EVE Online extended Thursday downtime to bring numerous fixes to game
CCP Games has announced that EVE Online will be patched to Apocrypha 1.2 on Thursday, May 14, and will require extended server downtime. Downtime is expected to last from 05:00 GMT to 12:00 GMT. The game's official forums will be unavailable for at least part of the downtime, CCP states.
The sheer number of changes being made to EVE Online with this patch -- some minor, others major -- is beyond the scope of this post. However, there are a few significant aspects of Apocrypha 1.2 we'd like to point out for our readers:
Covert ops pilots, beware, as the "microwarpdrive and cloak trick" is being nerfed. (In the past, a pilot could emerge from a stargate, pulse engines and then activate the cloaking device, using that momentum to escape gate camps and warp away stealthed.) The patch notes read: "If a ship cloaks, all active modules that modify attributes, such as ECM, will stop immediately and the icons showing the effect will disappear."
CCP has added another layer of defense against contract scams that's worth pointing out: "Contracts will now display the cost of an item in words (hundreds, thousands, millions) even if the figure is not a round number. For example, a contract for an Invulnerability Field II at 200.999.999 ISK will be displayed in word form also as 200.99 Million, much the same as if it were a round number."
It's such a small change but one that could make a huge difference provided players aren't complete vegetables and click 'accept' on contracts without reading. Certainly the scams will still exist in EVE, particularly in Jita local, but at the very least players will note that a contract price they're about to accept is in the billions rather than millions. All in all, tomorrow should be a sad day for contract scammers but we suspect they'll still carry on -- this is EVE and there will always be an abundance of people who still don't read the contracts they accept. For the rest of us, this long-awaited change should eliminate some frustration and further separate EVE's true con artists from those who profit from clerical oversights.
Agility and scan resolution boosts on some ships will go into effect on Thursday. CCP states: "The agility and the scan resolution of some ship classes has been adjusted to allow them to have a better chance of locking ships of their own size before they got to warp." Further details from the developers can be found in this thread on agility changes.
Players skilled up for Minmatar dreadnaughts should note that the Naglfar's attributes have been changed substantially: "The Naglfar has been overhauled to bring it in line with other Dreadnaughts. The Naglfar will now receive an additional mid slot along with a further 150 CPU. The powergrid has been reduced to 560,000 (-65,000). A new damage bonus has been added which will give the ship an additional 7.5% damage to projectile turrets per Minmatar Dreadnaught skill level. The bonus to citadel torpedo damage has been removed; however, the velocity of citadel torpedoes has been increased to 2.750 m/s while the flight time has been decreased to 25 seconds."
These are just a few highlights of the changes which are already being discussed by the game's playerbase on the forums. As always, updated info will appear in green text in the patch notes and with the extended downtime, players will have plenty of time to catch up on the numerous fixes and changes coming to EVE Online in Apocrypha 1.2.
