After much player anticipation and an 8-day delay from the original May 18th launch date, CCP has released its latest expansion pack for EVE Online—dubbed Tyrannis. Tyrannis is the 13th expansion of EVE online, the highlights of which include planetary interaction and the eve-gate web site.
Planetary interaction
Planetary interaction allows players the ability to construct facilities on the planets in the solar systems of EVE online which are then used to gather resources and produce many kinds of commodities. These commodities are of particular interest to corporation managers, as many of them are fuels and even components for the POS (player-owned station) bases that corporations anchor and use. As with other aspects of EVE, planetary interaction is not without competition—based on the nature of each player’s installation(s), players may find themselves either cooperating with or pitted against their neighbors. CCP plans to eventually add the ability for players to nuke planetary installations from orbit, and planetary player-owned intallations will also be potential targets for conquest in CCP’s upcoming first-person shooter, Dust 514. Nearly all of EVE online’s planets can be utilized by players—the only exceptions are planets which have been dubbed as being in locations where the population is simply too dense (for example, the solar system Jita, which is EVE online’s primary player trading hub), and planets which are considered historical locations.
EVE-Gate
The other major highlight of Tyrannis, the EVE-Gate, is intended to make corporation management and management of a player’s characters easier. After logging in to the site using your in-game login information (including character), players gain access to EVE online’s in-game mail system via the web site, as well as the ability to make facebook-style posts to let corporation mates and contacts know what you’re up to. It also allows players to view their character’s current location in the EVE world as well as what their character is currently training with time to completion.
The Tyrannis patch also includes many other new features, highlights of which include fixes for some previously broken ship models (Dominix users: your ship has engines and turrets now!), tweaks to the UI to make it easier to use, new graphics for the stars of each solar system, a new dynamic system of insurance calculation, and quite a few more things.
Deployment of Tyrannis was not, however, without its hiccups—the server has already been shut down once, and while official word on why has not yet been given, this EVE subscriber’s guess is that it was to correct a major oversight in a new chunk of code overseeing POS (player owned station) defensive systems. It seems that CCP intended to allow a corporation’s POS defenses to shoot back at its own corporation if the pilot engaged the tower. Instead, POS towers in zero-security systems (which comprise the majority of EVE online’s space) were actually firing upon its own corporation, even when the player had not fired upon or otherwise engaged the tower. Many corporations have already reported major losses to this bug, including a carrier-class capital ship and a jump freighter loaded with many high-tech ships and parts.
All in all, the update appears to have been deployed with relative success. Although you may want to be extra careful around your corporation’s player-owned stations for a while, the server itself is up and running and is stable and responsive at the time of this article’s writing. Happy capsuleering!
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