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EVE Evolved: Deployables in Rubicon
Last week I looked at EVE Online's upcoming Rubicon expansion, which aims to kick off CCP's long-term vision of deep space exploration with a series of new deployable structures. Until now, most structures have come in the form of modules that can only be added to starbases anchored at moons. Starbases are owned by corporations rather than individuals and require a significant financial and logistical investment to set up and maintain, putting them quite far out of reach for new players. Rubicon will fix this with a relatively inexpensive new personal Depot deployable that can be anchored anywhere in space. The mobile Depot is a small feature that was no-doubt trivial to implement, but it could have a massive impact on the shape of the EVE sandbox. The module offers a way to store your items and refit ships in the middle of hostile territory, and this is the first of a new breed of structure that will ultimately unlock deep space for exploration. This expansion will also give us a new auto-looting tractor beam structure and a Siphon Unit that actually steals resources from nearby starbases. Not much is known about these three deployables beyond the basic information already released, and there's a ton of potential for new complementary structures that could be released in the future. In this week's EVE Evolved, I examine the impact that Rubicon's two biggest deployable structures could have on the EVE sandbox and think about new structures that could be released in the future.
EVE Evolved: Everything we know about Rubicon
Back in April, EVE Online Senior Producer Andie Nordgren delivered an incredible long-term vision for the game's future that included deep space colonisation, player-built stargates, and players controlling practically everything that's currently run by NPC empires. This vision sets the tone and direction for development over the next ten expansions, each of which will introduce a small component of the overall goal. In a live interview session earlier this week, CCP revealed the first steps it will take toward space colonisation in its upcoming winter expansion. Named Rubicon, the expansion will be in players' hands on November 19th and promises to give individuals and small groups unprecedented control over the sandbox. It will let players fight over planetary customs offices in high security space, significantly buff the ability of small ships to participate in hit-and-run style warfare, and even introduce a new set of personal deployable structures that can be hidden anywhere in space. All this comes alongside two new Sisters of EVE ships, twitch livestream integration, and significant balance changes to Marauders, Interceptors, Interdictors, and Electronic Attack Frigates. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down all of the new features and changes announced so far for EVE Online's Rubicon expansion.
EVE Evolved: Strategic resources for everyone!
The past four EVE Online expansions have mostly focused on adding small features and overhauling old game mechanics and content that were beginning to show their age. Crucible delivered dozens of small but highly-requested features and gameplay improvements, and Inferno and Retribution continued with overhauls of several aging PvP systems. Even Odyssey contained mostly small features and revamps, its biggest gameplay features being a new hacking minigame and a streamlined scanning interface. It's been several years since EVE has received a truly massive and game-changing feature like wormholes or a sovereignty revamp, but that may all be about to change! CCP recently announced its intention to start reaching for big ideas again, but this time set over a more realistic timeframe. If everything goes according to plan, the next five years could see the introduction of player-built stargates and true deep space colonisation. I wrote about the potential of this concept last week and looked at some of the big features we'd need to make it a reality, but I didn't really delve into my personal favourite idea for a potential future expansion: New strategic resources and player-created deadspace complexes. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how strategic resources could be used to get even individual players invested in something worth fighting for, and how player-created deadspace dungeons could be a great way to introduce them.
EVE Evolved: Colonising deep space
If you were watching the news coming out of this year's EVE Online Fanfest, you no doubt heard Senior Producer Andie Nordgren's incredibly ambitious five year vision. The past few expansions have been mostly filled with bug fixes and improvements to existing gameplay, but the goal is now to begin delivering an epic vision of deep space exploration, colonisation, and PvP raids on enemy infrastructure. The five year roadmap toward this goal includes the addition of player-built stargates and completely uncharted solar systems to locate, explore and build an empire in. If the very idea of that doesn't make shivers go down your spine, something may be wrong with your central nervous system. CCP has opened new space before with the addition of the drone regions in nullsec and some new lowsec systems for faction warfare, but it wasn't until 2009's Apocrypha expansion that we saw a true exploration and long-term colonisation effort get underway. I think the intoxicating draw of wormhole exploration was primarily due to the fact that the new systems were hidden and the information on them wasn't public. Just adding new solar systems to the existing stargate network wouldn't have had the same effect. Nordgren's vision may take up to 10 expansions to fully realise, but what kinds of features will we need in those expansions to recreate true exploration and deep space colonisation? In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the challenges CCP will have to overcome to make deep space colonisation a reality and what small steps could be taken in each expansion to get us there.
