Ekchuah's Shrine Corporation

Crucible 1.1.3 will be deployed tomorrow, February 7th, during the regular daily downtime. No extended downtime is scheduled. The patch addresses a C++ runtime error some players have been running into lately, along with adding some much needed backend additions for devs. Patch notes and information about patch size can be can be found by scrolling to the bottom of this page.

The next mass test on our test-server Singularity will be on Tuesday, February 7 at 20:00 UTC. In this mass-test we will be testing the latest performance improvements to the overview window and brackets in space. The SisiLauncher tool is available for the Windows client, otherwise please follow the instructions on the Singularity page in Evelopedia.

Testing should last around 60 minutes. All participants will receive two million skillpoints on Singularity.

Please refer to this thread for more information about how you participate in the test, and this EVElopedia article for more information on mass testing.

The new EVE Online website (discussed in this blog) is going to undergo a few final tweaks and is scheduled to release next week, instead of this week as originally estimated.

At the same time the new website will be revealed, the resources and information which players have sought on the EVE Online site, will be made available on a new community website which should prove to be quite an improvement in terms of browsing and locating what you need. 

We look forward to showing you the two websites and wish you all a great weekend!

EVE Online: Crucible 1.1.2 is scheduled for deployment during a regular downtime on Wednesday, February 1. This patch includes several crash fixes and a number of improvements to the new Neocom. Patch notes have been added to the list of Crucible 1.1 patch notes.

The Community team have prepared a blog about some of the cool community events happening in the Harpa Center during Fanfest. Click here to read all about it!

We are upgrading the infrastructure EVElopedia is hosted on and we expect it to be down on Monday, January 30 between 14:00 and 16:00 UCT while we make the necessary changes.  Apologies for any inconvenience this causes you all and rest assured, my love for you remains as true as it ever was.

CCP Ginger.

EVE Online: Crucible 1.1.1 was successfully deployed during a regular downtime on Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Several small fixes to the Neocom were released together with corrections to localization and various texts throughout the game. The patch notes are available here.

The next mass test on our test-server Singularity will be on Thursday, January 26 at 17:00 UTC. In this mass-test we will have a look at client performance and server code improvements. The SisiLauncher tool is available for the Windows client, otherwise please follow the instructions on the Singularity page in Evelopedia.

Testing should last 60 minutes. All participants will receive two million skillpoints on Singularity.

Please refer to this thread for more information about how you participate in the test, and this EVElopedia article for more information on mass testing.

EVE Online: Crucible 1.1 Client Update #2 will be released during a standard downtime tomorrow. Patch notes for this release are still being compiled but will be added to the main patch notes page before downtime begins.

In addition there will be a 30 minute outage of the EVE Gate forums and EVE API to facilitate migration of web databases. In an effort to keep API downtime to a minimum, we will be truncating the player access logs which keep the last seven days history of locations and IP's.  

EVE Online: Crucible 1.1 has been deployed. This patch brings a number of improvements into EVE Online, including the new Neocom panel, rebalanced assault ships, ability for alliances to join Factional Warfare and numerous UI enhancements. For more information on these changes, please refer to CCP Soundwave's recent dev blog or visit the Crucible feature page. Patch notes are available here.

Please report any issues with Crucible 1.1 in this thread and a thread for general feedback is available here.

As of Monday, January 23 we have removed PayPal as a payment option for the buddy program due to an exploit discovered with this payment method. The terms and conditions of the program have been updated.

If a player you invite to the game selects Paypal as their payment method you will not be eligible for the game time or PLEX reward you had selected.

EVE Online: Crucible 1.1 is scheduled for deployment during an extended downtime on Tuesday, January 24. Downtime will begin at 11:00 UTC and is expected to be completed by 12:00 UTC.

Crucible 1.1 brings a number of improvements into EVE Online, including the new Neocom panel, rebalanced assault ships, ability for alliances to join Factional Warfare and numerous UI enhancements. For more information on these changes, please refer to CCP Soundwave's recent dev blog or visit the Crucible feature page. Patch notes are available in English, German and Russian.

Please note that in December we have temporarily doubled the size of POS fuel bays to reduce the impact of the delay to fuel block switch-over. In Crucible 1.1, these changes will be reverted and the fuel block consumption enabled. Towers left with their fuel bays in an "overloaded" state as a result of this change should continue to function as normal.

A discussion thread is available here.

On Saturday, January 28, 2012, the 7th annual Greek EVE Gathering will take part in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece. The event will include traditional pie cutting and a lottery, as well as video greetings from the CCP HQ in Reykjavik, Iceland. More information are available in this thread.

