EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Neocom Customization

The neocom is CCP's term for the user interface that appears on the side of players' screens. For the past few years, it has remained essentially unchanged, a clumsy yet ever-present part of EVE Online's user interface. This patch changed that, significantly. Suddenly we have more customization over the contents, layout, and grouping of the neocom than ever before. It's liberating, really.

Something that I have found annoying as an older EVE player is the inclusion of an ever-present chat channels button that does not allow itself to be deleted, no doubt as part of some sort of well-intentioned effort on the part of CCP to not have newbies lose track of it. Thankfully, there is a workaround: shrink your neocom so that the icons are very small, right click on it to make four or five groups, drag the chat channels button to the bottom of the neocom, then resize the neocom so that the icons are very large. There should be so many buttons that the chat channels button appears under the 'more' menu at the bottom. Open that, right-click on the chat channels button, and select 'remove'. Voila, CCP's clumsy good intentions have been bypassed.

Minor Features

Missile And Module Renaming

In an effort to make EVE Online far, far more newbie friendly, CCP has renamed most missile types and several named modules. The new names are more intuitive and consistent, instead of "as complicated as possible" as CCP Soundwave put it. An unfortunate side effect of these changes is that out of game literature relating to those items is suddenly out of date and in need of updating.

The gist of the naming scheme is as follows:

• EM Missiles: Mjolnir.
  
• Explosive Missiles: Nova.
  
• Kinetic Missiles: Trauma.
  
• Thermal Missiles: Inferno.

For example, this means that scourge fury missiles are suddenly trauma fury missiles, and juggernaut torpedoes are suddenly trauma torpedoes. Simpler? Surely. A pain in the butt for veteran EVE Online players that learned it the old way? You betcha.

The Starbase Fuel Change Goes Live

CCP's long awaited starbase fuel change has gone live, and by now starbases are happily chugging along, ignoring their old fuel types in favor of the new fuel blocks. And no towers or EVE servers went off-line, no fuel bays deleted their contents, nor did anything equally unpleasant occur. I freely admit my surprise.

Also handy is that the date that towers run out of fuel is automagically added to the in-game calendar, as well as the EVE Gate calendar. This is just fantastic for corporations with multiple towers, since otherwise we need to guesstimate, make complicated spreadsheets, or write complex web applications. The downside is that we still don't get messages when our reaction silos fill up or run out of essential ingredients. Ce la vie.

Planetary Interaction Buff

For some hare-brained reason, the storage facility structures initially introduced in planetary interaction had the same de facto requirements as launch facilities, yet stored less material. That has been fixed. I haven't quite puzzled out how this will help players with their planet-based industrial setups, but it seems very promising for low-effort setups where the player only checks in every week or two.

Easter Eggs

Most EVE Online expansions or patches are full of little changes with big ramifications. Here are a couple of the things that stick out about the most recent part of the Crucible Expansion:

Alliances can join factional warfare. Not a huge change, per se, by itself. But given that big changes to faction war are in CCP's pipe for the next year, this could become incredibly important.

A compact view of members of chat channels is now made possible by right clicking on a channel name. This new view is pretty much the best thing to happen to local chat channels since they were introduced, whether you are searching for neutral pilots in null-sec or skimming for war targets in high-sec.

There are tons of other little changes, ranging from the universally lauded to the miniscule, but these were the big ones. I hope you are joining me in hoping that the next patch is even better. Until next expansion, pilot!