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British warships will soon have Siri-like voice controls
British warships will soon integrate Siri-like voice systems into their controls, according to the head of the UK's Royal Navy. Speaking at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition -- one the biggest arms fairs in the world -- First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Phillip Jones said the Royal Navy wanted to embrace the speed at which warfare is being transformed by IT, and pointed to new Type-31 frigates as an example.
EVE Evolved: Wormholes should be more dangerous
When unstable wormholes began forming all over the EVE Online universe in 2009's Apocrypha expansion, players approached them with extreme caution. The promise of riches in the form of new loot and Tech 3 cruiser components was balanced by the incalculable risk of facing a powerful new enemy in untested circumstances. Between the Sleeper AI that had been reported to melt players' ships in seconds and the player pirates taking advantage of the hidden local chat channel to sneak up on unsuspecting victims, we had no idea whether any ship we sent into a wormhole would ever make it back out again. The risk of venturing into something truly unknown made wormhole exploration the single most exciting thing I've ever been a part of in an MMO, but the past five years have completely eroded that danger. Farmers now know exactly what to expect in every wormhole site and can efficiently farm Sleepers with the minimum of effort or risk, and PvP alliances can rapidly cycle through systems to find weak targets to attack. We've mapped and tamed all of the wormhole frontier, systematically reducing the risk to the lowest possible levels under the current game mechanics. Tuesday's Hyperion update aimed to shake things up with a few disruptive changes designed to keep wormholes dangerous, and I think it's a definite step in the right direction. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the changes in Hyperion designed to keep wormholes dangerous and ask what more could be done to keep things interesting.
EVE dev blog covers Rubicon ship rebalancing
EVE Online's 20th expansion, Rubicon, goes live on November 19th. Rubicon brings many changes to EVE including mobile structures, new faction ships, controllable customs offices, and a completely overhauled warping system. And of course, Rubicon includes adjustments big and small to a wide variety of the ships already flying in New Eden. CCP today posted a summary dev blog outlining the changes due with Rubicon for each ship type. Interceptors are receiving role bonuses that make them immune to warp bubbles, electronic attack ships are seeing range increases and general upgrades, interdictors are getting increased survivability and higher damage output, and marauders are receiving a complete functionality revision that splits the ship type into two distinct roles. Check out the full post for details. And if you haven't already, have a look at Brendan's EVE Evolved from yesterday so you'll be ready for these and other big Rubicon changes.
EVE Evolved: Getting ready for Rubicon
EVE Online's Rubicon expansion goes live in just two days on Tuesday, November 19th, introducing four brand-new personal deployable structures and revamping PvP across the board with a seemingly innocuous warp acceleration fix. The expansion represents the first step in new Senior Producer Andie Nordgren's plan to bring true player-run deep-space colonisation to EVE Online. The new Mobile Depot that can be placed anywhere in space is possibly the most sandboxy feature since the introduction of player-owned starbases back in 2004. Players have been coming up with plans for the device since its first announcement, but I think we'll see its true potential revealed in the coming weeks and months. If you've been saving up your Sisters of EVE loyalty points to get your hands on the faction's new exploration ships, be prepared to buy and build the blueprints as soon as the server comes up. These will be the first pirate faction ship blueprints that are available in high-security space, and a recent devblog confirmed that players have been collecting Sisters of EVE loyalty points like crazy lately in anticipation of the expansion, but those who get the built ships to market first will make an absolute killing. For the rest of us, getting ready for the expansion means planning where to set up a Mobile Depot for some quick profit-making enterprise or building a few small PvP ships to put the new warp speed mechanics to the test. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the best places to set up a Mobile Depot, re-consider the lure of low-security space, and propose adapting your PvP fleets to take advantage of the warp acceleration changes.
