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Here is still an issue present with the lighting models... light is reflecting from a nebula that is behind a planet and behind the rest of the ship. It gives most ships a candy coating fake plastic look to them that is terrible.

http://imgur.com/XyJ6RiL

http://imgur.com/6Jc4Zlo

http://imgur.com/HZtnngw

You can replicate this with nearly any ship in nearly any system, just put the bright spot on the other side of the ship and look at all of the angles and edges of textures/turrets etc, you will see them reflecting light through the ship.

And for the love of all things proper, please fix the horrible stacking of the asteroid environment (or fix the horrible environment effects that were in the missions before adding these new effects on top). You can't see anything in some missions now, and just landing on grid slaughters framerates.

http://imgur.com/38w43bl

And I still never got an answer why they normal asteroids can't cast shadows without having the asteroid blobs turned on. As in order to see light shadows you have to turn on the asteroid blob first, even though they are separate options and your ship and the harvestable asteroids are still there and cast shadows, but apparently can't cast shadows unless there is a blob of asteroids to clutter up the screen.

Same here.

Got a question about the Drifter BS - how on earth are we supposed to face them? They blap anything subcap once you eat through their first shield layer. So, if we do face them, unless we warp out we are guaranteed to be DD. (and if we do warp out and they follow us, will they resume the DD cycle again?) Otherwise - if we face them in a group, is the "payout" going to be worth the effort? As I see it now, the gang that faces them is guaranteed to lose 1 ship at least. As the DD can Blap a marauder in Bastion mode. So unless it's plated to hell and back, it won't survive it.

So what kind of rewards will we get from them when we successfully bring them down? As the reward has to be balanced with the risk.

PS: Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE these new features! PVE in EVE has been STALE for a LONG TIME. Even sleepers in wormhole space have now become just isk farming after only being in a wormhole for like a month. So the more PVE content the better. I'm just worried about the risk vs reward. As these things are extremely OP. Which is fine, as long as the pay off is good enough. As no one is going to fight them ore then once if the pay off doesn't match the risk involved with taking them on.

But keep up the good work! PVE in EVE seems to be taking an amazingly positive direction! Now when I want to make ISK for PVP I can feel more like I'm doing something exciting then just mindlessly going through the routine for the payout at the end. Which is what PVE in EVE should have been all along. (An engaging experience.)

A drifter BS just glitched on me.

The story:

I fitted me an enyo to see what the drifter would do. Predictably, I got blapped after removing his blue shield.
So I dock up, online links and throw together a high EHP Vargur to try and survive the doomsday.

I warp back, find the drifter BS with full shields again, enter bastion, shoot the guy, brace myself... AAAAND nothing happens. I just sit there shooting the drifter. He just sits there dying. He did throw the lock, but otherwise was completely passive. Not even moving or targeting back.

Edit:

A bunch of circadian seekers just called in drifter support. 2 BS. Apparently they don't consider a marauder to be a significant threat because they didn't even try to DD me.

Aaaand again.

Caught one on a wormhole. After I got him past the blue shield, he stopped shooting back and was just orbiting me.

Okay, I think I'll just leave it here

http://i.imgur.com/qqiqt6m.png
http://i.imgur.com/U1CTe8E.png

Well, no, I think an explanation is necessary.

That was a chimera. With siege links. With full shields. It had like 5% shield left after the doomsday.

Also it was the first time I was trying to drop a cap on a drifter. It did work. That is, it did cause a DD. Unlike my futile attempts in vargur. I've spent several hours warping back and forth between the structure and the wormhole in that trying to get DDed. Killed a dozen drifters, but no luck with getting blapped (an enyo was, though).

The first guess is, it DDs you only if it can point you. And you can't point a bastioned marauder, thus no magical oneshots for you.
I think I need to inject me some dread skills to test the idea.

Well, someone on ru forums said he got repeatedly DDed in his Kronos while in bastion (well, in his... kronoses? kronii? Considering a kronos does not last past the first DD). Though he says it was several days ago, and now he doesn't get DDed, so probably something changed in their logic.

Then again, I decided to check the ewar immunity idea and flashtrained a cruise phoenix on SiSi (fastest dread train I could do).

My first contact went hilarious. After 55sec lock I oneshotted the blue shield, and the poor drifter started orbiting the dread without shoting back (much less doomsdaying). After another 55sec lock he took 4 or 5 hits to die.

The second one was annoying. I killed some seekers, and 2 drifters came to the rescue. My guess is they were sigtanking, because the firtst one was taking 7K hits on average (13,5K structure), and those two were taking 1,5K hits and probably had also more raw HP. So I had to get a dualweb DD to speed up the killing. They didn't use their DDs anyway.

There was a third one and he was much like the first only he did use his turrets (which didn't help him). Oh, and since webs were useless by virtue of being 2km short even OHed, I swapped them for sebos.

So far I massacred about a dozen drifters in a vargur and a total of four in a phoenix. And one in a chimera. And chimera was the only one to be DDed.

Someone should probably try to mothership a drifter to see if a naturally ewar-immune ship would get some DD love.

Current issues: Bulk data update required during the last two update cycles


Current text issues in the new rookie system sites for the structure names.
If there was going be text added about those sites it is not in.
Drifter battle ships still glitchy see previous posts.
Are planets not taken in to account as blocking sky box effects?

On an older build I successfully jammed them with all types of ECM (four out of seven "hit"), and most NPCs have the same sensor strength for all four types.
But with the build after that only one ECM had success and for only one cycle. Didn't help that much, my Rook just got wrecked. Given them chance based nature of ECM, there's no way to tell wether the Drifters got their sensor strength buffed since my successful attemt.

Battleships? There are already dead carriers. Those things are no joke, I love them!

I decided to mess around in the Rogue Cloning Facility for a bit and... wow. Pretty interesting place.

I was messing around in Emrayur, in case the sites are different for different areas.

We'll see how things are on SISI, but as for the sites as they currently are on TQ...

The biggest oddity I found in the site was that everything was so far apart except for three of the rats, who were all very close to each other. I think these three might be a bit too close together, or at the very least, they respawned way too quickly.

Moving one of them further away (either paired up with one of the other two "solo" rats or placed solo on its own) or reducing the respawn a little bit would be ideal, I think, as having the three of them clustered together with such a high respawn makes it significantly more lucrative (for a low-SP character, at least) than I was expecting. It may even be more lucrative than some of the low-level HS anoms.

"Gun mining" seems like it could very much be a thing (again, for low-SP characters) in this site due to how many minerals the civilian items reprocess into (and that it seemed there was an extremely high, if not 100% chance, for a civilian mod to drop). Of course, it's really nice for someone who wants to get into industry. As it is, though, it seems as if a person can get significantly better returns from this rookie site due to the reprocessing returns on the mods than some of the low-level anoms.

Gallente and Caldari could both really capitalize on the cluster of three using drones (two for the Velator as opposed to one for all other Rookie ships) or the long range of the Civi Gatling Rails (Caldari), then combined with a small tractor (or even an MTU) and salvager. Again, it felt to me like it was a better average than some of the HS anoms, and that was with a short-range laser and having to slow-boat between the three.

We'll see how things turn out on SISI, though.