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News on the next QEN and a new Econ Devblog

Unfortunately we were not able to finalize the 2nd quarter, 2008 Quarterly Economic Journal before Thanksgiving despite our best efforts in mining through hundreeds of gigabytes of mission data.  So instead of giving you a QEN with thin discussion on missions and their statistics we decided to work a little further on getting a better dataset and delay the publishing by another week.

However with new team members we are able to churn out recent data in much faster way than before and in an effort to satisfy your hunger for numbers we made a devblog on the new ORCA.  So with dedicated work from CCP_Recurve, CCP_Diagoras and CCP_Spectrum we were able to find some interesting facts about the Orca.

Please enjoy.

How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Carebearing

Quantum Rise introduced the Orca, a capital sized industrial command ship, which was covered in technical detail in Chronotis' devblog of October 23, 2008.  The feedback to that devblog indicated considerable player interest in the ship, which, coupled with relatively low production cost, should translate into a large demand.  Therefore, we at the Research and Statistics deparment of CCP were very eager to see how its entry into the market would turn out.

The First Days of the Orca

The first Orca blueprint was sold on November 11 at 23:30 and within an hour 67 Orcas were in production.  Within 24 hours the number of Orcas being produced had risen to 478.  The first production job completed on November 15 at 17:07 while the first sale on the general market was on November 16 at 02:38.

From November 11 to November 23 a total of 1814 Orcas had entered production.  Of those, 1121 ships were completed which means that 693 ships were still in proudction at the end of November 23.  Over the same period, 548 Orcas were sold on the market.

It‘s interesting to see that during that period 2935 Orca blueprints were sold.  This suggests that at least a thousand Orca blueprints were put directly into research rather than production and the number may actually be closer to 2000 since many of the 1814 ships that entered production will be made from the same blueprints .  The producers that take the research route will, to some extent, miss out on the high prices experienced when ships first are introduced to the market.  Instead they gain the competitive advantage of lower costs compared to those that go straight into production with unresearched blueprints.

Like other capital ships, the Orca is made out of components.  Orca producers can either buy the ready made components from the market or produce them themselves.  The latter option requires the extra investment in the component blueprints.  The following graph shows the daily average price of Orcas and our estimated constuction cost.  The construction cost is shown both as the cost of buying the components and as the cost of buying the minerals needed for the components production.  We assumed a mineral efficiency of 20 on the component blueprints and no mineral efficiency on the Orcas.  The cost data does not include the fixed cost of buying the component blueprints or researching them.  Orca prices are world averages, while component and mineral prices are average prices in the Forge.

It‘s evident from the graph that it‘s far more expensive, in terms of variable costs, to make Orcas from purchased components rather than making them yourself.  Of course, this stands to reason since sellers of capital ship components will want a markup on their production cost.  Each Orca producer must then figure out if their expected volume of Orca production will warrant buying the component blueprints.  Most likely, the main function on the capital component market is to fill in any gaps in the component production of newer capital ship producers.

There has been some speculation about how often we‘ll see Orcas blown up, given their strength and expected focus on high-sec.  Well, the first numbers are in.  By the end of November 23 a total of 5 Orcas had been turned into short lived, but very pretty balls of flame.  The first kill was scored on November 18 at 20:41.  Of those 5 losses, 3 were in high-sec., 1 in low-sec. and 1 in 0.0. 

Comparison to Other Capital Ships

We decided to take a look at the number of Orca blueprints purchased in the first 13 days of its release compared to the number of blueprints of other classes of capital ship in their first 13 days. The numbers surprised us greatly:

As you can see, the Orca blueprint sales were a great deal higher - over ten times the number of Orca Blueprints were sold compared to freighters when they were released, with almost three trillion ISK being spent on Orca blueprints.

Summary

The Orca seems to be living up to the expectations in terms of popularity.  The main surprise for us was to see the large number of Orca blueprints sold.  This should lead to a massive supply of Orcas in the future, which in turn should lead to very heavy competition among producers.  It‘s therefore tempting to predict that the price of Orcas will fall rather sharply in the coming weeks and that profit margins will be low in the future.  As a consequence, we may see many Orca producers turning to the production of other capital ships that require similar components but may offer larger profit margins in the long run.

Yes... You read correctly!

