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EVE Evolved: Incursion guide -- Fleet setup and tanking

Brendan Drain — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:00:00 EST

Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, Game mechanics, Professions, PvE, Hands-on, EVE Evolved, Guides

In last week's EVE Evolved, I gave my first impressions of EVE Online's newest group PvE activity based on a cautious first night spent at an incursion in Obray. The Sansha incursions have been running for over a week now, and players have come up with some clearly effective strategies for clearing the sites. Many groups are now tackling the incursions in relative safety, and yet every incursion still sees several ill-prepared fleets decimated at the hands of Sansha's ships.

Incursions throw some difficult challenges at players, with focus fire melting vulnerable targets, energy neutralisers and ECM disabling your support ships, and bomber frigates wreaking havoc on large hulls. In some encounters, Sansha's Nation will even use deployable remote repair platforms and other structures to its advantage and will call in random reinforcement waves if your group is too slow. With the right fleet composition and strategy, however, all of those challenges can be overcome with ease. It seems that what players need most right now is a solid guide to tackling incursions.

Over the next few editions of the EVE Evolved column, I'll be smashing my way through EVE's incursions to compile a comprehensive guide from the ground up. In this week's first part of the guide, we get the ball rolling with vital information on incursion fleet composition and tanking strategies. This part of the guide is aimed mainly at those interested in Vanguard-level sites, but the fleet setup and tanking strategies described are fundamental to all encounter sizes.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I tackle the fundamentals of incursion fleet design and tanking, which should be enough to help your group jump right into 10-man Vanguard encounters.

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EVE Evolved: Incursion guide -- Fleet setup and tanking originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Daily Grind: What do you do when someone just doesn't get it?

Eliot Lefebvre — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST

Filed under: Culture, Endgame, Opinion, The Daily Grind, Humor

Tackling the endgame rush in any game can be a difficult proposition, whether it's the brutality of Final Fantasy XI or the staggered progression of World of Warcraft. It's always made more difficult, however, when someone doesn't understand what he's supposed to be doing. Sometimes, even instructional videos, pseudo-Gregorian chants, and screaming epithets over ventrilo will all fail to get someone to realize that he needs to stay put during Flame Wreath. And there are only so many times a group can take failure when there's an obvious weak link in the chain.

On the one hand, we've all had one or two things that we know we ought to do, but we're just not quite capable of doing reliably. On the other, there comes a point when the rest of the group is paying for one person's persistent mistakes. So how do you handle that one guy who can't seem to get what he's supposed to be doing? Do you try and get him kicked out? Kick yourself out pre-emptively? Or do you just resort to blaming him for any and all failures?

The Daily Grind: What do you do when someone just doesn't get it? originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The metagame and its importance to MMOs

Eliot Lefebvre — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST

Filed under: Game mechanics, Opinion, Academic

What is the metagame? It can mean a lot of different things depending on context, but all of the meanings share the sense that the metagame is not the game itself, but something above and affecting the game as a whole. In a casual game of poker, the metagame could be as simple as one of the players having an exceedingly poor poker face which makes betting that much easier. On a more complex scale, you have things such as the entire Band of Brothers incident on EVE Online, which has been called by some as what amounts to a forum war that was fought out over the space of the game.

That's a Terrible Idea recently had a post regarding the problem of MMOs as "serious" games due to how they interact with the entire concept of the metagame. As the post outlines, you're first cut out from the endgame by the leveling game, which is changing the variables of the game itself, and when you finally reach the end of the curve most of the strategy involves memorizing specific character builds and raid strategies. The metagame, in this case defined as "the process of strategizing and conceptualizing out of the game," thrives on the viability of different strategies and the necessity of discussion. While there are certainly sites devoted to this sort of theoretical work, they frequently involve simply boiling everything down to a single optimal setup. Take a look at the article (and, if needed, the supplementary piece on terminology), as it's interesting for anyone with an affection for the genre and its overall development.

The metagame and its importance to MMOs originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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