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Star Trek Online refitting two patrol escorts
Two big refits are in store for Star Trek Online's patrol escorts, so if you are partial to the Tempest or Maelstrom class vessels, pay rapt attention to the following announcement. The Tempest class refit will be improved to include a fifth tactical console slot, better bridge officer seating, and increased aft firepower. It'll also come standard with a Nadion Saturation Bomb console that "lays down a string of explosive fire" to the enemy ship and beyond, leaving a damaging radiation field afterward. The ship will require Vice Admiral rank and 2,500 ZEN to purchase. The Maelstrom class refit isn't as grand due to its size, but it will be beefed up, add a third engineering console slot, and include a fused aft Tempest tail gun. This ship also requires Vice Admiral rank to purchase along with five fleet modules.
EVE Evolved: Three exploitable game features
If there's one thing EVE Online players are good at, it's finding ways to get an advantage over each other. The hyper-competitive PvP sandbox breeds players with an investigative streak who will constantly figure out ways to bend and abuse new features to make ISK or get an edge over other players in combat. The most obvious cases include abusing bugs, as happened in 2009's starbase exploit that corporations used to generate valuable tech 2 materials out of thin air and 2010's MonkeySphere exploit that let players hide themselves from the local chat channel and sneak up on unsuspecting victims. Most cases of abusing features for profit or advantage aren't as clear-cut as these obvious exploits, as some have negative consequences but still use completely legitimate game mechanics. When players figured out how to abuse Faction Warfare's kill LP rewards to farm five trillion ISK, for example, they did so using in-game mechanics that just hadn't really been thought through. Many more subtle cases of broken game mechanics that undermine EVE's core design ethos still exist, some of which have been recently introduced and others that have managed to remain unchallenged for years because there isn't really a good alternative. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at three features in EVE Online that I think fundamentally break the design ethos of the game but don't have very clear solutions.