It is with great pleasure that I announce that we are in the initial stages of organizing another Alliance PVP Tournament. There have been a few threads on the forums over the last few weeks while we have been finalizing this, and I have been itching to reply to each one with this news!  As with previous tournaments, it's going to have excitement, explosions, extravagant setups, exotic dancers and plenty more (well maybe not exotic dancers; we will see how we go on that one!). This blog is the "early warning blog" to let you all know that it's on so you can plan accordingly.

Fancy a Date?

The tournament will consist of six days of competition - the same as previous tournaments. One key difference is that it will take place over three weekends and not two, which means that there will be no competition on Fridays - only Saturdays and Sundays (something our North American subscribers will appreciate I am sure).

These are the dates we have in mind:

• Tournament Signups - Dec 19th - Jan 9th
• Qualifying Round 1 - Jan 24th, Jan 25th
• Qualifying Round 2 - Jan 31st, Feb 1st
• Finals - Feb 7th, Feb 8th

Rules with an Iron Claw

Following the highly successful FanFest PVP tournament, we have enlisted the help of CCP Claw for the alliance tournament team. We don't anticipate a huge change in rules (although I already told him NO MINING!), but we do want to change things up a little from previous tournaments to keep everyone on their toes. The primary goal we have in mind is to tweak the points system so we see some more heavy hitting combat from both battleships and battlecruisers. I won't steal Claw's thunder, but I think we have some good tweaks to the points system in the works, so head on over to his rules thread in the tournament forum.

Sign here...

Signups are not open just yet as we want to give everyone a fair go and avoid any mixups. We will, however, confirm the signup dates and procedure well in advance. Our initial idea is to reserve a few slots for alliances that have performed well in the last two tournaments. These slots will be filled in order of finishing position and how recent their participation was. The remaining slots will be filled on a "first come, first served" basis. We will outline the exact signup process in the coming days.

Would you like to watch?

The final weekend will be covered live, with commentary from experts and devs alike. Expect mayhem! If you fancy yourself as some kind of internet spaceship expert and would like to kick off your budding e-lebrity career, then head on over to CCP Charlie's Expert applications thread and apply!

That's all from me for now! Please do keep an eye on the Tournament Forum, where we will be posting updates and information as it comes to hand.

Let's kick the tires and light the fires!

Mindstar

Please bear in mind that it may take an hour or two from when this blog is posted for the Tournament Forum to appear - so don't despair if the links from this blog don't immediately work.

Meet the Delegates of the Second CSM.

This has been a wild ride so far, and we have just begun. The election results have now been confirmed and we're pleased to introduce the first delegates for the new CSM:

Vuk Lau (character name ‘Vuk Lau') is the Council's chairman having received the highest number of votes. The first order of business for the Council will be to elect a vice-chairman, secretary and vice-secretary.

The following candidates were placed in seats 10 to 14 by number of votes received and will serve as alternate Council members:

The First Meeting

The first meeting of the Council will be held in EVE next Saturday, the 29^th of November. Though the session is closed to the public, you can follow the progress and discussions on the CSM forum section where all meeting minutes will be made public.

The Council members will be flown to Iceland the weekend of January 16th to meet with CCP after having deliberated and prioritized topics raised by players. A full listing of election results may be viewed here.

Demographics and Statistics

The format of the following information is identical to the analysis of the first election, to allow for an easy comparison - we will focus on the results from the second election here, while allowing for a seperate blog to compare the two later.

There were 20112 votes cast out of a pool of 233541 eligible voters, amassing a turnout of 8,61%. Of the total votes cast, 1149 voters (5,7%) chose to abstain.

The gender difference between voters closely follow the gender difference in the subscription base, with male voters being 97.1% and female voters being 2.9% of the total voting population compared to 95.4% versus 4.6% male - female ratio of the player base.

The average age of accounts voting is 1.94 years, meaning that most votes were cast by veteran players. 41.5% of the voting accounts are veterans of two years or more whilst those veterans constitute 29% of the eligible voters.

The below information reveals interesting facts. It displays voters sorted by countries, percentage of votes originating from each country, the total number of voters as a percentage of subscribers from that region and lastly the subscription percentage based on region.

What is clear is that the voters from Hungary are very interested in the CSM process, as 40.5% of the players from Hungary cast their votes. Icelanders are apparently interested in the CSM as well, where 13.07% of the Iceland-based voters voted.

We want to thank all of the candidates who threw their hats into the ring and gave it their all. Watching the campaigns unfold was fascinating. We also appreciate those who supported the CSM by voting. There is no way of knowing where this will lead, but we're all in it together and the promise of what we can accomplish together is astonishing.

