Today, after a relatively quiet week in EVE, CCP dropped several sets of information on us on a Friday afternoon.
Patch Notes
First, patch notes for July 11 arrived. This is the patch with the T3 cruiser changes coming in. There are some additions to what people were expecting. Such as this paragraph;
The procurement officers for major pirate factions across New Eden have been struggling to supply enough Small Ancillary Armor Repairers to equip their fleets, and their previous fallback of making up the difference from purchases on the open market is starting to require an ever-larger portion of their budget. Consequently, they have requested that their in-house research and manufacturing divisions increase output of these modules significantly until their module stockpiles have recovered. For a limited time, the chance of obtaining Small Ancillary Armor Repairer blueprint copies from attacks against pirate data sites has increased massively.
This may go some way to reducing the price of SAARs, which are currently on sale at 7m per unit in Jita, and have been a cause of major complaints among PVPers flying smaller ships. The limited time may not be enough to drop the price though, as people may just stockpile BPCs for when the drop rate returns to normal.
The next interesting item is:
It is now possible to remotely create sell orders for items in Upwell structures (assuming all requirements are fulfilled).
This is a nice quality of life change for traders.
It is now possible to split at stack in the corp hangar in an Upwell structure with the “Split Stack” right click option.
Another quality of life change for those who have been frustrated by the limitations in hangars at structures.
The bulk of the patch notes are regarding the T3 changes coming on Tuesday, and there is an important change that might slip the attention of players. CCP included a spreadsheet in the patch notes to give an overview of conversions. The conversion script for T3 cruiser subsystem conversions has changed from what was originally stated by CCP Lebowski. The only way to get the new support offensive subsystems, and covert defensive subsystems will be to have their precursors (The defensive ‘warfare processor’ and offensive ‘covert’ subsystems, respectively) fitted to hulls when the patch hits.
What this means is that if you want a T3 cruiser for logi, or covert activities, fit it before the patch with the precursors, or you will have to wait for them to be built and hit the market. Alternatively, fit the T3 cruisers with the precursors, and on patch day repackage the ship, and sell the subsystems.
Development Update
CCP Seagull also released a Development Update video:
There are two key things in the video. The first is the announcement of a dedicated ships and modules team. Prior to this, the work for ships and modules was split among several teams. This new team will work on both balance and new items. The second is that the roadmap for structures is being altered. Up until now, the focus has been on feature parity and Quality of Life issues. Now, CCP are going to look at combat and defensive issues with structures. One of the first things they will look at is Void Bombs. Other issues such as timers and vulnerability are ones that they will take a longer period to look at. The CSM Summer Summit will be full of discussions surrounding these topics. Hopefully by the end of summer or early autumn, we have an idea of what they are looking at changing with these issues.
Live Developer Q&A
Finally, CCP have announced that on Monday July 10, there will be a live developer Q&A on Twitch at 1800 UTC. Questions can be posed either live in Twitch chat, or on the forum thread.