The January patch went live on Tranquility today, and although it was a small patch, it certainly contains some interesting changes. The full patch notes are available in a news article on the Eve site. Here we will look at some of the key changes.

We begin by addressing the elephant in the room, which is the chat bubbles. For those who do not know, CCP has added a shortcut button which allows you to one button click to open up a conversation with anyone in the same channel and corp member list as you.

When it made its appearance on the test server, players were vocal about their dislike for it, that it only saves you one button click and it’s a feature that no one really wanted. it effectively allows for the ease of spamming start communication with a single player local channels as well as able to easy of spamming from a fleet of players.

This update mainly focuses on changes to the Agency, making it easier for players to access information and direct to new content that they may have missed. Faction warfare, incursions, epic arcs are all moved into the agency window. This allows players to gain information and experience parts of Eve that they may have missed.

One large change to is that FOB do not have to be scanned down anymore. They are now found in the Agency window under “Pirate Strongholds”. A warp in to the FOB is provided as well as some basic information about what you can expect.

The Agent Finder has been added into the Agency UI, and has therefore been removed from the Journal and Station menu.

I really enjoy the Agency and what CCP are doing to update it. I recently took up playing on an alpha to experience the game as a player who is playing for the first time would do, and it’s been a major help to me. It provides a visual aid, highlighting the areas of space with mission agents, mining and sites. It’s such a fantastic resource for new and returning players to help understand the game and different features around them.

CCP have also brought in changes in preparation for Structures 2.0, due this winter. You can now set your preferred reinforcement hour and day, although it will have no effect until the changes come out. You can change this as often as you want up until patch day without any cooldown period.

Another change this patch is that all NPC ships will now change colour depending on their standing towards you. This has previously been seen in the Blood Raider and Guristas Sotiyo rats:

• Blue indicates a friendly NPC either by nature or due to your standings with their faction. Blue NPCs may assist or aid you in combat.
  Note: The automatic response force from Empire/Faction Police against low-Security Status players will still appear to be Blue even when they are spawned as aggressive to the player. This will be resolved in a later patch.
• White indicates a neutral NPC. These NPCs will ignore you, but may retaliate if attacked.
  Note: The automatic response force from Faction Navy against an enemy militia target will now appear white instead of the previous ‘Blue’ friendly color. In a later patch they will appear Red/White/Blue depending on the Factional Warfare status of the player.
• Red indicates a hostile NPC. These NPCs are aggressive towards you, and will in most circumstances attack you on-sight.

This should help give players a better brief understanding of how NPC will interact with them and any actions they may take.

The last big point is that of a bug affecting station owners not receiving the right tax.

“When modifying an existing buy order at an Upwell Structure, the additional ISK payment covering the increased tax was being paid to the SCC instead of the structure owner. It will now go to the structure owner’s wallet as intended.”

This removed a way for players to use tax haven structures while avoiding paying broker fees to the owners. This would be done for example, if a player liked the 0% broker fee, but didn’t like the owner. Before this was fixed. you were able to set up a buy order at 1 isk for, say, a PLEX. You can then correct the price, and the broker fee would go to the SCC (as it does in an NPC station), rather than the owner of the structure.