As of 12/10/20, CCP has announced that the bug fix related to medical clones in stations without clone bays has been reverted. In another post, CCP has stated that the drone aggression changes will also be reverted in a future deployment as it has caused unexpected and unintended changes to other activities aside from the ones targeted.
Today, CCP launched version 18.12 of EVE Online to the Tranquility cluster, bringing with it some contested changes and several fixes to systems that we didn’t even think were wrong, including removing the ability to set your home station to a station without a cloning bay and removing the ability for drones to auto-aggress onto PVE targets.
ADMs and Guaranteed Ore Anomalies, DBS in Low-Security Space
For starters, it seems a weekly reminder on reddit was all that was necessary for local antihero Cable Uta to get his point across about the current state of gaining sovereign space after all the resource redistribution that has happened in the past few months.
- Increased Activity Defense Multiplier (ADM) Industry modifier to make it easier to increase and sustain high industry ADM.
- Increased ADM Military modifier to increase the delta between where the ADM drops to level 4 and the value where the Dynamic Bounty System reduces the output of the system.
- Added a guaranteed anomaly containing Arkonor and Bistot to all Null Sec systems.
- Added an extra guaranteed anomaly containing Arkonor and Bistot for systems with true sec between 0.0 and -0.5.
Previously, pushing a system to the appropriate ADM level to start getting upgrades required you to rat on gates and mine in belts. However, thanks to mineral redistribution, asteroid belts were commonly empty with ore being nonexistent. Without any ore to mine, players were unable to increase the ADMs in their systems and, unfortunately, never able to gain access to the upgrades that make owning space in null worth it. In addition to this, no ore in asteroid belts meant no NPC mining fleets which also affects the spawning and locating of NPC Sotiyos, a lucrative income-generation activity.
In addition, this patch has adjusted the way that ice belts spawn, meaning you may be more likely to see those ice belts in your null security systems. This addresses another issue where these ice belts were never respawning or just didn’t spawn in the first place (hopefully).
Not to be left out, low-security space gets a little bit of love (or hate) depending on how you look at it. As the dynamic bounty system that has been active in null-security space for the last few weeks has finally reached out and said hello. It is now active in all low-security systems.
Press F for Drone Auto Aggression, Literally
Our favorite pasttime, AFK ratting and mission running, is no more. The patch today changes drones “Aggressive” behavior setting to only cause drones to respond to direct offensive actions taken by another capsuleer (player) or their controlled drones. NPC ships will no longer be automatically attacked when they attack your ship.
There’s been a lot of talk about this change on myriad talk shows in the last few weeks and I highly doubt that is going to change any time soon. CCP has shown us that they really want us to play their video game actively despite not giving us any new content to actively engage in. Some people also said this is a way to crack down on bots because, now, it will be more obvious when a nefarious capsuleer is up to no good. I disagree as bots would have already manually attacked with their drones for tick optimization. I guess we’ll see where this change takes us but for now, sticks–5, carrots–0.
Japanese Localization is Here, 最後に！
EVE Online has completed Japanese localization which means that we will soon likely see a flurry of new players from the island join us in blowing eachother up. Every time a new localization gets added, EVE sees a fairly large influx of players from whatever area has been added. Hopefully our friends in Japan enjoy what they see and help make EVE continue to last forever.
Dunk Dinkle’s Dreams No Longer Memes
In stunning fashion, today marks the availability of two new drone types: the Tech II Salvage Drone and the ‘Dunk’ Faction Salvage Drone. After a long time of campaigning, including a stint on the Council of Stellar Management, the requests of Dunk Dinkle and his BRAVE compatriots has finally been answered. Along with the T2 and faction salvage drone comes a new salvage drone specialization skill to make salvaging the field after winning (or losing) an easier task.
Increased Server Stability in Intensive Environments
Through recent tests in controlled environments, CCP has been working on increasing the stability of the servers in resource intense environments (boson traps, anyone?). The hope here is that they can reduce the memory usage of multiple similar actions and, overall, reduce the load on the servers. This could lead to less disconnects, less time dilation, and overall less frustration in large setpiece battles that are common in nullsec warfare. Time will tell how these changes will impact these battles moving forward.
CCP did do a stream about the technical side of the game that anyone who feels a little extra nerdy should definitely take a look at.
Kiss Your Jita 4-4 Medical Clone Goodbye
Through a surprising bug-fix, this patch has removed the ability for a medical clone to be set remotely to a station or structure without an active clone bay. Normally, you’d see people creating alternate characters, remote setting their clone to Jita 4-4 and then self-destructing there to get right into what they want to do without any additional hoops to jump through. This will no longer be possible. I’ve played this game for almost 3 years and I honestly thought this was a feature.
We are unsure whether this change will cause existing clones at stations without clone bays to be destroyed.
The rest of the patch notes detail pretty heavily some changes to the user interface as well as some other graphical fixes here and there. Most of it is pretty inconsequential (though the work is appreciated). You can read the full patch notes here. What are your thoughts about today’s patch? Let us know in the comments below!