Following the Quantum Rise release we've deployed the latest version of the EVE API. The most notable additions are Certificates and Medals.

We added a list of granted certificates to the character sheet as well as a new page, /eve/CertificateTree.xml.aspx, which is similar to /eve/SkillTree.xml.aspx but displays all available certificates grouped by categories and classes.

We created 3 new pages which show Medal info for characters and corporations:

• /char/Medals.xml.aspx lists medals that have been issued to a character by its current corporation and previous corporations.
• /corp/Medals.xml.aspx lists medals that can be issued by a corporation.
• /corp/MemberMedals.xml.aspx lists medals that have been issued to corporation members.

Alliance standings have been added to /corp/Standings.xml.aspx. We also closed /corp/Standings.xml.aspx for NPC corps because it was in some cases returning large amount of data and timing out.

We've been looking at performance issues in the container logs and included in this patch are some changes which should speed things up. The patch also includes other performance related changes in the caching mechanism which will mostly improve things on the server side.

Today the voting booth has been opened for the second CSM. The campaign so far has been vibrant and lively and we truly look forward to seeing the results.

Why should you vote?

This question is asked in every election, no matter where said election is being held. The answer to why you should vote in EVE is that the CSM is there to influence us in regards to EVE.

We want to bring to your attention several topics that the CSM has affected to varying degrees.

An example of how they have affected change would be the Orca, a ship type that has been worked on for some time, which became reprioritized due to CSM input. That is, the CSM had presented the need for an industrial ship of a size between the ‘old' indies and the freighters, thus the Orca was bumped up in the development line.

Concerns in regards to suicide ganking were raised by the CSM during their visit in Iceland where it was stressed that the consequences of that gamestyle were little. Thus we proposed the first step of increasing the security status hit received by the attackers in parallel with player vs. player standing penalty. This was, again, moving a design that was already in the pipelines forward to be released earlier than previously planned.

Switching ammo for all weapons was something the CSM brought up. Our response was that we had tried in the past to come up with a solution, but due to the nature of the operation it had not been considered prudent to proceed after initial investigations. After the meeting with the CSM in June, the project was revitalized and expanded a bit with weapon grouping, hopefully to the liking of everyone.

Alchemy was also stepped up due to feedback from the CSM. The change proposed by them was to have the moon material behave more like asteroids, i.e. where they would be mined out and then appear again. The effect would potentially be an increased supply as more people would have access to the resources. Our implementation is not as drastic but still achieves increased supply.

There are several other topics where the CSM has impacted the future development of EVE but, as has been pointed out before, we do not consider their work to be a competition with future CSMs but more of a symbiotic relationship between CCP and our community where we help each other.

These are the reasons why you should vote. The CSM has changed our views about EVE and how players view EVE, and it is our honest intention to act on the information provided by the CSM. You might notice that the outcome of the talks with the CSM are not all or nothing - we want small steps like with Alchemy to see where it leads, yet acting on the information the CSM provided, or the utilization of the idea from the CSM to expand an idea we were working on like with weapon grouping.

You should vote because with the CSM you can affect how EVE is developed.

You should vote because you can.

"I can resist anything but temptation."

-Oscar Wilde

Unfortunately for you, the rumors of my death have been highly exaggerated. I‘ve seen the occasional post inquiring about my demise. While flattering, I think most people have forgotten all about the old nerfs and more vividly remember some random jokes while I was flaming some poor soul on the forums.

I‘m now many years older and a bit wiser. I think more before I talk and therefore I seldom talk. Meaning never. As Executive Producer, it is part of the job description that nobody can figure out what you do. I prefer it to stay that way--with "great success". For instance, I just saw Zulupark look at me and notice how very serious I was writing this blog and then didn‘t talk to me because it must have been something important that I was very serious about. Facebook is very serious business.

As we‘ve grown, our responsibilities changed. Managing CCP and all its projects requires more people at all the steering wheels. You know what I‘m talking about. We‘ve seen that the 400 people at CCP don‘t all share a hive mind--even though we‘ve put into effect a lot of restrictions lately, much against the will of our staff, that they can‘t be stating their opinions as freely as before. Words from a developer are taken very seriously and publicly stating private opinion often ends up as "forum law" 10 minutes later. That wasn‘t so great when posting drunk or tired after a 30-hour expansion deployment.

