Raiding

When Runes of Magic launched with the subtitle 'Rise of the Demon Lord' somehow we knew there would be a day when we faced off against the big guy. Sure enough, the folks at Frogster Interactive and Runewaker Entertainment have finally unleashed His Terrible Demonicness on the world of Taborea in the form of a shiny new 12-player dungeon.

Located in the Naga Plains, Demon Stronghold is a richly textured raid area, offering four mini-bosses before you come up against the Demon Lord Sirloth. Word is that the final fight is a 4-phase battle, which will challenge players to think fast. Those adventurers who succeed in defeating him will be able to carry off the Demon Lord's weapons.

We've gathered up some concept art and screenshots from this shiny new raid and piled them into a gallery for you to check out. Considering how cool this area looks, we're curious to see what kinds of goodies players will carry off from this new raid instance. Should be tasty!

The term "corporation" in EVE Online is something of a misnomer. While a corp can be run as a full-on business entity, most are just like guilds or clans in other MMOs. It's a group of pilots that join together under one banner for mutual benefit, organised operations or even just to have some nice people to chat to while you mine. For those that can't find a good player-run corporation that's compatible with their aims and goals, there are a few options. One option is to stay in one of the many NPC-run corps but perhaps the most interesting choice is to start your own corp. With the upcoming 11% tax being applied to NPC corps, some of the people currently in those corps may even want to start their own one-man corps to evade the tax.

Running your own corporation provides you with additional tools like corporate hangers and the ability to set up starbases or declare war on other corps. It also opens the opportunity to recruit like-minded individuals and friends into your group so you can work together on anything from mining and mission-running to full-on PvP and piracy. EVE is one of those games that really starts to take off once you start working together with people. Starting your own corp can, however, be a daunting task that carries with it responsibilities and risks.

For all those that have ever wanted to run their own corporation, in this article I explain how to the process of starting a corp, recruiting and keeping the corp secure against threats. I also go into detail on some of the corp operations you can hope to enjoy with friends.

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EverQuest II's next game update Shards of Destiny is now live, and that means that players can take advantage of a number of new features. We've summed up the biggest ones just below:

• Chronomagic: Visit some new "mysterious erudites" that have moved into Freeport, Kelethin, Neriak, Qeynos and Gorothyn, to lower your adventuring level for a small cost. This allows for grouping with lower levels, and a lot of older content has been revamped with more frequent bosses and changed loot rarities to make this option more attractive. There are also 37 new missions related to going back and seeing dungeons of differing levels.
  
• Achievements: A new way to compete with other players. Most achievements will just give Achievement Points, but some will offer non-stat item rewards. Achievement categories include Exploring, Dungeons, Quests, Raids, Player versus Player, and Tradeskills.
• Miragul's Planar Shard: a x4 raid zone and the first in EverQuest II to have a scaled difficulty feature.
• The Shard of Love: Choose to help or hinder the Sisters of Erollisi, beginning by visiting either a Disciple of Love or a Disciple of Hate.
• Teleportation Spires Event: Rewards are up for grabs for those who can assist the Quellithulians with the reactivation of the Ulterian Teleportation Spires.

Check out the full patch notes here, and before you head in-game, dip past the break to see the official Shards of Destiny trailer.

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There are a lot of players and former players of EverQuest that would love to see a server that is locked down to just the first few expansions, or maybe none at all. While the latest game update, Ancient Heroes (which goes live today) doesn't bring a new server, there will be a new "classic EQ" experience introduced to the game. An NPC in the Plane of Knowledge will transform your character into a level 50 (the level cap once upon a time) decked out in launch-era equipment, and send you off to fight the Kobolds in Nagafen's Lair or the Frogloks of Guk -- or even to raid the old dragons, Lady Vox (pictured above) and Lord Nagafen. There will be new rewards waiting for those that choose to take up arms in old-school fashion.

This character morphing is the primary focus of the Ancient Heroes update, but in fact, there is more character morphing to be had with some new Marketplace items. A Potion of Amnesia will allow you to change your character's name, and a Potion of Disgenderment will flip their gender -- both changes are permanent, though you should just be able to buy another potion if need be. The Witness Protection Pack combines the two new potions, for those situations where you've really driven your reputation into the ground and need to start afresh.

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While Champions Online is designed to allow players to live out their fantasy of being a lone superhero badass taking on all-comers solo, if that's what they're after, there's also content and features aimed at groups of players. A new video hosted at GameTrailers and featuring Bill Roper is focused on the things that await people who are interested in getting together with others to tackle crime and evil. The title of the video leads you to believe that it is all about SuperGroups (Champions Online's guilds), but most of Roper's comments are related to grouping in general.

The reinforcement system, lairs/headquarters, group events, multiple-group content and different roles in groups all come up during the featurette. Head past the break to see how you can help save the world with a little help from your friends.

