Eve Online has recently turned 10 years old, entering it's second decade of existence since the server opened in 2003. Most games would be tired and played out at this point, but CCP has no intentions of letting New Eden grow stale.

At EVE Fanfest this year there were several important announcements involving Dust514 and EVE, and the game's 11th year is shaping up to be a good one.



Ship Rebalancing

Over the last several months, a team at CCP has been slaving away at completely rebalancing every ship in the game from the bottom up, starting with frigates. Nicknamed tiericide, this process aims to make every ship viable in various situations, instead of the previous system, where most of the ships in a class belonged to a strict hierarchy, with some ships being universally better than others. These changes have been celebrated by the community at large, and ships that have languished in irrelevance for years are now enjoying their place in new fleet concepts and small gang warfare.

A panel on ship rebalancing covered what the team is working on at the moment (battleships are next on the chopping block), and where the team might do a second polishing pass on ships that are still a little unbalanced or lacking purpose.

Economy

Fanfest had panels on both the EVE economy and the process of merging it with Dust's. CCP has two full-time economists on the payroll to help them try to understand the complex working's of EVE's economy. Full integration of the two game's economies is going to take a long time because Dust's market is still very fragile, and the disparity in ISK value between games is huge.

The next step in the process is to allow ISK transactions between the two games. A likely way to allow this to happen without flooding Dust with EVE's massive amount of liquid ISK is to have any transactions taxed. The next step before full integration is a limited market integration with only some items being transferable. This will probably manifest as EVE players manufacturing and trading Dust weapons.

Dust

Dust is looking forward to several changes in the form of the Uprising build, it's first expansion, of sorts. Improvements include changes to the UI to improve usability, a revamping of skill progression, including racial drop suit skills, a huge update to the graphics as well as framerate and performance (both huge issues in the game's current state), new items and dropsuits, and it's big new feature: planetary conquest.

Planetary conquest will finally let Dust affect EVE in a serious way. Dust players can take leadership positions in EVE, and capturing a planet has benefits for that corporation's players in both games. This is the next big step in integrating the two games, and if CCP can pull it off, it'll be the first time this kind of thing has been possible on such a scale in videogames. CCP is slowly proving to the world that their vision of New Eden as a set of completely integrated games isn't just a pipe dream.

EVE Online

EVE's coming changes are as extensive as Dust's. In addition to graphical and UI improvements, along with continued ship rebalancing, EVE can look forward to further iteration on Crimewatch (different security statuses for each of the four races), changes to exploration and hacking, the removal of ice belts from the game and moving them to anomalies (as well as adjusting yields so that highsec can only supply about 80% of the universe's needs), rebalancing ore refines to further increase the viability of nullsec mining, increasing the number of available production and research slots across the board in player-constructed outposts, tweaks to nullsec ratting anomalies to bring rarer anomaly types up in value, and changes to Tech II production and newly-seeded r64 moon minerals to bring r64's back as the most valuable resources.

The Second Decade

EVE Online is an old game; Ancient by most standards, but this year's Fanfest has demonstrated quite nicely that CCP still has some tricks up it's sleeve.

There are well documented patterns of player behavior on a corporate or alliance level in Eve that happen when a corporation or alliance are faced with intense adversity. Many wars in Eve are trivial in terms of actual combat and hardship. As described in the above link, most player groups reach a breaking point, and once they snap, hostilities are effectively over and all that remains is cleanup (conquering their space).

Some alliances buck this trend by displaying a level of tenacity and resilience that most organizations don’t have, and for their effort their stories are the ones people remember in a game with 10 years of player-driven history behind it.


Red Alliance is one of the game’s oldest surviving alliances, being created in early 2005. These days RED is only a pale shadow of it’s former strength, but back in 2006 it was the largest and most powerful russian alliance in the game. Living in the southeast and villainized by the rest of the south, RED found itself at war with an entire coalition of alliances bent on wiping them off the map. They slowly lost territory until eventually only their capital system of C-J6MT remained under their control, but they never broke, and managed to eventually retake their homeland and take part in the Great Wars against Band of Brothers. Despite their lack of status in nullsec these days, this is what many players remember when they hear about Red Alliance, and it’s a standard that most newer russian alliances try to hold themselves to.


