EVE Evolved: A community guide to EVE Online
Some time ago, Massively started up a whole slew of new weekly columns, each covering a specific MMO. Each week, they bring guides, editorials, interviews and community news in a similar way to what I've been doing with EVE Evolved over the past two years. Each of the new columns started with a definitive community guide showcasing handy links to useful websites, blogs and tools. This week it's my turn to give EVE Online the community guide treatment. This article will be updated periodically with new links as they make themselves known. If you have a useful EVE link you think would belong in the community guide, leave a comment with it.
Skip past the cut for a breakdown of some of EVE's most important community links.
Official EVE Forums
The official forums are usually the backbone of an MMO's community. EVE's forums serve as a social hub, a corporate recruitment tool and a repository of information. The EVE General Discussion section has more than its fair share of trolls and you'd better have a flame-proof suit on if you're heading to the Corporation, Alliance and Organization Discussions forum. Nevertheless, the forum remains a good place to ask questions and discuss everything from ship setups and missions to PvP tactics and in-game politics.
CCP Games on Youtube
When an official trailer or awesome official video comes out, this is where you'll find it! The channel is also home to coverage of the alliance PvP tournament.
EVElopedia
The official EVE wiki, EVElopedia is stocked with information by players, volunteers and CCP employees. In its short time in operation, it's become a comprehensive knowledge base.
EVE Survival
Collecting together reports from dozens of missions, complexes, exploration sites and cosmic anomaly encounters, EVE Survival gives valuable information on what you can expect to come up against. Using these reports, you'll know exactly how hard a given mission is so you can judge the risk involved without putting your ship in harm's way.
EVE Agents
Finding a mission agent that meets your requirements can be a daunting task. Rather than checking stations manually or sticking to one of EVE's popular mission hubs, you can use EVE Agents to find the perfect agent for you.
Chruker's EVE Online section
For the number-crunchers among us, Chruker.dk's EVE section provides a wealth of data, charts and experimental results. Covering everything from invention and blueprints to salvaging and loot drops, it's the first place to look for raw facts and figures or handy web-based calculators.
Halada's Mining Guide
There have been many mining and industry guides over the years but none as complete as Halada's impressive effort. The guide covers not just mining itself but also manufacturing and research. Visually pleasing and easy to read, this guide is essential for any starting industrialist.
EVE Radio
EVE Radio has been a pillar of the EVE community since the game was in beta testing back in early 2003. With live shows and a full DJ schedule, EVE radio is one of EVE's most popular community projects. They routinely run competitions for in-game prizes, hilarious PvP events and tournaments.
Scrapheap Challenge
Although the official forum is good, there's plenty of room for more than one EVE forum on the net. Scrapheap Challenge is EVE's unofficial second forum, with thousands of registered members.
EVE Tribune
Now in its fifth year of operation, EVE Tribune provides a weekly dose of EVE articles on a wide range of topics.
Battleclinic
One of the oldest and most iconic EVE fansites, Battleclinic provides EVE players with a huge set of tools. The forum with integrated ship fitting tool makes discussion about ship setups easy. The site also hosts one of EVE's most popular killboards, tracking the stats and kills of players.
Crazykinux's Musing
Long-time EVE blogger and social media guru David "Crazykinux" Perry runs this incredible blog. His efforts in bringing EVE players together through social media have made him a cornerstone of the game's community. In addition to hunting down all the latest EVE links for his regular "speedlinking" feature, CrazyKinux has spurred players to begin blogging about EVE. He maintains a list of regularly updated blogs in the EVE Blog Pack and even runs a monthly Blog Banter contest. David also joined us here at Massively for a short time with his "Have Clone, Will Travel" column.
Podlogs
Podlogs is a clever initiative designed to get more EVE players blogging. Players can sign up an account at the site and begin blogging right away. Features like shared tags, a forum and a real-time list of the latest EVE blog posts makes this a very useful site.
