The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Summers tend to be a more relaxed time here at CCP due to vacations and whatnot. The Kali deadline looms ominously closer and closer while CCPers goof around sunbathing, imbibing insane quantities of intoxicants and perverting the general peace and harmony of our community. Well, that’s maybe a bit of an exaggeration – there’s no sun to sunbathe in. In June it rained 24 days out of 30. It’s not a record. And what did I do? I used my last vacation days to go camping in the North coast and missed the two days this summer where the weather in Reykjavik was actually quite decent. I got rain. Yay.

But now we’re back in business. The programmers are completing their tasks, allowing us in the content department to start creating all the new and exiting stuff we’ve been hinting at in our devblogs. I’ve been back for a week now and am just getting into the right gear. So next week I’ll of course start mass producing, right? Wrong! I’m going to uproot myself and enter the good ol’ US of A. My mission is simple: aiming for Indianapolis; my goal is to preach the holy word that is EVE the CCG to bright young Americans at the premium geek fest that is GenCon.

So what will I talk about this week? Of course, I chose one of the very few things that is still left on the programmer’s to-do list. Rigs. Known aliases ships mods, aka ship upgrades, formerly known as the feature-formerly-known-as-pimpisizers. This is what I told you in my last blog about Rigs: ‘A Rig is a new addition to the game, which allows players to modify the performance of their ship by adding Rigs to it.’ So basically it works like an implant for your ship. It follows much the same rules – there are fixed slots for them, only one of each type, once you insert a Rig into your ship you cannot remove it again and all Rigs are destroyed when the ship is destroyed.

All ships will have a fixed number of slots to insert Rigs into (we’re still debating whether we want 2 or 3 slots). All ships will get a new attribute called Calibration. Calibration is a restricting attribute similar to CPU – you cannot insert a Rig into a ship unless the ship has sufficient amount of Calibration left. It goes without saying (but I’m still saying it) that all Rigs have a Calibration need attribute on them. Tech II Rigs have higher Calibration need, but then again tech II ships have higher Calibration.

I’m not willing to give you concrete examples of Rigs, but here are a few hints: in light of our new battle doctrine we will favour defensive natured Rigs over offensive ones. Rigs will have a bonus effect, but also a detrimental effect (for instance, boosting shield recharge rate, but reducing max speed). Tech II Rigs tend to have bigger effects, but correspondingly bigger detrimental effects.

So tech II stuff is better? Yawn, what’s new? Well, Rigs are not available on market. The manufacturing of Rigs is entirely in the hands of the players. So is harvesting materials to build Rigs (as mentioned in my last blog). And the research of more advanced Rigs is also in the hands of the players. You see, only blueprints for tech I Rigs will be available on market. To get a blueprint for tech II Rig you need to invent it. It’s the only way to get your hands on them. So how do you go about inventing them? Well, that’s a discussion for our next blog. If your anxiety is reaching critical limits before then I suggest you vent your frustration in-game on some Veldspar rocks. Or BoB. Hm, did I just say that out loud? Oh, not BoB the Alliance! Eh… Bob the… Uh… Bob the Clown. Yeah, kill Bob the Clown. Damn.

Meanwhile, the light at the end of the tunnel is the Kali express train and lets all hope we won’t get run over by it.

So says Clover.