Despite their status as one of the game’s largest and most successful alliances, Goonswarm started out as a young underdog alliance in a universe that reviled new and unskilled players. Band of Brothers, widely considered the strongest alliance in the game at the time, decided that Goonswarm was a plague on the greater Eve community, and decided to snuff them out before they became too much of a problem. BoB camped the fledgling alliance into their home station in NPC Syndicate for two weeks, refusing to allow them to undock, and even remotely buying all of the station’s supplies and relisting them at exorbitant rates. After those two weeks, Goonswarm had stopped showing signs of life. They weren’t posting on the forums, and weren’t flying in nullsec. With the now infamous phrase “There are no goons.” BoB declared victory and returned home. What really happened is that for the two weeks Goonswarm was trapped into their station alliance leaders put out a gag order on the entire alliance to give the illusion of abandoning the game. They vowed to themselves that no matter what they did they would wipe BoB off the face of the game’s map forever as payment for what had been done. They allied themselves with Red Alliance, moved to Insmother, and began systematically annihilating every alliance in the south between them and BoB. Three years later, they had conquered BoB’s space and forcefully disbanded their alliance. To this day Goonswarm has had a hand in defeating no less than three different incarnations of the alliance Band of Brothers.


The Great Wars was an extended conflict that had two seperate parts, known and the first and second Great War. The First Great War began with the unveiling of the game’s first Titan by Ascendant Frontier, followed by it’s destruction by Band of Brothers, and ended with the Red Swarm Federation halted at the gates of “Fortress Delve” (consisting of the three neighboring regions of Delve, Querious, and Period Basis). With all sides thoroughly worn out from 18 months of nonstop warfare, battles slowed and the conflict petered out, with Band of Brothers and it’s allies losing nearly the entire south, but still in control of the most coveted regions in the game. The second great war didn’t go so well for them however.


I saved the best example for last.

The conflict last summer known to everyone as “Delve 2012”, and to some as “Delve IV” or “Delve V” (it depends on how many times you’ve been there) turned out to be a complete rout. A war that was hyped up to be the clashing of two massive powers ended up being a one-sided curbstomp. The Southern Coalition managed to put up so little resistance that TEST and the CFC gave complete control of strategic subcapital fleets to whoever wanted to command them. Junior FCs ran wild through Delve blowing up anyone who would undock, and massive supercapital fleets reinforced and destroyed sovereignty structures so fast that friendly logistics couldn’t anchor their own structures fast enough. Throughout the bloodbath, a single 400 man alliance managed to maintain their sovereignty longer than anyone else, defending their besieged home while other alliances cowered or fled. WALLTREIPERS ALLIANCE (you aren’t allowed to not capitalize it), put up the kind of unrelenting resistance that puts stories like the Battle of Thermopylae to shame. They ninja-repaired their station and Territorial Control Unit, stole enemy Sovereignty Blockade Units and sold them to buy more ships to fight with, camped the gates into their system 23/7, and hunted down any ship stupid enough to light a cyno in their system. Their defense was so full-proof and went on for so much longer than anybody expected that they started to gain admirers. This tiny alliance had the heart of a lion, and pilots in the CFC wanted them to keep fighting. When word got around that WALLTREIPERS was running out of ammo to kill them with, people from the CFC petitioned to give them the ammo they needed to keep going.



Sadly, their defense eventually came to an end, but only after repelling no less than 5 full-scale attempts to take their home system of T-IPZB. WALLTREIPERS proved themselves as one of the most tenacious and capable alliances in the game had ever seen, and they did so under the most hellish circumstances imaginable.

The Brave 300
Every now and again, an alliance comes along that decides fleeing isn’t on their to-do list, excuses aren’t an option, and vow to stand their ground and go down swinging. The results can be extraordinary, and are what Eve legends are made of.

In the wake of the almost-war that didn't happen between the Clusterfuck Coalition and Honeybadger coalition (post about it is here), there was an unbelievable level of complaining from the community, especially by neutral 3rd parties hoping to either watch the mayhem or see a long-time enemy go down in flames. People mourned the death of PvP and the fact that the two organizations wanted to safeguard their assets rather than generate content. Less than a week later Eve Online experienced a supercapital conflict so large that it would deadlock the node the fight took place on and crash the servers for Eve's sister game, Dust514.