If anything, the birth of an idea usually takes months. That‘s after the mud wrestling, rotten shark eating contests and a host of other of battles take place, usually under the influences of alcohol (now you know my strength and why I‘m here). It‘s then only appropriate that the persons responsible for the individual features, their champion, don the scapegoat costume.

On the brighter side it means though that most of us old "Fora Whora" try to keep our mouths shut. The size of our projects and ambitions mean that even though we can‘t talk much about game specifics, there is still great stuff to share now and then for everyone. Recently, Hellmar got the spotlight to shed some light on the status of CCP in the economic meltdown.  Now, we can look briefly at the big picture. If you‘re looking for details, I‘d suggest you read Zulupark‘s thread from the weekend, it‘s pretty cool.

Internode strategeries, we have them.

The EVElopedia will see the light of day before the end of the year. It will start out with a simple integration, while over time it will become more and more intertwined within the EVE client. You will be able find EVElopedia articles relevant to a certain window or activity by clicking on the contextually placed  "?" marks located in-game, which will help you  with delve further into the depths of the combined knowledge of all EVE players and developers.

The Item Database will be integrated into EVElopedia and players will see more frequent updates of its contents, which now can have commentary, tips and tricks associated with entries. EVE player history will be centrally located and further down the line we will leave room for players to contribute to the backstory of solar systems and other locations.

Our strategy is to allow EVE developers to start publishing information through EVElopedia when we write Dev Blogs and are deep in the development process, in order to provide a location for an organic, growing central information nexus and FAQ for all linked information on any specific topic. This will provide more visibility, longevity and structure to the history of everything EVE-a rich past, present and future that demands a persistent, permanent record.

Those of you that have attended Fanfest or read the occasional blog know that we‘ve had a number of initiatives where we intend to break down the barriers present in the EVE client and enable interaction through other media. Our social networking and communication tools, which have been in development for 2 years, will be showing up next year. They will provide you with everything you need, from your blog on harvesting Veldspar (I‘m looking at you Chribba), corporate front pages, alliance tools and our secret weapon, a screenshot of you (because they never seem to work on the forums, do they?) 

The beauty of all of this is that we've been building this strategy of multiple interaction points with EVE through our API service. It started out as listing your skills, but has been growing steadily since then. We want to continue this, so that when we build our own applications, we do it on top of the EVE API. You might also have noticed that there are already great iPhone applications out there for EVE. We expect to see more applications for other devices created by our genius community as well as by CCP.

That means, when the API information becomes available to us, it also becomes available to everyone else. Note, the big "want". We can already tell you that there will be quite a few functions which we can‘t open up due to performance, security and business reasons, but our intent is to open up as much as we can to you. We think it‘s pretty cool. It enables mashups. After all, you‘ve been doing much more awesome applications and websites using the API than we have.

Cowboy Mode - I wish I knew how to quit you

"Cowboy Mode" is what we've named the way we‘re deploying performance improvements. Think of it as some parts of SCRUM mixed with moderate recklessness. We‘ve erred on the side of caution with changes to many of our core systems, as some of them being almost 7 years old. Something had to be done. Patton said;

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

Sounded like a badass idea at the time. There is no denying that our saloon-brawling style did cause spillover, which, by applying some months of theoretical work, internal "faked" load testing, 3 tons of industrial lubricant and tender midnight lovin‘ might have caught. But in hindsight, it was worth it. Our six-shooters blasted us forward more than a year's worth of development in a matter of weeks and we realized it only by having all our changes running live on Tranquility. Only in with 40,000 real players hammering away would we find the real bugs and the real opportunities for further improvement.

Last week was a good example of this. We deployed some fixes to Tranquility and last weekend showed that they were wildly successful. Players participated in "totally playable"- and more recently "EPIC ****ING WIN"-fleet battles. We did however see some very weird behaviour with guns, drones and missiles which suddenly decided they had their own opinion on when to fire. Having identified this phenomenon enables us to apply generous amounts of cowboy love to it.

We‘ve won yet another battle, but the war is far from over. StacklessIO, EVE 64, Weapon Grouping, hardware upgrades, EVE Performance group, the upcoming optimizations to the inventory system and addressing NPC CPU usage are only the beginning; deploying all these performance increases and improvements allows the signal-to-noise ratio help us to identify other areas to attack. We‘re working ourselves up the mountain and we're looking forward to enjoying the view at the top with you all.

