Filed under: EVE Online

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 of the least expensive methods of getting around in EVE Online is definitely the oft-overlooked shuttle. No, they are not as majestic as many other ships, but for quick trips, shuttles are hard to beat. After all, if a shuttle gets blown up, you can just buy (or make) another one and continue on your way. (This is, of course, assuming you've updated your clone recently. Losing skillpoints due to being podded just sucks on all levels.) Today's incredibly picturesque image of this tiny ship comes to us from Tony H., who attached an equally small note: "This is a screenshot from EVE Online. In the picture, I was flying a Gallente shuttle."

Have you found an amazing view on your travels? One Shots relies on reader submissions, so we need you to send screenshots in. It's very easy to do. Simply mail them to oneshots@massively.com along with your name, the name of the game, and a quick description. We'll post them here for everyone to enjoy.

The magazine industry is a behemoth, catering to practically every hobby there is. No matter how obscure the hobby, you're sure to find a magazine on the shelf all about it. While there are plenty of magazines dedicated to gaming, only a few MMOs have their own dedicated magazines. Despite the rise in popularity of web-based publications, there's something special about having a physical magazine you can flip through. Since I am a massive nerdy fan of EVE Online, each issue of the quarterly E-ON magazine feels like a proper treat. The production values are very high, and it's pure EVE from cover to cover. The publishers even go so far as to include advertisements for EVE corporations and services rather than paid ads for other games or gaming services.

Issue 20 of the magazine was released last month, but the postal fairy decided I had been naughty and didn't deliver it until this week. I've spent the majority of today reading this magazine all about internet spaceships, and I've loved every nerdy moment of it. This quarter's issue has a strong focus on the impact of EVE's recent Tyrannis expansion and its planetary interaction feature. In addition to a guide on setting up planetary harvesting infrastructure, the magazine's editors ask whether Tyrannis was everything we hoped or a missed opportunity to breathe new life into the planets of New Eden. Other topics discussed in this issue include EVE's controversial Council of Stellar Management, the history of the alliance tournament, and a look at the new rebalanced supercarriers.

Skip past the cut for a breakdown of what you can expect in E-ON issue 20 and my impressions from reading it.

There are many of ways to make ISK in EVE Online, from mission-running and ratting to trading and research. Some methods, like mission-running, are very active processes in which the amount of ISK made is directly proportional to the amount of time spent playing. Other processes, such as trading or moon-mining, are largely passive endeavours in which ISK is made even while the pilot is offline. One such source of passive income, which has been around since the tech 2 invention system came in, is datacore collection. Players with high enough standings and the right skills trained in the science field can sign up to do research with various R&D agents throughout EVE. The agents automatically give players research points every day for free, which can later be redeemed for datacores to be sold on the market.

Datacore collection itself is an intended game mechanic, and this system for supplying datacores doesn't look like it will be changing any time soon. The issue is that characters on expired accounts will still accrue research points every day. Using this so-called "ghost research" loophole, some players have been farming datacores with an unfair advantage over active pilots. Abusers typically set up accounts with three research characters each, then let those accounts expire. Several months later, each account will be re-activated to harvest the datacores. In a recent devblog, CCP Soundwave explained that this issue came from a list of important player-voted issues that was presented to CCP by the Council of Stellar Management. The unintended loophole will be closed in a hotfix in the near future.

In nullsec, nobody can hear you scream. Well, okay, somebody might hear you scream, but depending on what side of the battle that somebody is on, the scream could either evoke a sympathetic response, or gales of laughter. That's just the way life is in EVE Online. However, for those willing to make the trip into nullsec, there's generally great ISK to be made, and occasionally, some other non-monetary rewards to be found -- like today's One Shots! This comes to us from Barlat, who writes in: "Here's an image of my pirate, Barlat, in search of prey in nullsec space. I hadn't found any booty yet, but that view was a treasure in itself."

Have you found a gorgeous view while out piloting around New Eden? Perhaps you'd rather show us a huge fleet battle, or some shots of a recent mining op? We're always on the hunt for great screenshots -- from EVE Online and myriad other MMOs. Just email your best to us here at oneshots@massively.com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing. We'll post it out here and give you the credit for sending it in. Easy, and fun!

