EVE Online: Apocrypha Uncovers a New Version of the Universe Itself
CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, today announced the launch of the tenth free expansion for EVE Online, its popular science-fiction massively multi-player online game (MMOG). EVE Online: Apocrypha is the most ambitious EVE expansion in the game’s over five year history and it coincides with the March 10th, 2009 release of EVE Online as a boxed product through a partnership with Atari.
In addition, we are offering an entirely reworked New Player Experience for those joining (or rejoining) the game – giving them better insight into how to thrive in a truly limitless universe. We’ve already launched EVElopedia—a great repository for information on all things EVE where our players are also building their own living history of the previous five years of Alliance warfare, political intrigue and nostalgic recollection
“Just this past week we broke our concurrent user record with 45,186 people flying unbound in the same game world at the same time—a huge percentage of our quarter of a million current subscribers and a true testament to EVE in our sixth year of operation,” said EVE Online Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson. “Today is an unprecedented time to start playing, as you can get ahead of the curve before Apocrypha releases in stores and our hard work hits the server cluster. It’ll be easier than ever to get ‘lost in the wormhole’ that is EVE with what we have planned for the future of our expanding universe.”
Leading up to the release of EVE Online: Apocrypha and the boxed version of EVE Online in stores, we’ll be revealing more features on www.eveonline.com.
Availability:
EVE Online: Apocrypha will be available at retail stores across the galaxy in March this year and as a free download at www.eveonline.com/download/ for existing subscribers. A new Premium graphics client for Mac will also be included in the retail box.
Visit the EVE website now to sign up for a free 14-day trial account or to reactivate your account to get ahead of the curve.
Eve Online has again been shaken recently by the discovery of a major exploit in which several very large player run corporations have been exploting and taking advantage of for some time.
Eve Online recently announced this in their press release (see below). There is also a massive discussion thread on the forums here.
There’s also an interesting thread on Scrap Heap Challenge here.
We have discovered an exploit involving starbases that made it possible for some players to gain an unfair advantage over others. We have taken measures to address this by removing the starbases used in the exploit. Additionally, assets gained from its use have been seized and bans levied against the players involved. We will continue to monitor the game for issues such as this one. We encourage players to create a petition if become aware of any activities which may permit others to gain an unfair advantage in the game.
Update by Customer Support:
On December 7th 2008, a date which will live in infamy, a petition from a concerned player alerted us to a serious problem with Starbase reactors. The petition had been filed five days earlier, a far longer waiting time than we can accept with our current queue status and we have now taken measures to fix that. We immediately started investigating the issue and found that there was indeed a problem and that it was being exploited to gain unfair advantages.
We discovered seven corporations with multiple Starbases set up for the express purpose of exploiting the issue. Three of those corporations were members of two alliances. We took immediate action against the offenders and banned over 70 accounts and destroyed all the Starbases run by the corporations in question. All the offending corporations are now effectively inactive as a result of our actions.
The corporations were producing high end materials for T2 production. Working with the Research & Statistics team we have established that the effects on the markets have been considerable and far reaching. The effects of our actions against the exploiters will also be felt on the market as the production of the materials has been cut substantially. However, supply should increase again once players have mastered the alchemy process.
We are still conducting operations to deal with this matter and we will keep you posted on the progress and results as things develop.
Update: 11th December 2008:
Here is an update on the investigation into the Starbase reactor exploit that we are currently conducting:
1. CCP has confirmed that this bug has been exploitable since February 2007. Changes to the Starbases code from launch until February 2007 are minimal and very unlikely to have caused the bug. So at this point we are working on the assumption that this bug has been exploitable since the release of player owned structures on November 24th, 2004. We will therefore focus solely on looking at Starbases data in order to determine who has been using this exploit, and for how long.
2. CCP has been able to restore older databases that show us that the bug has been exploited since at least January this year, but at a lower scale than in the last few months. The players involved then were the same ones that we found and banned recently. We are now working on restoring data from 2006 which will take us several days. It is uncertain if we will be able to have answers on that before holiday vacations.
3. CCP has been able to access data from our old petition system. We have been unable to confirm that a petition was filed in 2004, 2005 or 2006 pointing out this bug with Starbases. We urge anyone with information on who and when a petition on this issue was filed to contact us directly through the petition system under the Exploit Category. Alternatively, an email sent to community@eve-online.com with details on the matter would be much appreciated.
4. The full investigation will take several weeks. CCP will be in direct contact with the CSM to discuss this issue and we will provide information to the community as it becomes available.
5. We have done a thorough investigation on our staff members and CSM members and found no links to this exploit.
6. Our actions so far have included the eradication of 178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors running in the bugged state. We have also banned all those we have found directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to conclude.
Possibly one of the funniest and yet informative video reviews ever of Eve Online is the very amusing review by Yahtzee from The Escapist.
Personally I think Eve Online is the most challenging, engaging and interesting MMO games available today. Having been a player for over four years now, I still find that I am just scratching the service in terms of finding things to keep me entertained - and keep me paying my subscription.
But here’s the video - it’s still a classic.
EvE Mag recently published an “anonymous” letter from an alleged eve player who has developed and uses a Macro to mine.
As all good eve players know, this is against the EULA and will get you banned. RPGN.net do NOT condone this activity, but it’s an interesting article and I’m going to re-post it here.
You can also read the original at EvE Mag here.
(mac – ro).Computer Science. An instruction that represents a sequence of instructions in abbreviated form.
