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EVE Evolved: EVE Online vs. Elite: Dangerous
Like many EVE Online players, I grew up playing early sci-fi games like Elite and its sequel Frontier. In fact, CCP's recently released stats on the distribution of ages within the EVE community shows a peak around 29 years old, meaning that most players grew up in that same gaming era. A big part of what initially drew me to EVE Online was the prospect of playing the same kind of massive trading and space exploration game with other people, and for over 10 years it's scratched that sci-fi sandbox itch. I've watched EVE grow from a relatively unknown game with around 40,000 subscribers and laggy cruiser skirmishes into a vast game where thousands of players wage war for territory, profit, or just the adrenaline rush of PvP with something valuable on the line. Now that Elite: Dangerous is finally here, I want to see whether it can scratch the same sandbox itch as EVE and to what extent the two games can be compared. Both feature customisable ship fittings, open-world PvP with a criminal justice system, and real financial loss on death, for example, but the end result is two very different gameplay styles. And both also have that same intoxicating notion of exploring the unknown and try to make you feel like you're in a living world, but they take very different approaches to world design, content, and travel. Elite may not be a full-fledged MMO, but with a sandbox made of 400 billion procedurally generated stars and an open play mode that seamlessly merges players' games together, does it matter? In this edition of EVE Evolved, I compare my experiences in Elite: Dangerous to my experiences in EVE Online and look at their differing strategies with regard to server model, active and passive gameplay, and the new player experience.
WildStar announces megaservers
WildStar will be cleaning up its server list and condensing populations in the future, as Carbine Studios announced today that it will be implementing megaservers for the game. The team did caution that it "still some ways away" from the change but wanted to get the news out now. "Going the megaserver route means that we vastly increase server capacity allowing for greater critical mass of our player base, resulting in more people, more groups, more activity and more raids... more of everything that makes WildStar so fun," the team posted. The new megaservers will eliminate the old rulesets and replace them with one PvP and one PvE server per region (North America and Europe). The region lock will still apply, however. The team will also be putting specific chat channels (such as roleplay or French) to offset this elimination of old rulesets. All players will be getting an increased number of character slots to 12 when the megaservers go live, and Carbine will be adding last names to avoid name conflicts. In the meantime, Carbine is allowing for free realm transfers for everyone.
The Daily Grind: Are single-server MMOs uncomfortably big?
If I had my way and technology were easy, every MMO would be a single-server experience akin to EVE Online's or Champions Online's. You might never come in contact with the majority of players or ever encounter a scenario when hundreds of players gathered together, but the unified economy would be a trader's paradise, and it'd be a boon for developers, too, being easier to balance and avoiding the late-game server-merge nightmares that most MMOs eventually suffer. Best of all, you'd never have to find out your new co-worker plays your favorite game too... on another server. But there is a considerable contingent of MMO players who still balk at the idea of an MMO melting pot and tools intended to bridge servers like LFG systems or World of Warcraft's connected realms and battlegroups. Sharded server structures create tight communities, the argument goes. People don't want to deal with folks from around the world who don't speak their language, and they don't want to fade into the background of a massive server with what they perceive as no personality and no community ties or loyalty. Do you agree with that sentiment -- are single-server MMOs just uncomfortably big? Do you prefer a classic, sharded experience? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
EVE Evolved: Will Star Citizen or Elite harm EVE?
Publishers haven't been willing to put a lot of money behind a sci-fi sandbox for some time, but upcoming games Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous seem set to revive the genre thanks to the power of crowdfunding. Star Citizen in particular has collected a world record $19.6 million in pledges so far from almost 258,000 individuals, eliminating the need for publishers and heavy investment entirely. Though both games are designed to be a primarily singleplayer or small-scale multiplayer adventures, their respective developers have already promised shared online universes and sandbox gameplay that could give EVE Online a run for its money. The past decade has shown EVE to be one of the most resilient MMOs on the planet. It's survived several major scandals, barely noticed the release of giant World of Warcraft, and has somehow maintained its subscription-based business model in a market rapidly being overtaken by free-to-play titles. Even at its lowest point, the game managed to survive the 2011 monoclegate scandal and the subsequent fallout that saw CCP Games lose 20% of its staff worldwide. EVE's subscriptions and concurrent user numbers have historically been unaffected by the release of new MMOs or sci-fi titles, so why should Star Citizen be any different? In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how EVE Online has lived with very little direct competition until now and ask whether Star Citizen and Elite could be among the first games to directly draw players from EVE.