EVE Fanfest is drawing closer by the day, and we would like to remind you that there is just over one week left to get your Early Bird tickets. Until January 31^st you can get them at the EVE Account Management page, along with tickets for various Fanfest activities, including the Dev Pub Crawl and the Charity Poker Tournament.

If you still haven't made your travel arrangements, you can book your flight and hotel room in one go with the package deal provided by Icelandair, or use the offer provided by our hotel partner, Center Hotels.

See you at Fanfest 2012!

Thank you thank you! We'll take this as a big hint that EVE Online: Crucible was the proper way to end 2011. We'll also take this tremendous show of support as a clear message that 2012 should bring more internet spaceships to you in a similar fashion. Check out the awards site here for all the winners (including EVE!).

After the popularity of the statistics that I’ve been posting to twitter, I decided to take a look at 2011 as a whole. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering! Many stats, broken down into categories.

Planetary Interaction

There was an average of 64,840 planetary export transactions per day, or 2,701 per hour. Of that, 26,693 were in high sec, 6,936 in low sec, 15,844 in null sec and 15,366 in wormhole space. An average of 64,627 characters exported goods from a planet each month, with the annual total being 195,449 different characters.

The top five systems in empire space for planetary interaction and the average number of export transactions per day were:

Barren class planets were unsurprisingly the most utilised. Average number of export transactions per day per planet type:

Production

A lot was built! Just under 62 billion missiles. That’s an average of 7.08 million an hour. I’m pretty certain that’s more missiles than the Persians had arrows. 13.2 million ships, too - an hourly average of 1,506.

Average production per hour by hull size and tech level:

Average production per hour by hull size and race. This excludes any ships not belonging to the four main races, hence the lower totals:

Production of ships per hour by sec group:

The top 15 ships built in 2011 and their total, excluding shuttles and frigates:

Also, our congratulations to the mighty Dreddit corporation for producing more Rifters than anyone else in 2011! 7,829 of them to be precise.

People blowing each other up

In 2011, 5,381,636 kill reports were generated; that’s an average of 14,744 per day or one every 5.86 seconds. 65% of these kill reports were caused by damage inflicted by a player, whilst non-player controlled entities (from Serpentis to CONCORD) were responsible for the remaining 35%.

Average destruction rate in PVP of the various hull sizes:

By tech level:

By race, excluding rookie ships and capsules:

Overall, 576,860 different characters lost ships to non-players in 2011, and 422,801 lost ships in PVP scenarios. 155,087 characters scored at least one final blow, too!
 

The Market

To finish this blog off - If there’s one big thing in EVE, it would have to be the market. In total in 2011, 348,483,735 market transactions were performed with a total combined trade value of 2,692,367,631,609,430 ISK. That’s a lot. To break that down, 2011 on average:

Here's hoping for an even more productive and explosive 2012! If stats like these interest you, don’t forget to follow my twitter account and the comments thread of this blog. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions that come up as I can.

 -  CCP Diagoras

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Hi, CCP Alice here with the latest and greatest from web.

Last year we began a strategic journey of improving our web presence by launching a brand new Account Management website and new Forums. I’m here with the first dev blog in a series to come throughout 2012 that will detail important changes and updates to our websites over the course of this year.

Currently, the EVE website is a mixed bag. It's split between trying to offer an explanation of the game without really doing so, and trying to cater for our community's needs. Further, important information is distributed across many other websites, from EVE Gate to EVElopedia. We can do better.

Changes on large scale require a large amount of in-depth planning and development effort, so rather than taking on the whole web at once, we are going to do this in stages. 

Stage 1 - EVEOnline.com

The first part of these changes is taking the aspects of the current website that explain what the game is and creating a better front facing website for EVE Online. This means we will have a website that has information about the various elements of the universe, the rich gameplay, visuals and how passionate our players are. A website we will be proud to share with our friends, fellow gamers and potential customers.

The details

Some of the cool features that will be on the site include:

• Interactive star map with different view states where you learn about features of the universe
• Interactive 3D spaceship gallery showing a selection of spaceships ranging from capsule to titan 
• Popular gameplay styles like Pirate, Explorer, Fleet Commander, etc. represented as career paths 
• A short Personality Analysis quiz to help you determine what career paths may suit you
• Screenshots showcasing all aspects of in-game visuals
• Revised versions of popular EVE Chronicles downloadable in eBook format
• Community spotlights highlighting the passion and commitment of EVE players
• A Getting Started page where you can sign-up for a trial account and download the game without leaving the site

Here are sneak peeks of a screenshots page, starmap showing ship kills, an Absolution and the pirate gameplay style below:

This is ready and should go live next week. 

