Eve Online

[Marc]

Unfortunately pvpwise EvE has had it's day

Cant agree there. There are an abundance of small scale PvP alliances around now, whilst most of the useless fat from the NC days have disapeared. Some of the best PvP fights ive been in have happened recently. Also, whilst not a "great war", the whole of Nul is on fire. Cluterfuck v White Noise/Raiden v AAA v Hydra in the north. Russian civil war happening in the drone lands and the south is on fire with about 30 alliances all going head to head.

Branch has fallen with minimal rsistance from White Noise. All but 5 stations are in our hands (the other 5 are in RF) and we have 95% of the systems. All tech moons are now in Clusterfuck hands.

The best of it is, White Noise lead FC and alliance leader, Psi, called a massive CTA. 80 titans, 200 supercaps and 800 subcaps turned up. Psi slept in and missed it and no one else had the balls to stand up and FC so the CTA was called off lol.

Test arent making as good progress in Vale though as Raiden are defending, but the rest of the clusterfuck will go help once we have finished in Branch. Test will get Branch and Razor will get Vale.

 

[Raven]

I think its probably the biggest mistake they have made by making Dust514 a PS3 exclusive. It will flop massively and most probably damage Eve in the process.

 

[Marc]

I think its probably the biggest mistake they have made by making Dust514 a PS3 exclusive. It will flop massively and most probably damage Eve in the process.

Totally agree there. FPS only have a limited lifespan until the next one comes out.

 

[Marc]

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0qYw4XRYo&feature=related


TEST/Pandemic Legion v CCP

 

[Punishment]

Cant agree there. There are an abundance of small scale PvP alliances around now, whilst most of the useless fat from the NC days have disapeared. Some of the best PvP fights ive been in have happened recently. Also, whilst not a "great war", the whole of Nul is on fire. Cluterfuck v White Noise/Raiden v AAA v Hydra in the north. Russian civil war happening in the drone lands and the south is on fire with about 30 alliances all going head to head.

Branch has fallen with minimal rsistance from White Noise. All but 5 stations are in our hands (the other 5 are in RF) and we have 95% of the systems. All tech moons are now in Clusterfuck hands.

The best of it is, White Noise lead FC and alliance leader, Psi, called a massive CTA. 80 titans, 200 supercaps and 800 subcaps turned up. Psi slept in and missed it and no one else had the balls to stand up and FC so the CTA was called off lol.

Test arent making as good progress in Vale though as Raiden are defending, but the rest of the clusterfuck will go help once we have finished in Branch. Test will get Branch and Razor will get Vale.

You say smallscale pvp isn't dead they talk about a 500+ fleet not being big enough for a CTA ?

That's exactly why i have no interest in 0.0 anymore

 

[Genedril]

Problem I found with small mans was that the opposition would dock up until they outnumbered you 2 to 1 .

 

[Punishment]

I used to play some epic docking games with my 3bn isk Nightmare and my 2 alts in disposable shield rep scorpions

 

[Marc]

Dec 2010 the Russians invade the North
Dec 2010 Vuk Lau declares they wont win
Jan 2011 - May 2011 Hundreds of Titans and Supercaps destroyed in the bloodiest war in eve ever.
May 2011 Vuk Lau begs the Clusterfuck coalition for help
May 2011 Goonswarm tell him to go fuck himself.
June 2011 Vuk Lau blames Goonswarm for the fall of his RMT empire, sorry, the fall of the NC
August 2011 Vuk Lau calls out Razor publicly for now being pets of Goonswarm.
January 2011 4S Corporation joins Razor lol

 

[Ctuchik]

LOL!

EVERY alliance/corporation of worth RMT, officially or secretly....

 

[Punishment]

The NC used to pretend not to just so their members wouldnt do it all day and not be free to protect their RMT members

 

[Marc]

Mittani publicly said he doesnt care if his members bot.

What he cares about is if a fellow Clusterfuck grasses them up.

Not everyone bots to RMT.