Second Wind: Ultima Online
When I (legally) sold my Ultima Online accounts in 2000 for the hefty sum of $1800, the game was already three years old and being challenged by the likes of EverQuest and Asheron's Call. I thought I was done forever. My guild was eyeing Dark Age of Camelot, and I wanted to cash out and rid myself of the chore of maintaining a dozen grandfathered houses on the dying half of a shard struggling to find its footing in a post-open-PvP ruleset. I was wrong. A year later I was back in UO with a new account, prowling around Britannia. And the year after that. And every year since, only I never again made the mistake of selling my accounts even when I took extended breaks. It has a special magic that only a handful of MMOs have captured (let alone topped) since, and what it lacks in modern conveniences it often makes up for in unique features. The granddaddy of MMORPGs and one of the only true sandboxes still standing turns 16 this autumn, having survived EverQuest, World of Warcraft, the internet bubble, EA's blundering, Mythic's takeover, layoffs, price hikes, a recession, and disastrous design shifts. But is it still worth playing?
WildStar explains how MMO servers work
Welcome, class, to MMO Servers 101! Your professor today is Carbine Studios Lead Network & Database Engineer David Ray, and he's here to give a technical overview of how MMOs set up and run their servers. Please take notes. While Ray won't reveal all of Carbine's secrets, his explanation should be sufficient if you're curious as to how an average MMO sets up its backend. If you're expecting an article that reveals WildStar's server rulesets, specific regions, or other practical player concerns, then this is not for you. However, it is a frank and fascinating look at the guts of the ship that runs MMOs, and considering that Ray has worked on both the space shuttle and other MMOs, we suspect that there's a good chance he knows what he's talking about.
EVE Evolved: How would you build a sandbox?
Themepark MMOs and single-player games have long dominated the gaming landscape, a trend that currently seems to be giving way to a resurgence of sandbox titles. Though games like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series have always championed sandbox gameplay, very few publishers seem willing to throw their weight behind open-world sci-fi games. Space simulator Elite was arguably the first open-world game in 1984, and EVE Online is currently closing in on a decade of runaway success, yet the gaming public's obsession with space exploration has remained relatively unsatisfied for years. Crowdsourced funding now allows gamers to cut the publishers out of the picture and fund game development directly. Space sandbox game Star Citizen is due to close up its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter tomorrow night, adding over $1.6 million US to its privately crowdfunded $2.7 million. The creator of Elite has also launched his own campaign to fund a sequel, and even the practically vapourware sandbox MMO Infinity has announced plans to launch a campaign. While not all of these games will be MMOs, it may not be long before EVE Online has some serious competition. EVE can't really change much of its fundamental gameplay, but these new games are being built from scratch and can change all the rules. If you were making a new sandbox MMO from the ground up and could change anything at all, what would you do? In this week's EVE Evolved, I consider how I'd build a sandbox MMO from the ground up, what I'd take from EVE Online, and what I would change.
The Perfect Ten: Non-vanilla server rulesets
I've always thought that rulesets are a golden opportunity for MMO developers to get creative with their products and try something fresh and exciting. Unfortunately, most every MMO these days, new and old, adheres to the four "vanilla" rulesets that have been in place since Pong. You have your default PvE, your same-as-PvE-except-we-have-a-naming-policy PvE-RP, and the two player vs. player variants: PvP and PvP-RP. Those are all well and good, but... y'know... couldn't rulesets be used to create fascinating variations on these games? It turns out that yes, yes they can. While the vanilla rulesets are the vast majority, there does exist a group of fringe rulesets that dared to walk the different patch, er, path and made versions of MMOs that are a bold and refreshing flavor. Like blue! Sometimes these new rulesets were whipped up to inject new life into an aging title, giving players a valid reason to come back and see the game from a different perspective. In this week's Perfect Ten, we're going to check out just how wild 'n' wacky server rulesets can get!
The Soapbox: The industry's obsession with shards
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. The MMO genre is now over a decade old, and in that time we've seen countless innovations in game design, graphics technology and hardware infrastructure. Some of these innovations have become so essential that without them a game looks cheap, old or backward. A functional market or auction mechanic now replaces the old meet-and-trade style barter of some early MMOs, for example, and an MMO without copious map or chat tools is seen as grossly incomplete. The limits of what is possible have been pushed gradually forward, and yet certain ideas that were formed in the genre's infancy still seem to stick to new titles like glue. Sharded server models made a lot of sense in the early 2000s, when server hosting was expensive and the teams working on the server code were small. Those limitations have been rapidly shattered in recent years, but still new MMOs shard their communities into small groups. There are even alternative server models out there that are just as cost-effective as the sharded model but are devoid of the negative side-effects of smashing the community into hundreds of pieces. Read on as I take a look at why developers rely on the sharded server model, the problems surrounding splitting communities and what alternative server models are out there.