During a Goonswarm capital ship operation to drop on an ongoing lowsec fight, the bridging Titan accidentally jumped instead of bridging to a cyno beacon, and was promptly hot dropped by a Pandemic Legion supercap fleet. In an attempt to overwhelm the enemy fleet and save the Titan, the rest of Goonswarm's supercap fleet jumped in and started fighting. News of the fight spread like wildfire, and alliances from all over New Eden scrambled to get in on the action, especially enemies of the CFC. At the battle's peak, the system of Asakai had over 2900 pilots in local.


A snapshot of the fighting at it's peak

Forming up multiple subcapital fleets to evac the capitals which were now in over their heads, Goonswarm lit evacuation cynos all across Tribute, and the supercapitals, which can't be tackled by standard warp disrupters, jumped to safety, but not before losing two Titans and a handful of Supercarriers in the fray. With only standard capital ships still on field, the fleets fought a losing battle as they tried to clear tackling ships from the field, allowing the Carriers and Dreadnaughts to jump out.

Time Dialation (a system implemented by CCP that "stretches" time in nodes with heavy activity so that the server can process all of the information it's being fed) maxed out at 10%, meaning that for every second that passed in Asakai, 10 seconds passed in the rest of New Eden. Despite slowing the game to such a crawling pace, the action was so intense that game clients began crashing and the server started dropping commands, leaving players stranded in space, unable to move their ship or see what was happening around them. About halfway through the fight, reports began coming in that Dust514's servers had crashed, rendering the game unplayable, in sequence with the fight unfolding in Eve. Many players thought it to be a fitting welcome for Dust plyers to the world of New Eden, where the unexpected can and will happen.



Eventually only a few Goonswarm capital ships remained, permenantly tackled by the opposing fleets, and were left to go out in a blaze of spartan glory. With the system's time still dialated, it was a slow death, and all the pilots could do was try to make the enemy work for their kills.

In the end, over 300 billion ISK in ships were destroyed, and at roughly $18/550m ISK, the butcher's bill for this fight comes to nearly $10,000 USD. Just because there isn't a war, doesn't mean that there isn't any fighting. Even in peacetime the battles rage on.

Edit: As killmails continue to stream in and the dust from this fight settles, the confirmed overall ISK loss from this fight is now over 830 billion ISK, nearly three times my initial estimate.

Ketsui is a vertical arcade shoot em' up developed by Cave with an interesting story behind it. Released in early 2003, it's one of three games (three and a half if you hate whole numbers) released in 2002 and 2003 for Cave's custom IGS PGM hardware. All three games, Dodonpachi: Dai Ou Jou, Espgaluda, and Ketsui, are considered to be of excellent quality and are extremely popular even today. A japanese developer named Arika made plans to port all three games to the Playstation 2. Dodonpachi:DOJ and Espgaluda were released and praised by the community for being extremely accurate and faithful ports for their time, but the Ketsui port was scrapped. According to Arika, there were problems emulating a certain part of the game. A section in Stage 5 involves flying down a mine shaft. The illusion of the player descending was achieved by swapping the image in the background plane and scrolling the new image in reverse, and then swapping to yet another background plane at the bottom of the shaft and reversing the scroll direction a second time.


The aforementioned problematic segment is at 3:20

Apparently the PS2's hardware was incapable of managing this at an arcade perfect framerate and the section suffered from terrible slowdown. Unsatisfied with the port's single imperfection, Arika opted to cancel the title entirely rather than release what they viewed as a flawed product. Apparently the port was otherwise perfect, and Cave gave them the go-ahead to ship the title with the slowdown intact, but Arika refused, and so Ketsui went without a port, and remained out of the reach of western fans unwilling or able to spend thousands purchasing the game's arcade PCB for the better part of a decade.

In 2008 japanese developer 5pb announced plans to port Ketsui to Xbox Live Arcade, but Microsoft rejected the title, claiming to want to cut down on the number of arcade ports on XBLA. Ketsui was finally announced to have a full on-disc release in 2009 but was pushed back another year, being released in 2010 instead.