Just don‘t forget the reach-around.

ETC secure transfers made easier, more accessible and ingame

We‘ve had the secure transfer mechanism for almost 2 years now. Players have been able to exchange their EVE Gametime Codes (ETC) to other players for ISK through the account management pages and now more than 30 thousand players utilizing it on a regular basis.

We felt it was time to move forward with it--do another iteration to make it much easier and accessible exchange ISK for game time. The current situation has a series of flaws with it which we hope to address, while at the same time opening up totally new ground for current and potential EVE players.

With this new approach, you can take your run of the mill ETC code and enter it in-game through the escape menu, converting it into two in-game items called "30 Day Pilot's License Extension (PLEX)". You can then put them directly on to the market or into a contract! This means:

Benefit to you as a player

• Lower barrier of entry for exchanging ETCs. Everybody can do it easily in-game
• ETCs now use a transparent and efficient market, our very own EVE market
• Fights price fixing--one of the single most complained about issues with the current secure exchange
• Opens up for a larger supply, lowering the ISK exchange rate in the long run as anyone can exchange their ETCs more easily
• Enables you to create corporate Contracts for your members in exchange for Pilot Licenses
• Empowers you to recruit new players on trial into your corporations with Pilot Licenses
• Allows you to give someone a "free beer" (I like this part)
• Cramps down on RMTs (Real Money Traders) style with a kill and a smile
• It‘s pure awesome

Benefits to EVE and CCP

• Cramps down on RMTs style with a kill and a smile
• More and better options for you means more of you and your friends are able to play EVE.  That means more subscriptions for EVE, meaning more yardwarre and larger EVE expansions
• Provides a 30-day option while addressing our internal issues with the old 30-day ETCs
• Has the potential to increase monetary velocity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Velocity)

But we are aware of the drawbacks here, such as:

• A larger supply and demand could also increase prices
• Potential immersion breaker, we're sure you can look past it
• For safety reasons, the Pilot License can‘t leave a station, so you have to create it at the location you want to exchange it at
• The Pilot License can‘t enter any form of container
• It‘s pure evil

30 Day Pilot's License Extension (PLEX)

The 30-day renewable license pioneered by CONCORD is an alternative to its pod pilot contract license. Pilots on this new renewal scheme can purchase license extensions for ISK and thereby forgo the need for a contract altogether.

This item extends your gametime by 30 days when activated. It cannot leave stations but can be traded on the market and through contracts, except via courier.

You might also wonder why it‘s a 30-day license, given our recent move to 60-day ETCs. That‘s quite simple. We needed a single unit which easily mapped to most of our ETCs. While this leaves out the 50 and 100 day ETCs, the rest divide quite nicely with the time-length of the pilot's license.

We are going to try this out in the next couple of months and see what the results are. You should see this in Quantum Rise or shortly following it. I personally think that it will enable a lot of people to continue to play EVE despite the current world economy and enable others, that could never pay 15 USD in foreign currency but have time to play, to start playing EVE. Like this one time, in Iceland camp, it‘s almost impossible to get foreign currency. 15 USD would buy me a case of beer whereas previously it would get my voracious liver only one.

Giving players a more robust system to exchange game-time for ISK is something we also deem necessary as a result of abuse, exploitation, fraud and hard core companies trying to sell you ISK directly. In the end, this only hurts you the customer and therefore the universe of EVE.

We must continue to battle this and it‘s time for a new strategy. We see what the secure trade of ETCs between players did and we want to investigate ways of making that easier by enable all players to trade amongst themselves directly. If the key to battling RMT is to allow players to casually and securely exchange gametime for ISK, thereby neutralizing RMT companies as a necessary supply, then that is an acceptable, necessary evil.

We ask you, "don‘t hate, participate" in this endeavour.

Quantum Rise, this month

Discrete rise? Cool rise? What‘s rising? Does it describe my sex life? I can tell you that its flagship is performance. While not really a single feature, it signifies all the aggregated benefits that each of the many improvements deliver. Our initial focus on industry and commerce got diverted as we moved more people on to the performance gain team, which we strongly believe was necessary (sorry EON).

When deploying a lot of small fixes, few might actually notice in terms of daily performance - but having deployed 10 small ones, we might actually see a 2% decrease in total cluster CPU usage. That‘s a lot of CPU cycles freed up when you have more than 200 dual-core processors running Tranquility.