Stage 2 - Building for the future

Having moved the information valuable for potential customers and for all of us to show off the game to its own home, we can now focus on information needed by our current players and how we can improve your experience on our websites. We will be making changes that will bring together all the community related pages and functionality on the other sites under the umbrella of one EVE Community website. The long term goal here is for you as a current player to be able to go to the community website and from there access all the content, information and functionality relevant and useful to you.

The details

We are going to make changes to the now obsolete eveonline.com to re-brand it as the EVE Community website, allowing us to have a foundation to build on. This coincides with the launch of the new eveonline.com discussed above. It will live at community.eveonline.com, with the following tweaks:

• Replacing the header area with a Community branded logo and menu
• Adding the Login widget currently on Account Management to the top right of the site as a central place to login, go between eve websites and change language where applicable
• Re-organizing and simplifying the menu into a more logical structure where it's easier to find content without expanding and collapsing for an eternity
• Placing pages we don’t necessarily wish to remove yet from the old site into an archive section to be dealt with later

The site will be structured around these categories to start with:

Still tweaking these, so what you see above is subject to change before release.

We are finishing up these tweaks to be ready for next week as well.

What comes next for EVE Community

• Upgrade the hamster wheels behind the scenes (classic asp is not cool any more according to our hamsters) 
• Where it makes sense, we will merge content from other websites like Support, EVElopedia, EVE Gate, etc. into EVE Community in various phases
• Make site-wide UI and presentation changes so it looks and behaves like a modern, well designed website
• Add new content and features

More will be revealed in further dev blogs as we are working on the next stages.

We are really excited about these updates and looking forward to getting them live, teams Bitmap, Charlie Sheen and GForce have done a fantastic job over the past months (go team!). We will keep you posted with exact release dates and where you can give feedback as soon as we can.

Fly safe!

CCP Alice / Anne Walsh
Web Architect

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Hi folks. I'm CCP Abraxas; you may know me from such dev blogs as "Hey, we're going to do a lore wiki" and "Oh wow, we did a lore wiki".

I'd promised that I would keep you abreast on future developments of our lore, and now that I've got a better handle on how it all went and where our priorities lie - including new parts that I hadn't announced in the last dev blog - I wanted to drop you a quick note to tell you where we're headed.

As a side note: While admittedly I am, like all fiction writers, basically a professional liar, I assure you that I will tell you the truth. Not those other guys, they can go to hell - but you and me, we've got a connection. We've seen things.

The Fiction Portal

I'm actually amazed at how well the Fiction Portal launch went. Most people seem really happy with it, which is a good thing to hear after you've devoted a year of your professional life to that very aim. The most important part of the launch, to me and Mercury and everyone else involved, was that nothing would break badly enough to put a major damper on your ability to access and enjoy our content.  So far, so good.

In the weeks since launch, we've done a ton of minor edits to various pages. This includes not only aesthetic ones (including spellchecks, style checks, and unifying the '(tag)' suffixes we used to differentiate our lore from similar pages), but also reviewing several dozen page comments on lore consistency and improvement suggestions. This is something we'll be doing constantly from now on. If you ever feel that a Fiction Portal page is in error, use its Discussion tab to let us know. If you have more general comments about the Portal, post on the Fiction forum section. I review all threads that have anything to do with the EVElopedia, and note down anything we can use to improve it.

What we haven't done is add a ton new content. We want to do so in strategic fashion, so that you won't always have to trawl through the extant thousand pages of lore just to see if anything new got added. For the most part we'll be adding articles alongside patches and expansions; there was a small bunch coming out with the January release, for example. In terms of future expansions, CCP recently nailed down what we'll be working on and releasing up to and including this summer, so Mercury and I are hard at work right now figuring out what new lore we want to write up for you guys to tie in with those features. If you ever want to see what's new, just head on over to the Updates and Credits page.

Aside from articles tying into expansion features, there is a lot of published content we haven't yet gotten around to writing up in wiki form. We have almost the entire news archive to go, plus the three EVE novels, various bits and pieces of other published work, and, of course, our in-game PvE content. Major aspects of our canon, including the factions and notable persons, also need a going-over soon. Moreover, we want to rewrite the entire chronology section so that it'll be event-focused rather than purely date-focused. And somewhere, over the horizon, there is the fabled in-game connection, which I'll be quietly working on in between other content projects.

(A side note on in-game content and live events: The Arek'Jaalan project is a special case, and CCP Dropbear and I plan to figure out a workable way to transition A'J info into official canon.  It'll happen, but it's probably going to take a while.)

There really are three major points I'd like all of you to take away from reading this part of the blog: Firstly, we plan to do a lot more for this project. Anything new will get announced on the Updates page.

Second, it's all going to get done, albeit at a slow but steady pace. It's a great deal of work, and most of us at CCP have a lot on our plates these days, but I have a pretty good track record when it comes to delivering what I promised (such as the Fiction Portal itself).