WoW Rookie: Sharding etiquette
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's. UPDATE: Most groups use the automatic Disenchant option available in the loot roll box as of Patch 3.3. This week, we're going to help you understand a practice that varies wildly from group to group, server to server and even expansion to expansion. "In the past few months, I've run into a situation with people who are (or who I think are) new players who happen to be 80," reader Sarabande writes to WoW Rookie. "To them, the idea of DEing BoP items for shards is completely alien (and to at least one, he just rolled greed on everything 'just to see if he could get it')." Should your group roll for unwanted or unneeded drops when an enchanter is on hand to disenchant them? What's accepted in one situation might be scorned in another. Because there's no single way to handle the situation, it's important for new players to be aware of the options. It's also important to understand the reasons why players feel so strongly one way or another about this issue. Because there's no single "correct" method, the savvy player respects the group consensus.
Insider Trader: Who keeps the shards?
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.In the Burning Crusade, an Enchanter's job in a raid or dungeon was to disenchant the boss drops that no one wanted into Large Prismatic Shards, and the entire group would roll for them. This was considered the standard, and was the fairest way to divide up the loot. Instead of rolling on the bind on pick-up items that were not wanted, in order to sell them to a vendor for profit or to help pay for the repair bill, they were turned into something more useful. Prismatics sold for more at auction than a vendor would pay, and the shards could be saved for when the characters needed something enchanted. All of this changed in Wrath of the Lich King. Suddenly, many Enchanters were acting like anyone who expected to roll for shards were selfish and clueless, and it has since become the norm for the Enchanter to keep all of the shards. This week, I'll be discussing the reasons behind the change, and reassessing just how fair the change really is.
Is MMO terminology invading database programming?
Raph Koster couldn't help but wonder when he read the blog post entitled, "Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups," if he had a hand in creating that terminology. Sharding, as this blog post put it, was a method of running databases parallel to one another and making sure that the program could look in the right one for the information it needed. All of the older MMO users in the audience, however, know that this was not the first time the term "sharding" was used with parallel databases.Raph had coined the phrase "sharding" years before during the inception of Ultima Online. The story writers were looking for a way to tie in the concept of multiple servers running parallel copies of the same world into the lore of the Ultima universe. It was at that point where they got the idea that each server was the reflection in one of the many pieces of the shattered Gem of Immortality from Ultima I -- a shard world. So, is MMO terminology leaking into mainstream database programming? Raph has the whole story over at his blog, where he traces the origins of the term "shard," how it may have gotten used over at Flickr thanks to Game Neverending, and expanded into a term of it's own right. Check out the story, it certain brings back memories of the old days.
To shard or not to shard
As massive as we like our MMOs to be, the realities of modern networking have made sharding, the creation of identical game worlds hosted on separate servers, a practical necessity. Last week, Awen, Jumpgate Evolution community manager, elaborated on why the NetDevil team was looking at sharded server architecture. Understandably, players maintain that the ideal MMO minimizes sharding to allow players to interact with the greatest possible population of other users.As Awen explains, this isn't exactly possible with Jumpgate Evolution. While their spaceserver architecture--which is similar to EVE Online in that different regions of space can be hosted on different hardware and scaled to the server load--is technically capable of handling most of the challenges of going unsharded, the central-state server on which all the non-combat activity is managed, does have a physical limit. In a game that is focused on real-time space simulation, their focus is on minimizing latency, and that's why they're going to use sharding.
