This week saw the release of three Dev blogs, hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of Tyrannis.
The Circle is Complete… Only to Start Again
The first blog of the week was the announcement of the Q4 Economic Report. As usual it comprises demographic and market data covering the last 3 months of activity in New Eden.
Talking points in the report include:
- The number of paying accounts is now greater than the population of Iceland and continues to grow.
- The Drake replaced the Hulk as the most used ship in New Eden.
- A new section detailing population distribution on Tranquility gave some insight into where the players are. Would be nice to see it broken down by system security though. Just having Empire and nul-sec doesn’t give a complete picture in my opinion.
- The price of Hulks spiked at the end of December, some may attribute this to Hulkageddon II but unfortuantely there simply isn’t sufficient data to make this comparison (If anyone knows otherwise, let me know).
All in all its nice to see EVE continue to grow, and I’m sure the industrialists will get more from the report than I did.
ART BLOG – Improvement of textures, and a new Scorpion model
The new Scorpion was revealed in this blog which was equal parts eye candy and technical details.
CCP Salvo explained that, starting with Tyrannis, every ship in EVE would be getting a makeover. Starting it would seem with the Scorpion. Its nice to finally see the ship look something like its namesake.
The technical stuff covered how the various layers of texturing were packed into the .dds files of each ship and will be of interest to artists and those into such things.
As CCP Salvo said in the blog:
The tl:dr version though: Made stuff look better.
Pics or it didn’t happen: See below.
and now the pics (click to enlarge):
Organizational tools, standings and other interesting changes
In the first Dev Blog to reveal features and mechanic changes that would be coming with Tyrannis, CCP Greyscale details the new in game calendar and friends list. This post includes details of how the standings system is changing and that alliance standings are finally going to work in a way more in line with corp and personal standings.
These features are by no means final and feedback is appreciated, they will also be reflected in web-based features which will be detailed in a future post.
The calendar is looking very useful and will be a great addition to a corp’s organizational tools, finally allowing the easy organization and recording of events in game.
The friends list and standings changes look to be the more controversial of the features detailed in this blog. With the number of standings levels reduced across the board to 5, and the ability for player corps to set standings towards NPC corps being removed completely.
Your friends list will finally be separated your ‘watch list’ so that you can choose which characters to recieve login and logoff notifications from.
One point that I am wary of is the introduction of a globally accessible corp member list. This is potentially sensetive intelligence and the option should be there to keep it private. Being able to add an entire corp’s mebership to your watch list in one go has intelligence implications in itself and whether this information should be available outside the game at all is debatable.
Thats all the Dev Blogs for this week. Look out for more next Friday.
M out
