From
http://www.massively.com/2010/02/28/eve-evolved-staying-safe-in-high-security-space/
One of EVE Online’s defining factors is the idea that you’re not completely safe anywhere in the game. If you’re not docked in a station or securely logged off, there’s always a chance that someone will pick a fight with you. Many pilots opt to stay in the relative safety of high security space but even this isn’t an absolutely safe area. Suicide attacks, corporate wars, can flippers and loot thieves are a common sight in New Eden and if you don’t know how to handle them, you could find yourself on the business end of a 150mm railgun.
In this guide for newer EVE players, I look at the main threats you could be exposed to in high security space and how to keep yourself safe in spite of them.
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gmaxwell EVE Online
EVE Online is a game that’s often lauded for its sandbox style and realistic economic structures. Every quarter, CCP Lead Economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson and his team of researchers wade through mountains of EVE usage logs to find some interesting economic statistics. In their Quarterly Economic Newsletters (QEN), CCP deliver graphs tracking in-game prices, trade volumes, ships in use and a whole host of other useful metrics.
Read on for an overview of this QEN’s main highlights.
In addition to the usual price indices and market snapshots, the latest QEN comes with a triumphant announcement. Following the Dominion expansion last December, EVE reached an important milestone with over 330,000 active, paying accounts. There are now more EVE accounts than there are citizens of Iceland, CCP’s home country. Other highlights of this quarter’s report include interesting population density demographics showing the distribution of players throughout EVE, with a particular stress on their distributions in the nullsec regions. Following from this, the report contains a special segment looking back on the development of trade hubs throughout the game’s history.
Of particular interest this quarter was the effect that suicide attacks had on the market for Hulk mining barges. The first player-run Hulkageddon event concluded with hundreds of mining barges being killed but this didn’t cause an increase in the number bought on the market. Despite demand being the same, prices rose during and after the event from 120 million ISK to 170 million. Publicity of the Hulkageddon event’s success and the news that Hulkageddon II was being planned for the following January may have caused Hulk manufacturers to ramp up their prices in anticipation of a rise in demand. Since Hulks were killed in droves but no more units were sold than expected, the number of Hulks being actively piloted has also dropped this quarter. The Hulk is now the second most popular ship in EVE, being overtaken by the universally useful Drake.
Castille EVE Online
When high-quality ship models were introduced with EVE Online’s Trinity expansion, not every ship reacted to the graphical upgrade in the same way. Some ships, like the Megathron and Crusader, saw dramatic visual improvements with panel details and sharp lines. For the Scorpion, however, the upgraded detail exposed design flaws in the original model that spoiled its look for some players. The Scorpion has long been held as one of the ugliest ships in EVE, sporting the signature Caldari asymmetric design and odd metallic pylons. For a battleship, it’s always looked small, light and flimsy; a look that perhaps suited its original role as a long-range electronic warfare ship. With it being rebalanced for a close-range “brawler” role last year, the old model really started to look out of place on the field of battle.
In a new devblog, the CCP art department have released screenshots of a new Scorpion model they’re planning to roll out with the Tyrannis expansion this summer. Using design themes from their work on Tech 3 strategic cruisers, the team have turned one of EVE’s all-time ugliest ships into a masterpiece. Not only does the ship now look more like its namesake, it has a much more solid and aggressive look to it that better suits its role in PvP. This may mark the start of a change for other Caldari ships, many of which sport elements of the same bizarre asymmetric design that spoiled the Scorpion’s appearance. As an added bonus, CCP’s graphics programmers have created a new texture packing system that vastly improves the visual quality of small details on ships. If you’re interested in the new Scorpion model or the finer details of how CCP texture the ships in EVE Online, the latest devblog is definitely worth a look.
gmaxwell EVE Online
It goes without saying that the times in Fallen Earth are hard. What used to be a cheerful little town is now a jumble of burned-out buildings that have been cobbled back into some semblance of shape by survivors. As a new clone, players will undoubtedly pass through this area on the way to bigger, meaner things. This One Shots, sent in to us by TheExplorer (or Vendayn as he’s known in Fallen Earth) shows off “a scenic view of North Burb and the surrounding land.” At night it even kind of looks peaceful from the outskirts — at least until a mutant prairie chicken shows up and tries to chomp on you.
Castillans EVE Online
On Friday, CCP released the first details of EVE Online’s next expansion, Tyrannis. The expansion’s main feature is a form of planetary exploration and control but details on what exactly that will entail have been limited. Like walking in stations, planetary interaction has always been a major missing component from EVE. It’s been on the drawing board from day one but the technology and resources were never really there to do the feature justice. A prototype planetary flight system was even demonstrated at EVE Fanfest 2004 and while it impressed Fanfest attendees, the feature never materialised. The announcement that Tyrannis will include a form of planetary exploration has a lot of players excited but is their enthusiasm justified? The information we have so far on the expansion is limited to a single devblog, which provides only a general mission statement for the expansion.