 

[Marc]

Endie: GoonSwarm Alliance Update – Vernichtungskrieg: War of Extermination


Home » Endie: GoonSwarm Alliance Update – Vernichtungskrieg: War of Extermination

26 Jan Posted by Endie in Scuttlebutt | Comments (165)

Editor’s note: GoonSwarm minister of propaganda Endie has a knack for good writing, we present you both in the latest GoonSwarm Federation alliance update.
Here’s a stream of racist abuse dressed up as a rousing call to arms for Goons everywhere:

.
Raiden’s latest, complex and multi-dimensional plot to kill us. Many GIA agents died a little inside to bring us these plans.
Vernichtungskrieg

Once every year, on average, someone tries to destroy Goonswarm. In 2006 it was Lotka Volterra and in 2007 it was Band of Brothers. In 2008 and 2009 it was BoB in various guises, Against All Authorities, Atlas and Red Overlord. In 2010 it was, well, Goonswarm. In 2011 it was basically everyone in the Assault on Precinct VFK. Now, this year’s attack has come a little early.
For the last week, Raidendot have been amassing, in Venal, every goonhating relic of 2007 who ever loudly proclaimed that they detested all blues or that ganking a raven on a gate with 12 cynabals was the epitome of small-gang warfare. They have been hitting our moons and those of our allies and, in the face of some complacency from a bloc gorged on tech and conquest in the aftermath of branch, they have already made some gains.
Next, they intend to assault our sovereignty and our CSAAs. To defeat this plan we will need two things. One is an Xttz, and we fortunately picked up one of these quite cheaply, ages ago. The other is you, with your maelstrom or scimitar or huginn.
Changing the direction of a big alliance to attack Goonswarm is a bit like altering course on an ocean liner: you’re probably drunk when you decide to do it; the person who made the call will be the first one in a liferaft paddling for safety; and there’s every likelihood you’re going to end up wrapped around a small but highly figurative Italian island. But this won’t happen unless we are rolling with several full fleets of battleships each night. The fact remains that we are facing four large alliances, the largest force of supercapitals assembled since the DRF’s attack on Tribute and a trashmob of “sorry, who?” types like Biblical enthusiasts Giantsbane, ticker “David”, who have been dragged from Vale to PF-. Not to mention the five hundred Greeks of Hell4s (I’m not making these names up) who, driven into a plate-smashing frenzy by the thumping sound of bazouki music, with no prospect of jobs any time soon and reduced to living off tzatziki and pine resin, will doubtless be able to squeeze in plenty of POS-bashing between riots.
All in all, I admit, they look an unimpressive crew, most of whose leadership I wouldn’t trust to paint my shed. But they have a lot of titans, and that does make up for a lot of failings in Eve Online.
Having gradually lost fully ten percent of their membership in the last 6 weeks, Raidendot badly need a good war. Unfortunately for them, this shall not be that good war. It will be an ugly, grinding war of kiting and timers; a war of Vee’s bombers; of five full fleets of Maelstroms; of suicide dreads and of Dominion sovereignty. And most of all it is a war that will eventually end with the shattered dreams, once more, of the hapless residue of Finfleet and x13 who we have beaten so often before.
Background

Starting in the late autumn (or “Fall” if your national pastime is complaining about Mexicans taking your jobs) of last year, Raidendot began attempting to assemble a slightly-shuffled arrangement of the usual suspects in order to attack us. Deklein has been offered to various more-or-less sceptical recipients, Pure Blind and its technetium to others. For a while, their putative allies – especially Tri Mk Ncdot – were nervous about the effect of the winter patch on supercapitals, and shuffled anxiously while trying to remove imaginary lint from their left sleeve.
Now, they are all worked up and ready to invade, full of outraged assertions that their 90bn ISK wanking chariots should be invincible to repay the risk they took in botting for them for four months.
There is some good news. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a fight with a bunch of people at once, but my Dad always told me to pick a big cunt and hit him fucking hard. Since he was the headmaster of the secondary school I attended you can imagine that this was not a purely theoretical discussion. So while the Axis of Faggotry were humming and hawwing and waiting for it all to kick off we punched White Noise, and we did it fucking hard. Minus one enemy, according to this announcement:
Show Announcement »

