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The official Jumpgate Evolution website is periodically updated with lore and fiction articles about places in the Jumpgate universe. They reveal information about the game's setting and back story, but they're also detailed enough that they shed some light on what gameplay will be like in the sector in question.

The latest of these articles is about the Bleakstone Sector, an inner sector that's every bit as harsh and dangerous as the sectors in the outer frontier. In a binary star system, the planet Bleakstone gives off a radiant glow thanks to the minerals and chemicals on its surface. But that glow is a dangerous siren's call, as the atmosphere is extremely hot and toxic. One domed mining facility and a few outposts in space are the only evidences of humankind in this hostile region of space.

There's also a faux news report about a violent attack by The Inferno on the colonists who inhabit the sector.

We've known for a little while that the EVE Online 2008 PvP Tournament will be a departure from how it's been run in previous years. Perhaps better reflecting the interests of the wider player base, the 2008 PvP tournament will feature mining that takes place amidst the chaos of combat. The implementation of these new objectives was briefly outlined by CCP Games in July, but they've now clarified the rules and systems to be used; a video they've put up on the official EVE site does a good job of explaining how it's all going to work.

Basically, all tournament participants will receive 'super characters' with all skills maxed at level 5. Both sides will have a Rorqual capital mining ship -- the space between those is considered to be the arena, where combat can occur. Both sides attempt to collect as much ore as possible within 15 minutes, as the video explains: "Any methods within the rules can be used to accomplish this and stop your opponents from doing the same. Mining ore yourself, killing enemy miners and looting their wrecks, stealing from enemy jetcans or just outright destroying the opposing team are all within the rules."

One of the highlights of the annual EVE Online Fanfest in Reykjavik is the PvP Tournament, which draws strong competitors from the most powerful alliances and relative unknowns alike. As you'd expect, the PvP Tournament has always been purely about annihilating the opposing side or conversely losing horribly in front of a live audience of EVE fans. The 2008 PvP tournament, however, will be a little... different.

CCP Claw has dubbed this year's tournament "The Super Ultimate EVE Online Mining Tournament of Awesomeness." Why, that name just rolls off your tongue. But the changes coming to the tournament aren't limited to an unwieldy name; players will need to mine for ore while under heavy fire from the opposing team. "Any method within the rules can be used to accomplish this and stop your opponent from doing the same. Mining ore for yourself, killing enemy miners and looting their wrecks, stealing from enemy jetcans, or just outright destroying the opposing team are all within the rules," CCP Claw states.

EVE Online is a complex game. There's no doubt about that. That complexity is a large part of the draw, but that doesn't mean learning about the game has to be a daunting experience. With that in mind, Massively has EVE Online in its sights. We've brought solid writers on staff who are quite knowledgeable about the game and are here to give some in-depth info on how EVE is played.

CrazyKinux and Crovan of The Drone Bay podcast joined us in April, and since then have provided Massively's readers with some helpful columns. CrazyKinux, aka David Perry, writes the Have Clone, Will Travel column. David's most recent piece, 3 Essential Tools for Capsuleers, provides a great overview of some of the third-party programs and resources available to help you plan your skill progression and your ship fittings. But we're also running two more EVE-centric columns at Massively. Read on after the jump to see what else we're bringing to the EVE community, and how we're easing that learning curve.

EVE Online blogger Morphisat recently unearthed a good video tutorial on the profession of exploration, by a player called SRRAE. In a vast, open galaxy like EVE Online's setting of New Eden, the option of becoming an explorer is an appealing one. However, despite the name 'exploration,' players cannot actually discover new solar systems. They can, however, find hidden content throughout space, both in highsec and lowsec. This can include hidden asteroid belts (presumably with rarer ores to mine), hacking and archaeology sites, harvestable gas clouds used in drug production, and numerous combat encounters.