After seven years of elusive existence, the game was finally available to anyone with a 360 capable of playing NTSC-J games. During those seven years, Ketsui garnered status as one of the best games of it's type, strongly praised by the few who had played it, and remaining one of Cave's most highly rated titles after it's console release. It's also properly emulated in MAME now, further increasing it's availability to western audiences.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this story. One is that Microsoft sucks because they hate arcade games despite having a service called "Xbox Live Arcade". Another is that apparently the PS2 is kind of a shitty console, because it was incapable of emulating a game that was developed for and ran perfectly well on a printed circuit board with only 20Mhz of processing power. The third and final lesson is that they don't make game developers the way they used to. It's hard to imagine any studio these days working as hard as Arika did back then to perfectly emulate Ketsui on new hardware, and even harder to imagine that studio having the balls to dump the entire project because they were unable to accurately recreate a single tiny section of the game. That is a testament to perfection, my friends, and one that you are unlikely to see in an age with humongous zero-day patches and Silent Hill ports without any fog.

Eve is famous for it's stories of large sweeping nullsec conflicts and constant backstabbing and subterfuge, but outside of those headline grabbing activities are entire playstyles that are often left ignored. Many people read about the goings on in Eve and tell themselves that there is no way they are able to dedicate that much of their life to playing the game when right behind that curtain of news headlines are any number of engaging activities that take infinitely less commitment to enjoy to the fullest.


If you want to experience the excitement of player versus player combat in Eve without dedicating your life to a nullsec alliance, Red vs Blue is where you want to be. Two player owned corporations, the Red Federation and the Blue Republic, locked in a mutual war with each other in highsec. The focus is on affordable PvP in small, cheap ships with little necessary commitment. Just pick a side and join a fleet. There are self-imposed rules in order to keep the fights simple, fast and fun. Occasionally the two sides will have themed fights using specific ships or modules, or team up in a "purple fleet" and go roaming around lowsec looking for fights. This is the ground-level when it comes to PvP and the organization is fun and successful enough that it runs off of donations from players.


Often considered and intended to be a lite edition of nullsec sov wars, faction warfare takes place in nullsec between the game's four races: the Minmatar, Gallente, Amarr, and Caldari. Players run complexes in deep space and fight with another faction to increase their control in various solar systems in order to capture them from the other faction for theirs. Faction Warfare recently got a huge revamp, with two expansions dedicated to developing and balancing it. The barrier for entry is extremely low and is a good way to familiarize yourself with the game's mechanics and get used to flying in more dangerous solar systems.


The barrier of entry for incursions is higher than either Red vs Blue or faction warfare, but it's a strong comunity of players and a great way to enjoy the game as a team activity. Constellations across the galaxy are occasionally invaded by an NPC force known as Sansha's Nation. These NPCs are tough and smart, using what CCP referrs to as "sleeper AI" to mimic the behavior a real human might have in a fight. They switch targets, use warp scramblers and ECM and generaly are much tougher to kill than regular NPC pirates. Fleets of players come in and clear systems out until a control meter hits 0%, and then a final boss spawns for the players to kill. When this is complete then the incursions ends and participating players are rewarded. There are two groups that run incursions in empire space, and they differ in how they tank their ships. High SP characters are generally needed to do incursions, but the requirements other than that are fairly low.


Another activity that isn't for brand new players is wormholes. If nullsec politics or highsec PvE is too dull for you than wormholes are a great way to inject excitement into your game while also making fistfulls of money. Wormholes spawn all over New Eden which lead to systems far outside the known galaxy (k-space) known as wormhole space (w-space). There are no stations or NPC factions in these systems, and gameplay is very different here. All NPC pirates have sleeper AI similar to Incursion NPCs, the local chat window is delayed, so it's harder to know if there is anyone else nearby, and you need to probe out the wormholes to exit and enter the area. There are a lot of corporations and alliances dedicated to exploring these wormholes and exploiting them for money. Occasionally these groups run into each other in w-space and duke it out. Because of w-space's massive profitability, battles in w-space between wormhole corps can involve only a couple dozen players, but result in as much ISK lost as a huge 400 player fight in nullsec. It's a different life, and one that very few players ever experience.

Nullsec politics and fights grab all of the gaming headlines because they are bold in-your-face events frequently involving thousands of players, large personalities, and thousands of dollars worth of in-game assets, but Eve Online is more than just the big battles and masterminded plots. If the game fascinates you and you want to try it but are worried about minimum level of dedication it requires, then know that you don't have to go all-in if you don't want to. Eve is the most complex game on the market today. There are hundreds of game systems available and an uncountable number of playstyles to try out. There's definitely one for you to enjoy.