With White Noise out of the way, we still face Raidendot, Ncdot, Evzeroke, Initiativedot and some pets whose names are very nearly as punctuation- or number-strewn. Lacking a credible American timezone, they are attempting to scrabble around for more and more reinforcements. Maybe IRC need a new home now that they’ve betrayed Mactep!
They also tried to plead with Test to abandon us, and promised them a variety of rewards on the never-never. Picture Test, here, as a kind of tubby, cross-dressing but nonetheless comely Eve in the Garden of Eden while Raiden are like that snake from The Jungle Books but with a worth lithp. Nevertheless, despite the attempts of Nugz and a few, retarded others to alienate Test, they remain our friends, whether or not we actually deserve them.
All of this would be distinctly unworrying: we have hammered pretty much every corporation in Raiden and NCDot into the ground, some of them on three or four occasions. But they have titans and they have supercarriers and we’re going to need every single clusterfuck member to be Xing up if we are to keep our moons and our space. If Goons sit back and hope someone else turns up then we lose our untouchable US timezone, and then we lose.
What To Expect

For the last week or so, Raidendot and their rapidly growing blob of allies have been hitting tech moons. Thus far, they have only taken a handful, and those have almost all been badly timed ally moons. But take tech they have, and in our space. You should expect them to keep doing this: kiting towers into Ev0ke’s timezone whenever they can and gradually trying to crumble our holdings down.
We are dealing with people trained at the feet of the Great Swede, however. So you should expect a very high chance that they repeat the same routine. At some point in the next few weeks they will, mid-week, red pen every titan, every supercarrier, and every subcapital that they can (well, every one which hasn’t been sold to raise a deposit for a new flat) and corral them into a symbolic target for a headshot. They will post screenshots of huge screenfuls of erebuses and avatars, and at the sight of these they will gloat and preen and surreptitiously rub themselves under their workdesks at the sight. They may try a headshot or they may try to achieve this in several systems at once, doubtless following the advice of some badly-remembered quote from Sun Tzu. When that comes, we will need to do what we did in VFK, and in PNQY and elsewhere: X up, keep Xing up, and then reap the rewards.
Those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to come back in the summer for study camp. And in this case Camp Deklein might well end up with hostile ragnaroks desperately evacuating at downtime, stabbing at the ctrl-Q buttons and cursing CCP for getting rid of that exploit. But in order to achieve this traditional end-of-campaign celebration we will need every one of you, and every one of our allies, to join fleets.
CCP’s physics model sucks. Whenever you put a large group of supercapitals in one place the likelihood is that one of them will, a few minutes later, hurtle off into the distance at thousands of metres per second. This will happen and we will kill them.
The sad fact is that we are looking at several weeks of intensive fleet warfare, and that is going to seriously impact the amount of time left over for masturbation and… well, whatever else it is people try to squeeze in between bouts of Onanism.
What To Do

Get alphafleet ships in place. Watch the op threads to see where to have them. If you can fly a capswarm dread then please get one fitted and follow the instructions in capswarm. It is ridiculous that Eve has been reduced to the need for a 200-man suicide dreadswarms in order to counter otherwise-invincible titan blobs but we can only piss with the cocks God gave us so until CCP gets their act together it’s time to insure your Revelation and x up for titan destruction.
Have spare ships fitted. Even if you cannot afford multiple first line ships, have some spare drakes or digicanes or the like ready to go. In the era of Time Dilation it will come down to which side keeps coming back.
Genuinely good at Eve? Hate fleet fights? Love having your killboard seeming scroll in real-time before your eyes with the massed wrecks of travelling hostiles? Then join Black Ops and help theAdj make reinforcements and latecomers walk a trail of tears.
If you can get into a supercap, do so. Check out this thread from S-Mart for how to get in on these low, low prices and vast subsidies (save up to 45 billion over open market costs, overall):
Show Spoiler »

Titan Subsidy:

-All tank and rig modules
- Doomsday and Jump Portal modules
- All weapons (turrets or launchers)
- Discounted BPO/BPC use (see above)​

Supercarrier Subsidy:

