Believe it or not, everything mentioned in the title is linked to one and another in what has been a very depressing week for EVE Online players.

Last Tuesday saw the release of the latest expansion, Incarna, and in its wake, outrage from most active forum users. Whilst the game [will] completely change EVE with its walking in stations and new adjustments to turrets, it hasn’t been all good. Many paying customers have been faced with buying new hardware or unable to play the game at all as Incarna fries their computers. The problem is widespread and the Devs are still trying to fix it. It’s also to be noted that Shader 2.0 support will be discontinued by April 5th. This will affect approximately 9000 customers, but CCP is trying to work a discount deal with a graphics card vendor so look out for this.

The walk-in stations are very much like that shown by CCP previous to its release. There’s an all new agent finder, which does exactly what it says on the tin. You can also walk down the corridor to view your ship floating in all its awesomeness. Lastly, there’s a locked door which will eventually lead to a multiplayer area which is still in construction. This in itself as lead to a genius idea of photoshopping in what you think is behind the door. For a good laugh, check it out here. The graphics itself is an improvement on what you typically expect from CCP and could be just a hint of what graphics they do want to implement. There’s quite a long waiting time whilst you load the station so I’ve gone ahead and disabled the walk-in station. Even then, I’m faced with a static image of, “the door” instead of being able to spin my ship around for hours.

This new expansion also brought around an update to the turret system which is explained thoroughly and better than I could in this Dev Blog.

And while the artists were adding the additional locators to all the ships, the programmers upgraded the hi-slots so that a turret slot could now occupy any hi-slot. Locator pairs or triads on ships are numbered 1 through 8 (of course not all 8 are present on all ships, there just isn’t enough room) and static, and now hi-slots correspond to them left-to-right, so slot 1 is where turret pair/triad 1a,1b,/1c would fit – which means, if you don’t like the layout of the turrets, move it to another hi-slot and the turrets will shift their position on the ship. (Prior to this update, turrets used to fill the turret locators numerically regardless of which hi-slot you used.)

In the mist of all the new content in Incarna, there is also the NEX (Noble Exchange) store which allowed players to buy clothes for AUR – a new currency implemented in the latest expansion and will be used in DUST 514. Whilst vanity items may be interesting for some people, the price of them just caused outrage, especially the monocle. The monocle would set you back $65 for what is essentially a useless virtual, pixel item. No one else can even see it as no multiplayer is available. This can also be linked to a leaked CCP bulletin which can be found at EVE News which has CCP Soundwave talking about paid for items. Scarily enough, it seemed as if CCP was going to introduce more vanity items, and maybe even “instant win” items for real money. CCP Zulu made a blog post but failed to say there was no intention to introduce these items, only worsening the situation. I would personally quit the game if more microtransactions were introduced, especially if it gave them an advantage over me just because they paid real money for it. CCP Zulu has come out with a new blog trying to damp things down and apologise. The tl;dr of it was that they’re inviting CSM to an urgent meeting in Iceland in just a few days time. I may not be a business expert, but surely they should be having meetings with CSM prior to things like this happening, especially as the success of CCP relies upon making the community happy.

That’s it for this blog post. What do you personally think about NEX and the leaked article?