Warp Drive Active
Possibly EVE's oldest fan-site, Warp Drive Active started out as a comic and later added a podcast. The podcast has become popular in its own right, hosted by Warp Drive Active creator Winterblink and published at irregular intervals.
Planet Risk
The Planet Risk Show is a relatively new podcast dedicated to wormholes and wormhole colonisation. In previous editions, they've covered tactics for tackling the advanced Sleeper ships in a Class 6 wormhole and other equally daunting topics. The podcast has even been the site of CSM candidate debates.
The Drone Bay
Hosted by long-time EVE player Crovan, The Drone Bay has always been one of the EVE community's favourite podcasts. You might recognise Crovan from his blog Bitter Old Noob, his appearances on EVE TV as an alliance tournament commentator or his contributions to Massively in the short-lived Rogue Signal column. The podcast had a long break of inactivity but recently returned to a welcome reception.
PODDED
The PODDED podcast started in 2007 but was met with only limited success and a run of only 11 episodes. Relaunched in 2009, it's quickly become of of EVE's most listened-to podcasts. Hosted Dillon Arklight and War Childe, the show talks about anything and everything that's happened in the world of EVE since the last episode.
EVE Online facebook
The official EVE Online facebook page. News and other articles get posted here from time to time.
CCP Games twitter
Much like the EVE Online facebook page, the official CCP Games twitter mostly posts links to EVE news.
Tweetfeet
This handy resource links all the EVE players discussing EVE on twitter together.
CrazyKinux's twitter
If something is going on in EVE, chances are CrazyKinux is posting about it right now on twitter!
EVE-Central
This is a handy way to get a rough price estimate on an item. Additional functionality for finding trade routes exists but as it relies on players submitting data, it has limited usefulness.
EVEMon
EVEMon is one of EVE's oldest and most useful external application, allowing players to develop skill training plans and alerting them when skills need to be changed.
EVE HQ
EVE has no shortage of external applications to help with various aspects of the game, from ship fitting and skill training to asset management. EVE HQ brings all of those together in one place, making it a very popular and handy application to have.
EVE Fitting Tool
EFT is probably EVE's most used tool. It allows players to set up virtual ships and optimise their fittings without testing in-game. Setups can be copied and pasted into forum posts of EVEmails, then copied back into EFT by someone else, making it a great way to share setups. They can even be exported to a format the game can load into the saved fitting list.
Capsuleer
If you're lucky enough to own an iPhone, the Capsuleer app is definitely for you. It gives easy access to your EVE characters in a portable format, allowing you to check your skill training and more. It also has a built-in web-reader, bringing the latest EVE news and updates from the Blog Pack right to your phone.
EVE-Kill
Killboards are a handy tool for all EVE players, letting you keep track of your kills and losses. They also serve as an intel-gathering tool for times of war, letting you look up what kind of ships your enemies fly and where they do most of their PvP. There have been many attempts to make one single conglomerated killboard over the years but each one has had its own difficulties. EVE-Kill is the closest thing EVE has to a single killboard source and has taken over from many corp's separate killboards. Kills can be added automatically by supplying your full API key.
ICSC Jump Planner
If you have a capital ship, you'll know the pain of having to plan your jump drive routes, ICSC Jump Planner is an awesome tool that does all the planning for you, even allowing you to customise your route and add mandatory waypoints.
Dotlan EVE Maps
This incredibly useful tool should be on every EVE player's bookmark list. It provides strategic 2D maps of every region in EVE with selectable information overlayed such as number of asteroid belts or security status. Outposts and soverignty can be highlighted on the map, among other useful options. Perhaps the best part, however, is that Dotlan periodically looks up information on systems from the EVE public API. It keeps track of the number of NPC kills, player kills, jumps and pod kills in a system over the past 48 hours using a handy graph. This makes it an incredible intel-gathering tool, especially since it also gives this information on hidden wormhole systems that can't be seen on the map.
Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at massively.com. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at brendan.drain AT weblogsinc DOT com.
Special thanks go to reader "Astral Dominix" for suggesting a similar topic. I hope this covers everything you were thinking of!
