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EVE Online plans drone renaissance
EVE Online is giving much-needed love to its drones come this summer, and a new dev blog posted today has all of the copious details. "There are several aspects of drone balance that are not yet up to our current standards," the devs posted. "In the summer release we will be implementing a wide ranging balance rework for drones of all sizes." The changes will include balancing drones between the different empires, between quality levels, and between drone sizes. There will also be modifications made to drone skills and sentry drones. These changes will also impact skills and modules for fighters and fighter bombers. After the update, these "larger drones" will have reduced base damage and can only be hosted 10 at a time on a supercarrier instead of 20.
EVE Evolved: Is EVE becoming a spectator sport?
This week saw another landmark event in EVE Online grab the gaming community's attention as over 3,000 players from dozens of alliances battled it out in the lowsec system of Asakai on the Caldari border. The battle reached 2,800 concurrent players at peak, falling just short of 2011's record-breaking siege of LXQ2-T which hit 3,110 simultaneous combatants at its peak. There were livestreams, tons of after-action reports, and the story of this immense battle started by one man clicking the wrong button really captured our imaginations. EVE is one of those rare cases in which a lot of people find the media that surrounds the game more fun than the game itself. News of big in-game events like scams, heists, and huge battles spreads across the internet like wildfire, even among people who hate the game or have never tried it. When news of the Asakai battle emerged, someone on Reddit suggested that people should play EVE for only a few months to get some background and then quit and just read the stories. I've seen a lot of similar comments over the years saying that EVE is more fun to watch and read about than play, and it makes me wonder if the game is becoming a bit of a spectator sport. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at why stories like the Battle of Asakai are so pervasive and explain why I think EVE should embrace its role as a spectator sport.
EVE Evolved: Returning EVE to the Crucible
When EVE Online launched in 2003, it was a barren game without many of the comforts we enjoy today. The user interface was abysmally worse than today's (if you can imagine such a thing), players with cruisers were top dog, and practically the only activities were mining or blowing up miners. The culmination of years of hard work by a small indie studio, EVE Online sold almost entirely on its future potential. When I was introduced to the game by an excited friend in early 2004 during the Castor expansion, he encouraged me to get in on the ground floor because he believed the game was going to be huge. Years later, I find myself introducing the game to thousands of readers on the same premise. EVE's continual success over the years transformed a fresh-faced CCP Games into a multinational game development giant. And yet, for all that growth and all the updates to EVE over the years, the fact that the game sells largely on future potential is still firmly embedded in both players and developers. Players subscribe not only because they like the game but because they want to support development to reach EVE's true potential. Two years with very little iteration on existing features sent the message that developers weren't trying to reach that potential, but it seems that trend is soon to be completely reversed. With the newly announced Crucible expansion, CCP will be adding countless small features, graphical updates and iterations that put EVE firmly back on the path to reaching its full potential. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at CCP's plans to return EVE to the crucible and reforge it into something awesome. Those waiting for the third part of my look at the new player experience can catch that in next week's column, as Kajatta is enjoying his final week in EVE before delivering his verdict.
EVE Evolved: Looking forward to the winter expansion
Since EVE Online's release in 2003, CCP Games has been the center of one of the most interesting success stories in the games industry. Produced by a tiny indie development studio on a frozen volcanic rock, EVE was the perfect example of how to do things right. The game's publishing deal with Simon & Schuster allowed CCP to buy back the rights to the game several months after its initial release. With no publisher taking a cut of the profits, CCP ploughed subscriptions back into the game's development and grew the development team organically. As a one-game company, CCP worked closely with players to make EVE the best game possible for its loyal playerbase. In a recent letter to the players, CCP CEO Hilmar laments that somewhere along the line, things changed for the worse. The CCP of today bears little resemblance to the "little indie studio that could" of 2003, not just housing over 600 employees in offices around the world but also developing upcoming MMOs DUST 514 and World of Darkness. Resources are spread thin, and EVE Online has suffered for it. Last month I looked back at the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion and asked why every expansion since then has cut down on the in-space development players want. Hilmar's letter and its accompanying devblog answered that question this week with a solid plan for iteration on flying in space features during the winter development period. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look forward to the winter expansion and explain why each of the issues being tackled in the coming expansion is a big deal to players.
EVE Evolved: Force projection and jump bridges
When EVE Online's Dominion expansion launched, we expected to see large empires contract into smaller areas of space and smaller entities move in to fill in the gaps. High sovereignty maintenance fees were meant to keep alliances from claiming systems they didn't intend to fully use, and smaller territories were meant to localise wars to only an alliance's immediate neighbours. Unfortunately, almost the exact opposite happened. Large alliances continued to group together into massive mega-coalitions, collectively owning huge regions of space and preventing smaller organisations from staking a claim on their own. Dominion failed to achieve its stated goals, and in the years since its release CCP has been reluctant or unable to revisit the sovereignty mechanics Dominion overhauled. In that time, the face of EVE's nullsec warfare has changed drastically, with most large alliances now flaunting dozens of once-rare supercarriers and titans. Starbase jump bridge networks, titan jump portals and jump-drive enabled ships allow alliances to project force over immense distances, letting them support a war on the other side of the map. With the recent announcement of changes coming to jump bridges, the force projection debate has once again taken center stage in forums and blogs. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the problems associated with force projection, examine the jump bridge changes and weigh in on the debate.