Admittedly, exploration is not an easy profession to pick up for beginners, but with enough skills related to scanning and covert ops, paired with a decent understanding of game mechanics and the value of a cloaking device, exploration can be lucrative -- particularly in 0.0 space. Of course, there will inevitably be times where an explorer is simply burning off scan probes in the futile hope of finding something new. Perhaps SRRAE has become a victim of his own success, as he recently lamented the downside of exploration's growing popularity among New Eden's capsuleers.

[Via CrazyKinux]

This blogger has recently been gathering resources in Age of Conan, and despite the manifold other attractions of that game, resource gathering is so mind-scrapingly boring that you end up wishing your character's pick could be used on your skull instead. The first quest for any resource is to gather 20 of something - silver, ash wood, cotton - which is as simple as finding a node with some resources left and clicking on it. Sometimes, for variety, a bad guy of some sort will jump on you.

However, to progress to the second tier, you have to find a much rarer resource that has only a one per cent chance to drop while you're repeatedly clicking on the node. All you can do is click, click, click and move on. Apparently it's not much better in other games - set the mining lasers, put your feet up and go and make a coffee.

Far be it from us, though, to condemn anyone else's fun. So: do you enjoy resource gathering, in AoC or any other game? Do you go fishing in LoTRO, or in WoW for that matter? What mechanics make it fun?

Five years since launch, space-faring MMO EVE Online is still going strong. Over the years, the game has evolved from its simple roots into a complex game packed full of content. Virtually every element of the game has drastically changed since launch to keep it new and interesting. Every free expansion brings new ships, modules and missions for all players. Some expansions have even brought us impressive new gameplay elements like the faction warfare system. One thing that unfortunately hasn't changed significantly over the years is the Mining profession. But why hasn't it been updated?

Nostalgia:
Back in 2004, EVE was a very different place. The universe was sparsely populated and the cost of new ships meant most players avoided war like the plague. Mining was the primary moneymaking profession and dedicated mining corps were commonplace. While mining was just as boring then as it is today, it was the easiest and fastest way of gathering minerals for production. Today, mining is one of the least profitable professions and isn't even close to being the best way of gathering minerals for production.

What happened over the years that has ruined the mining profession? I'll tell you what happened...

With EVE Online's time-based skill system of character progression, multiple accounts are pretty commonplace amongst the hardcore and even semi-casual player. CCP even occasionally holds special discounts for the opening of new accounts, called the Power of Two program. EVE is unique in the way that it handles alts, in many ways. Since only one character can be training at a time, and, unlike other MMOs, there is no real end to the training a character will do, if you want to start something new from the ground up, you're going to need to either scrap your existing character, or open up a new account. Today, we'll take a look at how to go about creating an alt.

CrazyKinux from The Drone Bay podcast, and of course one of Massively's EVE Online columnists, had an interesting find which he recently shared on his site. "When Carebears Attack" isn't the newest video out there, but given the absolute hammering that miners have been taking in Empire space over the past few months, it's quite timely. Here we see an exhumer pilot named 'JNB' who's fed up with ore thieves and being griefed in general, simply for being a miner.

While not technically griefing as it's considered a fair use of game mechanics, 'can flipping' is the time-honored tradition of a thief sneaking up on a mining vessel and replacing the floating cargo container (being mined into for greater efficiency) with his own, bearing the same name. When the miner or his hauler unknowingly removes ore from the thief's can, the innocent party becomes criminally flagged -- ironically, for being a thief himself -- and then is predictably blown apart by his antagonist. Concord, i.e. 'the police' in EVE, takes no action against the can flipper. Tired of this use of game mechanics, the carebear in this video snaps and starts hunting down griefers in a repurposed Hulk, which is little more than a fancy mining vessel; it's completely unfit for PvP... or is it? The footage shows the miner racking up a respectable kill count by using his normally defensive drones as vicious little attackers. It turns out some carebears have teeth after all.

Ever since ION 2008, the fine folks at NetDevil have been slightly more forthcoming with details from their sci fi opus-in-development, Jumpgate Evolution. First there was the interview that writer Keith Baker did about the game's three factions, filling us in one some of the background lore that's being plugged into the game. More recently, they did an interview on the more technical aspects of the game's development. Not wanting to miss out on the action, we caught up with Jumpgate Evolution producer Hermann Peterscheck, who, as you might recall, is awesome.