- ECM burst module and 20 Fighter-Bombers
- Free Aeon / Nyx BPC for use with alliance-approved producers (limited supply)
You will still need to provide any implants or skillbooks yourself, so remember to take that into account. pirate sets and hardwirings can cost 2-4bn, while the titan skillbooks are around 6bn.​

Don’t travel solo and unscouted in your alphafleet ships. Occupational Hazzard are having so much fun popping hapless soloists in VFK itself that even I have wistfully eyed their “Apply” button. For big fights our Skirmish Commanders will be running reinforcement convoys.
- Endie

 

[Marc]

Bring it on vOv

 

[LordjOX]

Botter tears: http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?5791-pre-fanfest-macro-purge

Maybe time they also try follow the iskflow and catch their mains aswell, hmmm ? Else it's kinda pointless

 

[Marc]

Updated SOV Map

 

[Marc]

ahhhhhahahahahaha The Mittani wins eve. Check out the tears from Raiden and NC. now their IWIN Titans cant one shot subcaps

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=80374

 

[Punishment]

Looking back as a non eve player it strikes me that eve politics are really really boring

 

[Marc]

They pretty much are now. The big players are Mittani (CFC), Shadoo/Shamis (PL), Vince Draken (NC.) and uaxdeath (Shadow of death) and they all pretty much get along.

Eve needs another SirMolle, someone who just doesnt give a fuck

 

[svartalf]

It's Fanfest weekend. Check the lectures & reveals out here:
http://www.youtube.com/ccpgames
and the livestream here:
http://fanfest.eveonline.com/en/stream/free

 

[svartalf]

Fanfest Cinematic 2012

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI53ydJaus8

 

[Reno]

What's DS9 doing there?

 

[Ctuchik]

They ran out of good footage?

 

[svartalf]

More Eve stuff...

EVE Evolved Extra: Revamping PvP in Inferno

by Brendan Drain

on Mar 25th 2012 8:00PM

Sci-fi, EVE Online, Events, real-world, Expansions, Game mechanics, PvP, News items, EVE Evolved, Sandbox


When Inferno arrives on May 22nd, it will introduce a whole new wardec system, war UI improvements, and iteration on faction warfare. We'll also see a ton of new modules released over time to completely mix up how people currently fit ships for different roles. For those who started playing EVE Online after 2007, getting new modules and having to rethink all your ship setups will be a very unusual state of affairs. For older players, it signals a glorious return to the way things were before Empyrean Age expansion -- players will have to learn to adapt to a constantly changing PvP landscape or stagnate and die.

The only people immune to wardecs will still be those in NPC corps, and all current loopholes like EVE University's infamous decshield will be removed. The number of wars the target corp is fighting will no longer be factored into the war cost, but the base cost is rising to 20 million and an additional 500,000 ISK will be added for every active member in the target corp. The number of wars the aggressor is fighting will still factor into cost, so you can sort of do a reverse-decshield by having alt corps wardec the target and waiting a week for his bill to recur. There are flaws with the system as presented, but those may have been at addressed at the roundtable, which was not streamed.

In this special EVE Evolved Extra edition, I delve into the information revealed at Fanfest on revamping PvP as presented at those talks that were streamed live.[/url]

Making war meaningful

CCP's intent with the war changes is to make wars a commitment for the aggressor and give them a higher chance of backfiring. The aggressor can no longer retract the war in the middle of the war week, but he can stop it by deciding not to pay the bill. The defender can make a plea for surrender in the form of ISK, after which there's a week-long enforced peace in which the other side can't re-wardec you.

Players quickly pointed out that most wars are undertaken by alt corps that won't mind being stuck in a bad war for a few days and that surrendering would give your corp a reputation as an ISK piñata. A new war report interface will give details of the war all in one place, tracking kills and losses in realtime, and a new mercenary marketplace will let players targeted by wardecs easily hire mercenaries into the war. To make wars risky for the attacker, the defender can call any number of allies and mercenaries into the war, though the aggressor can't call any in.