Third, and very importantly: All of this is only possible thanks to the amazing efforts of our Mercury volunteer team. If you want to help contribute to our fiction, you should defintely consider joining them.

The Chronicle Portal

So what's new? Well, here's a thing.

The EVE Chronicles are, for the most part, a collection of over two hundred short stories set in the world of EVE. I wrote about a hundred of those, over a period of four years - it was basically the biggest part of my day job at CCP before I switched over to doing the Fiction Portal and various other things - so I've been heavily involved with them for quite a while, and I want to make sure they're treated right.

Ever since beta times, they've been hosted several layers deep on the eveonline.com site. They have long since outgrown their place there, and now that eveonline.com is going to be given a total, streamlined redesign, we figured it was high time we moved them to somewhere that was a bit more amenable to EVE fiction. The natural decision was to create a separate portal for them on the EVElopedia.

Here's what this means for the chronicles from now on (not 'going forward', because I don't even know what that phrase means.) We'll need help from you, so look to the end part for that.

• Official CCP fiction (novels aside) will now be published and stored on the EVElopedia Chronicle Portal. Any publicity efforts will point you to that portal, not to eveonline.com

• There will not be any more chronicle artwork. I'm sad to see it go, but we have good reason to drop it. Art creation has always been a major bottleneck in chronicle production and a notable draw on the Art Department's resources. Moreover, art and thumbnails are not amenable to the kind of categorization we have in mind for the chronicles. It's easy to plonk down a thumbnail when all you've got is a 200-strong list of alike pieces; it gets progressively harder when you want to start reordering them in all sorts of ways.

• Also, you see how one of those Chronicle Portal categories is 'Flashfic'? Flashfic means really short fiction, and that means that if I have an idea for a Chronicle but I don't have the time to turn it into a full-fledged story, I can ninja it into that category without forcing myself into some hapless artist's schedule and waiting for him to produce a picture. To rephrase this bit in more high-level terms: While we plan to release short stories only around expansions and such, the Chronicle Portal's organization gives us far more leeway in adding fresh fiction without having to tie it in with a release schedule.

• (You're all subscribed to our twitter feeds, right? The official one is @ EveOnline, Dropbear is at @ccp_dropbear, and I'm @cloisterphobe. If we do something cool, we'll undoubtedly mention it there.)

• From now on, 'Chronicle' refers to any published story by us, of any length, and the terms "EVE Chronicles" and "Chronicle Portal " refer to the entire bulk of our online fiction. Also, the long stories (like Ruthless and Saccade) will now be called Novellas, while the short stories will simply be called 'short stories', not 'chronicles' - because employing the same term both for a particular type of story and for the entire bulk of all types of stories is a silly thing to do and leads to misunderstandings.
   
•  The categories will overlap. One chronicle can belong to many categories. If a story involves both the Caldari State and the Guristas, it'll show up both in the Empire and the Pirates category.
   
• The categories will be manually updated. The wiki tag system is too unwieldy in design and insecure in appilcation for us to employ at present.
   
• The categories aren't fixed. This is where you come in. Do you have ideas for new or different categories? For subcategories? (For instance, Empires is  going to split the stories up along the four-empire axis.)Tell us. Comment on the forum thread for this dev blog, or start a new thread on the Fiction forum.

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The subject says it all! Ok, it actually doesn‘t so I‘m going to write some more words about this.

We are adding the option for every corporation in EVE to have it‘s own Corporation Forum, on the EVE Online forum.

Why are we doing this?

There are two reasons basically. We are very interested in providing corporations, particularly new and smaller corporations, with a community enhancing tool which boosts communication and corp cohesion without all the hassle of starting their own external forum. We also have DUST approaching and this will provide corporations with a cross-game platform where both their EVE members and their DUST members can talk and discuss whose planet to curbstomp next.

How will corp forums 1.0 work?

Once we launch this feature in the coming days, every CEO who goes to the forums will have the option to activate a Corp Forum. We know that not every corporation is interested in, or needs, a private forum on the EVE forums, so your CEO will have the option not to activate them and you will never even notice their existence in the code base. If, however, your CEO curiously chooses to activate them because he likes pretty buttons, they are there to stay and will become visible at the top of the category list for every corp member with your corporation logo next to the title. They will be collapsable much like every forum category so even if your CEO is a button-happy-son-of-a-gun and you have no interest in corp forums, they shouldn‘t get in your way too much.

Acme "Awsome" Corp has been extra "awsome" after getting its own forum

Tell me more about how these forums work, Guard? Tell me more!

All right, since you ask so nicely.

There will be three channels in your Corp Forum.