Check below the cut for some insights into NetDevil's perception of the recent mergers in the MMO industry, their approach to integrating PvP and PvE into the same game, and some information about Jumpgate's capital ships.

We read recently that you were against the idea of separate servers for players who want to PvP and players who want to PvE. How do you plan to allow the two groups co-exist and still fulfill both groups' desired play-style?

I'm actually not opposed to that at all. I think it depends on what kind of game you have. The issue of PvP versus PvE is a hotly contested issue in the core gamer circles and the game development industry. Outside of that, it's not nearly as hot a topic. It's like every other almost religious debate, like capital punishment or abortion or whatever. You're never going to convince people that are believers in one versus the other that the other is correct. If I hate PvP, you're never going to convince me that it's a good thing. You have to build the game in such a way that you acknowledge that both of those positions are valid and that you give both sides something to do.

That being said, the way you implement it into your game is largely dependent on the kind of game you want to make. So if you look at a game like World of Warcraft, which is a largely kill-collect, progress-based game, you see the Battlegrounds and Arenas and stuff like that. They've acknowledged that both are important.

The way I see it working in a game like Jumpgate is that the large PvP space battles are largely going to be done by the people who represent a large minority of players. Maybe something like twenty percent. They're going to log in every day and want to engage in massive battles. Those people are being fed by the player-run economy, which is being contributed to by another minority of players. And the rest of the people are in the middle, and are probably going to mostly hang out in the safe areas. Every once in a while though, they'll venture out and see what PvP is all about.

You basically just divide the space. This area of space is safe, this area of space is not safe. But you have to make sure that there is opportunity for fun on both sides. If you make a sort of situation where the first 30 levels are PvE and the second 30 levels are PvP, you're going to make everybody hate you. The PvE players are going to quit at level 30, and the PvP players are going to wonder why they have to grind through all this crap to get to the fun part.

"I'd love to have something like the hardcore servers in Diablo where you lose everything if you get killed."

So by bifurcating the experience, we tell players, 'Go PvP, and you'll get X rewards. Go PvE and your rewards are Y.' There's no bias towards one or the other and you can easily flip between the two. That's kind of how I imagine Jumpgate being. That said, I'd love to have something like the hardcore servers in Diablo where you lose everything if you get killed. So I love the idea of having a server where everything is open PvP, and you can kill anybody at any time, and that's it. We'll see how that pans out, but that's how I imagine the Jumpgate universe working in regard to that.

How does that translate to an end-game. Obviously, PvP players can just continue with their huge battles, what would be the PvE equivalent of that?

That's already reasonably well-established. PvP would be something similar to Battlegrounds, where you have instanced PvP and also open, epic PvP between organizations. And then on the PvE side you have things like really, really tough creatures that you have to band together with a bunch of people and there's limited access to. Those are the things that give you the best rewards in the game.

Personally, I like both. I like engaging in big battles against other players and I also like cooperative battles operating with others people against some giant boss that nobody's every taken out before. So we try and do both of those things.

We've read on your forums that you're knocking around the idea of including capital ships, how big are these battles going to get?

We've been knocking the idea of capital ships around for a while. It's sort of the consequence of the way that we approach iterative development. If you think about space fiction, one of the things that always comes to mind is blowing up the Death Star, basically, or the equivalent in other fiction. It's the huge base that a bunch of people take out. So we've had this idea for a space station. And there's all these reasons why we thought we wouldn't be able to do it. We didn't have time, maybe it's something that we can do after release, but it kept coming up. So we decided that we have to look at this. So we actually made a battlestation. And it turns out that fighting a huge battlestation with a bunch of people is really really fun.