I can't help but think this system is fundamentally flawed, as the aggressor can just get other corps to wardec his target manually and the two corps can work together informally. He would have to pay two war fees, but ISK has never been a good balancing factor for warfare; just look at titans. Ex-CSM member Dierdra Vaal asked whether there was any way for the defender to actually win the war militarily and so end it. I've suggested similar systems before, such as the aggressor's having to create a military structure into which the war fee must be poured. The defender could then kill the structure to get the ISK and end the war. CCP said that this hadn't been considered and won't be part of the wardec revamp.

Faction warfare iteration

Faction warfare was 2008's big feature; it aimed to get new players into casual PvP without reducing the consequences, and it immediately succeeded beyond all expectations. Rather than iterating on it and fixing the few issues that cropped up, CCP left faction warfare to die, and it did just that. At this year's Fanfest, developers discussed preliminary ideas they'd had for revamping faction warfare and invited players to visit the roundtable discussion to voice concerns and make their own suggestions. Over a hundred people turned out for the roundtable, but so far, only those present know exactly what was said.

All we have to go on are CCP's initial ideas, which are not concrete plans and are subject to change. CCP aims to make faction warfare a stepping stone to nullsec, eliminating occupancy and instead letting players affect system sovereignty itself. The control bunker in each system will become an infrastructure hub, and players will be able to upgrade systems by dropping faction warfare loyalty points into the hub. To encourage donations, CCP will ensure that corporations and individuals who donate LP into a system will get temporary bonuses. When enemy players complete complexes in a system, they steal some of the loyalty points invested in the system, and when the pot is empty, the hub becomes vulnerable.

Ideas CCP is considering

System upgrades may include cheap clones, reduced market fees, navy NPCs spawning at gates, and even potentially cyno jammers. Perhaps the biggest change is that militia members won't be able to dock in enemy stations, making it more dangerous to be behind enemy lines. Some of the more interesting ideas include getting LP for kills proportional to the value of the destroyed ship's cargo and fittings that are destroyed. This way, LP for kills can be increased without making the system exploitable, as you'll have to destroy several times the value of the LP you gain.

Faction warfare could also be linked to DUST 514, possibly by making the system's infrastructure hub vulnerable when matches are won on the surface of nearby planets. CCP may also replace passive datacore production through research agents with active datacore production by listing them in the faction warfare LP store. Combined with LP gains for killing enemy ships, this would theoretically provide the income that players need to keep fighting. Players raised some pretty big concerns at the faction warfare talk, and CCP urged them to attend the faction warfare roundtable to discuss them.

New modules

EVE Online's PvP landscape has remained pretty static for the past couple of years, with a few thoroughly tested cookie-cutter ship setups for each ship that are rarely challenged in effectiveness. Developers want to fix this by introducing a number of new modules that will fundamentally change how we fit our ships. A new adaptive resistance module is on the way; it will actually read the type of damage you're hit with and shift your resistances to counteract it.

A tactical warp module will charge up and then make your ship almost instantaneously warp 110km in the direction it's facing, ignoring all warp scramblers. New tactical variations of existing modules will be released so that higher meta levels may provide tactically different operation and not just better stats. We'll get new light and medium web drones and a new salvage drone, and drones will finally get damage mods. We'll also be getting a new UI for controlling drones that puts them into a module button.

A new fueled shield booster will be able to draw energy from either your capacitor or charges stored in your cargo. An anti-blob target breaker module will have a chance to break all targets on you, and that chance will be increased based on how many people are currently targeting you. Capacitor batteries will give a chance of reflecting nosferatu and neutralisers back on the attacker, and tracking disruptors will affect the damage of incoming missiles. CCP is also experimenting with extreme rigs with massive bonuses and penalties, such as a rig that lets frigates or destroyers snipe at 150km.



One of CCP's most interesting ideas still in the early stages is the introduction of PvP seasons and themed expansions. The core of the idea is that new modules might be introduced only as limited-run blueprint copies dropped as loot or sold in loyalty point stores. CCP may decide to phase a module out of existence by removing the blueprints from the drop tables, leading to the module's becoming more expensive over time and eventually being infeasible to use. This may change up tactics enough to provide a certain type of gameplay for a limited time only. We could see active-tanking expansions that introduce charge-based shield boosters and armour repairers, for example, or a capital-warfare-themed expansion.