EVE Fanfest 2013 final day: Trailers, EVE's TV show, and a vision for the future
We usually don't expect to see much from the final day of the EVE Fanfest, but for this year's tenth anniversary celebration, CCP isn't doing anything by half measures. The first two days of the event had a strong focus on DUST 514 and EVE Online, delving into the specific details of DUST's upcoming Uprising update and EVE's Odyssey expansion. I went into the convention centre today expecting a nice slow wind down with the usual CCP Presents keynote looking at the state of the company, but I left with several huge reveals that seemed to come out of nowhere. Not only did we find out that EVE Online is finally getting a collector's edition box full of goodies, but CCP revealed that a new EVE comic book and lore compendium are both on the way. As if that weren't enough, there's also an EVE TV series in the works based on player-submitted stories of true events inside the EVE universe. I couldn't help escaping the feeling, though, that this year's CCP Presents talk was more than a little marketing-oriented. As one of the press put it to me after the talk, it felt at times like watching an infomercial. On the plus side, we did get to see more of CCP's future vision for the EVE universe and an amazing new trailer showing the game's core storyline. Read on to check out the incredible EVE Universe Origins trailer and my summary of the final day of Fanfest 2013.
EVE Evolved: Temporarily fixing starbases
With its exploration-focused Odyssey expansion on the way, EVE Online is about to be hit with a deluge of players (new and old) venturing into the unknown. The expansion will introduce the yet-to-be-revealed Discovery Scanner and will add a ton of new exploration content all across New Eden. Odyssey aims to follow the lead of 2009's Apocrypha expansion, which saw hundreds of corporations lead lucrative expeditions into uncharted wormhole systems. We don't yet know whether the expansion will open new systems for exploration, but when Odyssey goes live, the race will be on to find and lay claim to all the goodies hidden in deep space. With no stations to dock at in wormhole space, corps currently have to store everything in destructible starbases that aren't really up to the task. Player-owned starbases were released in 2004 as sandbox-style tools for tech 2 industry and alliance territorial warfare. They were never intended to be the sole base of operations for an entire corporation, so they suffer from some pretty severe security and usability flaws as a result. Theft from ship and item hangars in wormhole space is commonplace, setting up corp roles for them is a nightmare, and living exclusively in a starbase provides a daily dose of frustration players could seriously do without. CCP has been planning to completely overhaul player-owned starbases for years, but some of today's issues can't afford to wait any longer. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the chronic problems faced by starbase-dwelling explorers and how CCP plans to temporarily fix some of them for Odyssey.
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.
EVE Evolved: Everything there is to know about Crucible
This summer's lackluster Incarna expansion and the ensuing microtransaction drama took a massive toll on EVE Online's player community and development staff. Players were quitting in droves, and CCP eventually had to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. Two years of half-implemented expansions, broken features, and "first steps" that were never iterated on left players begging for a content-heavy expansion like Apocrypha or those released in EVE's early years. EVE is known for being practically a new game every six months, but since the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion, daily life in New Eden hasn't changed much at all. To pull things back from the brink, CCP refocused development on EVE Online and gave developers a free pass to work on hundreds of small features and improvements. The company began flooding us with details on new ships, graphical updates, new gameplay mechanics, and desperately needed balance tweaks, and we loved every bit of it. Although it's mostly small features and gameplay tweaks, the Crucible expansion feels like a genuine rebirth for EVE Online. The types of changes made show that CCP knows exactly what players want from EVE and that the company is now willing to deliver it. With CCP's renewed focus on internet spaceships, the Crucible expansion feels like the start of a new era in the sandbox. In this week's EVE Evolved, I pull together everything there is to know about the Crucible expansion that went live this week, from its turbulent origins to the awesome features and PvP updates it contains.
EVE Evolved: Building a better empire
It's often said that EVE Online is 99% endgame, with only the tutorials and epic mission arcs really providing directed gameplay. Once you get out into the open world, the game is dominated by sandbox laws and social interaction. This is most clear in the lawless nullsec regions where alliances war over territory and build their own empires in the void. Last week I looked back at the early days of nullsec industry and examined the problems industry has developed over the years. With a massive nullsec revamp scheduled to begin this winter, I went on to speculate on how the game could be changed to bring back the glory days of nullsec industry. Although adequately incentivised local mining and production could transform player-created empires, those aren't the only areas of gameplay being revisited. Sovereignty mechanics, fleet warfare, small gang warfare, exploration and small-scale territorial control will all eventually be redesigned as part of the massive iterative overhaul. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the history of EVE's empire-building and territorial warfare mechanics, some of the problems faced by the sovereignty system, and how those aspects of EVE could possibly be changed for the better.
