A Scientist's Life in Eve

The modules session has just finished, and we were given a list of potential new modules that could be added.

Although it was made clear that these would only be seeded via drops and BPC’s (no BPO’s boo!!), the list included:

• Tactical warp – after spool-up you warp 110km in the direction you’re facing, very quickly
• Tactical warp disruption bubble – 48km radius that acts like a normal bubble, but only affects tactical warps
• Lock breaker – chance of breaking all locks on you increases the more people are locking you up – counter-intuitive in some ways, but clearly anti-blob
• Increase drone damage module – yay!
• Rig to increase your CPU
• Rig to allow frigates to lock out to about 150km – sniper rifter anybody?
• Small and medium stasis web drones – pretty obvious addition and surely worthy of a BPO?
• Salvage drones – seriously! Only able to salvage one wreck at a time and must return to you for it to work

Other changes were also suggested, such as a truly adaptive active armor hardener which varies it’s resistance profile each cycle based on incoming damage, I guess this would need to be on a small % change each cycle eventually getting to the optimal.  Another nice idea was allowing shield boosters to use “fuel” held in your cargo, this would mean your shield tank could be much less vulnerable to cap warfare – wouldn’t armor reppers need to have the same considerations?

The attitude of the whole presentation was that things needed to be more dynamic, and that they wanted to approach it in a way that the flow could be increased / reduced / turned off as a reaction, and that some modules might even have a limited life for availability, described as seasons.

They also talked quite a bit about balancing, including filling in missing gaps in meta levels, and also making meta levels more meaningful rather than simply (often, but not always) affecting small things like fitting requirements.

A very cool talk and although many of the above probably won’t make it into Inferno, it’s encouraging to see them thinking along different lines.

Next up at 15:30 is the Eve key-note talk, and the crowds are already building so I’m going to go and get in the queue now.