All in all, the warfare revamp seems like a bit of a mixed bag. There are some great ideas being passed around, but the new wardec system doesn't seem like it'll achieve anything. It has some pretty serious fundamental flaws, and it's worrying that they weren't spotted early in the design stage. I can't help but feel I have an incomplete picture of the new wardec system, as I wasn't able to attend the roundtables or interview any developers on it. It will be interesting to see how the new system turns out, as CCP has only a few short months to build it.

Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at Massively. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you have an idea for a column or guide, or you just want to message him, send an email to brendan@massively.com.


Tags: ccp, ccp-games, console, dust, dust-514, eve, eve-evolved, eve-online, faction-warfare, factional-warfare, featured, fps, inferno, mmofps, opinion, playstation, playstation-3, ps3, pvp, sandbox, sci-fi, shooter, war, wardec

 

[svartalf]

And more...

EVE Evolved: New info from Fanfest 2012

by Brendan Drain on Mar 25th 2012 6:00PM

Sci-fi, Trailers, Video, EVE Online, Culture, Events, real-world, Expansions, Game mechanics, PvP, News items, EVE Evolved, DUST 514, Sandbox



The annual EVE Online Fanfest is starting to become a major event in the gaming calendar, thanks to CCP's partnership with Sony and the addition of DUST 514 and World of Darkness talks to the event schedule. This year, CCP flew gaming journalists to the event to give the press hands-on time with DUST and demonstrate the game's impressive realtime integration with EVE Online. Massively, unfortunately, is not permitted to accept such travel stipends, which meant that we couldn't produce in-depth coverage and interviews as we did last year, so instead we've pieced together information from the talks that were streamed to viewers at home.

The theme of this year's Fanfest was unmistakably DUST 514 and its integration with EVE Online. Attendees got first-hand experience with DUST 514 and a free pass to enter the beta in April. There was even a live demonstration of the EVE-DUST link during which a battleship delivered an air strike directly into a DUST match in realtime. There were several talks on EVE's upcoming Inferno expansion and its PvP revamp, with details of new modules and gameplay designed to shake up the PvP landscape for the first time in several years. Players report leaving Fanfest this year with a very real sense that CCP is back on track and recovering from the aftermath of Monoclegate.

In this week's colossal EVE Evolved, I piece together some of the information from EVE Fanfest 2012 and consider what it means for EVE players.[/url]

The past year

A lot has happened in the past year, with CCP dropping thousands of subscribers during the summer drama of monoclegate and subsequently having to lay off 20% of its staff. In the CCP keynote speech, CEO Hilmar Petursson didn't shy away from discussing this topic. This year's keynote also had a refreshing lack of stat-waving; previous Fanfests would always show how much the playerbase and company had grown, but after the humbling events of the summer, both of those stats would be in the red.

Perhaps the most interesting talk that was streamed was CCP Veritas' The Year in Lag. Veritas is the kind of eccentric character you can't help but call a genius; on a daily basis, he works with complex problems in a jumble of code running on a supercomputer. In his talk, Veritas showed a graph of lag in a fleet fight last year and then another of a similar fight this year. The difference was staggering, with practically zero module delay and queued commands in the second fight. The magic sauce that made this possible was time dilation, with the system running at 20% normal speed in the second fight. This year, Veritas will be working on client-side optimisations. We've actually seen some of his client work already, a string optimisation that lets the overview update once per second instead of once every 2.5 seconds.

The road to Inferno

With Inferno approaching, players came to Fanfest with one big question: Is Crucible a one-off, or the start of a trend? CCP confirmed that it is the start of a trend, and Hilmar personally promised to stop thinking about big features that aim to bring new people to EVE and instead vowed to focus on iterating on existing gameplay for the people who currently play. The talks that were streamed all seemed to mirror this realistic restraint, with developers talking about what's coming in the months ahead rather than diving straight into visions of the far future.