You should see the feature pages when we send out another press release this week to detail what is coming this month.

MUCH MOAR EVE - Revealed at Fanfest

Following our two expansions per year strategy, next year's schedule is starting to shape up as well as the future releases beyond that. For those that haven‘t been with us for long, our release plan revolves around two expansions, launched around summer and winter respectively.

Between these expansions we sometimes roll out smaller patches which typically contain improvements, fixes and more content. In addition, we'll deploy hotfixes to our servers which address a wealth of under-the-hood things such as those most recently implemented by our teams in Cowboy Mode. Hotfixes happen on a weekly basis, sometimes even more frequently,

The same applies for next year and the years beyond that. Having the largest team ever working on EVE, next year has some real surprises, where we see the fruits of our labor in the last 5 years. There will be some totally new aspects to the game and possibly some old friends revived that you have long missed.

We‘ll be revealing our future vision at Fanfest in person, and of course here online afterwards. However, the point we‘re trying to make is that EVE is still here for the years to come. We'll have our 2 expansions per year, to infinity and beyond.  Frankly, having such huge things like Walking in Stations, player housing, new races, planetary interaction, new environments, professions, new tech levels, and improving all the current functionality with an infinite universe in which to design, we‘re having difficulties putting them all in.

As a result, the next "open" spot for the greatest thing since Fedo sushi is in our winter 2012 expansion. Anything special you‘d like to see happening there? We‘re doing more mud wrestling next week and you are welcome to throw in your ideas. OK, I think Zulupark has a crush on me, he‘s still looking. I'm still giving him a very serious look.

We realize that this summary isn‘t new for a lot of our players who have been with us since 2003, but the contents deserve a repost. The future is bright for EVE. We have a huge backlog of revolutions for gameplay, art, story and design, --some will be unveiled shortly and we truly hope you like what we‘ve been planning. In the last year, you have seen a lot of new faces appearing in game design, engineering, quality assurance, marketing and recently long-standing employee Torfi Frans into the role of Senior Producer for EVE, who has been with us since the dawn of the game and who will be presenting what‘s in store next year. I believe you will be pleasantly surprised by what we‘ll be revealing.

Fly safe - and hopefully I see you at Fanfest. The beer is quite cheap now.

Much has changed in Eve since many of the hauler or mining class ships were introduced. With Quantum Rise we felt the time was right to review these ships and make changes where necessary to refocus their roles and ensure they can still perform in the age of New Eden's Great War.  Of all the ships, we found the transport class to be the most lacking in distinct roles, so much of this blog will focus on the changes to those and then we will briefly list some of the other improvements to some other ships.

Blockade Runners

The Blockade Runners (Crane, Prorator, Prowler, Viator) are meant to be rather good at getting through gate camps and navigating through low and null sec space with more impunity than the other industrial ships.  Several changes such as the introduction of interdictors, heavy interdictors, and force and fleet recons have had an impact on their ability to run blockades with much success at all. As a result, we wanted to try and balance things to better focus them towards their role in light of many changes EVE has seen since they first were introduced.

To improve them we refocused on stealth rather than agility.  They will gain the ability to equip covert ops cloaking devices and therefore can warp whilst cloaked.  In lieu we removed the +2 warp strength and one or part of their active tanking bonuses which were not really being used anyway as much.  They will also gain the ability to utilize the black ops jump portals.

By switching to stealth and cloaking as their primary defense in navigating through space and getting through gate camps they gain a significant edge in being able to cloak and move away fast if within a bubble.  The ability to use the black ops jump portals is a fringe benefit allowing specialised operations where you would need cargo capacity moved around for a variety of reasons.

Deep Space Transports

The Deep Space Transports (Bustard, Impel, Mastodon, Occator) have good tanks and good cargo capacity but really no focused role beyond the good tank.  The most important part of moving your cargo around is arriving safely at the destination.  The DSTs have significant drawbacks as they are less prone to getting through the all critical gate camps like their Blockade Runner cousins. If warp scrambled, it was a matter of how long their tank might last in order to have a remote chance to survive the encounter. 

To revamp their role we gave them the +2 warp strength of the Blockade Runners and also a bonus to shield hitpoints (Bustard and Mastodon) or armor hitpoints (Impel and Occator) to increase the ability to fit for a HP tank which is much more useful than their active tanks in many situations where you are receiving a large amount of damage over a short duration. In balancing this out, one of their active tanking bonuses was removed. 

