Yesterday, CCP released the February patch that many have been waiting for! The new patch brought several exciting changes to the game: Skill Injectors, Skill Extractors, Force Auxiliary ships, and PvE progression.
Skill Injectors & Extractors
The new skillpoint trading system brings all sorts of marketing opportunity to the pilots of New Eden. Materall of TMC wrote an in-depth article covering the new injectors and extractors, but to reiterate, I will cover the basics from the patch notes:
CCP: “It will now be possible for players to trade skill points between each other on the in-game market using two new items, the ‘Skill Extractor’ and ‘Skill Injector’.”
- Extractors can be bought with AUR and both they and Injectors can be bought or sold on the EVE market
- Consuming a Skill Extractor extracts 500,000 Skill Points from previously trained skills
- There are skills that can not be extracted: Infomorph Psychology, Advanced Infomorph Psychology, Cybernetics, Command Center Upgrade, and Interplanetary Consolidation
- Skill injecting tapers off based on the characters SP:
- Less than 5,000,000 skill points trained = 500,000 unallocated SP injected
- 5,000,000 = 400,000 SP injected
- 50,000,000 = 300,000 SP injected
- 80,000,000+ = 150,000 SP injected
Skill injectors have already seen wide adoption. CCP Quant stated that “As of 2100 EVE time (February 9), approximately 30,000,000,000 SP extracted at 21:00 eve time, 5,000,000,000 SP sunk, and 16,000,000,000 SP applied.” At approximately $5.55 per extractor, this is over $108,000 worth of skill extractors on day one.
Pilots are already losing ships carrying the skill injectors. However, Zkillboard is not currently properly depicting the price for the item.
Changes to Wreck HP
From the patch notes: The hitpoints of ship and NPC wrecks have been rebalanced. Instead the formerly uniform 500 hitpoints for a wreck, wrecks of larger ships have considerably more hitpoints:
- Frigate, Rookie Ship, Shuttle, Small NPC: 700 hp
- Destroyer: 1000 hp
- Cruiser, Mining Barge, Medium NPC, Generic NPC: 1500 hp
- Battlecruiser, Industrial: 2500 hp
- Battleship, Large NPC, Officer NPC: 3500 hp
- Carrier, Dread, Rorqual, Orca, Freighter: 15000 hp
- Supercarrier, NPC Supercarrier: 25000 hp
- Titan: 30000 hp
This is incredibly great news for highsec gankers. A common problem during highsec ganking are players called White Knights’ — people who wait for suicide gankers to destroy a ship, and who then proceed to shoot the wreck to keep the gankers from taking the loot. Now that freighter wrecks have 15,000 HP, what will the wreck killers do? It is also good to hear that capital wrecks will survive accidental fire from trigger happy fleet members.
Upwell Consortium & Sisters of EVE
Research Components for the Upwell Consortium no longer drop from Ghost sites and Serpentis exploration sites. Sisters of EVE Flotillas can now be found in Drifter wormhole systems. Many reports of SOE Flotillas have come from wormhole dwellers across New Eden. One post on reddit stated:
“An SOE flotilla has been sighted in J200727, and while this seems an unusual location for SOE operations, this further substantiates a report received by the Scope from an anonymous source.”
Other capsuleers have taken snapshots of the SOE armada:
These SOE ships are classified as ‘Large Collidable Objects,” do not move, and cannot be destroyed. What does this mean lore-wise, and more excitingly, could this mean that we will see a SOE carrier or some kind of Drifter-SOE hybrid ship?
Market, Skills and Skins
Hitting the market on the patch were the skills for Force Auxiliaries and Light & Support Fighters. Force Auxiliary and fighters skills for all empires were added as well. If you plan to hop into the vertically supreme FAXs, make sure you go and get your skillbook now. Be prepared!
As for skins, the patch notes showed: “Tronhadar Ink SKINs for Tech-2 Frigates and Destroyers now appear in the market properly and will apply to ships correctly.”
SSO Bug on February 8
On February 8, a bug allowed players to log into others accounts. After the exploit was discovered, CCP said:
“Today (8 February) we applied an update to Tranquility’s login server (also known as Single Sign-On or SSO). We had previously deployed this update to Singularity and discovered an issue whereby two database tables were conflated by the SSO and therefore users were given valid authentication tokens for accounts that were not their own.”
The issue appeared again at they updated the Tranquility server and it once again allowed users to log on to accounts that were not their own. It happened to many pilots including myself. After downtime when I logged onto my account, I was given the “your subscription has expired” window. This was because I was logging onto someone else’s account that was unsubbed. Other players in game recalled actually reaching the login screen and seeing another player’s characters.”
When CCP caught onto the problem, an emergency message was sent out to the players of New Eden:
“Info Dear players, the servers will be closing immediately for an emergency reboot at 12:42. If at all possible, please make sure your characters are out of harm’s way. See you again in 20 minutes!”
This angered many players, as pilots were only given about twenty seconds to safe up. Since the server was already up long enough for players to get into fleets, CCP could have given at least a five minute warning. This would have given let’s say, a dozen dreadnoughts stuck in siege mode enough time to actually “safe up”.
If you feel that your account was logged onto, CCP also released this statement:
“We are compiling a list of affected accounts and our customer service and security teams are working on verifying the integrity of the accounts and assets contained therein. We will be in touch with those affected in due course, so you are not required to file a support ticket. However, if you feel that you have been adversely affected by the issue, you are still welcome to submit a ticket.”
The bug has since been fixed and there should be not more issues with the SSO.
Update: Minor errors in this article have been corrected.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lemba.
