eve online

Play EVE Online for free
Official Site: EVE Online
Studio: CCP Games
Launch Date: May 6, 2003
Genre: Sci-Fi Sandbox
Business Model: Hybrid Free-to-Play (Optional Subscription, Cash Shop)
Platform: PC

The MOP Up: Star Trek Online’s DS9 expansion gets a console release date (July 14, 2018)

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The MMO industry moves along at the speed of information, and sometimes we’re deluged with so much news here at Massively Overpowered that some of it gets backlogged. That’s why there’s The MOP Up: a weekly compilation of smaller MMO stories and videos that you won’t want to miss. Seen any good MMO news? Hit us up through our tips line!

Maybe you’ll discover a new game in this space — or be reminded of an old favorite! This week we have stories and videos from Elsword, EVE Online, Soulworker Online, League of Legends, Realm Royale, Survived By, EverQuest II, Prosperous Universe, Black Desert Mobile, and Star Trek Online, all waiting for you after the break!

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Battle Bards Episode 124: Old MMOs, new music

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It’s a catch-all, catch-up episode for the Battle Bards as they dig through new soundtrack releases from MMORPGs that they’ve covered in the past! You may be prepared for an eclectic and enjoyable mix of music — but there is no way that you can steel yourself for the raw and heartfelt confessions that take place on this show.

Battle Bards is a bi-weekly podcast that alternates between examining a single MMO’s soundtrack and exploring music tracks revolving around a theme. MOP’s Justin co-hosts with bloggers Steff and Syl. The cast is available on iTunes, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, and Player.FM.

Listen to Episode 124: Old MMOs, new music (or download it) now:

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Interview and excerpt: The ‘Braving Britannia’ book preserves Ultima Online’s oral history

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Earlier this week, we wrote about the launch of a new book that’s right up MMORPG fans’ alley. Dubbed Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online, the book gathers together 35 interviews with players and both former and current Ultima Online devs to effectively become the first published oral history of the MMORPG that started it all.

Author Wes Locher was kind enough to answer a bunch of our questions about the book and provide us an excerpt to help you folks understand what you’re getting into if you decide to pick it up. Read on for the whole scoop!

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Ashes of Creation handles world persistence and local economies in its own fashion

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With a rapidly expanding studio and Alpha One coming later this year, Ashes of Creation is shaping up to be one of the great hopes of the MMORPG industry these days. PCGamesN has a piece on the technical development of Ashes of Creation, in which the team talks about using Unreal Engine 4 to create the persistent massively multiplayer environment. Currently in Alpha Zero, 2,500 players are romping around in a 16×16 kilometer zone that offers limited progression. This is due to expand, however.

The team also discussed how Ashes will be similar to EVE Online in terms of its economy: “A similar aspect with regards to our economy is that we don’t have a global auction house. We don’t have a global warehouse for resources, so while you may be able to put your staff or your sword in your warehouse and grab it somewhere else, you can’t put iron ore [in there] and grab it somewhere else.”

The dev team recently posted a new video showing off some of the environments that future lucky Alpha One testers will enjoy. Might as well tantalize yourself by viewing it after the jump!

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EVE Online launches the Dawn of Liberation event along with its July update today

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EVE Online has a decent-size release up this month – today, in fact, as it’s already live. Notably, today’s update tweaks Abyss looot drops and other Abyssal Deadspace bits, lightly balances select ships, fixes missile optimizations, adjusts the duel wager system, improves the UI, and tackles bugs. It’s a hefty set of patch notes!

Probably the most interesting release is actually to the storyline, however; the latest leg in the game’s plot is dubbed Dawn of Liberation. Players will be helping The Republic transport rescued slaves. Yes, there’s something in it for you too.

“Access the Dawn of Liberation objectives via The Agency in the Neocom menu. Then, decide what objective you’re going to tackle, choosing from battling slaver ships, bounty hunting and rescuing slaves from enemy ships or Human Containment Facilities. Finally, set course and start racking up those Agency points for any objectives completed, eventually unlocking further rewards with your gathered points.”

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EVE Online kicks off a new recruitment program on July 11

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More pilots are needed in EVE Online. The game has another patch arriving tomorrow, but it’s going to wait another day to introduce a big new recruitment program aimed at drawing in new players or existing players who wish to take advantage of the recruitment advantages. This is chiefly due to backend issues; the existing referral program goes offline today, and the new infrastructure will take about 48 hours to put into place.

New rewards will be implemented for recruiters, although prior results for recruitment will not be carried over in order to properly track everyone. There are new ship skins and new rewards for recruiters (with special rewards for up to 40 players recruited) and the same bonus of 250,000 skill points for accounts so recruited. Players will need to generate specific email referrals to comply with EU data privacy laws, however, something players should be aware of well in advance. Get out there on Wednesday and start bringing people into the fold.

Source: Official Site

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EVE Evolved: Improving EVE Online’s organisational tools

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Throughout most of EVE Online‘s lifetime, players have developed their own third-party applications (and yes, spreadsheets) to help organise and enhance their gameplay. We’ve got skill training calculators, websites for keeping track of structure fuel, databases full of information on items, and advanced industry and market tools that look like they belong to real world stock brokers. Most large alliances also now use Slack or Discord to organise out of game, have their own dedicated voice comms servers, and use tools like Jabber to notify members of important events.

