Such awesomeness definitely deserves some coverage on every Eve blogger’s web site, and there’s also some hilarity to go with it.

Basically if you want to immortalise yourself by designing a star ship that potentially tens of thousands of players will pilot, you can submit your entry at the deviantart contest page. There’s also some pretty awesome prizes for the winner & place getters.

Here’s a few of my favourites, including the hilarity I mention above…

"Neon" by ~Aphoxema on deviantART

Caliban Class Battlecruiser by ~Hyperian-Dutchman on deviantART

Civilian Shuttle by ~buttface76 on deviantART

kjhm by ~gayboy333 on deviantART

This is a quick snippet from CCP on the contest, but the deviantart link has all the details.

All the best to the competitors!

This is the old Eve online server room... lol

The mere fact I’m posting this must mean I’m an intractable geek, but I’m excited to say that CCP games is upgrading the servers that feed the single shard Eve online universe.

The area of space I live in, Providence has seen its fair share of large fleet battles lately, and I’ve actually been hearing a lot of pilots complaining about lag issues.

It’ll be interesting to pick their brains after the server transfer to its new cooled, upgraded environment… because I’ve personally never experienced any lag (or any big fleet battles). I think 180 is the biggest number I’ve ever seen in local.

Anyways, read the full article about the server upgrade here.

Eve Online Economy Report 2010 – link is direct to a CCP hosted .pdf file.

There’s some really interesting stats in there, some pretty pictures of Eve ships, and of course a deluge of amazing statistics on mineral prices, the most popular Eve systems, tech 2 ship production, Wormhole habitation numbers, t3 ships destroyed… and LOTS more.

Next years will be interesting to see how planetary interaction affects pos refueling, t2 production & pos construction (not that I know anything about any of these topics…).

Ok so I’ve been slack, I missed out on even reviewing the last major Eve expansion, but on the plus side, I am ready to look at the latest planetary interaction expansion, Tyrannis.

Like all the Eve expansions, Tyrannis is free. I’m so glad to see CCP maintaining free expansions, mainly because it keeps the community together, and of course it saves players a few dollars.

No being left behind, locked out of new content just because you can’t afford it… I like that.

Tyrannis’ major feature is planetary interaction and the Eve Gate player portal.

Planetary Interaction

Planetary interaction, or “PI” for short, is the second way that Eve has allowed players to harvest terrestrial objects – the first being moon mining with a POS which was introduced I don’t know how long ago (feel free to enlighten us).

In what I personally believe was a halting start for PI, CCP allowed players to train planetary interaction skills, but didn’t allow them to buy the command modules to use them for 2 weeks. Odd, especially when you read the patch notes that practically screamed, “Go mine planets NOW!”.

What the 2 week gap did do, was allow alliances to wheel & deal with their members on who gets to mine what planets. A certain planet type (I think storm or plasma) for example has a valuable, easy to extract pos fuel as a resource, so those kinds of planets are no doubt causing heated debate everywhere.

Allowing instant access might have caused a few ruffled feathers in that regard… but on the other hand it wouldn’t have confused 50% of the player base who don’t religiously follow dev blogs and forums.

Perhaps another nice bonus that came from the delay, is that it let me train for 2 weeks and use improved command centers, rather than rushing out & using the crappiest command centers available & wasting my time. I’ve already spent another 20 million isk for 4 advanced command centers though… so I better get training!

Interface & Features

So far the scanning interface is nice. As you can see from these screens I’m really liking how CCP let you see the planets up close & personal. You can zoom WAY in to each site if you want/need to, or just view from orbit.

Very, very pretty looking new planet graphics from Tyrannis.

The only draw back — if you’re viewing in 1920 x 1200 resolution. Textures can start looking a bit low in resolution at max zoom in level. Otherwise, excellent.

The interface is also nice for scanning. Although CCP insists on sticking with its nasty right click menu’s for getting into PI, I’m really liking the scan interface.

