tyrannis posts

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.

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.

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.

CCP Blaze has posted a dev blog on the official EVE Online website detailing the various fixes and performance improvements made to the game client since the Tyrannis expansion. The piece goes into a fair amount of technical detail about everything from the game's physics, to Overview changes, to resource loading and memory issues.

"It turned out that there was an issue with the way the resource manager assigned a size to textures that had not been fully loaded. This caused the resource manager to hold on to too much memory; this was fixed shortly after it was discovered. We also found and fixed a memory leak in the module responsible for reading resources. At that time, during internal testing, we started noticing that some objects from our physics simulation weren't being cleaned up as well as they should have been. We fixed that as well," Blaze states.

Read all about it on the EVE Insider dev blog.

Friday's news of the Perils of Summer sale had some great deals, but it looks like Steam isn't done with MMO sales quite yet. The powers-that-be at Steam surprised players today with news of a sale on EVE Online.

Not just any sale, however; EVE Online: Tyrannis is priced at 90% off. Customers taking advantage of the sale will pay $1.99 for the full game and 30 days of free gameplay.

If you want in on this, you'll need to hurry, because this is one of Steam's "today only" sales, and you've got less than 24 hours to take advantage. Check out the sale page for EVE Online to purchase, and if you're not an MMO-only gamer, you may want to take a peek at all of their today-only sales.

As I sat down to write a guide to planetary interaction in EVE Online, I realised that I hadn't explored the system fully enough to come up with any definitively good deployment strategies. A few great guides to planet industry have been circulating since the expansion came out, but it will be some time before people really start to figure out the best ways to use EVE's newest feature. It's a complicated business and since a lot of the products made on planets are still currently available to buy from NPCs, the market potential hasn't yet been fully realised.

In this short opinion piece, I give my first impressions of planetary interaction and the Tyrannis expansion.

When EVE Online's Tyrannis expansion went live last month, its main planetary interaction feature was initially disabled. The command centre structures required for planetary interaction weren't released as more time was needed for testing. This had the unfortunate side-effect of causing havoc with the starbase market. Until now, players were only able to scan planets for resources and train the required skills in preparation for the inevitable planetary gold rush. Today the markets in EVE were seeded with command centres, opening the flood gates on planetary exploitation.

To help you get to grips with planetary interaction, several helpful guides and instructional videos have already been made. EVE University have produced an impressive and thorough guide, along with a handy chart of what you can produce with each of the planet materials. Similarly, EVE player Korai Iarok has taken the initiative and produced a great flow-chart style PDF showing the manufacturing processes for each item. With these helpful guides and CCP's own video tutorial, even new players should have very little problem setting up their own planet-based industrial networks.

Skip past the cut to watch CCP's official planetary interaction video tutorial.

With its single-server structure, EVE Online is home to over 330,000 pilots, all playing in the same instance of the game universe. As subscriber numbers rise, EVE continues to set new records for the number of players simultaneously online in a single 3D game world. Records tend to be broken in the days leading up to or following a big expansion, usually during EVE's peak activity on Sunday evenings. The previous record of 56,021 set following the Dominion expansion was beaten yesterday with a peak concurrent user total of 60,453.

The high active subscriber levels we're currently seeing can be attributed to both the buzz caused by EVE's eighth alliance tournament and the newly released Tyrannis expansion. The main feature of Tyrannis goes live tomorrow, when the command centres required for planetary interaction will be seeded on the market. With two more weekends of the alliance tournament to go and the imminent Tyrannis land grab, we're sure to see this new record pushed even further in the weeks to come.

After what seemed to be a smooth launch, it soon became apparent that EVE Online's Tyrannis expansion had brought with it several broken features. While the planet-scanning interface works fine and looks fantastic, the deployment of command centres was pushed back until June 8th. The materials produced on planets could not possibly be made until June 8th but on May 26th, tier 4 products from planetary interaction began appearing on the market. It wasn't long before EVE players figured out that you could refine NPC-sold starbase structures into high-end planet products. Starbase structures are one of the many things that CCP is switching from being supplied at fixed prices by NPCs to being produced by players through planetary interaction. The NPC supply was meant to be removed on May 26th but as players were currently unable to produce the structures, that change was delayed until June 8th.

Lost in the hubbub and excitement surrounding the launch of this week's Tyrannis expansion is the debut of CCP's EVE Gate social networking platform. Luckily, CCP Zymurgist charges to the rescue with a quick news release detailing the features of the new service.

"EVE Gate is a new social networking site open to the pilots in EVE Online and is now open for business. Head on over to http://www.evegate.com and get started with managing your contacts, reading your EVE mail, setting up calendar events, and talking with your corporation and contacts all without being logged into the EVE Online client," he writes.

Check out the press release and the official EVE Gate website.