• Corporation Announcements will be the place for corp directors or your CEO to post announcements about upcoming ops, wars, or just whatever the heck they please! Nobody tells them what to do after all. Regular members will have read-only access to this section of the corp forum.
• General discussion will be the public area where every member of the corporation will be able to start threads and post replies.
• The Board Room will be the private area for the directors and the CEO to discuss business amongst themselves, far from the prying eyes of their minions.

Access will be determined by in-game roles.

Click to enlarge (but don't click the green cross unless you´re ready for corp forums)

CEOs have to have the ability to make informed decisions on serious matters

But who‘s going to moderate when someone posts ASCII penises and stuff?

Not us! Neither CCP Staff nor the Volunteer Forum Moderators will monitor your Corp Forums. As the proprietors of the database, CCP staff will have emergency access in case something terrible happens that we need to verify, but Volunteer Moderators will under no circumstances be able to gain access.

Your corporation should have all the tools necessary to maintain order and to discipline rowdy members who just can‘t stop posting ASCII penises for some reason. But additionally to the ability to simply kick people from your corp, we decided to add limited moderation roles for directors. They will be able to lock topics, move them between channels, delete all your badposts and the like. These are somewhat similar tools to the ones our Volunteer Moderators have, apart from the fact that they will only work in your own corp forum (sorry).

While I‘m slow-clapping, is there anything else I should know?

Only that this is the first version of Corp Forums and that both the Community Team and the Web Team will be listening to your feedback very carefully. We decided to launch a rather streamlined version to begin with, while including a few options that give you the control you need to enjoy your new corp forums. If there‘s anything else you really need or if you notice something that we may have missed, let us know.

The current expected launch date is February 8th, which constitutes as "soon" in every sense of the word I believe.

All the best,
CCP Guard

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As hundreds of players from all over the world prepare for the trip to the Harpa center in Reykjavik for Fanfest 2012, we here in the Community team wanted to give you an insight into some of the community events we will be hosting this year.

The aim of community events at Fanfest is to provide players with non-EVE activities that they can participate in outside of the normal roundtables, presentations and panels. This also ties in to our drive to enable players to raise funds for our charity of choice, Get Well Gamers.

Get Well Gamers President, Ryan Sharpe, will be attending Fanfest this year and will be making a sizeable donation of toys to the hospital in Reykjavik on behalf of EVE Online players.

Office Tour

Every year we offer Fanfest attendees the opportunity to win a VIP tour of the CCP offices and a lunch with the Developers. Historically this event worked by inviting players to submit a minimum bid of $1000 and the highest bid would win the tour. A $1000 bid or more in this economic climate is a huge request of any one player so we are going to change how you, a Fanfest attendee, can win the office tour.

This year we will hold a draw and allow every attendee, plus a friend, the opportunity of winning for as little as one PLEX. We have set up the character ‘CCP Office Tour’ and in order to be in with a chance of winning, simply contract a PLEX to this character. The cutoff date for all contracts to this character will be Thursday, March 16 at 17:00 UTC and the winner will be announced in a CCP video on our You Tube channel on Friday, March 17. The winner will then be invited to attend the Office Tour starting at 11:00 UTC on Wednesday, March 21. Naturally, we will contact the winner by mail and arrange to get them to the office.

Ok, ok that’s all well and good but why do I want to spend part of a day in an office? Offices are boring! In many ways, that is true but these are the offices of CCP and you will be one of the few players who will ever get to take part in such an event. If that is not enough, let’s sweeten the deal a little more. CCP Soundwave, the Lead Game Designer for EVE Online, will allow the winner to pitch a game design idea of their choice in a 20-30 minute private meeting. This design idea can touch on any aspect of EVE Online. We cannot guarantee that the idea proposed will make it into the game. For example, if you propose that every Gurista Despoiler has a bounty of 20 Billion ISK or that Titans can go to High Sec space, chances are Soundwave will nod and smile while thinking about dangerous animals. Should your idea be well presented and thought out, who knows!?

No Limit Poker Tournament

The poker tournament at Fanfest has grown over the past few years and it is one of the events that players love to participate in. Each year we have been making the prizes bigger and better and this year, we will push it through the stratosphere. The tournament will take place on Thursday evening in a special area in the Harpa center and will be limited to the first 80 players who purchase tickets and tickets are available at the Fanfest 2012 site.

The format for the poker this year will be a knockout tournament and each player will have their initial buy-in of 5,000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona. An additional buy-in is available for all players of 5000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona before the end of the first break. A full rule set will be available at the venue.

So enough about the buy-ins and format how about you tell us about the amazing prizes on offer for the winners?

Ok so prizes will be awarded to the final three players placed in the tournament and we are giving away 60 PLEX, the first Ishukone Scorpion skin in-game and the winner will have their name on the show info window of this ship for eternity, T-shirts and other goodies.

