On January 6, CCP released the patch notes that will take effect on Tuesday January 10 at downtime. As with many of these patches, the majority of the changes are minor fixes to bugs that don’t effect the majority of players. However, there tends to be one or two changes that can shake things up.
The current patch will have some changes to Encounter Surveillance Systems (ESS) that will undoubtedly be felt all across New Eden’s null sec ratters.
Structures & Deployables:
- Citadels and Engineering Complexes can no longer be anchored within 1000 km of a deployed Encounter Surveillance System. You may submit a support ticket for any existing ESS that violates this restriction to be removed.
- Personal Deployables now enforce the same anchoring range restrictions from Citadels and Engineering Complexes as they do from Stations and Stargates.
Prior to this update, it was possible to anchor an ESS on or very near an online citadel. As long as someone was around and had the roles to man the citadel, they could alpha off most small ships resulting in kills such as this (ZKill:Astero). This made it almost impossible for roaming pirates to steal the ISK that builds up. With the risk reduced to almost zero, it was only a matter of time before CCP stepped in with the nerf bat.
The other interesting update I found was a result of the new player experience. During the series of tasks a new player is sent through, they are rewarded with a Mini Skill Injector. It awards the player with 25,000 Skill Points (SP), but can only be used on characters with less than 1,500,000 total SP.
Gameplay:
- Removed the following 3 options from contextual menu shown for Mini Skill Injectors: “Create Contract”, “Find Contract” and “Add to Market Quickbar”
This seems like a fairly insignificant item in the grand scheme of things, but it obviously had enough of an impact to warrant being patched. Most veteran players can attest to the benefit of having extra unallocated SP at their disposal. By cycling new characters, it would be possible to build up a stock of unallocated SP by trading these Mini Skill Injectors. While many players may feel that spending an hour or two to get 25k SP on a new character isn’t worth a lot, keep in mind that a character with an optimal neural remap and +5 implants only makes 2700 SP per hour. This means that each of those Mini Skill Injectors is worth just under ten hours worth of training time. If you haven’t made a new character lately let me tell you, those first few hours of training can seem to take forever.
There are a bunch of other changes included in the patch from graphic updates, description corrections, and User Interface bugs. The full list of changes can be found here on the official website.