EVE Evolved: Bringing back the glory days
In years gone by, exploring the unknown far reaches of the EVE Online universe meant setting a course for nullsec. With no way to install a permanent residence in the most lucrative far-off systems, players would launch dangerous expeditions into the deep with the hope of striking it rich. Nullsec was the only place to mine rare ores containing megacyte and zydrine, and piracy wasn't as common as it is today. For putting themselves at the risk of pirates, miners were rewarded with an income stream greater than that of any other profession in the game. It was a golden age in exploration that wasn't to repeat itself until March 2009's Apocrypha expansion opened 2500 hidden wormhole systems for exploitation. Things have changed considerably since those early days of EVE. Player-built starbases and outposts have transformed the face of nullsec, allowing alliances to build themselves an empire in the void. December 2009's Dominion expansion brought a complete revamp of the nullsec sovereignty mechanics, allowing alliances to upgrade their space but dramatically increasing the cost of system ownership. Despite all of these updates and improvements, over the past several years we have somehow lost a lot of what made nullsec great in its glory days. Local industry has been replaced by risk-free logistics, and nullsec's risky but rewarding mining profession is now greatly overshadowed by safe highsec mission-running. With a new iterative nullsec revamp scheduled to begin this winter, I use this week's EVE Evolved to speculate on what can be done to bring back the glory days of nullsec industry.
EVE Evolved: The Industrial-Sized Knowledgebase
The EVE Evolved column has been home to dozens of in-depth guides on various aspects of EVE Online. Over the past two years, I've written multi-part guides to many industrial and PvP-oriented topics. On the topic of research and development, we've covered tech 1 research, invention, reverse engineering and five top tips for researchers. Perhaps more useful was the three part series on trading, which first covered the basics before delving into advanced trading strategies and a few useful tips. Other guides which have proven popular among newer players included our three-part guide to mission-running, and the recent three-page guide to exploration. Members of the EVE community regularly produce new guides and tools to help players make the most of their time in New Eden. This week, EVE player Laci surprised the EVE community with the release of an impressive new guide aimed at new players and industralists. The comprehensive 416-page Industrial-Sized Knowledgebase (or ISK for short) covers practically everything a new player could want to know about the game. Until now, the guide had been available only in Hungarian. After intensive translation and design work, the full guide has been released in English. In this week's EVE Evolved, I take a look at this impressive guide and ask its creator Laci a few questions about it.
One Shots: Overkill
When it comes to the battle for sov in EVE Online, players will use just about every trick in the book -- including making your POS (player-owned station) look like some fairy space castle, such as the one we see in today's One Shots. This image, captured for us by Jeff, offers an interesting sight that some players who stick to hisec may never see. He writes in to explain: "When an attacking force sieges a station in a sovereignty conflict they try to ensure that the enemies assets within the station stay trapped there. The standard tactic for accomplishing this is a constant blockade of combat ships to engage targets trying to escape, along with anchoring Mobile Warp Disruptors at strategic points around the station (mobile disruptors scramble the warp engines of all ships within the radius of the deployed bubble). However, sometimes deployment of these bubbles can be a bit... excessive." Have you captured an image of something others may not often see? If so, we'd love to see it. Just email it to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing. It could be the next one featured here on Massively! %Gallery-85937%
An insider's account of galactic warfare in EVE Online
Prolific games journalist Jim Rossignol is an avid EVE Online player, who has made regular contributions to Eurogamer focused on this particular sci-fi MMO. His latest piece, "EVE Online: Battle Reports", is a brief account of how his PvP-focused corp (EVE's version of a guild) fared in a conflict against some steep odds. His aim is to explain a bit about how the game works while telling his story, hopefully holding appeal for those who don't play the game as well as those who do. "Because of the open structure of the game world, player-versus-player battles happen in all kinds of contexts and situations, and the sheer number of variables means they can make for a great story," Rossignol writes.
