A new update from CCP Falcon and Team Five-O to development plans for structures in EVE Online has been released, and players are excited as it shows that CCP is committed to improving performance in the large-scale fights that make EVE famous.
The devblog discusses the realities and difficulties in trying to manage an unpredictable and chaotic game such as EVE.
“While there were obviously issues for some of our pilots during the most recent engagement,” Falcon said, “Tranquility remained online for the fight, and thankfully we didn’t experience any unscheduled downtime. This allowed us to watch performance, look at where the main bottlenecks are for an engagement of this scale, and provides us with a substantial amount of data that we can use to help plan the next steps toward strengthening our infrastructure to support these massive engagements.”
However, the team admitted that things did not go entirely as planned. Eve’s lead community developer, who goes by the handle CCP Guard, said that the unprecedented volume of players did cause “some issues” that created an imbalance in the engagement.
“We’ll never know for sure,” CCP Guard said, “since there are so many variables at play, but, as Falcon says, the attackers did report problems launching fresh waves of fighters from their carriers, which was their main tactic and which accounted for the lion’s share of their damage output. The delay in deploying their DPS meant that the defending Keepstar’s repair timer was able to count down and secure itself from attack.
Interestingly enough, CCP plan to release a new line of Standup Fighters that are exclusive to these structures, and offer a much more powerful alternative to Carrier-launched craft. Maybe the Imperium can make use of those too.
This is where CCP admits that it’s changing some previous plans to account for some of these issues.
Firstly, they’re adjusting the mechanics for how modules can be used with Citadels. The Standup GTFO is being shelved entirely for example. CCP also plans to introduce new Low Power and High Power modes to structures that changes how their reinforcement timers work. Here’s the overview for Low Power modes:
- Significantly reduced shield and armor resistances
- One less reinforcement cycle (jumping straight to the final reinforcement as soon as the structure shield are destroyed and skipping armor entirely)
There’s also plans to revamp the entire reinforcement system to make it simpler to manage overall. The time between reinforcement windows is being drastically shortened depending on which phase the structure is in. Structures on their final timer have a built-in delay, ranging from 0.5 days to 5.5 days depending on the system Security rating, that applies to the reinforcement window. The algorithm will add/subtract 2 hours from the that value to arrive at the actual time.
The repair timer for Hull reinforcement is also being doubled to 30 minutes, this will not affect other timers.
Players are also concerned that CCP gave players too much safety with the asset safety system built into Upwell structures. In the future, the asset recovery system will levy a fee of 0.5% of the value of the recovered item(s) in exchange for the use of this system to decrease risk-averse behavior.
Locking of blueprints is coming soon to Upwell structures! Locked blueprints will remain locked if they enter asset safety and will need to be unlocked by vote before being recovered from the asset safety system.
Hopefully, these and other changes combined with software optimizations will allow EVE Online to continue to support large-scale conflict for the foreseeable future.