P-P-P-POKERFACE-P-P-POKERFACE!

Wait a second; I think I should explain a little more. The 60 PLEX will be broken down as 30 for the winner, 20 for the runner up and 10 for third place.

Unique T-Shirts will be issued for the winner, runner up and third place

The first in-game Ishukone Scorpion skin will be awarded to the overall winner as well as having their name added to the in-game description of this ship. We need to stress at this point that the winning name is subject to approval and we may ask that you create an alt or use an alt name if we find your name unsuitable to be added to the permanent lore of EVE Online. For example I opened a thread today and names like Chribba, Kronossan, Ion Rubix and Zagam would be completely acceptable. Other names like 243636 or lol buttes would not be considered acceptable. The final decision on naming will be decided upon by the Lead Game Designer, CCP Soundwave. Should you have the name of a dangerous animal in your player character, you are pretty much fine.

Click to enlarge

This leads on to another question, does this mean we will be seeing ship skins for sale in the NeX store or by some other method? That is currently not the plan and is not in development so the short answer is no. The Ishukone Scorpion was already created as the first prototype and Game Design plan to release it to everyone at some stage. The winner of this event will just be granted the first one, before anyone else has ever owned it, along with the bragging rights of having their name in the lore.
 

Silent Auction

Every year we hold a silent auction which allows players to bid for extremely rare or unique items. In previous years we have auctioned off the famous Banhammer, hand painted ship models and EVE/Dust art. This year will be no exception and we are hearing rumors around the office of some very, very cool stuff if we can arrange to get it on time. I will not go in to any more details but you are all invited to drop by the Community area at Harpa and check out everything on offer.

Battle of the Bands

We initially started this project using Rock Band for players to compete against each other and it has turned into quite a big draw for many, simply for the many lulz it provides. Goonswarm have been dominating this event in recent years and remain undefeated so the gauntlet is thrown down. We have witnessed vocal powerhouses like Zastrow destroying all comers while Michael Bolton III has treated us to a partial striptease. Who knows what this event will bring this year but everyone is invited to take part. If you wish to sign up, drop by the Community area and we will be happy to have you listed.

 VIP area at the ‘Party at the top of the world’

The final part of the community events will be inviting the top three placed players in the poker tournament, the winner of the Battle of the Bands and Office Tour along with the player who buys the most expensive item at the silent auction to a VIP area at the main Fanfest party. This area will include table service all night, your own private seating area and security guard. Nothing quite says, ‘I won’ as much as lording it over everyone else like the rich pimp you are.

So that’s all from the Community team. If you have been debating whether to come to Fanfest then this is the ideal time to visit the Fanfest 2012 site and check out the early bird specials which are on sale. If you have already signed up to attend Fanfest, sign up for our poker event here and be quick as tickets really are selling out fast.

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The sixth Council of Stellar Management’s term is due to end on April 4^th, and as such it’s now time to start up the machine that is the CSM election cycle!

CSM election results announced at Fanfest 2011

This CSM term will see a change to the election process where upon being approved by CCP, the candidates must prove a certain level of support in order to be included in the final candidate list. This initial nomination stage will be assessed based on the number of “likes” given to the initial post for that candidate’s forum thread; if the number exceeds 100 then they will be included in the final list.

The schedule for the elections is as follows:

February 8^th to 22^nd – Candidacy application period opens
February 22^nd – Publication of the list of approved candidates; nomination stage begins
February 29^th – List of candidates who passed nomination stage published
March 7^th – Voting opens
March 21^st – Voting closes
March 24^th  – Results announced during Fanfest keynote.
April 4^th – CSM 7 take office
April 3^rd, 2013 – CSM 8 take office

The requirements to be able to run as a candidate in the CSM7 elections are as follows:

• You must have an active EVE Online account that is older than 30 days.
• You must be aged 21 years or older as of April 4th, 2012.
• You must provide your address and an e-mail address where you can be reached, which will not be made public.
• You must provide a scan or reasonable quality photograph of a valid passport to verify your identity and that you can travel internationally to the CCP HQ in Reykjavik, Iceland.
• You must be willing and able to sign a non-disclosure agreement with CCP as the CSM are regularly provided with information that is not for public release.
• You must be willing for your real name and country of residence to be made public alongside your character name on the EVE Online website. No other personal details required for candidacy will be made public.
• You must provide a reasonable campaign message stating your reasons for running, in no more than 200 words.
• You must have up to date and accurate account ownership information on all of your EVE Online accounts.
• You should be willing to actively engage in forum and chat room style discussions with CCP and the other members of the CSM.