In the absence of further information, I find myself wondering what the planetary interaction in Tyrannis might be like. In this speculative opinion piece, I look over the information we know for sure about Tyrannis and go on to speculate on what it might be like.
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Castillans EVE Online
Whether you play EVE Online or not, the chances are you’ve read a lot about the harsh, cut-throat universe of New Eden. Alliances routinely clash over territorial disputes, spies work to destroy organisations from the inside and death is an inevitability. While dying in most MMOs means respawning at some far-away camp and having to repair your gear, death in EVE is a somewhat more vicious affair. When your ship is destroyed, whether it’s by NPCs in a particularly tough mission or pirates hunting in a low security system, it’s gone for good. While insurance will provide a sum of ISK to help with the loss, you’ll need to re-buy a new ship and all the equipment that went on it. This would be like having to buy a new set of armour every time you die in World of Warcraft; a scary notion.
For the denizens of New Eden, losing a ship is a strictly in-game financial loss but for those that don’t play EVE the scale of those losses can be hard to grasp. Jump On Contact tackled this issue head-on recently with a handy chart showing the rough value of EVE ships in both ISK (the in-game currency) and US Dollars. The prices show the sheer scale of the losses incurred in large battles and are based on a player buying game time codes for cash to be sold in-game for ISK. A fully geared battleship, one of the most common types of ship for players to own in the game, comes out as being worth approximately $10 US Dollars. Most ships fall somewhere between $1 and $13 but perhaps most shocking is the price of a fleet-ready titan, which is estimated at $7600. The next time you hear about a titan being killed or a fleet of capital ships being wiped out, perhaps this chart can help show the sheer scale of that loss.
Castro EVE Online
EVE Online’s latest expansion, Dominion, brought sweeping changes to how alliances claim and hold space, and more recently revamped capital ship warfare. However, there has been a downside of late in terms of server stability and lag. Twitter is pretty much aflame with players lamenting the server issues, not to mention the forums, and it’s something CCP Games needs to address right away.
To that end, CCP is looking to the playerbase for help with “Mass Testing” on Wednesday, to determine the source of lag in large fleet battles. The devs will be looking into the problems widely reported with medium and large scale fleet combat and will need at least 50 pilots, though if 200 or more showed up this would be even better, says CCP Tanis. Players interested in helping out should hop on the Singularity test server on Wednesday, January 27, at 17:00 UTC. Mass Testing participants should join the “MassTesting” channel in-game on the test server as well. All EVE pilots who want to get involved should see CCP Navigator’s announcement for more info about tomorrow’s fleet combat tests and the discussion in a related forum thread.
Castillans EVE Online
We have met the enemy and he is us.” The player identified as “Patrick” is not the malevolent monstrosity we’d like to see. Nor is he a victim of circumstance, at that. He acts for all the world like a perfectly normal gamer, and if you didn’t know he’d scammed between $10,000 and $20,000 in a year of reprehensible behavior, you certainly wouldn’t be able to guess. That’s what makes a video interview with him, mirrored and annotated at PlayNoEvil and originally recorded by Marcus Eikenberry, so odd on many levels.
The full interview lasts thiry-eight minutes, which makes it a bit long for casual viewing. The article which mirrors the video notes some of the highlights, including when he almost breathlessly exhorts the moment he realized that there was nothing in PayPal’s EULA that prevented him from not transferring his EVE Online account to a purchaser on Craigslist.
His rationalizing of the actions include the loss of his job and financial instability, even as he begins the interview explaining how he would scam players in both EVE Online and World of Warcraft for fun. His words are unsettling, but what makes them all the more eerie is the fact that without the foreknowledge… there’s no way to tell his voice from any of ours. When you have the time, the whole interview is well worth looking at if you’re at all interested in account security and the culture of scammers.
Castro EVE Online
EVE Online players who were fortunate enough to attend Fanfest in 2009 kept raving about a collection of animated video backgrounds that were running on screens during panels and presentations. Players were so taken with these that they’d been pressing CCP Games to make them available for download. CCP delivered on their promise this week, making these sweeping tours of the Gallente, Caldari, Amarr, and Minmatar space station interiors available for download in HD.
Once you see them, you’ll probably understand why the EVE Fanfest attendees have been wanting them ever since. Those are some fairly hefty file sizes though, so for a quick look you can also see all four of the hangars and a nice selection of each race’s ships in HD on YouTube. Stick with us past the jump for a look within an Amarr hangar which shows off the theocratic race’s golden fleet.
Castiglione EVE Online
EVE Online players who were fortunate enough to attend Fanfest in 2009 kept raving about a collection of animated video backgrounds that were running on screens during panels and presentations. Players were so taken with these that they’d been pressing CCP Games to make them available for download. CCP delivered on their promise this week, making these sweeping tours of the Gallente, Caldari, Amarr, and Minmatar space station interiors available for download in HD.
