CCP has released “The Onslaught” patch for EVE Online on November the 14th.

Among all the small fixes and balance adjustments, it’s coming with novelties in four big areas:

1. PVE: A new iteration on the Triglavian sites (introduced last summer) that will allow a small 3 people frigate fleet to join forces and cooperate cleaning a deadspace pocket. Also, for solo cruiser pilots, there is an optional PVP branch with (potentially) better rewards. It looks good, but… I’m not into PVE in this particular game. I just do the bare minimum to keep my wallet on the black side, so… not for me.
2. UI: The Activity Tracker. As far as I understand, it’s used to measure how much time you put in doing a different kind of things. E-peen measurement? I’ll pass on that. They also added the “EVE search”. A search bar that will try to find a term into “anything” (characters, corporations, alliances, skills, ships, objects…). It can be useful, sometimes, but it can also overwhelm you with tons of unrelated results.
3. New ships: Two new (triglavian) ships: destroyer and battlecruiser. As with the previous battleship, they seem to be useful in some circumstances but they will probably be scarce and expensive (due to the difficulty on being produced), so they won’t get a place on any doctrine in the near future.
4. New structures: As one of the final steps in getting rid of the POS system, they’ve added 3 new Upwell structures: a cyno beacon, a cyno jammer, and a jump gate. The first two basically substitute their old counterparts with some adjustments on the timers. But the jump gate is not just a new “jump bridge”. It opens the possibility of joining with a gate owned by a different entity (hello blue-donut), can be used by capital ships and doesn’t generate jump fatigue (hello 2007, I’m back!!).

I’m impressed by the amount of changes that comes with this patch. I think most of them are good changes, can’t see anything wrong (I’m on the fence about the jump fatigue on the jump gates, we’ll see). But I don’t feel like logging in to try it.

I’m not saying goodbye to the game (not yet, at least), but this patch (even thinking that it’s good) has put me a bit off. Maybe I’m just becoming a bittervet?

A couple of weeks after the end of the war, we’ve started a new campaign. This time is a different kind of beast, as we are engaging in High-security space.

It’s been about 10 years since the last time I had a fight on High-sec, I didn’t even have an Overview ready for this and judging for what I hear on comms, most “testies had never been on a High-sec war.

We’ve started the campaign by reinforcing some enemy citadels on Perimeter , just 1 jump ahead from Jita (the main trading hub in the game). We were expecting some oposition (judging by the War declarations that came yesterday) but for now, we are just bashing structures and creating TiDi around us.

We’ve gone into several fleets simultaneously attacking different structures each one, to maximize the number of citadels reinforced in one go.

The first reinforced citadel (by the fleet I was on) was a Fortizar (Perimeter Planet V Panfam Secured Hub). Its armor timer will come out tomorrow during EUTZ.

After that, we’ve come after a small refinery (IChooseYou Tatara Max Reprocess). By then, it seemed pretty clear that they weren’t coming to fight today. Too bad, because I don’t know if tomorrow I’ll arrive home in time to be fighting, and bashing structures without opposition is boring.

And finally, we were to the Sotillo (IChooseYou Sotiyo) to help another of our fleets end it before docking up again.

Of course, we also have our own Fortizar deploying now (a faction one, this time). It will be online (or dead) by tomorrow. Having a Fortizar next door to Jita will probably mean that we will have to come and defend it every now and then. This may be interesting (content!!) or a chore, depending on who comes to attack it. Time will tell.