(Note: A universe map can be found [here] to help unfamiliar readers with locations and general movement in the story)

Read Part One: [x]

Spoiling for a fight after an unexciting recent campaign and hoping to settle some bad blood with Against All Authorities, the CFC was all too happy to help fight a war in Delve for their best friends. They had been there four times previously, so they had particular knowledge about the region and how to attack and defend it. In a single weekend the entire coalition migrated it's war machine south and in an overwhelming show of power even dropped 60 billion ISK to construct their own outpost station in F2OY-X to base out of, rather than using the station in a next door system.



The arrival of the CFC shattered the Southern Coalition's morale, and the next few weeks were an orgy of destruction as supercapital fleets rampaged across the region unabated while SoCo fleets sat camped in a station, unable to do anything. Delve and Querious fell with next to zero resistance. The CFC decided that their obligation was complete and began to withdraw and let Test and PL finish mopping up what was left and sort the spoils amongst themselves.



Part of the agreement for CFC assistance was that Goonswarm would maintain a handful of embassy systems in the area. The reason for this was to show the CFC's determination to keep SoCo out of Delve and act as a deterrant. If SoCo got rebellious and tried pushing any boundaries, the CFC would bring down the hammer. Unfortunately there was miscommunication about this to the line members in Test, and fueled by enemy propoganda, the average member took this as Goonswarm trying to keep Test on a short leash.

Eventually Goonswarm gave in to Test requests for independence and left the region completely to stand or fall on it's own. Both leadership and line members were left feeling unappreciated after being asked to leave mere weeks after help was requested of them.

In the following months, Test and PL began forming their own coalition, called the Honey Badger Coalition, with their own allies and with their own goals. They continued the fight against SoCo, pushing through Querious to Catch, Against All Authorities' long-time home region. Goonswarm and the CFC had their own business of clearing out the north and making room for allies who had spent years living in some of the poorest regions in the game. With the new separation of interests, and wanting to respect Test's request for independance, many alliances in the CFC mutually reset their standings with Test, however Goonswarm and Test remained blue to each other.

Throughout January 2013, tensions started simmering between Test and an alliance in the CFC called Fatal Ascension. They accused each other of breaking Non-Infrastructure-Pacts by attacking jump bridges and camping station undocks. The two organizations had previous spats at various intervals and it had become a running joke within the CFC. Hardly anyone remembers or cares how the bad blood started, at this point it's simply a matter of he said/she said over which alliance is more terrible, but this time was different.



Test's CFC diplomat mentioned in a CFC diplomat chat channel that Test's CEO, Montolio, was planning to trick FA into attacking Test sovereignty so that Test could go to war with FA while still remaining blue to Goonswarm. Naturally this didn't sit well with Goonswarm, so they quietly removed Test's access privileges to the diplo channel in order to cut off any further discussion of the subject and hopefully diffuse the situation. Over the next few days Montolio removed all CFC access to Test's chat network and made several public announcements and broadcasts related to the incident, even going as far as to imply that he was opening lines of communication with alliances opposed to Goonswarm in preperation for a potential conflict.

As of January 22nd Goonswarm hasn't taken any further action, but The Mittani, Goonswarm's CEO, released an alliance update candidly informing everyone of the situation. Goonswarm leadership's official stance on the situation is that the entire problem stems from Montolio being an impetulent child and whether or not the situation escelates is up to his ego. He stated that Goonswarm has no problem with Test's line members or a majority of Test leadership.

A notional war between the CFC and the HBC could potentially be the single largest conflict in the history of Eve Online. Goonswarm and Test alone have over 20,000 characters between them, and estimations for the size of either coalition range anywhere from 15,000-30,000 apiece. Both coalitions command massive supercapital fleets and scores of titans, along with trillions of ISK worth of ships and war material. If both sides fully commited to a war, then the levels of destruction would be unheard of. Unrelated parties would likely try to get in on the action since both coalitions have plenty of enemies that would leap at the opportunity to get revenge.

So where does that leave the two alliances? Both are staring each other down with a hand resting on their gun while the two respective coalition's stand by, watch, and wait. How will the story end? Will the whole situation blow over as egos cool and reason prevails, or will it be galaxy-altering conclusion to a three-year friendship?