredible amounts of time that seriously take away from training industrial skills. Also, industrial skills have gotten significant improvements in training time as well. That Orca and freighter I've been wanting to trained for? By readjusting attributes, I've cut so much time off it was astounding.

That's all I have for now but I truly look forward to getting home from work again this evening and seeing what else I can discover. Might just take the probes out and see if I can track down myself one of these wormholes. (not that i have any intention of going in yet but still curious to see one plus see how well my character can probe with what skills I have.)

-ML-