The natural progression of that is to have some sort of large ship that flies around . My expectation at this point is that they won't be player-flyable. One of the problems we had is that since Jumpgate is a skill-based game and if you have this giant battleship that you're flying and you have turrets on it -- now you have to balance it against you and your ship with aiming. It's tricky. We've thought about things like having other players man the turrets and then one person is the pilot, which games like Battlefield have done, so there's a possibility for that. But for now, when we're talking about battleships, on the PvP side they would be largely AI controlled and player-friendly and on the other side, they'd be either giant things you attack or things that fly with you when you attack. You as a pilot would still be controlling your personal ship.

That being said, it's really cool to fly around and get that sort of Battlestar Galactica thing going. You see the huge ship that's sort of hulking along, around it are the little Corvettes that are a little bit faster, and then around that are the sort of quick-moving individual craft. We want to create that sort of experience.

How do you take something like mining for minerals or hauling cargo and make that as fun as a giant space battle?

I don't know, I think it just sort of works out. I spend many hours in EVE just mining. In fact, right now I'm trying to get my isk bars because I want to do that. So I'm happy to spend lots and lots of time just mining, learning how that system works, and just making money in doing that kind of stuff. They have this other kind of stuff there that drives the economy . So it's a different kind of economy. The way we've implemented mining, for example, is to make it a sort of Easter Egg hunt. You're flying around amongst the asteroids, looking for that rare thing. And then you go and find it and it's like a slot machine, and you mine at it and it might drop something rare. Then you can go sell it and make a certain amount of money, and there's an anticipation and reward for that in the same way that there's a reward for taking out a new tough enemy that you've never taken out. I think it's all about giving people a path to achieve something. And you can do that with any number of different verticals -- you can do the same thing with crafting, which we call manufacturing. It's all about putting in time and effort to make progress, and getting rewarded for that is fun.

To me the whole point is that different people like to do different stuff, and those same people like to do many different things instead of just one. I think many successful MMOs have alternative activities that you can do so you don't get bored. As fun as it might be to just blow something up, after you do it two hundred times, you might want to do something else too.

Going back to the PvP, we've heard Jumpgate described as a skill-based game. How much is skill going to weigh in relative to the amount of time invested in player versus player engagements?

We're somewhere between World of Warcraft and Quake. In WoW, equipment arguably matters more than skill (although this tends to change as you get further and further into the arenas), but if you look at a game like Quake, equipment is irrelevant because everybody has access to all the weapons. So we're somewhere in between there. A rank 1 guy coming in with beginning equipment whose the best pilot in the game is unlikely to take out the guy in the most powerful battleship and the best equipment. Our game, however, gives a much larger range where you can participate in PvP. So whereas in WoW if I'm level 65 and you're level 68 and have much better equipment, it's unlikely I'll be able to beat you. But in our game, that's not the case. If you're a much better pilot, you'll probably take me out, even if I'm in better equipment. It's that sort of subtly that I have to balance. So we have to be careful balancing that.

Of course, it's very unlikely that somebody whose played the game for hundreds of hours and has accumulates a bunch of equipment is not to be a better pilot within the rules of the game than somebody who just logs in one day. So it's likely that the people who spend the most time will be the most skilled AND have the best equipment.

Positioning yourselves as a skill-based game, do you plan to use client-side hit detection or server-side?

We're similar to first-person shooters, where we have to trust the client to some degree, but we have a check on the server to make sure that people aren't cheating. In a game that's more turn-based, you can do something where you say you want to hit, and the server says, "OK, now you're swinging" and plays the animation. We can't do that. We have to verify and authenticate and trust more than a lot of MMOs do. But it's really no different than games like Quake and Counterstrike, and those kind of games have. You just have to solve for the cheating using the game style that you have.

Anybody that's developed an MMO before knows that a certain percentage of your resources goes to the eternal battle against people trying to cheat. Every game has it, and it runs the gambit. It's hacking the client, it's trying to break into the servers, it's contacting customers and trying to steal their accounts, it's hacking memory, it's exploiting weaknesses in the system. I can't think of any MMO that doesn't have a constant war between their tech people and groups of people that are trying to exploit the game. The funny thing is that most of the people trying to exploit the game aren't doing it for any other reason than it's a challenge for them to do so.

