I’ve survived my first EvE expansion, patch, or whatever you wish to call it. Seems I had no trouble whatsoever downloading the new patch and installing it. Got right into EvE after installation, and zipped off to mine in a nearby system.
Got can-flipped almost immediately. So we all know the usual miscreants are skulking around the asteroid belts, and they seemed to have survived the upgrade too. Didn’t engage or take back the stolen goods though, wasn’t about to lose my Hulk to a silly can-flipper. I was thinking about going back to get my Drake for about a second, but then realized I didn’t have any tackling gear on it and I was up against a Crow anyway.
After the can-flip incident, I found a new belt (not surprisingly the miscreant left the system) and started mining again. I discovered something was different about my fitting buttons on my strip miners. I noticed a small grey ring forming around the edge of the buttons to the right of my capacitor display, and I realized what it was, a cycle timer. I think this has to be my favorite so far in the Quantum Rise expansion. It shows the cycle timing of any activated fitting. You can actually see how long the current cycle of your mining lasers are. This works for everything that requires activation, like shield boosters, invulnerability fields, tractor beams, and salvagers. It’s a great way to manage when to move your ore to a can from your cargo hold, especially when you have the skills enough to fill your hold in two cycles (I can finally say I made it there). The funny thing was (unless I missed it), that I couldn’t find any mention of the feature in the expansion notes online.
I fiddled with certificates a little. I’ll need to spend a bit more time with this feature to really know what it is all about. I accepted the certificates I was eligible for, but it only showed me how much I still needed to train for. So we’ll just have to see how this is used.
Other than that, system performance was very smooth for the first hour after the upgrade, but then started to get laggy in the system I was in. Possibly with the load of more people logging in after upgrading their clients and checking all their new stuff out. I expected this, so I’ll probably see how it works over the next few days.
All in all, it was a good first expansion upgrade for me.
Nov 21st, 2008 UPDATE: I have come to find out that most people are having the laggy issues due to a known problem with the Quantum Rise expansion. It has to do with a memory leak in the client and seems to degrade system performance over time, which would explain the smooth then not so smooth later thing mentioned above. I do know that CCP knows about it and is working on it.