In addition to the above in accordance with the CSM white paper, any serious violations of the EVE Online EULA may void your eligibility to run. All applications will result in an audit of the accounts belonging to the applicant. In cases where EULA violations have occurred, the application will be assessed on the basis of the severity of the violation and the length of time since the violation occurred. More information on candidate eligibility can be found in the CSM white paper.

Should you have any queries regarding the CSM election process, please head over to the comments thread or if you would like more private issues addressed, you can contact us via e-mail at csm-contact@ccpgames.com.

 - CCP Diagoras

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First up, if numbers like these interest you and you’re a twitter user, you may also be interested in my twitter page! Now that my shameless plug is out the way, with this blog I thought I'd respond to several requests that have been received for statistics relating to CONCORD/law enforcement losses. It turns out that CONCORD don't have much free time for eating doughnuts.

From the beginning of 2008 until the end of 2011, excluding rookie ships and shuttles, sentry guns and CONCORD were responsible for destroying 567,304 ships. That’s 11,818 a month, or 388 per day. 16.2 ships an hour, or one ship being removed from service every 3.7 minutes. New Eden is evidently a high-crime neighbourhood.



Month by month you can see spikes from events such as hulkageddon and the recent “Gallente Ice Interdiction” campaign by the Goonswarm Federation alliance. The green line only shows Hulks, but is still a good indicator of what all the people who were getting blown up by CONCORD were doing.

Where are these all taking place? Well, aside from a few sentry gun kills in NPC null security space, it’s of course all in empire space.


The map above shows a bubble chart for the empire regions, with the size of the bubble being relative to the number of losses to CONCORD. Whilst it does look cool, it probably isn’t quite so clear, so here are the top 10 regions for 2008-2011.

What does this mean? From what I can tell, Caldari space must be full of criminals. It could also be due to the vastly higher population, but I think I’ll go with the criminal thing.

Looking into what ships people are using to break the law, the results weren’t exactly shocking:

The alliances who have lost the most ships to CONCORD/sentries and the number of unique ship losers (different members of that alliance who lost ships) are as follows:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people of Goonswarm have managed to top both categories. To wind this blog down, I thought I’d take a look at the rate of these losses since the launch of Crucible. I was somewhat expecting a decline due to the change to insurance payouts, though apparently the number of people carrying around high-value goods has been tempting enough to actually cause a slight increase:



Lastly, the number of tier 3 battlecruisers lost to the police during 2011:

It will certainly be interesting to see the long term trends in overall losses from the removal of insurance payouts from CONCORD related deaths, as this has a significant impact on the cost of “suicide ganking”. As usual, I’ll watch the comments thread and answer questions that I can.

- CCP Diagoras [Twitter]

No Hulks were harmed in the making of this dev blog.
 

I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first, random reader on the internet?

Let’s go with the bad news:

Team Best Friends Forever and Pink Zombie Kittens have been disbanded. In memory of their service to the internet, a small statue was erected in Reykjavik today, following a lengthy parade which also had cake. It’s been a fun ride and we hope you all enjoy the features the teams got to make.

Now it's time for the good news:

The teams were disbanded because the influx of developers making spaceships was too great, so we had to be split them into three teams (or as I call them, friendship-bands). Please welcome Team Super Friends, Team Game of Drones and Team Five 0. All three teams are full of good looking men and women, with some familiar faces and some new ones.  Hopefully we can introduce you to some of the people on the teams at a later point, but right now, let’s focus on spaceships (and safety).

To celebrate this transition, Team Best Friends Forever and Pink Zombie Kittens decided to do one last push to get features out and we’re happy to give you this list of items on January 24^th:

• We’ve rebalanced small, medium and large Null ammo. I came back from vacation and Tallest had done this. He’s a pretty cool dude.
   
• We’ve changed the CPU on cap shield transfers. Much needed, high five.
   
• Assault ships have been rebalanced. We’ve wanted to do this since forever and were originally planning to do it for Crucible. It fell out due to time constraints, but has been completed for the coming release.
   
• We’ve buffed some of the modules launched in Crucible. You can now whine about how overpowered they are.
   
• When one of your friends logs on and get an annoying pop-up with his picture, you can now click the picture and start a conversation, telling him how annoying the pop-up is.
   
• The skills list now has a filter box so you can track down your individual skills. This is pretty great if you have a lot of them.
   
• Starbase fuel notifications are now shown in your calendar. You know why? Because it makes goddamn sense, that’s why.
   
• Overheating can be done by shift-clicking a module. This is a viable alternative to clicking the worlds smallest button.
   
• The agent list inside a station will now display your current status with an agent (mission offered, accepted etc). Hopefully less people will be cursing after undocking without pressing “accept” on a mission.

Before we go on, here is a brief intermission for some animal safety advice:  If you’re having issues with mosquitos and other bugs, rubbing garlic all over yourself is a natural repellant. If you are lost in the wilderness, this has the added effect that you can call for help once you locate an Italian restaurant to get garlic.