CCP Games on the extent and impact of EVE's starbase exploit
Massively has been watching the issue of a significant starbase exploit in EVE Online, through which some players reaped vast financial rewards, as it went from rumor to confirmation from the developers themselves. Unlike your average run-of-the-mill exploit in most massively multiplayer online games, the exploit in question has had a significant impact on EVE's virtual economy -- the backbone of the game itself. All players in EVE interact in one vast galaxy, and their actions in the sandbox can create ripples felt by their fellow players, which has certainly been the case in this past week.EVE Online's developer CCP Games has opted to hold off on responding to most press inquiries for comment on the issue, having issued a statement on the matter and then focusing on the investigation and a weekend meeting with EVE's player-elected community representatives, the Council of Stellar Management (CSM). The minutes from that meeting are now available, and several of EVE's developers took part in the discussion: namely CCP's Lead Economist Dr. EyjoG (Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson) and CCP Arkanon -- who heads up the company's Internal Affairs division, which investigates the CCP Games staff themselves, hopefully ensuring that no CCP employee can abuse their influence over the game. Read on for Massively's highlights of the state of affairs in EVE Online, in the wake of the starbase exploit.
An update on the EVE Online starbase exploit
In the wake of last week's revelation of a market disrupting exploit in EVE Online, a growing number of players have been calling for increased transparency on the situation. EVE's developer CCP Games has stated they've discovered seven player-run corporations taking advantage of the player owned station (POS) exploit, which yielded a vast amount of materials used in the EVE Online's manufacturing (crafting) system. Three of those corporations were in two alliances, and over 70 accounts have been banned thus far in connection with the exploit. The starbases used in the exploit have been destroyed by CCP, and they've stated that the corporations in question are now effectively inactive following the bans. CCP Games has not released the names of characters, corporations, or alliances linked to the exploit, but a player named "moppinator" of the AMT. corporation (part of Ev0ke alliance) stepped forward and issued the following statement on the extent of his alliance's involvement:
EVE Community Spotlight: SirMolle
Alliance warfare in EVE Online is a defining aspect of the game. EVE's setting of New Eden is a sprawling galaxy of over 5000 solar systems, where players are free to build empires, establish vast enterprises, and do whatever is necessary to maintain dominance over their competitors -- be it financial, political, or military. All of that freedom to do what you choose eventually leads players, collectively, into one another's sphere of influence, triggering bitter and protracted warfare. That's the nature of EVE -- the setting provides potential, but it's largely the players who drive the game. In what has been aptly described as "the largest virtual conflict ever waged", the Band of Brothers Alliance (BoB) has stood at the forefront of that struggle for dominance in EVE Online for years. As an alliance, their strength is undeniable. But the power they've gained has sparked a fiery resentment from the much larger non-BoB playerbase in EVE, polarizing the community into those who either love or hate them. In many cases, it's been the latter. After all, for some time, Band of Brothers' goal was to control all space in New Eden, beginning in the lawless frontier of 0.0, where most alliance warfare rages, and eventually consolidating control over Empire space and its commerce. Band of Brothers set a goal for territorial control that's simply not possible in the game, however. The times have changed, and now the old paradigm of territorial grabs characteristic of the epic conflict with The RedSwarm Federation has been replaced with the MAX campaign, and a different nemesis -- the Northern Coalition. As vendetta-turned-alliance policy, MAX is intended to be a wave of destruction that cuts through the hulls and holdings of their opposition. The man behind the MAX campaign, and the Band of Brothers alliance, is SirMolle. Massively recently spoke with SirMolle about the pressures of leadership, the impact Band of Brothers has had on the game, and the endgame of control over New Eden.
EVE Community Spotlight: SirMolle Part 2
Band of Brothers fields the largest capital ship fleet in the game. Obviously this provides your alliance with an advantage, but how do you respond to what many players feel is a problem of capital ship proliferation? Do you miss the days before capital ships and POS warfare became the norm? EVE is ever-changing. It has evolved since the early alpha and beta days to early release, to today's EVE. It will never stop changing, and the players have to evolve with it. You can always say "remember the good old days", but, that's just nostalgia. Evolve or die, adapt or be overcome. I could say I miss ninja-mining, I could say I miss dura-Mallers, I could say I miss splash damage from torpedoes, I could say I miss the days before POS's were in the game. But all in all, EVE is a larger game, a larger world, a more complex world today than when it started. Changes are a part of your EVE-life. Embrace it. The most important ship in EVE is not a capital ship; it's the battleship.
