It's been a few weeks since the release of Tyrannis, and I find myself

continually finding excuses to delay writing a review of it. First I

put it off because the entire focus of Tyrannis - its headline feature,

Planetary Interaction (PI) - wasn't actually available until a week

after the patch went live. Then I put it off because I was hoping to

see what impact PI would have on the markets, but CCP hasn't removed

the NPC-seeded goods from the pre-Tyrannis economy, and it's not clear

that they'll do so anytime soon. Finally I realized that I was delaying

the review simply because I did not want to admit, in print, the truth:

Tyrannis is basically Facebook for style="font-style: italic;">EVE,

complete with it's own

space-Farmville equivalent.







It's an ugly realization, because you then inevitably imagine some CCP

devs goofing off at the office and messing about on Facebook and

playing Farmville. Then one of them has an Eureka moment and blurts

out, "Hey! Let's do this, but IN SPACE!" Six months later and an awful

lot of hype we have Tyrannis, which brings us Eve Gate (ie: Spacebook)

and Planetary Interaction (Planetville?). And a new Scorpion

model. I had written a href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/83514" id="h1-5"

title="column">column

several months ago warning against this development direction, and

sadly here we are. With gritted teeth, it's time to get it over with

and examine the micro-level impact of this patch, and see if it has any

interesting implications for nullsec dwellers.







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Spacebook: Eve

Gate! It's Facebook. In space. It looks like Facebook, it has contacts

like Facebook. The good thing is that I can finally check my evemail

via the web. All the same, it's hard to get folks excited about a

reskinned Facebook. Next!







Planetary Interaction: Obligatory

Planetville joke aside, PI deserves a more serious review than Eve Gate.







First of all, I respect one of the intentions of PI greatly; it was

designed to allow people to have something to fiddle with while in

fleets or on ops. You can now move your little planet-harvesters around

while chilling on a gate or listening to your FC freak out about

something; EVE has always lacked for minigames to give pilots something

to do during the 'boring bits', and PI is our first Bejeweled or

Farmville timewaster that's actually inside the game client.







The problem is that PI could have been so much more. Perhaps it will

develop into something greater in time, but as it stands right now it's

frighteningly similar to the aforementioned farming browser game. You

mine some stuff; you build a little network of extractors which go into

factories which spits out, well, POS mods, mostly. If we were going to

have a timewaster minigame, couldn't it have had more game and less

timewaster? There are many other browser games that CCP could have

cribbed design notes from (city-level Civilization clones seem

particularly popular at the moment); these at least provide a challenge

greater than 'scan mineral source, adjust extractor location'.







That said, PI has several implications for the entire game. It shows

CCP's intent to have a completely player-created economy, removing many

of the NPC-seeded items. This is, broadly, a good thing; it means there

is more chaos and involvement and opportunity for things to Go

Hellishly Wrong, which is what makes EVE interesting. Logistically PI

provides nullsec alliances the ability to locally produce outposts,

control towers and cumbersome mods such as Capital Assembly Arrays;

this allows alliances with organized PI setups to completely skip

freighter ops through chokepoints. Alliances won't even need to do the

PI themselves; they can ship PI-produced modules to nullsec in a jump

freighter from empire, then assemble the bulky components which would

ordinarily be manually freightered on site. This makes nullsec

logistics even easier and safer - and thus possibly more stagnant,

depending on how you view the optimum risk/reward spectrum.







The implementation of the PI system has been - to put it charitably -

rocky. When first patched, tower modules could be refined, which

allowed players to reprocess certain mods to create mass numbers of PI

modules; this essentially allowed many alliances to create outpost eggs

out of thin air. Right now you can set up a PI network to produce

items, but every item produced by PI can presently be purchased from

NPCs at a fixed rate; until the seeded items are removed, the entire PI

economy is a sham. This means that we can't judge what that economy

will be like, and the seeds also allow speculators to stockpile an

endless number of seeded mods at a vastly discounted rate.







Empire Mission Stealth Nerf: This

is one of my favorite features of Tyrannis, and is probably better for

the health of the game than anything else. The loot tables for empire

missions have been nerfed broadly - by expanding the drop rates for

named modules and removing mineral-heavy 'meta 0' drops. This means

that the isk value of named mods have plummeted, and the risk-free

iskmaking of the average empire dweller has taken a huge hit. As a

nullsec dweller it's always rubbed me the wrong way that Raven pilots

in the Forge can hoover up isk without putting anything on the line,

while in nullsec we live in relative poverty; slowly the balance seems

to be shifting.







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Insurance Adjustment: My

eyes glaze over at the mention of insurance rates, but this is actually

a significant change. For a long time, 'insurance fraud' has

artificially inflated the costs of highend minerals; by increasing T2

insurance payouts and reducing T1 insurance, the bottom has fallen out

of the highend mineral market. Similarly, certain ships which were

previously only used at great cost are now worth using in mass fleets;

expect a lot more HAC ops called, because they now cost about as much

to lose as a battleship.







The Scorpion: There's

a CCP dev whose name is sadly unknown to me. He sketched out the

Scorpion, as well as designed for the Alliance Tournament prize ships.

The new Scorpion is hands-down the best looking ship in EVE, and

whoever this dev is, he needs to be immediately re-tasked to updating

the older ship designs. There's an obvious talent there, a gift, and

that talent needs to fix the Raven. And the Bellicose hulls. And the

Dominix. You get the idea. I've never seen so many Scorpions on ops

before, and it's the closest thing to an unmitigated crowd-pleaser that

Tyrannis has to offer.







So, the verdict? Tyrannis could have been so much more. Perhaps it will

be eventually, one of those 'organic growth' patches which we are

presently underwhelmed with, but eventually some 'really cool stuff'

comes out of it. The shift to having the economy being entirely

player-based is good; the nerfing of risk-free empire missions is good,

and the Scorpion owns. But it's hard to say that this is an expansion

in the sense that Dominion was, where the game was radically altered

and major new features were added that affected everyone; Tyrannis

feels more like a bugfix with Spacebook and Planetville tacked on.