Basically, you select the resource you want to scan for, and then use a slider to highlight which deposits are the richest.

The higher your scanning skills the better resolution you get, and the better you can place your command modules.

Here’s a bunch of planetary interaction screens from my first exploration of the system I hang out in – please excuse the blurry bits on some of the shots, better safe than sorry

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Eve Gate

The browser based Eve Gate is a long time coming. World of Warcraft has for years had an in-game calendar system which has always worked very well for guilds. Now, apparently, we’re saved. We can now used calendars to help organize corp events and other important times.

The problem?

Apart from one member, hi Sky! it seems my corp and alliance have no idea the calendar even exists. Its still alliance mails and Eve mails for organising everything… so maybe this is just a growing pain/the way things have always been done, but I’d like to see some more calendar usage before I can judge whether this feature is working well or not.

Next is the mail system included in Eve Gate.

I can’t complain, it works fine and sends messages from outside of Eve online to “inside” of Eve online… sorta like talking over the phone to people in the Matrix when you’re in the Nebber… err, Nebu… however you spell it .

You also get to check your skill training without logging in, check your contacts, set your bio, and use a Facebook like status update which I haven’t seen anyone use yet! But its nice to have all the same, and I guess like the calendar its been too short a period of time to see if people will use it much.

But I imagine Eve Gate will be a god send for people at work all day who want to catch up with Eve online or just get their fix, albeit to a far lesser extent than playing.

The Other New Stuff in Tyrannis

Alienware keyboard effects.

Seriously? Keyboard effects? Why not make new sound effects that everyone can use. I know why of course, the mighty dollar. I have no issue with CCP making more money from Eve, but seriously, why not deliver an obviously valuable feature to all Eve players – Alienware users can still have the flashy-flashy stuff.

Some new image service? I can’t work this one out, I Googled it, but have no idea what its supposed to do or how to use it. Anyone that does know, please enlighten us in the comments.

A raft of other minor bits & pieces, a “mystery dungeon”… nothing to write home about, but generally all welcome.

So what next? If you’re a new player, or a vet thinking of getting back into the action, give Eve’s free 14 day trial a go and checkout Tyrannis for yourself.

Shouldn't this little marketing piece from CCP read 60,000...?

In what can probably be attributed to Alliance tournament 8, 60,453 pilots were logged in simultaneously on June 6th 2010, a new record I think worthy of a blog post.

I’ve written about new Eve subscriber records in the past, as well as commenting on CCP’s slowly but surely growing subscriber base for Eve, and I hope I can continue to do so in the many years ahead. Why…? Because growing subscriber numbers makes potential new players more interested in playing.

No one wants to join a dwindling user base like the (maybe) doomed Age of Conan, Warhammer Online (Australian servers gone!! Nooo!), and maybe even soon, the giant, World of Warcraft.

But lets not fool ourselves… Eve is no WoW.

Its better.

I think part of that objective has to be providing reviews from players other than myself, to provide that realistic angle, and of course to make it a lot more balanced.

Some people like Eve more than I do, some really hate it and quit.

I’d love to get reviews from those people, and everyone in between… so if you’d like to throw up you own review on EveOnlineReview.com, please get in touch with me via my contact page! I might even swing newbs a few million isk depending on how in depth the review is (but not depending on how much you love or hate Eve).

If you’re a blogger, I’m equally keen to hear from you, and am happy for you to include a brief description about yourself and your own site at the end of your own review.

So… I logged into my corp soon after Tyrannis launched to find everyone talking about planetary interaction (what else, right?).

After listening in for a few moments I decided to go to the help channel. Wow… the SCROLL.

The question most asked in the scroll?

“Where do I buy the command modules?”

I reported this back to the corp who all seemed perplexed since CCP had been telling everyone that PI (planetary interaction) wouldn’t be ready for two weeks, due to command modules not being seeded in the market.

