Massively^™

Everyone knows that the death penalty in EVE Online is harsh but is it really as bad as we make it out to be? Is losing a ship really a devastating blow or does the emotional factor of losing something we've put care and attention into make us exaggerate the loss? Since EVE's gameplay is focused entirely on piloting ships rather than walking around with your character, we can get very attached to our ships and feel a great sense of loss at their destruction. It can be hard to keep in mind that our ships in EVE are just tools, which can make their loss feel a lot harsher than it should be. Is this the fault of the player for getting attached to their ship or of the game design for not encouraging us to form attachments with our characters instead?

In this brief article, I discuss some of the golden rules of EVE used to minimise the death penalty and ask whether our perceptions of EVE Online's death penalty are really that accurate.

Earthrise is a new title that we haven't seen much of thus far beyond screenshots and concept art. Still, it's one that's holding the interest of a small but growing community, waiting to see if the game will offer an experience that's a far cry from a fantasy MMO. In making the game a departure from the fantasy genre, the Earthrise creators at Masthead Studios have been fleshing out the game's lore and relaying it to potential fans through its own newsletters and some media exclusives, at IGN's RPG Vault in particular.

IGN continues its series of Earthrise previews, focusing on the lore of the post-apocalyptic setting. That is to say the old world is dead, wiped out in World War III. Those who weren't part of the Continoma-selected elite are either ash or reduced to slavering mutants prowling Enterra in search of their next meal. The previous piece titled Continoma: The Beginning focused on the corporate entity that rose to power and came to rule what was left of the earth following the near-annihilation of human society. IGN now looks at what happened after the burn in "Continoma: The Rebirth." Check out their piece for the full story on the pioneers of Earthrise who work to rebuild society to utopian standards, and the anarchists who resist the order of this new establishment.

EVE Online tends to appeal to MMO players who like the depth and complexity of a sci-fi game where players have the freedom to act as they wish in a vast galaxy. But that freedom comes with a price; EVE can be a harsh setting, particularly for newer players trying to get a handle on the game.

For the newer player who's recently completed the tutorial, EVE largely remains a mystery... one which only reading, learning from other players, and just 'going for it' can solve. Still, it's always good when someone passes on advice to newer players as many of us learned our lessons the hard way. To that end, we bring you The 10 Commandments of EVE. Truth be told, there are a lot more than ten essential things to know about the game, but this is a good start. Feel free to add your own "commandments" or lessons learned in the comments below.

There are a few essential things any pilot in EVE Online should do before they undock from a station and get themselves into a potentially hostile situation. Come to think of it, anytime you undock there's at least some chance of hostility. Keeping that in mind, think of this as a visual checklist you should go through before entering space, as you're not only risking your ship, but your skillpoints if you bite off more than you can chew. This happens all too often, to novice and veteran pilots alike in EVE. So to help you avoid this fate...

There are some valuable lessons learned as you progress in EVE Online, lessons which get pounded into you when making mistakes. There are so many things you wish someone had told you before you went out and made a noobish ass of yourself.

Even with the much-improved Aura tutorial that's been implemented in EVE, there are lots of things that still cause players to scream something to the effect of, "Why didn't anyone warn me?!" This is often accompanied by frantically warping away from one's obliterated ship in an escape pod with a liberal amount of cursing. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way.

You can say a lot of things about a game you don't like. You can say that it sucks or that it's poorly balanced. You can say that the art direction is all wrong, or you can say that it's lacking in any number of features a good game should have. But sometimes a game takes flak for committing the most grievous sin of all: copying another game. One of the most commonly cited complaints about any given game is that they copied "feature X" from "game Y."

For some reason, MMOG players in particular just love to cite the classic "It's just a clone of (whatever)" when they're trying to challenge the very essence of a particular title. If a game is a copy (the reasoning goes) then clearly the designers are wholly uninspired, worthless, and incapable of creating anything interesting or original. It really seems to irk players who feel that their game is being somehow wronged when another game uses similar ideas. But is this really such a bad thing? Might cloning features, or even cloning games, actually be the best possible thing for the games industry?

The most recent iteration of Tabula Rasa's Feedback Friday brought the announcement of a change to how the client will work in future deployments of the game. "The Bubble," as they call it, is an optimization that the developers hope to roll out in a future build of Tabula Rasa's Deployment 9. Until now, all static map objects such as rocks and trees loaded up front, but at the cost of decreased system performance. The Bubble will limit the client to loading only those static objects within a certain distance from the camera. The end result promises to be a client that uses less memory and delivers increased performance. They would, however, like help from the players with testing the bubble feature once it's viable.

As always, Feedback Friday also addressed player questions and concerns, namely that logout countdowns in PvP will stop being exploitable in Deployment 10. As it stands, players can evade combat during clan-wars by simply logging off. Another issue in the game that's being resolved is the common complaint about how difficult it is to keep track of friends. Presently each time a player creates a new character, they must reinvite all of their friends, ad nauseam. So beginning with Deployment 9, both the friends and ignore list are now user-based instead of character-based. This change alone will eliminate a number of headaches for TR players, but check out the Feedback Friday page for more details on how the game is evolving.

The clone credits in TR were originally created in lieu of an easy way to freely change your character's skill and attribute points. This pertains both to the storyline, and a more hardcore approach to skill point changes. We tend to think NCSoft had the right idea with this, as do most game developers in their MMO's infant stages. Does anyone remember the attribute point system in Guild Wars when it first launched? Now skills and attribute points can be reallocated repeatedly with no penalty or cost at all. This seems to be the lay of the land with most current games, but we wonder if Tabula Rasa will soon follow that trend.

So now the question is, what's easier: completing a Target of Opportunity for the clone credit, or gathering 600 control point tokens for the respec? The opinions seem to sway for either side, but there are certainly pros and cons for both. With cloning, you can remake your character completely, while keeping the same class and points. This can also be a con though if you've grown rather attached to your character. In that case, a respec would be the appropriate course of action. Whichever you decide, it is nice to know we have a choice to use either now, depending on the situation.

Have you ever played a game over a period of a few months, thinking that you've plundered the very depths of its gameplay system, only to have some facet of the game come along and smack you on the forehead? It happened to me this morning in Tabula Rasa when I was playing around with a brand new Forean clone and stumbled on an entirely new control scheme I had never seen before. It was buried in the options menu, and has completely changed the way I play. I knew I had to share it with you, dear readers, because there have to be a few other players out there who weren't aware they had this option at their fingertips.

If you go into the options menu, click the key bindings tab, you can select "MMO Style" from the drop-down menu. It swaps the control bars at the bottom of your screen in a way that should completely change the way you play. Where before you had to use the toolbar to select a Logos ability and then right-click to activate it, the MMO style scheme allows you to use the ability simply by pressing the corresponding number, just as it does in other MMO titles. As an added bonus, the interact button is switched from the "T" button to the right mouse button. The MMO scheme, I'm finding, is particularly helpful for those under the Specialist tree who need quick access to a variety of Logos abilities. Saving those extra button presses is a real life-saver. If you haven't already, give it a try.