Not only am I LIKE the Cheshire cat, I’m also just like you! ~The Evil Macro’er
Please let me introduce myself. I am an American, in my early thirties and I have two kids, two cats, and a neurotic dog with a Quaker Parrot buddy. I’ve played some MMOs for 4 years at a time. I like Front Lines: Fuel of War and ketchup goes on just about everything but a good steak. I am a degreed professional but not a programmer, I served in the military and I knew Obama would be the winner. I am also an amateur macro’er. Yes, I have macro’ed the holy crap out of certain video games. I’ve been doing it for more than 8 years now so tell me; at what point did you notice your Eve gaming experience going down the tubes because of me? I’ll bet your downward spiral really has nothing to do with me macro’ing, now does it?
Here’s the latest teaser trailer for Eve’s upcoming expansion Quantum Rise - which goes live tomorrow!
Here’s the latest upto date Expansion Patch Notes.
Players have great things to look forward to in EVE Online: Quantum Rise. Corporations will be able to set their products apart from the rest by building trust in their goods through customizable storefronts. The backbone of EVE’s vibrant economy, industrial ships are being rebalanced and optimized to better suit the needs of haulers and industrialists, including the latest edition to the fleet, a massive capital industrial ship dubbed the Orca. A new certificate system will give a quick and verifiable means to discern a pilot’s skill level in trading, gunnery or countless other professions, providing plenty of bragging rights. Meanwhile, the introduction of a medal system allows corporations to distinguish their most valued pilots and honor them for their achievements.
The staged delivery of EVE Online: Quantum Rise began with the recent implementation of technological breakthroughs such as StacklessIO and EVE64 which upgraded the server hardware and streamlined communication between server and client to severely reduce lag. The reality of thousands of ships simultaneously engaged in adrenaline-charged combat is at hand and several fleet battles have already been fought using this new technology. Emboldened by the significant effects these improvements bring to high-level gameplay, CCP will push forward with a myriad of hardware and server improvements to bring the most massive player vs player experience available, expanding a boundless universe into a limitless one.
“We are very proud to be delivering this expansion, both in terms of features and the sheer performance increases made possible by deep refactoring of selected portions of our network and server code, complimented with the finest hardware we could find,” says Torfi Frans Ólafsson, Senior Producer of EVE Online. “I can’t imagine a better game where you can engage hundreds of people simultaneously in highly immersive tactical combat or simply sit back and make millions off of the conflict via research, manufacturing or logistics. You choose your destiny; that’s the beauty of it.”
Further features also include:
Published quarterly, E-ON is EVE Online’s official magazine: now 84 pages of glossy, high-colour news, interviews, previews, exclusive fiction and player guides, all of it professionally written and produced by a dedicated team of writers and designers from within the EVE community and beyond.
Click here to order the Magazine.
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
The theme for this issue of E-ON is the economy. Yes, we know it’s all doom and gloom in the real world, but in EVE things are actually doing OK. Thing is, not everyone understands how it all works, yet perhaps we all should, beyond the buy low/sell high mantra that some like to wheel out to prove they’ve got it all figured out.
Like some great unseen power, the economy of EVE surrounds and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together. Luckily we’ve found someone who can teach us all about its mysterious ways without continually putting nouns before adjectives and spouting lots of voodoo nonsense… and he isn’t all that diminutive either. And, no, we’re not referring to CCP Chronotis, who kindly lets us in on CCP’s thinking behind what will be the focus of the coming winter expansion, and why even those who might have already dismissed it as one for carebears should sit up and take notice.
Read more
WAAAAGH!!!
We apologize for the short notice but our team has been working long into the night to make sure 1.0.2 came to you as soon as possible…and come it has!
Starting at 7AM EDT all North American servers will be brought down to begin the update, Oceanic servers will follow at 9AM EDT. We anticipate North American servers to be online by 12PM (Noon) EDT with Oceanic servers being back online by 1PM EDT.
You can find all of the exciting changes 1.0.2 has to offer right here. As always check the Herald for important information and updates.
Have fun!
Update - 7AM EDT: All NA Servers are now down for the update. Oceanic servers are still scheduled to come down to begin the update at 9AM EDT.
Halo Wars is a real-time action strategy game for the Xbox 360 that allows the player to control large armies and to shrewdly direct them in realistic warfare. Set early in the iconic war between the Covenant and UNSC - made famous by the Halo FPS games - Halo Wars provides a new angle on the war while bringing new heroes to the battle.
In Halo Wars fans will be able to control armies of units that are familiar to them from the FPS games, such as UNSC Marines, Scorpion Tanks, and the iconic Warthog.
For those who havn’t seen it yet, here’s the latest Halo Wars trailer.
Having been a little aprehensive at first, and a little jaded myself after participation in the Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning beta, I decided to wait for some of the hype to settle down before taking a closer look at the latest MMO on the block.
When I realised that EA we’re offering the game as a direct download from their website, I couldn’t resist downloading it last weekend and giving it a good look through.
I am pretty impressed so far to be honest - it’s not perfect but then what game is right? It did meet my expectations, and exceeded in some cases.
After reading a lot of reviews, I came across this one posted on the Eurogamer website. I think it sums up nicely the entire gameplay pretty well and so wanted to share. Here’s the original link, or pasted below for the lazy.
So what do YOU think - is everyone having as much fun as I am? Oh, and one last thing - if you watch the entire intro video on the game it is absolutely amazing. Fantastico!
We just launched LocoTV.com.au!
Loco TV is an on demand television station.
This means that you can watch the shows you want to watch, any time you want to watch them. The vast amount of our content is free to stream to your PC, TV or web enabled device. For instructions, check the How Do I Use It section. You will also be able to download our shows to your 3G phone, iPod or iPhone for a small charge (coming soon).
There are many places on the Internet that you can download and watch TV shows, but not like these. LocoTV film, produce and broadcast their own shows on a variety of different subjects and styles.