Fine I thought, but then I checked the patch notes — i quote! (emphasis is mine)

Planetary Interaction

• The planets of EVE and their resources are now yours to use. There are a small number of exclusions, such as major hub systems, shattered planets, and sites of historical significance.
• Planetary Infrastructure can be built using Command Centers, Extractors, Processors, Storage Facilities and Spaceports. These are all connected using Links.
• Planetary commodities and products can be imported to and exported from a planet using the Customs office, connected to all spaceports built on a planet.
• See CCP Soundwave’s dev blog Impossible is our Middle Name for more information on Planetary Interaction.

Huh.. REALLY? I thought to myself…

Now yours to use? Wrong.

Can be built using command centers? Wrong…

Can be exported & imported? Nope.

CCP has been telling people command modules won’t be seeded for two weeks, yet read the patch notes.

As you can imagine there were some confused players around the traps.

So anyway, I’m not sure what my point is, other than to say, c’mon CCP – tell your marketing department to get their facts straight. Your marketing department won’t do a good job promoting the game when they’re annoying players!

All that junk aside, I’m training up all my planet skills to 4 in preparation for command centers being seeded. I’ll be very interested to see how much isk I can make using them in our alliance’s territory.

Some youtube links on Planetary interaction:

Eve online: Planetary interaction tutorial
Eve planetary interaction quick start guide

Tyrannis is all about planetary interaction, and some extra handy features like Eve Gate, which lets players interact with their characters without actually logging into Eve.

Like most things in Eve it seems planetary interaction will be easy to get into with training just one skill to level 1, but to use more in depth and profitable aspects of the new system, you’ll need to invest some skill training time and of course ISK.

Here’s a video from CCP on planetary interaction.

Enjoy… and I’ll see you when the servers return!

This news report from the volunteer reporters in Eve online describes the retreat of Paxton Federation from Providence space, the area where my alliance has recently invaded and is in the process of consolidating.

Having not been around long enough to know what most wars in Eve progress like, its interesting to see this “formal withdrawal” piece — although in Eve you never know what’s really happening. For all we know CVA and Paxton have new allies coming to support them and will be a major threat in months to come.

I like that about Eve, its backstabbing and scheming at its best!

I actually took part in a few more fleet actions mainly in mopping up POS’s in CVA & Paxton space, but haven’t had time to do a post about it. But suffice it to say it was a bit more fun than the first station bashing exercise I took part in.

It happened when our alliance attacked nearby alliances by firing on their star base facilities and infrastructure buildings, putting them into “reinforced mode”.

Reinforced happens when you take down the shields of the structure to 0%, basically stopping you from doing any further damage for a few days and allowing the alliance (who may all be in bed asleep) to come on and repair it.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the reason why this fleet engagement (or should I say, station engagement) was one of the most boring few hours of my life in Eve Online.

Well… the first 20 or so minutes were thrilling because I was thinking at any turn we were going to engage a big fleet, but they were all asleep, and whoever WAS awake didn’t want to come near us.

Sigh.

I was just in a crappy little rifter in what we called the support fleet. We hung out at stargates and stopped anyone coming through. We killed maybe 10 vessels all up which was ok, but typically they were killed by sensor boosted allies before I could even lock them.

Sigh!

To cap it all off, engaging the station itself was just plain boring.

Imagine 60 ships all sitting at optimum range beating on a station for an hour while no one attacked them… I was ready to log off and go play Battlefield: Bad company 2 for a while.

Maybe if I was actually able to do some damage myself I would have been a bit more engaged… but I still would have been VERY bored.

The sheer time it takes to break down the shields on a station makes the whole exercise very time consuming and boring, and I can’t help but think there has to be a better way.

But still I’m only very new to Eve, and perhaps the fleet we had beating on the station and infra was actually tiny compared to most. We didn’t have any capitals either so that probably slowed things up a lot.

Here’s some screenies of the action. Looks pretty! Like I said in another post, I’d love to see CCP implement some collision graphics to make it look like lasers are hitting the outside of the station, rather than going inside it.

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