EVE Online's long-awaited Tyrannis expansion is finally upon us and here at Massively we're celebrating with a roundup of our recent Tyrannis coverage. The expansion's main feature is a form of planetary interaction that gives players the ability to colonise and industrialise the planets of New Eden. Tyrannis also sees some important changes coming to EVE, with a new insurance scheme coming into effect and the release of the EVE Gate social network. Tyrannis was initially scheduled for May 18th but some last-minute changes forced CCP to push it back to May 26th to give more time for testing. The structures necessary for planetary interaction will be released on June 8th, giving players around two weeks to learn the new skills and plan the conquest of their favourite planets.

As you wait for your client to update, catch up with our previous coverage below and be sure to visit the official Tyrannis features page for more details, backgrounds and interview videos.

EVE Online's next expansion revealed: Explore planets in Tyrannis It's been known since the last EVE Online Fanfest that the next expansion would be based around planetary interaction, but details on exactly what that interaction would constitute have been thin on the ground. In a bumper devblog today, EVE's Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson gave a first glimpse of what we can expect this summer.

EVE Evolved: What could planetary interaction be like? 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.

Click past the cut to see more of our Tyrannis coverage!

EVE fanatics are undoubtedly familiar with the EVE Online store, which offers clothing and other goodies so that pilots can strut around making the statement, "I'm leveling up my skills right this very second." In celebration of the touchdown of Tyrannis, EVE's latest expansion, shrewd players can nab a few great deals as the store cuts its prices.

If you want an EVE ship of your very own to admire (or snuggle with at night -- we understand), a hefty 15% discount could tempt you in the right direction. They've bundled the popular EVE Conquest board game with a t-shirt, so now your best friends have a reason to gank you and loot your corpse. If you're looking for back copies of E-ON, issues #1-18 are available for the taking for the low price of $7.00 apiece.

Finally, they've got a couple all-purpose coupons for the entire store: one for 10% of shipping, and one for 10% off any order. Head on over for the full announcement, including coupon codes and specific details.

EVE Online has always been one of the most open and accessible MMORPGs in terms of in-game data. The new Tyrannis expansion, recently delayed a week to May 26th, will expand on the game's history of making its APIs (application programming interface) available to players and enterprising programmers.

"In Tyrannis we are delivering a vastly improved contacts system and the new calendar. For these features, we will be providing a new set of APIs for you to consume in your own applications. Not only will we expose this new data to you, we have made some changes to existing APIs, and two Outpost related APIs have been added to help ease outpost management," writes CCP Stillman in an EVE dev blog entry posted earlier today.

Whether the new APIs are incorporated into the the plethora of player-developed EVE tools already in existence, or they inspire the creation of entirely new programs, we can't wait to see what New Eden's residents do with the new information. You can check out all the details over at the EVE dev blog.

Over the past two weeks we've been running some awesome weekly contests for readers to win EVE Online game time courtesy of CCP Games. In celebration of the upcoming launch of EVE's Tyrannis expansion, we gave away 10 PLEX in our planet screenshot contest two weeks ago. Last week, we ran a caption competition with a 15 PLEX prize total and received a flood of entries. So many in fact that we're still debating which captions should win a prize. The winners of that contest will be posted as an update to the second contest post within the next few days and the winners will all be notified via email.

This week marks the last week of our Tyrannis contest trilogy and to end on a high-note we're giving away a whopping 25 PLEX. Ten top prizes of two PLEX are available and a further five runner-up entrants will get one PLEX each. To enter, all you have to do is write a short piece of fiction based on the planets and moons of New Eden and submit it to the comments on this post. Entries are limited to 200 words or less as we're sure to get a huge number of entries and we want to give each one the full attention it deserves. Your entry can take the form of a short story, a poem or any other type of written fiction. Prizes will be awarded based on creativity, writing style and presentation. As with the previous two competitions, this contest is open to readers from any country.

UPDATE: Entry is now closed. We are now reading through the submissions and picking winners!
UPDATE 2: Winners have been selected! The list of winners has been added to the end of this post. Each winner will be contacted via email to arrange delivery of their prizes.

Skip past the cut for the contest rules and full submission guidelines.

CCP has just announced a delay of EVE Online's forthcoming Tyrannis expansion. Originally scheduled for May 18th, the new content will now debut one week later on May 26th, and market seeding of Planetary Command Centers will be pushed back to June 8th.

Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson, writing on the official EVE Dev Blog, briefly outlines the reasoning behind the delays. "In our regression testing, we have identified scalability issues with the Planetary Interaction feature, which led to code refactoring that then needed further testing before being launched to Tranquility. Planetary Interaction is a unique feature in the sense that it is available to almost all players in the game providing opportunity for manufacturing for the masses, so ensuring that it runs smoothly on our cluster is of great importance to all," he says.

You can read the full press release here, and don't forget to check out Massively's extensive Tyrannis coverage.

[Thanks Darkdust!]