With these changes we hope that the extra warp strength and HP tank will greatly aid their use in all areas of space especially in empire where they have less to worry about with no bubbled camps to have to run through and only the heavy interdictors as their nemesis.

Mackinaw, Procurer, Skiff and Rorqual

The mackinaw gets some love with an additional +10 cpu and +1000 cargo capacity to allow it to be more effective at ice mining.  It always under performs a little compared to the hulk and these changes should allow it to specialise at ice mining better.

The Procurer and Skiff both received minor boosts to their agility as we wanted the smallest barges to be at least agile if completely outclassed by their larger cousins in most scenarios and nudge them towards more of a ninja mining role a little.  It might also be good for you all to know the Skiff has always had a +2 warp strength bonus but this was never detailed in the description so we have updated the description to highlight this rather powerful bonus as a good selling point.

The Rorqual will be receiving a minor boost to its corporate hangar capacity.  This is done to allow the hangar to be used as a shared and secure container for mining ops and also increase its utility for carrying cargo around.

In Summary

These changes are not final and are subject to change following feedback here and from public testing on Singularity.  By no means are we finished and we will continue to look at the industrial line of ships in the future. We plan to focus on improvements to help them fulfil and expand their roles. Specialised cargoholds is one improvement we are looking at in detail for the future.  For now we very much want to hear your constructive views on these proposed changes.

Ave - Chronotis

Now, this is a story all about how...

So to start this off maybe a quick introduction is in order, I'm Charlie the newest face in the CCP Marketing team, working as a video producer and having the fantastic role of managing EVE TV's events. While EVE TV may be changing a bit in the future, its ideals are still based on "something made by EVE players, for EVE players." I can safely speak for myself and others who have moved from EVE TV to CCP that we'll continue to put all our efforts, and our free time, into bringing you more events in the future.

Fanfest 2008

So next up on the EVE TV schedule is Fanfest 2008, held every year on top of the world in Reykjavik. The Fanfest is always a massive hit with those that can attend, meeting the developers of EVE, other players, their corp mates and getting the first viewing of what will be coming to EVE over the next year.

But understandably not everyone can make the trip to Iceland, which is where we step in. EVE TV this year will again be filming nonstop for all three days to bring you;

· Every main lecture - over 15 lectures covering every topic you could think of.

· Keynote speechs from Oveur and Hellmar.

· The Producer's Panel Q&A.

· Roxor & The Party on Top of the World.

· The Fanfest PvP Tournament including "EVE TV Live on stage".

· Many many interviews with players and CCP staff.

· Everything else we see until we run out of tape!

Once we have recovered from all of that every video will be made available for download within a week or two after the Fanfest.

Book an interview

Attending the Fanfest? Maybe you're coming with your entire corp? Or maybe you run a big EVE service such as a fan site? Then the ever curious StevieSG and CCP Mindstar would love to schedule you for an interview while you're visiting! We'll be interviewing players and staff alike all through the Fanfest but we'd like to book big groups and special interest interviews in advance so we definitely get you on film. If you're interested drop us an Email with some quick details on who you/your group are and we'll send you more information. Stevie also recommends that corps bring their own t-shirts, flags and any other corp branded items (wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man?) to give your corp the full on screen impact you deserve!

As Dr.EyjoG has remarked in the past, one of the differences between the EVE economy and real-life economies is the inability for the participants - that's you lot - to work around inefficiencies with genuine product innovation. In a real-world economy, shortages and bottlenecks drive R&D teams to find new and better ways of doing things. If oil prices rise, people start looking harder for reliable alternative energy sources, and the higher prices go the harder people look.

Because we're not (yet) at the point where this can be done in EVE, we as developers have to step in occasionally and do the job instead. This happened in a big way two years ago when we added the invention mechanics - essentially an innovation that allowed you all to bypass the T2 production bottleneck imposed by the limited supply of BPOs.

Under invention, T2 BPOs still have significant value, but players who don't have the good fortune or good business acumen to own an original blueprint can still compete in the market, and this competition has increased availability and driven prices down.

However, there's rarely such a thing as a perfect supply chain, and in opening the floodgates at the manufacturing stage, we increased demand for raw materials, which also have limitations on maximum supply in a way which closely mirrors the original situation with T2 BPOs. With player numbers rising and increasing numbers of players reaching the skill levels needed to use more advanced T2 gear, the pressure on certain key raw materials has steadily increased.