Once you see them, you’ll probably understand why the EVE Fanfest attendees have been wanting them ever since. Those are some fairly hefty file sizes though, so for a quick look you can also see all four of the hangars and a nice selection of each race’s ships in HD on YouTube. Stick with us past the jump for a look within an Amarr hangar which shows off the theocratic race’s golden fleet.EVE Online players who were fortunate enough to attend Fanfest in 2009 kept raving about a collection of animated video backgrounds that were running on screens during panels and presentations. Players were so taken with these that they’d been pressing CCP Games to make them available for download. CCP delivered on their promise this week, making these sweeping tours of the Gallente, Caldari, Amarr, and Minmatar space station interiors available for download in HD.
Once you see them, you’ll probably understand why the EVE Fanfest attendees have been wanting them ever since. Those are some fairly hefty file sizes though, so for a quick look you can also see all four of the hangars and a nice selection of each race’s ships in HD on YouTube. Stick with us past the jump for a look within an Amarr hangar which shows off the theocratic race’s golden fleet.
Castres EVE Online
Regardless of whether or not you play EVE Online, this is something you have to see — especially if you’re a lover of either science fiction or pretty things.
This Russian blog has a whole lot of cool spaceships from EVE Online that have been turned into all sorts of cool pieces of art. And yes, not all of them are necessarily “nature” art, but most are more or less — with the major exception of a robot and alien from, er, Aliens. There’s one that’s even a sneaker! Although, we’re personally fans of the apple, eagle and Star Wars images. They come in wallpaper format for your laptop or desktop and honestly, there’s not too much more to say about them besides praise them. Mmm…. beautiful wallpapers.
Cephalonie EVE Online
We recently had the opportunity to ask Cryptic’s Jack Emmert a few questions regarding Star Trek Online and its PvP elements. With the looming open beta (tomorrow!) and similarly imminent February 2nd launch, we consider ourselves lucky to get some fairly definitive answers on topics like the game’s Cryptic Store and the Klingon faction’s future — including if deeper customization is in the wings or not.
It’s a quick read, but with less than 24 hours until open beta kick starts, that’s probably a good thing. We wouldn’t want to take away from anyone’s Star Trek movie marathon, which is obviously what everyone is doing the day before, right? Khan!
Castille EVE Online
It was just last week when we mentioned EVE Online’s new peak concurrent user (PCU) record of 54,446 pilots online. That record was smashed yesterday though, only one week after the previous PCU record was set, with 56,021 pilots online in New Eden. Beyond the new PCU record being set, this past Sunday’s traffic may also make CCP raise the limit on number of players that can be in the Jita trade hub at a given time. 1400 players crowded into Jita yesterday, which is apparently the hard limit that the game’s developers had set for the busy solar system. This prompted CCP Games Software Director Erlendur Þorsteinsson (aka CCP Explorer) to state, “We have been increasing the limit in the last few weeks and it looks like there might possibly be room for more in Jita.”
This could be good news for the legions of traders who flock to the system, and overall a good sign for EVE Online to see the PCU climbing higher and higher. Likely a major factor in the surge of active players is the upswing in nullsec alliance warfare which resulted from changes in the Dominion expansion — not the least of which is that a certain moon material holds great value now; the desire to control these rare resources is a major driver for large scale conflict. And of course, the recent ‘get EVE for $5′ sales on Steam probably hasn’t hurt either.
gmaxwell EVE Online
EVE Online has rung in the new year right, announcing a brand new peak concurrency record of 54,446 users logged into the expansive universe of New Eden. Thinking of having 3,000 players on a single server is mind boggling enough, but 54,446? Color us very impressed.
The announcement was a very subtle one, only appearing on the game’s official Facebook page so far, but CCP’s own server graph and the user data collected by third-party website eve-offline.net confirm the announcement. Congratulations to CCP and their very impressive server technology for pulling off such a feat.
So guys… speaking of new year resolutions… about that Walking In Stations thing…
Kanghi EVE Online
One of the things we really like about EVE Online is how the sandbox encourages all manner of player-run services and ventures. Sure, some of them can be risky, but others have been quite successful. A few of these projects are starting to become a mainstay of the game and some players have really made a name for themselves by establishing such ventures. A good example of this is EVE Online player T’Amber who is known for running lotteries. Big lotteries. The current (and fourth) “Ships of EVE” lottery that T’Amber is running is no exception and has tons of prizes, including some very rare ships in the game. Ticket prices are reasonable at 10 million ISK each, particularly in light of what can be won.
1st place is a whopping 228 ship collector’s fleet, featuring one of virtually every Tech I, Tech II, and Tech III ship across the game’s four races, along with their faction variants (including the pirate faction ships). The collective value of this prize fleet is many billions of ISK. Just as appealing to some players as winning first prize in this lottery is coming in second — and getting a “Mimir”. Blueprints for these rare cruisers were only given to members of Pandemic Legion for winning EVE Alliance Tournament VII this past September. Indeed, the “VII” is emblazoned on the ship’s hull, commemorating the tournament victory. There are very few Mimirs in the game and Ships of EVE 4 might be the only chance most players will have of obtaining one.
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Mustapha EVE Online