Thursday, October 31, 2013

Post Patch: Check Your Charges

This is a quick one.  But did you notice that after the last patch, when you logged in, all of the charges were removed from modules on your ships?  It was a minor annoyance any time I reshipped, particularly when I quickly tried to jump into my Tornado, with three tracking computers and eight guns.  Having to do it again and again as the FC changed doctrines on the fly was a headache.

At first, I didn’t think much about it.  Sure it was annoying, but there had to be a reason, right?

Under the old ASB mechanics, you could fit 13 Navy cap charges into your ASB.  When CCP changed the modules to fit only 9 charges, anyone who already had 13 charges loaded pre-patch was allowed to keep the ships as-was.  And, CCP allowed those ships to be flown in tournaments, so you’d occassionally see a ship holding an ASB tank for about half again as long as it should.  Alas, this quirk of mechanic tweaking is no more.

Why didn’t they do this before?  I suspect finding time for one of their programmmers to enact a mass unload just wasn’t important enough to them, given the few numbers of ships that still had “over-filled” ASBs.  The major sov blocs, who I’d wager go through the most ships, didn’t have a workhorse ASB-fit doctrine at the time, and those who did fly ASBs would tend to burn through those cap charges quickly.

But now, CCP has a pretty clear reason for making this “clean-up” script a priority, and testing it well in advance of the need.

The mechanics are already in place to prevent pilots from undocking with two interdiction probe launchers fit, but I imagine there were more than a few Sabre pilots who planned to keep at least one Sabre on hand until the need arose to drop ten bubbles in rapid succession.

Alas, the good folks at CCP seem to caught wind of that one.


Anyone want to buy an extra Sabre?

6 comments:

  1. "with three tracking computers and eight guns"
    You know you can just select all the ammo/charges/scripts you need and drag them into the middle of the fitting window at once to auto load everything right?
    It'd only take a couple of clicks and one drag to load it.

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  2. "
    Under the old ASB mechanics, you could fit 13 Navy cap charges into your ASB. When CCP changed the modules to fit only 9 charges, anyone who already had 13 charges loaded pre-patch was allowed to keep the ships as-was. And, CCP allowed those ships to be flown in tournaments, so you’d occassionally see a ship holding an ASB tank for about half again as long as it should. Alas, this quirk of mechanic tweaking is no more."

    Jesus man, check your facts. CCP banned them from the tournament, so you never saw a ship tank longer than it should. This is just as bad as your "kite artillery with autocannons" post

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    1. You're right. The original decision was to allow them, but CCP walked back from that a few weeks later. I admit, I didn't keep up with all those updates a I couldn't participate. Regardless, the tendency in Eve players to try to exploit changes for their benefit holds true, and clearly CCP is learning.

      But as far as your other point , my advice wasn't a generality of "kite artillery with autocannons", which is the opposite of what you normally want to do. But when you fight a whole fleet, you need to treat a whole fleet as one object, trying to keep them all in the same direction relative to you. If you do that, you can minimize the variety in vectors, which reduces the chances your transversal will be 0 to any given ship. You can't fly through a fleet, because if you do, the multiple attack vectors make keeping transversal up impossible. You can't maintain transversal against multiple targets at different angles of attack unless you keep outside their grouping.

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    2. Hilarious stuff like this is why razor has the reputation it does

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    3. After we return from Doril, I invite you to bring your next roaming gang to our space (USTZ please, so I can participate). We'd love the content.

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