EVE Evolved: Fitting Heavy Assault Cruisers in Odyssey 1.1, part 2
EVE Online recently revamped all of the Heavy Assault Cruisers in its Odyssey 1.1 update, in addition to buffing active shield boosters and armour repairers and rebalancing medium beam lasers and railguns. Last week I put together a new brawler setup for the recently revamped Deimos, a sentry drone sniper fitting for the Ishtar, an extremely effective anti-frigate Cerberus setup, and a sadly underwhelming railgun Eagle. This week I've turned my attention toward the Amarr and Minmatar HACs, with some surprising results. The Zealot and Sacrilege are still as powerful as ever, and the Muninn may see some use as a tactical frigate sniper, but this patch could see many players retiring their Vagabonds. The nano-fit Vagabond was once the unrivaled number one ship for lone pirates, able to speed-tank anything larger than a frigate and still deal over 500 DPS. It engaged safely from outside web range, moved too fast for turrets to track, and absorbed any attacks that did hit with its sizable buffer tank. When CCP made warp scramblers knock out microwarpdrives, Vagabond pilots adapted with dual propulsion module fits that use a microwarpdrive to approach the target and an afterburner to orbit. Unfortunately, the Vagabond didn't fare well in the Odyssey 1.1 patch and players aren't sure if they can adapt this time. In this week's EVE Evolved, I put together PvP setups for the at the Zealot, Sacrilege, Muninn, and Vagabond Heavy Assault Cruisers.
EVE Evolved: Could EVE use twitch controls?
A few weeks ago, the EVE Online community went nuts for EVR, CCP's exciting new virtual reality dogfighter developed for the upcoming Oculus Rift gaming headset. The game demo was produced by a team of just a handful of developers in just seven weeks using nothing but their spare time, but attendees and press at EVE Fanfest 2013 were nevertheless blown away during test sessions. Though EVR isn't going to be integrated with the EVE universe, Senior Producer Andie Nordgren stated in her Keynote address that CCP will be looking into more immersive flight and combat mechanics for some the game's ships. This comment has sparked a lot of discussion over the possibility of finally getting some direct flight controls in EVE. The lack of direct twitch-based controls in EVE is often cited by gamers as a big part of the reason they can't get into the game. There's no active dodging of missiles, manual ship targeting, or really complex tactical maneuvers in EVE, but that's kind of the point. Most ships in EVE are colossal lumbering hulks more akin to today's seafaring battleships than fighter planes, and combat with them is more a game of strategy and teamwork than a battle of reaction speeds. But that isn't exactly true of all ships; interceptors and fast microwarpdrive frigates move at several kilometres per second and are so agile that pilots can already pull off some interesting tactical maneuvers. So isn't it about time we made the combat for those ships a bit more visceral and immersive? In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the fast-paced world of interceptors and explore how twitch controls and weapon aiming could possibly be implemented without killing the server.
EVE Evolved: Expanding on wormholes
It's no secret that I'm nuts about wormholes! Last week I looked at the reasons why EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion was such a big success and rejoiced at the recent announcement that CCP will be developing similar laterally designed expansions from now on. In the announcement, developers wrote that they would ideally have liked to iterate on Apocrypha's wormhole gameplay for several releases, which got me thinking about how that gameplay could be expanded on now. Wormholes were a massive catalyst for exploration, small-scale colonisation, industry and PvP, but would it be possible to recapture that magic in an expansion? The Sleeper storyline certainly evolved with the Incursion expansion as it became known that Sansha forces were able to control wormholes and had invaded Jovian space, but that story sadly didn't translate into gameplay for people living inside wormholes. There's no risk of running into the Sansha home system on your travels, and Sansha forces will never lock down a wormhole system and attack your starbase. That feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to me, and I worry that a new wormhole expansion could similarly pass up the opportunity to add interesting new gameplay. Adding more hidden wormhole systems and combat sites would be fun for a while, but the underlying wormhole mechanics and NPC capabilities are already common knowledge. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at various ways that a future wormhole expansion for EVE could recapture the magic of Sleeper space.