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If it seems like I've gone wormhole crazy lately, that's because I have. The wormholes that arrived with the Apocrypha expansion have infiltrated and enriched many different aspects of EVE Online, from exploration and corporate goals to small gang PvP and piracy. In previous articles, I looked at preparing for an expedition, untangled the mystery of the Sleepers and told the story of a tense week for Total Comfort alliance in the Sleeper's den. After a week spent hunting wormhole-dwellers for fun and profit, this week's EVE Evolved is dedicated to the fine art of being an interstellar cut-throat as I delve into the world of wormhole piracy.

Wormhole piracy is one of the few professions where small gang warfare is most prevalent. While many pirates have already begun including wormhole systems in their roaming gangs, our corporation (and I'm sure others) have come across a much more effective method. By setting up your own pirate staging base inside a wormhole system, your corp can use its regular outgoing wormholes to wreak havoc in systems all across EVE. Using this method, it's possible to spring attacks on people without anyone even seeing you coming. Whether you're planning surprise attacks on 0.0 systems or hunting in the 2500 new unknown sleeper systems, wouldn't you like to run your own pirate way-station?

Read on for an informative guide on using wormholes to wreak havoc around EVE and make a profit in the process.

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One of the things that people love about MMOs is that there is often a lot of choice as to how they spend their time in-game. Some like to PvP, some like leveling a whole platoon of alt characters and others enjoy crafting. Then there is raiding. For some folks, an MMO just isn't complete without a fulfilling raiding experience built in, with the promise of some of the best shinies in the game to reward them for their effort.

The raiding game isn't for everyone though. Though this isn't always the case, raiding often requires quite a lot of commitment to a game (and probably a guild too); having to be online and available at a certain period of time for a minimum number of hours is just too much for a game to ask for many people. But for the devoted raiders, the fun and rewards that are had when finally beating a hellishly difficult encounter are worth the extra effort. So we ask you readers, are you a regular raider? Hardcore, or keeping it more casual? Is raiding content one of the first things you look into when searching for a new game to play?

Not the upcoming unreleased title from Sony Online Entertainment, but agency in the sense of making choices to effect change. As MMOG players, do we technically have any agency at all, or is that taken out of our hands, limiting us simply to selecting which ways we allow the game to push us around?

As players, of course, we get to choose our quests and missions from those that are made available to us, but of course there's no change effected. No sooner do we rescue the frightened hobbit, Lalia, from her folly in the Barrow Downs in Lord of the Rings Online, than she is wandering lost on the hillside once more, ready to be rescued again and again. And indeed, with a group, you can help to rescue her over and over and over. Until you get thoroughly tired of it.

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When EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion was released, details on how wormholes and the 2500 new systems that came with them worked were sketchy. The advanced Sleeper AI found protecting these systems were a force to be feared, unknown and mysterious. There were no guides, no stories of encounters on the forums and anyone that had mounted a successful expedition was keeping their closely guarded secrets to themselves and raking in the ISK.

My corporation (Pillowsoft) were among the first to launch their expedition, having previously prepared an Orca with a medium POS, fuel, equipment and everything else we thought we'd need. We set up in an unknown system and explored this new frontier with a cautious optimism. Over the months that followed, we learned a great deal about EVE's new wormhole systems and the Sleepers that lived in them. After striking gold many times and making each of our expedition members over a billion ISK richer, we began telling our story and giving up those secrets we had been so careful to protect. Today, a great deal is now known about the "unknown" wormhole systems and with ever more corporations launching their own expeditions, it's now more important than ever to research the Sleeper menace before venturing into the abyss.

Join me for this extensive three-page article where I dole out the fruits of my research on wormholes and begin to untangle the mystery of the Sleepers.

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Summer is now in full swing and the lure of the outdoors is strong. School is out, people are going on holiday, to muddy music festivals or just enjoying the fine weather. Suddenly virtual worlds and MMOs are that much quieter as people dip back into real life. Each year, my guild mistress institutes what she calls a 'summer amnesty'. Over the summer things become a little more relaxed, there's no ire if people don't raid as often. Real life takes precedence for once and things just chill out a bit. People come, people go. Even better, rather than monthly farming, we just have to contribute once and it covers the majority of the summer. That gives me the freedom to not feel guilty about lengthy absences so I can sit in my garden and drink cider or go to the pub. It's nice.

So with the heat of summer now upon us, I'm wondering, how does your guild cope with the summer months. Do you have an amnesty? Do you forget about farming and just have fun? Do you just tone raiding time down? What about guild taxes or farming? Do you make an effort to improve guild bonding by maybe even having a real life meet up or BBQ? Do you partake in summer festivals? Tell us in the usual manner.