EVE Online blazes into The Empyrean Age
Massively has been beating the war drums as EVE Online enters a new era in PvP: The Empyrean Age expansion. This time of factional warfare will sweep players of all four races in New Eden into a whirl of conflict never seen before in the game. PvP will no longer be limited to low sec ganks, 0.0 alliance warfare, or Empire war decs. For the first time, it will be integrated with the storyline on a massive scale. And all the while, embedded reporters loyal to their respective factions will be conveying news and swaying the masses of New Eden to their cause. With all of this build-up to the expansion's release, there's a great deal of information to absorb. So we've written about what exactly The Empyrean Age is, and what it is not. Our columnists at Massively have written on the background of the conflict between EVE's races, and torn through some of the complexities of EVE's factional warfare for you as well. Although factional warfare has been tested extensively, these radical changes to the universe of EVE Online require a hefty amount of downtime to deploy. But after the full day's downtime, the shardless galaxy of New Eden will be set ablaze at 02:00 GMT on June 11. While you're rocking back and forth in your chair waiting for the server reboot, check out Massively's ramped up coverage of the sci-fi MMO and get yourself into the mood for tearing into the hulls of your rival faction. We suspect that a number of EVE vets are going through booster-level withdrawal symptoms today; so for the truly hardcore, CCP posted the full patch notes in all its 18-page glory on their provisional 'downtime site'. And of course, there's always time to watch Clear Skies a few more times while you wait for New Eden to ignite once again. %Gallery-24797%
Insider Trader: A disenchanted profession
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Back in the early days of the Azerothian economy, enchanters performed enchants with their own mats. You didn't sell anything you didn't have all the mats for, with the exception of special items such as Righteous Orbs for exclusive, high-end enchants like Crusader. When you were out of mats, you closed up shop for the day. Players laughed in your face if you asked them to provide their own mats, and anything for sale on the Auction House was overpriced to the nth degree. Enchanters developed relationships with crafters in other professions to create items that disenchanted into useful components. Players who leveled enchanting purely to disenchant items and sell the resulting reagents were frowned upon and hid their identities behind banker alts and mules.Today, it's a disenchanter's market. Disenchanting has become a profitable "gathering" profession in and of itself. Groups expect enchanters to "shard" items on the spot during instance runs so that members can choose a more valuable shard instead of an undesirable BoP drop. Disenchanting is a whole new "profession"! Read on for Insider Trader's look at disenchanting as a money-making venture in its own right.
Insider Trader: Bags for the pros
Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Need more bag space? It's a completely rhetorical question for most WoW players. Blizzard's tight rein on player bag space is a perfect example of what I only somewhat jokingly refer to as WoW's "relentless tuning." And nobody feels the pinch quite so strongly as professions addicts -- crafters whose bags are full of little bits of this and that for making, well, even more of this and that.Specialty bags to the rescue! Crafters have access to a whole host of beefier bags designed especially for holding crafting materials. These player-made bags do have some drawbacks. You can only carry one at a time on your person, and since they only hold profession-related items, they do cut down on the space you have for general inventory. You'll undoubtedly catch yourself snarling at the banker when tussling with the specifics of what items will and won't go into these bags -- but for all their prissy limitations, you'll come across some sweet surprises, too.No discussion of specialty bags would be complete without a mention of player-made ammo bags and soul shard bags for warlocks, too. We'll include details on those containers at the end of this article.
...and Mages and Warlocks too!
Recently, I wrote a post on Rogues having trade windows opened up on them without so much as a word. As I suspected, many other Rogues out there indeed have the same problem. Of course, many had their own ways of dealing with it like picking the box, but not hitting trade until there was a tip in the window. Another idea was just keeping all trades off in their options so that people couldn't open up trades with them in the first place. All of these are things that I've tried from time to time with varying levels of success. What I didn't expect, however, was the sheer amount of people who jumped in and brought up the similar plights that Mages and Warlocks face on a daily basis. As I've got a L59 Warlock and a L61 Mage, trust me when I say that I completetly understand and appreciate what you all go through with the requests you get. I'm not even able to portal others to Shattrath yet on my Mage, but anytime I'm playing her, I almost immediately get asked to open a portal there for someone anyway. Now, nobody has opened a trade window on me without asking and grunted out "food/water" as yet, but I've definitely gotten the tells demanding that I make food or water for them, as opposed to asking nicely.
Warlock changes in 1.9
It has been a little over a week and I have been grinding my warlock towards getting my mount... Since I am purely spec’d for affliction right now, I haven't seen much downside (personally) from the recent patch. I have seen a lot of whining about the CoS/CoE nerf on the forums. Most of the whining is geared towards the fact that CoS is only useful in groups/raids now because the damage buff is easily overrun by CoA when running solo. Any warlocks with real numbers done a comparison? The other item I wanted to discuss was the addition of the soul shard bag - I have mixed feelings about them. I am running with 19-20 shards on me, average now. Even thought I have more shards, I find I still use them up at the same old rate when running solo (I don't have shadowburn, yet). I have seen a lot of flak about the cost of the bags and the fact that they should have been a quest reward, at least for the low end bag. Ecksvee has started an effort on Uldum to take donated components and money to make free bags for everyone - a brilliant idea! What are your thoughts on the shard bags? Was 1.9 a buff or nerf for warlocks, or do you not care? :)