EVE Evolved: Fitting Minmatar cruisers for PvP in Retribution
Ever since EVE Online's PvP-focused Retribution expansion landed last month, I've spent most of my play time hunting for kills in cheap PvP cruisers and loving every moment of it. The standard tech 1 cruisers used to be underpowered ships that new players used as a stepping stone into more capable battlecruisers or tech 2 cruisers, but Retribution buffed them to ridiculous proportions. Every tech 1 cruiser was given extra module slots and stats, and the low-tier cruisers were buffed up to the same level as the highest-tier hulls. Believe it or not, these cheap ships that new players can comfortably fly with just a week of skill training have become competitive PvP ships. In the first two editions of this ship fitting series, I put together new ship setups for each of the Amarr and Gallente tech 1 cruisers. This week, I've been zipping about the universe at high speed in the Minmatar cruisers and putting together effective ship setups that can take down some huge prey. The Stabber has been transformed into a competent miniature Vagabond that can keep enemies at arm's length and nibble them to death, and the tanky Rupture remains a highly effective close-range brawler. The Bellicose now excels in an anti-tackler role, and the Scythe is a throwaway remote repair platform that uses speed to stay safe on the battlefield. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give PvP setups for the four recently revamped Minmatar tech 1 cruisers.
EVE Online $6,000 ship kill may be a hoax
EVE Online player "stewie Zanjoahir" made history yesterday when he reportedly lost a tiny ship with cargo worth over $6,000 US. Now it appears that the value of the kill may not have been accurate or that the kill could even be a hoax. Evidence that the kill may not be authentic surfaced last night as players found that three Hulk blueprints listed on the kill were marked as originals. That would make them priceless items that change hands for over 500 billion ISK each, which would raise the kill's value to a ludicrous 1.71 trillion ISK ($51,685 US). It's believed that many of the original blueprints in the kill were actually cheaper blueprint copies. One possible explanation for the aberration is that there was an error in the EVE API that supplied the original kill data to third-party killboard websites. It's also possible that the kill was marked as API Verified without actually being checked, in which case the kill may have never even happened. An alternative version of the kill valued at only 34 billion ISK ($1,024 US) has also surfaced, but this was manually uploaded and so isn't verified at all. CCP Games posted the kill on its Facebook page and Twitter feed, but didn't officially confirm the kill or its value. We reached CCP for comment, but privacy concerns prevented the company from confirming or denying the kill's authenticity. If this monumental kill turns out to be an error or a hoax, the next-highest value confirmed EVE kill would be Bjoern's Avatar class titan destroyed in March 2011. The titan was kitted out with expensive officer modules and came to a total value of over 128 billion ISK. As the price of PLEX was much lower in 2011, this would have bought 355 PLEX worth a total of $6,212.50 US.