Without giving away too much, we have to be clever in a way that corresponds to the style of game we have, expecting of course that it'll be an on-going scenario.

Maybe it's too early for you to talk about, but have you decided on a subscription model for Jumpgate? Will it show up on the shelves at Gamestop, or will you use digital delivery or what?

It is too early to say, yes.

That doesn't pose much hope for this question, but we'll ask anyway. How close are we to the closed beta?

Let me put it this way, I want to release a game as soon as I possibly can, which means I want a beta as soon as I possibly can. However, I won't do it until it's necessary. The way I see it, you should go into beta when internally you can't make decisions about where your game is without it. Not just to prove some point. A lot of MMOs go into beta way too early, because they have some schedule that says, 'OK, beta here.' I think what happens when you do that is that, you have these players who are really excited about your game, and we have lots of these kinds of people. And then you release them a pile of crap doesn't work and then they say, 'Hey, why did you give us a pile of crap that barely works?' and they tear you apart. Then you close the beta, go back into development, and work on something else, and maybe it's better, but you've already burned all those people.

So yeah, people ask that question all the time, and I think a lot of the time they think I'm being coy or something, but I really don't know. It's not tomorrow! And there's some period of time where I know it's not, but I don't know, because game development is a tricky thing. You don't really know when a game is going to be fun, you don't know what thing is going to make it work, and you also don't really know what major probably could be lurking just around the corner. So to know more than a few weeks or months in advance for something like a beta is just guess-work. You can beta when you're ready or beta before you're ready, but that doesn't change when it's ready.

I guess the simplest answer is: as soon as we can.

Thanks Hermann, we appreciate it.

No problem.

Whenever I start playing a new MMO my interest in crafting tends to go through two phases: hope and realization. During the hope phase I find myself wondering what sort of cool things I could create. I also think about being able to use those creations in useful and interesting ways. My head tends to float up into the clouds as I contemplate all the great times I'm about to have with a game's crafting system.

Then there's the realization phase, where my crafting dreams are crushed. This is the point when I start playing with the crafting system and moving through its inner workings only to find the same old thing: Talk to an NPC, get crafting skill of choice, look at recipe, gather ingredients and proceed to select how many I want before clicking a single button to create my item. When will developers admit that this is incredibly boring and at least try to spice things up a bit. They don't have to re-think the entire system. I would be perfectly happy with some evolutionary changes.

As you may already know, we've been looking for a few good pilots to join our ranks here at Massively. The competition has been extremely tough, but we're almost at the end of the process. (Thank you for those who have been hanging in there!) To relax, some of us have been hanging out in EVE, enjoying many of the different aspects of game-play. Today's One Shot comes from one such (noob) adventure -- mine! This was taken while running a mission in Minmatar space, with a pile of rats bearing down on me, and a mining colony to save. Also: yum, lots of salvage.

Do you have a great screenshot of Corp war, or of something equally exciting sitting in your screenshot folder gathering virtual dust? Why let it languish? Send those screenshots on to us at oneshots@massively.com along with whatever information you'd like to tell us about the scene in the picture. It could be here next. Until then, fly safe!

Steve Hartmeyer dropped another dev diary into the laps of MMO Gamer, this time he talks about how mining will play out in their upcoming sci-fi MMO. Apparently it was a "major pastime" for a large portion of players in Jumpgate Classic, and basically formed the game's economy.

That's all well and good, and I understand the need to cater to loyal players and all types of game styles, but Jumpgate Evolution (for me) better be more about the space combat (the "fun" stuff) then sitting around mining (what I consider insanely "boring" stuff).

JGE's mining is getting a whole new face lift in terms of the process and the graphical presentation. Thankfully, they intend to make it fun by turning it into a treasure-hunting activity that can be done as casually or intensively as the player wants. Whew. NetDevil will be able to provide a clearer picture in a few weeks since the whole mining experience is just now entering the implementation phase and hasn't been put through the rigors of testing yet.

So if the thought of working in a coal mine (pardon the song pun) spins your wheels, check out the diary for all the details (and there are plenty).