I feel expanded upon

In my humble opinion the Rubicon thing that happened yesterday is the text-book example of the perfect Winter Expansion. A gosh darn ton of new stuff not one of which is a dead-end, game-changing, controversy inducing, hot-bed of contention in waiting. The game is somehow better than it was on Monday. And that is good enough for the cold months of Winter.

The game seems tighter than it did before, overall I mean. The graphics crisper, the text more readable, the windows better organized, and overall - tighter. I appreciate that. I do like the new character selection window, that is pretty slick. The launcher remains quaint and meaningless, but I don't mind having it. At least it remembers my User Name again.

The new Cert system and the ISIS Tree take some getting used to. I did discover a skill I had forgotten to train playing around with those yesterday, so they helped me already. Nothing serious, I meant to top off Armor Layering a while back and just forgot to do it. So its chewing on Level V now. I'm almost over the 100m skill point rubicon myself, so these new features don't impact me as much as they would younger players. But I think they are awesome and a HUGE improvement over what we had back in the olden days.

Stay Frosty Director and Diplomat Akirra Menelaos spent the last month stock-piling SOE LP, so she hit the ground running yesterday. Popping out both classes of the new SOE ships at a record pace. She was nice enough to let me have an Asteros Frigate at a decent price. I have no idea how to fit the damn thing, but I did manage to create a decent fit that puts the little Frig at over 7k ehp and puts out a respectable amount of drone dps. I managed to catch a Venture on my trial run, but he got away. I originally thought dual web, but I'm thinking dual scram now. Maybe. More testing to come.

The speed change is as awesome as advertised and not as horribly game-changing as feared. It fits. And while some ships can be engineered to go ludicrous speed, the compromises needed to make that happen render them all but useless in combat. So what we are left with is slightly faster PvP Frigs and smaller ships, and slightly slower larger ships. Once again putting the choices in the players hands, the way these things should be.

Congrats to Fozzie and his team once more. And to everyone at CCP, this was a smooth expansion with little in the way of problems.

Also, special thanks to the SOE ship designers. Nicely done. I Hope this proves the concept that out-of-the-box spaceship design can be achieved in Eve and that we are witnessing the dawn of a new era of ships being introduced. Make it so.

The rest? Well now, we'll just have to wait and see won't we?


PS: The war with that other corporation is over now. You really should come fly with Stay Frosty y'know.