Expansions: Difference between revisions

This expansion was the first of three major expansions moving toward the Faction Warfare system and saw the first of the Need For Speed changes coming into effect, significantly reducing lag for all pilots.

Warp to Zero was added in this patch, finally making the existing Insta bookmarks obsolete. Previously to this patch, the closest you could warp to a stargate or station was 15km, meaning either the space would need to be made up by slowboating, or alternatively by placing a bookmark 15km beyond your destination then warping to that. This of course meant that different bookmarks were needed depending on the duration you came from, meaning hundreds of bookmarks per region. Bookmark sets were traded between players, and it was not uncommon for each player to have thousands of bookmarks, which were found to significantly slow down the system, so they had to go.

The Contract system was revamped, going from the then 'Escrow' system which was inflexible and simply difficult to use, to a system supporting contracts on a corporation, alliance, and personal level, along with the ability to search for specific items.

This expansion unlocked the Drone Regions, which were previously unavailable with no gates linking to them, as the Jove regions are at present. Initially, the regions has no names, and instead simply had alphanumeric designations, however these were later named by capsuleers in a competition. The initial lack of logistic structures there made life quite difficult, with even relatively close systems around 20-30 jumps away from any market, but within a few months a number of sizable alliances had constructed a significant logistical backbone.

Eve Voice was also introduced at this time, allowing voice communications between various people. Initially, this was provided as a free trial, with a low-cost subscription model to follow, however the slow take up and a number of client problems meant that it was not as successful as had originally been thought, and eventually became included with Eve.

The scanning system, which had previously been used only to locate other pilots in space was also revamped, removing the majority of the then static [[Plex|Deadspace Complexes]], and moving them to [[Exploration]] sites. A new on-board scanner was also added to all ships, allowing the relatively easy location of low-level sites around planets. It was however quite some time before the exploration system would become easy to use, as at this point probes were disposable, could not move on their own and had to be dropped manually, not to mention the may the probes would work meant that locating a single site would typically take 30-40 minutes.

Introduced in Revelations were the Tier 3 [[Battleship]]s and Tier 2 [[Battlecruiser]]s, along with [[Salvaging]] and [[Rig]]s. This changed ship fittings significantly, although it wasn't until Apocryphia until small and medium rigs were made available, making it financially viable to rig T1 ships below Battlecruiser hulls. Heat was also introduced, allowing those with relevant skills to overheat modules for more performance, at the risk of damaging or destroying other modules in the same rack. Bombs were added, finally making the [[Stealth Bomber]] live up to its name, and adding a way to deal with close concentrations of ships.

In the industrial side, invention was introduced, finally ending the T2 BPO Lottery, and making T2 modules available to all. Prices of once expensive T2 modules and dropped sharply, often to around 20% of their previous cost, with notable items such as the Hulk dropping to around 120 Million ISK from 600 Million.

Other things added in this patch were [[Booster|Combat Boosters]] using harvested gas from NullSec exploration sites to produce drugs to provide small boosts to skills, an updated 'New Player Experience' with significant more structure, and new characters now began with around 800,000 skillpoints, which unfortunately meant a significant rise in [[flip|canflippers]].