• The chat member list can now be condensed and have been given some more intuitive icons. This should be more in line with the actual chat, which you can already condense.
   
• Shield bonuses are now applied like armor bonuses. Remember when you got a shield bonus and LOST shield? Yeah that, we fixed it.
   
• The session change has been lowered from 20 seconds to 15 and hopefully we can adjust it even further in the future. Death to session changes.
   
• The watchlist now holds 15 people and you can drag and drop to re-arrange them. If you don’t have any friends, this isn’t relevant to you.
   
• We’ve started re-naming modules (missiles and ABs/MWDs) in a schema that tells the user what they do, while still maintaining a lot of the sci-fi feel. The aim is to make everything make sense, instead of today where everything is as confusing as possible.
   
• Meta 11, 12 and 13 Invulnerability Fields have been added to the game. We stumbled on them in the basement of CCP one day. Someone must have left them there.
   
• We’ve iterated on locations. You can now choose if it’s a personal or corp location when you create them. This means less dragging and clicking.
   
• Alliances can now join faction warfare. This is the first of a series of Factional Warfare iterations CCP Ytterbium is working on. We’ll tell you more as we get closer to fanfest, but we’re working on Factional Warfare. In other news, a flying pig just passed my window.
   
• The old Neocom has been replaced by a younger, prettier model. It’s customizable and has a ton of cool features you can play around with.
   
• We’ve added autocomplete and search hints to the asset search function from Crucible. SEARCHING HAS SUDDENLY BECOME REALLY EXCITING. Or not, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, that’s what we have for you here. Thanks from Team Best Friends Forever and Team Pink Zombie Kittens.
 

Toodles,

Soundwave

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Some of you may have heard about the re-organization that is ongoing within EVE development led by CCP Unifex. A part of this re-organization is the formation of a group of developers within a larger segment called EVE Service Quality.

EVE Service Quality includes Customer Support, Community Relations, Virtual World Operations and now a dedicated group of EVE ‘Live’ developers. Some of these developers will be familiar to you as parts of the old Engineering teams Gridlock, Sleeper Cell, Pi and Riding Mower. The EVE Live team is led by CCP Zulu and has the specific mandate to work on raising the quality of your experience playing EVE.

I am CCP Masheen, I have worked on teams BFF and Pi since 2010. Together, myself, CCP TomB and CCP Highlander will be identifying, researching, testing and prioritizing those issues which adversely affect your EVE experience so that EVE Live developers can work on improving them.

We are kicking the year off with a focus on Client Performance, how the client behaves and areas where we could show it some love. Over the past year Team Gridlock and EVE Operations have refined and overhauled both the server software and hardware to reap huge performance gains. This year, in the name of making your EVE experience even better, a series of client optimizations are on the way.

We are looking for the type of issue that might not normally be reported. For example:

This happens because it takes a few seconds to summon all the ships and display them on your EVE client. However, the initial appearance that the hangar is empty can be a little scary if you’re not expecting it. So, perhaps what we could do is add some way of letting you know that the list of ships is being fetched so that you don’t panic momentarily and since it may have been a while since one of our clever people took a look at the hangar code, we can check to see if there is any way to speed up the process.

If you would like to promote something which you believe is worthy of a performance tune-up please tell us in the comments what things about the client you would like to work just that bit better, but... for-the-love-of-CONCORD…be specific!

Including a summary of your PC’s vital statistics is extra helpful and clicking ‘Like’ on the posts of other players whose suggestions you support will help us to determine how popular improving something would be.

Developers in the EVE Service Quality group are already working on client optimizations to the Overview (yes indeed), more about that exciting development in an upcoming Dev blog. 

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The sixth CSM and CCP had their second scheduled summit from December 7^th to December 9^th, 2011. A wide variety of topics was covered during the summit, as can be seen from the table of contents listed below. The full meeting minutes can be found here: http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2011/CSM_CCP_Mettings_7-9_12_2011.pdf

• Meeting with the Senior Producer of EVE Online             
• The CSM
• EVE veterans/loyalty program
• The economy
• The PLEX
• Security
• Crucible wrapup
• Incursions
• Null sec –stations, sov, resources
• Little things –Factional Warfare, Wormholes
• Game balance
• Future highlevel discussions –War
• Future highlevel discussions –Fixing broken systems
• Web cell
• Microtransaction Microsummit
• New Player Experience
• A meeting with the Art department
• UI discussions
• The CSM and Hilmar CEO

This is quite the wall of text to read through, and there are bound to be many comments from players regarding many of the issues. Please feel free to place your comments in the related thread, it will be monitored both by CCP and the CSM.