Before the Inferno expansion goes live, it will be preceded by a separate patch on April 24th. This patch will iterate on incursions, which have remained unchanged for so long now that people have worked out the most efficient ways to farm them. There'll be an iteration on rogue drones to examine how they affect the universe's markets, mini-professions, and political region stability. We'll also see the first of a new wave of ship balances and more small changes and fixes. Devblogs on each of these will be released over the next few weeks.

Graphical updates

Even though EVE is almost nine years old, constant graphical upgrades have kept it on the very cutting edge of graphics technology. With Inferno, we'll be getting a missile graphics revamp, and missile launchers will finally be visible on the hulls of our ships. Amarr and Minmatar sub-capital ships will all receive the V3 treatment, being ported over to a new shader system that lets CCP re-skin ships for different faction variations just by changing a few variables. This will inevitably lead to players re-skinning their own ships and adding corp or alliance logos to their hulls. We also saw some new models coming in for stealth bombers.

For the next year at least, CCP will be working almost exclusively on the in-space portions of EVE. Avatars won't be left out completely; a small team will be working on what CCP described as "a slow burn" to produce new graphical elements for the character creator. Screenshots of some impressive sleeve tattoos were shown off at several talks, and CCP confirmed that these will be coming to the game with the Inferno expansion. The team has also been experimenting with giving each race a wider range of skin tones to allow pale Brutors or dark-skinned Caldari and adding the ability to mix races and so inherit parts of each.




Looking to the future

CCP took an uncharacteristically cautious approach to discussing future development, favouring releasing ideas early and taking on feedback. Incarna is still happening, but CCP admits that before developers start implementing it, they first have to find a way to build avatar-based gameplay that won't compromise the rest of the game. This same caution has been applied to DUST 514's rollout, with CCP asserting that it has "a commitment to tie this into EVE in an awesome way that you guys won't stab us for."

The biggest in-space EVE feature on the way is definitely planetary ring mining. CCP showed off graphics of a planetary ring made of asteroids, but I'd caution people about getting excited at just a screenshot; I've programmed systems that produce similar visual results in a single day, and we haven't seen any ring mining gameplay yet.

The initial idea for ring mining is awesome: It will be a group expedition in which you scan for veins of material and follow them until they deplete. It's like escalating encounters for mining, with hotspots on the planetary ring being found by scanning. This was on my wishlist for system-wide asteroid belts in 2007, so it's nice to see it finally being used for something. The most awesome part of ring mining is that you'll find moon minerals there, giving players an active way to gather the resources needed to build tech 2 ships.

Big ideas

The idea with the biggest potential to come out of Fanfest is CCP's plan to give third-party developers something they've always dreamed of: direct client-level access to the EVE universe. A new CREST interface to the EVE server has been developed, one that can translate the language that mobile apps and web tools speak in to the language the EVE client uses. CCP will be careful what gameplay it exposes through CREST as people would surely build apps to automate certain functions like updating market orders, spamming Jita local, or farming.

The new interface does mean we may eventually see apps that let us change our skills, pop into alliance chat, or fit ships from a smartphone, tablet, or browser. CCP also revealed its new third-party developer license for the EVE API and CREST, which has no restrictions and is completely free. As if that weren't generous enough, the company also agreed to allow players from the UK to pay in GBP instead of Euros and dropped the price to a competitive £9.99 per month. Finally, CCP committed to continuing the Crucible-style updates and to releasing new ships once or twice a year, but the team stopped short of confirming that Inferno will contain any new ships.

A future vision

While most of the Fanfest focused on CCP's past and present, the CCP Presents keynote took a look into the future of CCP and its game properties. CCP not only aims to move logging in to the launcher but also wants to make it possible to log in with your Google credentials or Facebook details. In an interesting move, CCP showed players some awesome new graphics and then asked them to make the decision of whether to spend time implementing them. The graphics demo showed EVE with DirectX 12 lighting and geometry shaders, which automatically generate actual geometry based on an object or ship's existing normal map.

The system is capable of generating about 500,000,000 triangles per second and seemed to create an on-screen vertex density of almost one vertex per pixel. This wasn't even demonstrated on the latest Nvidia card; it was on a GeForce GTX 560 -- the most commonly used graphics card among EVE players. The demo also showed asteroids smashing into a ship and shattering with PhysX, a technology that could vastly improve mining and has some reasl gameplay-changing potential. Players were told that it will take five man years to implement this technology, which is about one team for a year, and it's a tenth of the work of the Trinity graphics overhaul. Players seemed very supportive of the idea, so I think it's going ahead.