It seems as though everywhere I go to read about EVE Online, someone is complaining about lag. Throughout the game's seven-year history, developers and server engineers have waged a constant battle against the lag monster. Frequent upgrades and code overhauls have ensured that the capacity of each server cluster increased at pace with the growing subscriber numbers. When the Dominion expansion came, something in it caused lag to get a lot worse. The issue has yet to be corrected and has even spurred some players to put media pressure on CCP to correct the issue.

Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it. Aside from the occasional fleet-fight mass testing event on the test server and the news that there was actually an entire team dedicated to lag, players were left largely in the dark as to what was being done to address the issue. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, many players began to assert that EVE's developers weren't working on lag at all. Earlier this week, we posted that CCP was planning a series of devblogs on lag to showcase the progress it's made. In a surprisingly rapid turn-around, four devblogs on lag and another on CCP's core technology groups have already been posted. They cover such topics as server scalability, the results of recent mass testing events, and CCP's new "thin client" testing tool.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I introduce each of CCP's four recent devblogs on lag with a quick summary.

Development studio CCP Games has been in the news a lot this year with their ambitious MMOFPS project codenamed Dust 514. When it's released, Dust will actually tie into the studio's current MMO EVE Online. Dust players will hire themselves out to EVE players as mercenaries, their combined aim being to dominate territories on a planet's surface. The first steps toward this unique integration of two MMOs in the same concurrent universe came with EVE Online's Dominion and Tyrannis expansions. Dominion gave EVE players a new Sovereignty framework, which will later be adapted to include planets as strategic points of interest. In the recent Tyrannis expansion, the planets of EVE began producing resources worthy of domination, ensuring that players will fight over them once it becomes possible.

With EVE Online's single-shard universe, the server hardware and game code have to be continually updated to cope with the game's constantly expanding playerbase. Each time the server is upgraded, node stability and lag in large fleet battles improves significantly. Unfortunately, this trend of periodic improvements took something of a wrong turn when the Dominion expansion came along. Before Dominion, fleet battles took place with over a thousand ships on each side and no crippling lag or node deaths in sight. Since the expansion's release, however, fleets of only a few hundred have regularly experienced unplayable conditions.

Frustrated by CCP's lack of visible progress in tackling lag, members of the EVE community have been making their outrage known. A recent appeal to the gaming media by a few players resulted in the issue getting very high exposure, which could be bad for CCP's public image. CCP issued a response explaining that lag is a high priority, and that there is even an entire development team dedicated to tackling it. Earlier this week, CCP Zulu expanded on CCP's lag-busting efforts in the first of a new EVE devblog series dedicated entirely to lag.

In last week's EVE Evolved, I looked at a few of EVE Online's most famous outlaws. In the game's open-ended sandbox, players are free to turn to a life of crime. Around every corner, you'll find another thief making off with someone's loot, or a pirate waiting for an unsuspecting victim to pass by. Worse still are the many scam artists and market manipulators you'll find in trade hubs like Jita, making a dishonest living at the expense of other players. But it's not all doom and gloom, and not all players are the dark, nefarious types EVE is famous for.

For every low-life scammer trying to steal your hard-earned ISK, there are helpful individuals working to counteract scamming. For every war-mongering pirate preying on new players, there are hundreds of people willing to teach new players to defend themselves and stay safe. Despite all the talk of EVE's anti-social element, you'll also find a rich and diverse community, built around forums, chat channels and dozens of blogs. Programmers even spend their free time to provide the community with free tools to aid play. These are all people I would call heroes of EVE, either because they work to prevent the wrong-doings of outlaws, or because they selflessly enrich the EVE community.

In this opinion piece, I look at a few of the people and groups I consider to be true heroes of EVE. Who are your heroes?

EVE Online is a game with complex economic activity that often mirrors real-world economic systems. The similarity is so pronounced that CCP even hired its own Lead Economist, Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, to examine the in-game markets in detail. Each quarter, the economist and his team of researchers publish the EVE Quarterly Economic Newsletter (QEN). The report provides a timeline of market indices and major economic changes over the past several months. This quarter's report focuses on the effect of the insurance changes that came with the Tyrannis expansion. It also has a special segment on ISK sinks and faucets, and their changes following the release of planetary interaction.