EVE Online player loses tiny ship worth over $6,000 [UPDATED]
EVE Online is well known for its sandbox gameplay and ruthless citizens, with monumental kills and record-breaking scams popping up year after year. In 2010, one player lost over $1,000 US worth of 30-day game time codes (PLEX) when he transported them in the cargo hold of a tiny, fragile frigate. Thinking his ship too fast to be caught, that player lost his entire alliance's budget in a single mishap. That record was thoroughly eradicated today by player "stewie Zanjoahir," who reportedly lost over 213,000,000,000 ISK when he tried to transport a huge cache of valuable blueprints through nullsec in a tiny, unfitted frigate. That much ISK could currently buy around 367 30-day game time codes (PLEX) at around 580 million ISK each, for a combined total of over 30 years of game time. To put that into perspective, 367 PLEX bought with real cash would cost about $6,422.50 US. Some players doubt the authenticity of the kill report, but the killboard it was posted on claims to have verified it with EVE's automated API service, and CCP Games itself posted about the kill on Facebook. Kills of this scale may have happened before, but it was previously impossible to tell whether a destroyed blueprint was a cheap copy or an expensive original. The value of this kill may even be higher than the reported figure, as several of the blueprint copies that weren't counted are actually worth billions of ISK. Today's kill may be the largest confirmed kill of any ship in EVE's history and could even be the most expensive character death in any MMO to date. [UPDATE: Evidence has emerged that the kill might not be authentic. EVE-Kill has since updated its report with a revised value of 5.3 billion ISK]
EVE Evolved: Fitting a brawler frigate for PvP
EVE Online's PvP usually has more in common with a game of chess than a dogfight; it helps to have more pieces on the board than the other guys, and tactics usually play a more important role than the size or cost of your ship. You can't automatically win by bringing a gun to a knife fight in EVE, but you can win by being better with a knife than the other guy or by bringing a dozen knives and just flinging them all over the place. The lowly tech 1 frigate may not seem so ferocious on its own, but a hundred frigates can smash even capital ships to bits. Despite the advantage of bringing more pilots to a fight, the frigate is also one of the best ships for soliciting solo PvP. Its superior speed and maneuverability will help you avoid groups of enemy ships and pursue individual targets. It's most common to find lone players in faction warfare areas and the borders of nullsec, and there are even dedicated wardec corps that will let you find solo PvP in highsec. Frigate duels can provide a fun and much more twitch-based style of combat than you'll find elsewhere in EVE, and a well-designed frigate can punch far above its own weight. The Rifter has always been the ship of choice for close-range frigate PvP, but Inferno 1.1 gave all four races an equivalent option. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give close-range PvP setups for the Minmatar Rifter, Amarr Punisher, Gallente Incursus and Caldari Merlin that make full use of the Inferno 1.1 overhaul.
EVE Evolved: Making your first billion ISK
A lot of the people I introduce to EVE Online ask about the possibility of playing for free by buying game time codes with in-game ISK. It's a legitimate way to turn EVE into a free-to-play game, but the rising price tag of a 30-day PLEX can make it seem as if only veteran players can afford to do it. New players typically scrape together just a few million ISK by the end of their free trial periods, making the 500 million per month required to pay via PLEX seem like a tall order. With the right guidance, a new player can actually pull in over a billion ISK in his first month or two of play and quickly become able to afford a PLEX each month. Farming missions requires a bit of time investment but can pull in 20-30 million ISK per hour once you're set up, and exploration and salvaging can lead to some unexpected big hauls. There are also plenty of newbie-friendly corps that run group activities, and those who aren't interested in grinding to their first billion ISK might try their hands at trading or turn to a life of crime. It's all possible in the sandbox. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give some practical tips on making your first billion ISK, from scraping together the seed capital to buy your first big ship to reliable farming methods and some more underhanded methods.
EVE Evolved: EVE Online's new tutorial
If you've ever tried EVE Online and couldn't make it through the cumbersome tutorial, you might want to revisit it. The new player experience received a huge update with the recent Inferno 1.2 patch, which visually updated the starter tutorial and revamped the rookie ships and free frigates players are given. The new tutorial is fully up to date, even introducing recent gameplay updates like the "loot all" button on cargo containers and the new interface for accessing agent missions while in space. A lot of effort has been put into the updated tutorial, but has it really made a difference? This week I gave it a try to find out. Last night at around 6 p.m. EVE time (GMT), there were over 38,000 players online, and only 1,200 were marked as trial accounts. I logged in to find 2,800 players in Rookie Help, a mandatory help channel exclusively for characters under 30 days old. That means just over 7% of characters logged in at the time were either rookies or veterans starting new alternate characters. With only 1,200 of those characters being on trial accounts, a healthy number of the remaining 1,600 must have been recent signups on fully subscribed accounts. Even the most cynical player has to admit that these are encouraging numbers of new players. In this week's EVE Evolved, I give the new EVE tutorial a spin to find out whether now is a good time for new players to sign up.