Future expansions

After Inferno, CCP plans to focus on the harvesting part of EVE Online with ring mining and then iterate on manufacturing. Popular ideas for the industry update include a truly modular starbase system that can start very small and scale up to be absolutely colossal. The plan is to eventually put all stations and services run in stations into the hands of players rather than NPCs.

This worked extremely well with customs offices, promoting EVE's unique sandbox style of conflict. The idea for starbases is to let individual players set up small and affordable personal structures to manufacture and research or to gain a small foothold in a system they want to use. Larger organisations would be able to expand the structure to produce large industrial complexes or towering death stars.

After that, CCP wants to boost lowsec and improve smuggling. At some point in the future, we will also be getting some impressive graphical improvements. We'll see weapons actually hitting shields, and your ship will show real battle damage in its hull geometry. To organise fleet combat better, we may also get a new tactical view that provides a more abstract representation of the battlefield. The most impressive graphical improvement proposed is a small picture-in-picture view of your currently selected target, so you can see your attacks hitting or missing and see the target explode.

What about Incarna?

In the far future, CCP wants to eventually return to Incarna and do it right. The previous plans for Incarna to be a purely social environment have been scrapped, and CCP is now exploring ways to use the core themes in EVE's in-space gameplay to design similar avatar-based gameplay inside stations. One exciting idea the devs are working with is the idea of exploring abandoned outposts and installations for loot. We might be able to dock with Sleeper structures in wormhole space and lead on-foot expeditions with our corpmates during which we explore the ruins for artifacts and ancient technologies.

The environments won't be safe, and if you die, you'll be sent back to your clone and your ship will be left docked to the structure for someone to steal it. CCP won't implement instanced environments, so other players could already be in the structure setting a trap or might find your ship docked and decide to take it. Torfi Frans Olafsson warned that "someone else might come in, weld the door shut and close you in for life." While this is a vision of the far future, it fits perfectly with the themes of EVE and was the core concept behind the story for the incredible Fanfest 2012 cinematic trailer below.





Keep an eye on the EVE Evolved category later tonight as a special extra edition of the column is coming to cover all the PvP updates announced at Fanfest.

Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at Massively. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you have an idea for a column or guide, or you just want to message him, send an email to brendan@massively.com.


Tags: ccp, ccp-games, ccp-veritas, console, crucible, dust, dust-514, eve, eve-evolved, eve-fanfest, eve-fanfest-2012, eve-online, expansion, expansions, fanfest, fanfest-2012, featured, fps, hilmar-petursson, incarna, inferno, lag, mmofps, playstation, playstation-3, ps3, sandbox, sci-fi, shooter, time-dilation, torfi-frans-olafsson, trailer, trailers, video, videos

 

[Marc]

lol @ Mittens

gets CSM Chair with a landslide victory for second year in a row. Then gets shitfaced for the alliance presentation and proceeds to try and get all the eve players to make some depressed eve player commit suicide. The media have all picked up on it.

Mittens..My CEO

 

[Marc]

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=86980

and an 82 page thread "Apology"

My CEO

 

[Marc]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-intent-to-resign-apologises-to-the-community

Cant see him resigning. He and Goonswarm own EVE now.

 

[LordjOX]

Most top EVE CEO and alliance leaders have a bit of an arrogant/narcissist streak in them

+1 for him to get more attention, I guess. Seems that he loves it, being the star of worldwide gaming media and all

 

[Raven]

Does he do book signings at travel taverns too?

 

[Marc]

Most top EVE CEO and alliance leaders have a bit of an arrogant/narcissist streak in them

+1 for him to get more attention, I guess. Seems that he loves it, being the star of worldwide gaming media and all

He may be an attention whore, but most of the player driven content in game for the past few years has been down to him. He is the best thing to ever happen to CSM.

CCP wont have the balls to sack him of his CSM chair, he is too powerful.