Have you ever wondered why MMOs have multiple servers and limitations on the number of people that can be squeezed onto each? It's a good question, especially when you consider EVE Online's impressive single-shard (single-server) setup, where tens of thousands of concurrent players can log on in the same environment.

CCP's Kjartan Emilsson wrote an article for Gamasutra explaining why most MMOs choose to separate their population onto several severs. The main problem, Emilsson said, was the issue of avatar density. Too many players in too small of a space creates a miserable experience for all involved. So either the game has to put limits on how many avatars can be in an area, or create a playing field that is so large as to render this issue null.

Emilsson went on to argue the case for single-server games that create a united society instead of a fractured one. He detailed the setup of EVE's server architecture, which is held together by a single database at its nucleus and has been steadily growing and improving over time. If you love to read the nuts-and-bolts of the underlying technology that makes games like EVE run, then do yourself a favor and give this article your time.

Unless you make it a point of skipping every EVE Online story on this site, you know that recently a player had the great misfortune of losing over $1200 worth of PLEX during a rather ill-advised market run, solo, in a Kestrel. Well, today's One Shots contributor, Xeron Rich, didn't tell us what was in his cargo holds, but he does note that he's "just making a highsec market run through the Lonetrek region." We're going to hope that he's not carrying an obscene amount of PLEX around, lest another potential round of spaceship schadenfreude ensue!

From large to small, we love MMOs! If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. Part of that love is looking at all manner of things players are doing here on One Shots every day. However, without player-submitted screenshots, all we can do is stare longingly into our mailbox and hope to hear from you. If you'd like to share your love of MMOs, then send a screenshot to us here at oneshots@massively.com. Be sure to include your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing. We'll post it out here and let everyone know you sent it in!

Like many MMOs, EVE Online has a problem with players buying ISK from shady websites to short-cut the ISK-making process. On the other end of the spectrum, many players are great at making ISK but unable to afford the monthly subscription. To kill two birds with one stone, CCP created PLEX. Sixty-day game time codes purchased for cash can be converted into two 30-day Pilots License Extensions, which become items in the game. The PLEX can then be traded to other EVE players for ISK, creating a legitimate way to buy ISK without fear of being hit by the ban-hammer. Players with some ISK to spare can buy PLEX from the market and redeem them for game time, essentially playing for free. It's an innovative system, and until recently it was a completely safe market to deal in.

EVE Online's Community Manager CCP Wrangler once said that "EVE isn't designed to just look like a cold, dark and harsh world; it's designed to be a cold, dark and harsh world." That sentiment sums up the core philosophy behind the game, which permits such nefarious gameplay styles as thief, smuggler, scam-artist, pirate and market manipulator. Underhanded deals go on every day in EVE, with bounty hunters hired to ruin someone's day and spies tearing corporations apart from within. Many are drawn to EVE because it's one of the few MMOs that allows players to embrace their darker side. The opportunity to be a real villain in a sandbox universe can be intoxicating.

Perhaps more intoxicating is the notion that the presence of tangible villains affords players a rare opportunity to play the role of hero. For every pirate gang lurking at a stargate in low security space, there's an anti-pirate squad somewhere planning an attack. For every thief ready to empty their corporation's hangers, there's a security specialist weeding out spies. The true outlaws of EVE are people who have earned their infamy through acts of ruthlessness in their chosen field.

Over the years, we've interviewed and examined some of EVE's most notorious outlaws. In this article, I look back at four of EVE's most wanted, how they earned their infamy, and what they're doing today.

Safe spots are an integral part of EVE Online's tactical warfare, making it harder for other players to locate and consequently destroy your ship. They're created by making a bookmark while in warp, which causes the bookmark to lead to the middle of nowhere. When you're on the run from bad guys, you can often slip away by warping between several safe spots while they try desperately to scan you down. Deep safe spots are illegal bookmarks created far outside the bounds of a solar system. Pilots hiding here needn't bother warping around to evade pursuers, as they'll be quite literally off the grid and virtually impossible to locate. Deep safe spots several hundred AU from the nearest celestial object have also been used in the past to jump huge capital fleets into a hostile system without fear of being attacked.