EVE Evolved: The great ship overhaul
One of EVE Online's most important features is that the game is constantly updated to avoid falling behind the development curve and being overtaken by new titles. The EVE we have today bears little resemblance to the primitive sandbox released in 2003 thanks to major graphical overhauls every few years and iteration on gameplay systems. I think that's a big part of why people start playing EVE; they know that the game will still be alive and kicking years from now and will look as good as anything else on the market. EVE remained largely unchanged from March 2009's Apocrypha expansion until Crucible at the end of 2011, but since then, CCP has made huge leaps in iterating on ship graphics and gameplay. This week we saw an impressive new video of the revamped Drake model, and CCP announced details of a complete mining barge and frigate revamp due to hit the servers before this year's winter expansion. These changes seem set to put a sizeable dent in EVE's notoriously steep learning curve. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the recent graphical updates to EVE's ships and explore the upcoming ship overhauls in more detail.
EVE Evolved: How to fit the Enyo and Ishkur
When tech 2 ships were first introduced to EVE Online, the first models off the production line were interceptors and assault ships. Interceptors served as agile tacklers with unmatched speed and maneuverability, while assault ships provided a slower but tankier option. Each race's assault ship had a bonus to its racial resistances, making it an incredible tank against certain damage types. This made it great for ninja-ratting in nullsec or tackling larger ships of a particular race. When subsequently released ships were also given this racial resistance bonus, the assault frigate lost part of what made it so useful. Players have begged for an assault ship buff for years, and in Crucible, it finally arrived. The Gallente Ishkur and Enyo have always been capable PvE ships for speed-running low-level missions or ninja-ratting in nullsec, but with Crucible, they've become absolute monsters in both PvE and PvP. With the maneuverability and signature radius of a frigate but more tank and damage output than a tech 1 cruiser, both ships are incredibly fun to fly. Drone users will probably prefer the Ishkur, but the Enyo's raw damage output and buffer tank are truly terrifying. In this week's EVE Evolved, I offer PvE and PvP setups for the Gallente Ishkur and Enyo to help you get the most out of these incredible revamped ships.
EVE Evolved: The new player experience, part 2
Two weeks ago, I began an experiment to look into EVE Online's new player experience from the perspective of someone who has never played the game before. I convinced my friend Kajatta to try the game for the first time, with his only prior knowledge being the same stories, videos and screenshots that anyone will have seen before signing up to give the game a shot. In the first part of this investigation into the new player experience, Kajatta delivered a harsh first impression of the user interface and character creation. A common story I've heard when I'm talking to current EVE players is that many didn't really get into the game the first time they played. As happened to Kajatta, some found adapting to the UI and control scheme a jarring experience and were put off as a result. It was usually the second time they played EVE that seemed to make the game stick, whether that was restarting a new character immediately or giving the game a second try up to a year later. Could it be that EVE is most likely to appeal to new players the second time they play it? To put this theory to the test, this week Kajatta took a fresh second stab at EVE Online and played through all the career agent content. But has his first attempt provide the equipment necessary to scale EVE's famous learning cliff, or did the UI and control scheme prove as impenetrable a barrier as ever? In this week's EVE Evolved, Kajatta delivers his verdict on whether EVE is better the second time around and delves into the Cash Flow For Capsuleers combat missions.