The Hunter's Mark has an interesting post regarding making the transition from casual to hardcode raiding for if you decide that you have enough of PuGs or your casual guild and want something a bit more hardcore. Although aimed at WoW the ideas and concepts are true for all the other games that also have a similar raiding system.

The guide starts off with the important point of checking that your current guild doesn't already have plans for that already, not burning your bridges with your current guild leadership because that may well be asked what you are like by your new guild and then where to go to actually find your new guild. It follows up with actually getting onto your guilds raids if they use DKP or a system like EPGP, how to be prepared through doing your homework and finally how to keep that spot when you get it so that you can continue raiding.

EVE Online's Faction Warfare system was released almost one year ago with the Empyrean Age expansion and was initially a complete success. It provided a stage on which thousands of players waged war. From fleets of over a hundred players to gangs as small as two or three pilots, everyone found their own place in the conflict. After the initial wave of success, questions began to arise on the lack of rewards to offset the cost of losing ships in PvP. In addition, while the point of faction warfare initially revolved around capturing systems, holding an enemy system provided no benefits beyond bragging rights. Almost a year on from its initial release, faction warfare has barely changed, prompting very real concerns from players that EVE's developers CCP have entirely abandoned it. These issues have even made it as far as the Council of Stellar Management.

In this article, I take a retrospective look at how faction warfare has (or hasn't) progressed in this past year and ask the question "Has Faction Warfare been abandoned?".

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EverQuest II's Game Update 52: Monument and Might is almost ready to roll out on the Test server, and the official community site has put up a preview of some of the highlights of the patch. There seems to be a focus on the Rise of Kunark areas for this update. Here's what the preview tells us is coming:

• The player-written books we had a look at last month
• A new zone called the Emperor's Athenaeum in Charasis
  
• A group instance called Kurn's Tower: Breaching the Void
• A x2 raid zone also based on Kurn's Tower
• Research Assistants that can upgrade spells and combat arts
• Over 80 new quests in the overland zones of RoK

We spotted a post from Kiara on the forums saying that these things are planned to be on Test next week if possible, so it won't be long until we know a lot more.

Stealth bombers were originally advanced frigates aimed at an ambush predator role. They launched cruise missiles at foes from a distance and dealt very high damage to small ships like cruisers and other frigates. With the changes in the recent EVE Online expansion, they've been re-focused into an anti-battleship role. They now fling massive torpedoes that deal impressive damage to large targets but poor damage to smaller ships. In addition, they were switched from an ambush predator role intended to use normal cloaking devices to a pack hunter role able to warp while cloaked using a covert ops cloaking device.

It's all very well to speculate, but how well do the new stealth bombers actually perform? I took a gang of stealth bomber pilots out on the town for a tense PvP test drive. In this gallery article, I show a visual record of our adventure and go on to give my opinion on the new stealth bombers after a night of EVE PvP.

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You might see where this is going now...

This is a hard concept to explain, yet it's the concept that drives all social games, real-life based or online based. If you're taking the game so seriously that you're not having fun, then you've found the line where the problem begins.

"Serious business" sounds like a joke, but all games have some degree of seriousness in them. The only ones that are truly unbound by this rule are the ones that are entirely luck based, like The Game of Life, Chutes and Ladders, or Trouble, where the dice determine the progress of game play. Players have no true input into the game, thus no true focus is required.

"So are games getting too serious? Nope. They're doing the same things they've always been doing."

Once decision making is introduced, strategies begin. Once strategies are introduced, players will formulate efficient ways to win and those winning methods will always win unless luck determines otherwise or a more efficient strategy is found. Regarding our MMO games, which require player movement, button presses, and (to some degree) luck, you will need players who are focused. If players aren't standing in the right places or if the right skills aren't being used, then loss will almost constantly occur. Players don't gather in raids to lose, they gather in raids to win.

A football team and a raiding party are actually closer than one might think. Both get together to overcome a challenge presented to them, whether it be the Blue Mountain Eagles from the other side of the county or Patchwerk of Naxxramas. The fun comes from the work of overcoming the challenge; from "winning" the game. Sure, there might be rewards involved, like trophies or purple loot, but there is also going to be work involved. So are games getting too serious? Nope. They're doing the same things they've always been doing.

So next time you're in that raid group, or next time you're on that PvP team, or in that corporation war, or sieging that city, remember that focusing is not being overly serious. It's about working to get the task done, not screaming at one another. It also means that perhaps you might want to save your list of jokes and gossip for another time.

There's always more time to kid with friends. But right now is one of the few times you may be standing in front of Malygos.

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Colin Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who is still forced to make decisions he totally doesn't want to. When he's not writing here for Massively, he's rambling on his personal blog, The Experience Curve. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com. You can also follow him on Twitter through Massively, or through his personal feed.