In particular, two rare moon minerals - dysprosium and (to a lesser extent) promethium - are becoming ever-more expensive as increased demand puts pressure on a limited supply. This is likely to become an increasingly large issue as time goes on, with prices for these minerals continuing to rise due to demand, and the increased price being passed on to the consumer of the final product.

If you think this is sounding remarkably similar to the original situation with T2 BPOs, you're not alone! In order to head this problem off at the pass before it becomes critical, we're implementing some new mechanics with similar goals to invention - take the load off the limited resources while preserving a good chunk of their values - but this time with moon minerals rather than blueprints.

So how will this work? We've created six new reactions which allow you to create key intermediate materials without relying on the rarest moon minerals. This isn't, of course, an efficient process! Each rare mineral has been assigned a more common counterpart, which can be used in the place of the rare mineral in these new reactions at a ratio of 20:1, which roughly approximates the difference in moon count between the rare mineral and the common mineral in each case.

Let's take ferrofluid as an example. Currently it takes 100 hafnium and 100 dysprosium to make 200 ferrofluid. With the new reaction, you'll take 100 hafnium and 100 cadmium to make 1 unrefined ferrofluid, which can then be refined down to give 10 ferrofluid and 95 hafnium. The final ratios at the end of the process see you using 100 cadmium and 5 hafnium to create 10 ferrofluid, per cycle. The proportion of hafnium stays the same, but the amount of cadmium is 20 times the amount of dysprosium you'd normally use per unit, and it takes ten times longer to make 1000 units of ferrogel.

The four pairings are cadmium/dysprosium, vanadium/thulium, chromium/promethium and platinum/neodymium. The final output of each of the reactions will be ten units per cycle, and the common mineral always replaces the mineral at a 20:1 ratio.

This will allow the moon mineral market to take some of the strain off dysprosium and promethium moons in particular while also preserving their value. If oil prices stay low, the incentive to develop and deploy alternative energy sources diminishes. In the same way, market prices of the commoner materials and the cost of mining and reacting them will create dynamic minimum values for intermediate materials created through this process, which gives owners of rare moons the ability to undercut these values and maintain a hold on the market in situations where supply can keep up with demand. Where demand outstrips supply, these reactions will allow the market to try and adjust itself to cope.

We're hopeful that this change will fit in cleanly as the "other half" of the invention mechanic, and we will of course have the good doctor monitor the situation so we can react to changes down the road.

Build safe!

-Greyscale

With FanFest only two weeks away and Quantum Rise bringing technology and content to new levels, now is a great time to be a part of the EVE community. We’re going that extra mile on all fronts, and the Buddy program is no exception. From today until the start of FanFest, CCP will be tracking all Buddy invites to see who locks down the highest number of Buddy conversions from invites sent during that time. The subscriber with the most conversions will become the proud owner of a massive Special Edition Commodore EVE Rig!

If you haven´t used the Buddy invite system before then now is a perfect time to check it out. Click a link and enter an email address – it’s that easy! Link, rules and specs of the machine are outlined below. Introduce friends to the most immersive MMO on the market and increase your chances to win an incredible gaming rig in the process!

RULES:

1. Buddies invites that are converted to a subscriber from today (Oct 24th) until November 6th will be counted. Since trials are 14 days we will make the cutoff for conversions on Nov 20th to give your Buddies enough time to decide and enjoy their full trial time.
2. Participant must be a current subscriber.
3. Buddy invites must be sent out from the Buddy Invite Page so they can be tracked
4. Only conversions from invites sent during this promotion will be counted, conversions from invites sent before Oct 24nd will not count.
5. In the case that two or more Buddies are even as winners, then a drawing will determine the final winner.

PRIZE:

Special Edition Commodore EVE Rig. The EVE DEV team will sign the rig, so this is a real collector’s item. Below are the specs:

• 3.3ghz Core Duo processor
• 750W power supply
• Sound-deadening components
• ASUS P5N-D (NVIDIA nForce 750i) motherboard
• 4GB of Commodore Corsair RAM
• GeForce 280 1GB video card
• 2-year warranty

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ABOUT THE BUDDY PROGRAM:

The Buddy Program is for current EVE Online subscribers that want to enable their friends to try out EVE Online without any obligations. By clicking on the link below you can send your buddies a free 14-Day Access Pass and have them join you online.

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