Odyssey

My first EVE expansion arrived. Although expansion seems to be overstating it, but if CCP wants to call their biannual major patches that, then why not. It's good that EVE is still changing after ten years running. It is kind of a pity I didn't start playing earlier, when I had more time. But less money. Such is life. Anyway, onwards to Odyssey.

Shiny!

Cosmetic things first. I like the new radial menu. The old one I immediately moved to the middle mouse button and then forgot about it, since it was a set of small, I think either unlabelled or labelled with a twitchy tooltips small icons, which only got in the way of navigating in space. The new one I still keep under the middle button, but with zero delay, which allows issuing commands with quick gestures. And it both looks nice and is labelled. And you can fluidly adjust navigation command ranges by dragging from the center, which is neat, if not extremely useful.

Jump animations are also nice. And the UI seems to working the whole time, rather than freezing for a moment during loading. Or disappearing completely, which I read was what happened on the test server when the feature was introduced. The undock button makes more sense where it is now, even if I still habitually move the mouse to the corner of the screen. I imagine that must be much worse for players who are playing EVE for years.

Scanning

Apparently the scanning effect annoys some people, but I barely even notice it. Even when it glitches and the arc just kind of jumps back repeatedly. I also barely notice of pay attention to brackets in space, because why would you. The list is infinitely more convenient. Especially since why would anyone care where in space the anomalies or signatures actually are? You just jump to them, and the only thing their position affects is the few seconds of warp time more or less. I guess it could matter for aggressive d-scanning. Also the exploration brackets and their window popup look completely different than everything else in space. But who needs consistency. Maybe they will change everything else to big colorful icons. What could possibly go wrong?

The scanning is streamlined, which I on the balance of things is a good thing. It means more competition, but after a few days most people appear to have gotten bored, and I like the saved time on initial scan, both for anomalies, and initial position of signatures. Automatic probe formation and scaling is also fine, since it only saves the tedium. And in some cases for very faint signatures I still had to adjust the position of individual probes manually, which is good.

Removing NPCs from Relic/Data sites was great in that it makes it possible to explore low/null in a T1 frigate that anyone can afford to lose, rather that a Tengu or some sort of multiboxed setup.

The hacking minigame is, at best, serviceable. Restoration nodes seem extremely unbalanced. Why do they increase coherence of defenses beyond initial values? I think someone doesn't quite grasp the definition of the word "restoration". Otherwise the minigame requires a minimal amount of pattern recognition, and with that the only remaining factor is luck and character skills/ship loadout. I guess that's fine. The loot appears to be a bit better from both relic and data sites, although I didn't do that much exploration before Odyssey to have a good comparison base.

The can spew is less annoying than expected. Apparently it was adjusted late during the testing to reduce the speed and number of cans. This makes it possible to most of the time capture all cans of a given type. And after cargo scanning the container before you can know which type of cans actually contains the valuable loot. I think I miss what I want about one in five times, which is tolerable. I guess this changes in nullsec, where there can be multiple types of good loot in a single container, and probably they spawn more of them moving faster.

Will Tag For Sec

I don't really plan to do anything that would drop my security status, so this doesn't affect me outright. But it is still a thing, especially since I recently tried to do things in lowsec. One issue I have is that it makes security statuses below zero essentially equivalent, since the only things it means now is how much someone cares about not having low negative sec status. Before, it was at least a vague indication of how much time someone is spending attacking other players to shooting NPC. On the other hand, it is a nice lowsec belt ratting loot.

Other stuff

I am not playing long enough to be affected by ship balance changes, so I nothing much to say about those. I can now fly Iteron V, which is nice. Although Iterons makes even less sense now than before. I only dabbled in mining, so I have no idea how mining sites being moved to anomalies will change anything. Probably increase the amount of nominally lowsec minerals coming from highsec, because the anoms will be now mined out quicker, and so respawn faster. No clue about ice changes. Even less about moon changes, although I guess a null-sec war is something to read about.

So, in general the expansion didn't seem to break anything that affects me, it improved a bunch of things that do. That, I suppose, is a success.