EVE Evolved: Getting into your first PvP frigate
In last week's EVE Evolved, I encouraged new players to grab a few friends and charge head-first into PvP with guns blazing from day one. Whether you join a faction warfare militia, form a corp to declare war on other corporations or head out to lowsec or nullsec, starting your PvP journey is an important part of enjoying EVE. Several readers requested help with picking a ship, putting together a viable ship fitting and finding the funding for it. So many players asked for help that this week's column is entirely dedicated to the messy business of putting together your first PvP frigate and learning to fly it. Although the ship of choice for most newbies is the agile Minmatar Rifter, each race has a range of frigates that can perform well in PvP groups with minimal skills. In this article, I'll suggest fittings for two frigates from each race that new players with as little as one day of trained skills will be able to fly. One of the core concepts of EVE Online's PvP that often discourages new players is the idea that your ship is irreversibly destroyed when you die. While this may seem like an extremely harsh death penalty, deciding how much you risk in PvP is part of the game's tactical gameplay and even the best active PvP enthusiasts lose at least one ship per week. Death in EVE is essentially a financial loss followed by the inconvenience of having to buy and fit a new ship. Most of the financial penalty can be countered by using cheap and effective tech 1 equipment and insuring your ship, and the inconvenience of death can by bypassed by building up a stockpile of disposable PvP ships. With that in mind, this week's absolutely massive EVE Evolved is dedicated to getting you and a few friends into your first PvP frigates after as little as one day in the game and helping you mitigate the financial loss of death.
Rockets and more to be boosted in EVE's Incursion expansion
Of all the small issues players want to see fixed in EVE Online, few have gained as much community support as the campaign to boost rockets. Rockets are intended to be short-range but high-damage anti-frigate missiles for tech 1 and 2 frigates with missile hardpoints. Unfortunately, their damage output and effectiveness against other frigates has been extremely poor since missiles and ship signature radii were rebalanced years ago. The issue has gained so much support in the community because it's seen as one of the few problems in EVE that could possibly be fixed in a matter of minutes. Players assert that all it would take is changing a few numbers in the EVE database, and yet the problem has remained unsolved for so long. Missile-slinging frigate pilots across New Eden will breathe a sigh of relief today as a new devblog has finally answered their prayers. In the upcoming Incursion expansion, rockets will have their explosion velocity and base damage increased to make them effective against frigate-sized ships. In addition, several neglected and underused types of tech 2 ammunition are being boosted to make them desirable to use instead of faction ammo. Further changes covered in the devblog include some performance optimisations with the Supercarrier Fighter Bombers and the inclusion of faction ships in the standard market browser. With easier access to faction ships and boosts to underused ammo, players taking part in the expansion's new group PvE feature will be pleased with the changes.
EVE Evolved: Getting into PvP from day one
Although it has significant PvE elements, EVE Online has always at its core been a heavily PvP-oriented game. Players wanting to get into PvP are often advised to train months' worth of skills and build up significant ISK reserves before even trying it, but this is something I strongly discourage. As I've said in several previous articles, a new player can be a useful and effective part of a PvP squad with very little training time. This is something I personally put to the test when a few real life friends and I started completely new characters and started engaging in PvP with less than 12 hours of skills trained. Although we had significant PvP experience under our belts, the exercise proved to me that skill training and ISK weren't the absolute minimum requirement they were thought to be. I firmly believe that all it takes to successfully PvP from the outset is some patient direction from older players and perhaps a little generosity to help you afford some early ship losses. In my experience with introducing new players to EVE, I've always found the EVE community to be more than willing to provide both of these in abundance. I'd say that not only is it possible to try out PvP within the 14-day trial period, it's highly recommended. In this opinion piece, I explain some key things you can do as a new player to get into PvP right from day one of the EVE free trial.
EVE Evolved: Making the most of your EVE Online free trial
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/EVE_Evolved_Making_the_most_of_your_EVE_Online_free_trial'; Like many MMOs, EVE Online offers a free trial to let players try the game out before they buy it. While this lets you see if you like the gameplay before committing, the sheer scope of EVE makes it practically impossible to experience everything the game has to offer within the trial period. Additionally, since the learning curve is relatively steep to begin with, it's very easy to become overwhelmed in a short trial period. These factors can make it hard to experience what EVE is really like, meaning it's hard to make an informed decision.In this guide, I explain how you can maximise your time and fun with the EVE free trial and help make an informed decision on whether it's the game for you.