CCP Games itself has added some brilliant in-game tools over the years that help players organise too. We now have a great in-game Calendar and event system, a customisable notification popup tool, corporation bookmarks, and an official smartphone app. We even have the ability to simulate and share ship fittings, and a new Agency panel that helps new players find content near them. These are all extremely useful productivity tools, but with a few improvements I think they could be even better!

In this edition of EVE Evolved, I discuss a few improvements I’d love to see for EVE Online‘s calendar, Agency interface, and official mobile app that would help players organise and work together more easily.

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EVE Online is simplifying missile rendering to improve performance – the July patch drops this Tuesday

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Missiles are a big deal in EVE Online. There are a variety of ways in which missiles can be helpful and important as a means of delivering their explosive payloads to targets in combat, so there are usually a lot of them. And there are a variety of extra demands placed on the game client by rendering these missiles, which means that a bunch of them can really slow down the game. Hence the upcoming revisions for missiles that will make the projectiles less demanding on systems.

Among the changes are refinements to the way the game calls for missile data when firing and the application of LOD rules for missile meshes, ensuring that distant missiles don’t cause additional system drain. It’s important to note that none of these changes will actually alter the damage or performance of missiles; all that’s going to change is the rendering of same. Check out the full development entry to see all of the more technical details.

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EVE Online plans a massive missile test for July 4th

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The best way to celebrate July 4th is to fire as many explosives as possible in as many directions as possible. If you would prefer to do so without destroying large chunks of property in the real world, you can do so in EVE Online, which is calling for everyone to log into the game and test out the server hardware with lots of missiles.

We should perhaps specify that you are testing the hardware by firing missiles in the game. Not firing missiles at the hardware and seeing if it keeps operating.

Participants will receive two million skill points on the test server along with the satisfaction of shooting off lots of missiles. The test will be running at 17:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. EDT), so set your clocks accordingly and get ready to shoot off some explosives. Luckily, nothing else will be happening during the day, probably.

Source: Official Site

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The Game Archaeologist: Raph Koster on MUDs and Privateer Online

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The release of Raph Koster’s monster book of game essays, Postmortems, was of high interest to Bree and me for different reasons. For her, it was because Koster was a creative driving force behind two of her favorite games, Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. For me, it’d because Koster shares my passion for MMO history and has some unique stories touching on topics that no one has heard before.

So I combed through his collection of essays to see what I could find out on two topics of interest to me: MUDs and the elusive Privateer Online. Chances are that many of you reading have never touched a text-based multi-user dungeon, and none of us save Koster and his coworkers, ever got to even peek at Privateer Online.

Here’s a few quotes that popped out at me, and if you’re interested and have $35 to drop on a Kindle version, you can read Koster’s full collection of essays in Postmortems.

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Perfect Ten: The best MMO debuts by year, 1997-2006

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By now, many of you probably know that I’m the curator of the MMO Timeline on my personal blog. On this page, I’ve attempted to catalog the launches, expansions, business model shifts, reboots, platform transitions, and sunsets of MMOs by year. It certainly helps me to get a high-level overview of certain eras of online gaming history as well as to trace the development of certain titles.

For fun, because that’s a lot of what Perfect Ten is about, I wanted to start with the year that MMORPGs really took off and select one title per year over the next two decades that I felt had the best debut and was the most exciting title to launch that year. Some years it’s going to be really easy to pick, while others… man, I am setting myself up for some hate mail, aren’t I?

Let’s turn our time machine back to 1997 and get this show on the road!

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EVE Online’s ousting of an epithet-slinging CSM candidate was part of a corporate plot because of course it was

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If this isn’t the most canonically EVE Online story, I have no idea what is.

Remember earlier this month when we reported on the drama in the elections for the Council of Stellar Management? CCP Games had caught wind of the racist comments of one particular candidate for the council had made in-game and disqualified him. That candidate, Creecher Virpio, apologized for what he characterized as “casual racism.”

As it turns out, CCP Games didn’t learn about Creecher’s indiscretions by accident. As The Nosy Gamer notes, Creecher is a high-ranking member of Test Alliance Please Ignore and a “vociferous proponent of shield-tanked supercapital-class ships.” Had he been seated on the council, he surely would have voted against the interests of Pandemic Legion, which favors armor-tanked supercapital ships.

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EVE Evolved: Will EVE Online’s Abyssal Deadspace ever be expanded?

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EVE Online‘s recent Into the Abyss expansion has managed to grip me in a way that few expansions have, providing a challenging new solo PvE feature that’s as addictive as it is lucrative. Now that players are starting to figure out ship fittings and strategies for taking on abyssal deadspace and it’s being farmed at an increasing rate, the question on many players’ minds is “what comes next?” The Triglavian storyline is far from resolved, and these new size-restricted instances could be expanded on in dozens of different ways to spark a virtual renaissance for small-scale PvE and maybe even PvP.

CCP Games has a long history of making impressive “first steps” like these in new areas of gameplay, but sometimes those ideas don’t go much further and the first steps are the last. Abyssal deadspace could easily become another one shot feature that joins EVE‘s permanent gameplay, just like the Sansha incursions that are still in the game years after they probably should have ended. I seriously hope that CCP doesn’t abandon the feature this time though, as further work on abyssal deadspace has the potential to open up whole new types of gameplay that aren’t available anywhere in EVE right now.

In this edition of EVE Evolved, I theorise about some of the different ways abyssal deadspace could be expanded and how the story of the Triglavian Collective still has a long way to go.

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