The Rumors of Our Demise

The Den collects articles of general wisdom, from philosophical musings to the examination of game mechanics, to simple tales of great hilarity. This one is about Retribution and how it has not quite managed to kill ninja salvaging as a profession.

Well it's certainly been an interesting few weeks! Retribution brought many changes to EVE Online. Of particular note to us are the new Crimewatch system, killrights and bounties, and the new mission AI. All of these would bring about the long-awaited end to ninja salvaging. Of course that didn't actually happen.

Yes we will, Gloria.

Crimewatch

Perhaps the biggest deal in Retribution for us, the new flagging system means that when we yoink someone's stuff, we become a legal target to everyone in EVE. This opens the door for white knights to come to a mission runner's rescue and violence our boats. I wrote about that last month and my sage predictions have so far come true. Eath that, Jester :-)

What did change is that two of our old tricks – in-situ ship swaps and aggro extention – no longer work. The Weapons flag means you can't eject from your ship for 60 seconds after running a hostile mod, like a warp disruptor, and that means no more quick jumps from a Slasher to a Hurricane. The cleaner Crimewatch flagging system also means that odd loopholes like resetting the combat timer by shooting a wreck are gone. It's back to basics for us.

Killrights and bounties

We can be short about killrights – they don't affect us at all. We operate under Suspect flags, not Criminal flags (the sort that get you Concordokkened) so we don't generate killrights. And bounties? Well, if anything, they make people more inclined to shoot us which is a good thing. Former corpie and ninja icon Waagstrom gave us a 250 million ISK corp bounty for Christmas which looks very sexy on our avatars. Thanks!

The predictable wave of frivolous 100k ISK bounties that has washed over New Eden in the new system has resulted in some great tears, mostly from people who don't understand the system and believe it makes them legal targets in High Sec. The common response to such complainers has been to put more bounties on them. They've become an excellent, cheap little trolling device.

Thank you Morbo.

New mission AI

I'm still not entirely sure how this thing works. There was a lot of brouhaha about different levels of AI in EVE and a sophisticated signature radius-based target selection system being implemented. Judging by the patch notes, somebody said "fuck it" and just slapped on the Sleeper AI instead. This has made mission rats jumpy and unable to focus. They switch targets seemingly at random, though they do seem to reserve a particular hatred for drones (with more rivers of salty tears emanating from lazy Dominix pilots who can no longer go fap while their drones finish the mission for them).

Yeah, it's a little tricky when a full room decides to direct its blind anger at the little ninja Slasher that just showed up, especially when EWAR is involved. But we've dealt with rat aggro before and a good speed tank, or a quick warpout and return, remains an excellent counter.

Odds and ends

Some other bits and bobs changed that weren't immediately apparent from the patch notes. One thing that's slightly hard to quantify is the new default overview settings for Suspects and people in a Limited Engagement (LE). The former is now flasy orange: not nearly as aggressive as the "corp red" of the past, this makes us somewhat less intimidating. Whether that's a good thing or not is hard to judge. People have been shooting us regardless. And the LE display color is something called "dark indigo," a friendly-looking greenish blue that inspires no sort of terror whatsoever. I suspect it will make the unwitting more likely to stick around in their missions after taking a shot. After all, that soothing dark indigo isn't going to hurt anyone, right?

But... It was indigo!

And then we come to perhaps the most exciting and somehow overlooked change in Retribution: legal pod killing. A Suspect, Criminal or LE opponent can now be podded without sec status hits or CONCORD intervention. As such we've been separating triggerhappy mission runners not only from their pimped-up boats, but also from their expensive old clones and shiny implants. Make sure you add "biomass" to your overviews, folks – CCP gave us an early Christmas present!