“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Hello again everyone. It’s time to to look back at the last few months and then take a quick peak into the near future for the pilots of EVE Online. Last November’s release of Crucible was a key moment for us. Not only did it herald a shift in focus in what types of releases we were going to deliver to you, it also coincided with significant changes in how we, CCP, go about making the game we all love. There is plenty of detail about all of this in this dev Blog from CCP Zulu and in the December CSM minutes. In short, we are focusing the majority of our efforts on the “core” game of EVE whilst taking some time to give some TLC to our own internal structure, processes and tools.

The good thing is that the first big mountain of work on our reorganization has been completed, although there will be more change for us ahead. After the initial disruption that an effort like this always creates, all our developers are back in the serious business of making EVE better and better. You have already seen some of the results of this with January’s 1.1 point release for Crucible which brought balancing changes for Assault Frigates, Neocom improvements, Factional Warfare increments and a host of other changes all designed around making it a better experience to play EVE. Time Dilation has brought a level playing field in super-populated server situations and Team Gridlock have now turned their attention to performance improvements for the client, having recently released some of their work in Crucible 1.2.

A picture from a recent Time Dilated fleet fight courtesy of Deathcrow (click to enlarge)

You will also have noticed an increase in the pace of small targeted patches and hotfixes, many in response to the reports we are getting in from new back-end systems we put in place to help us react to issues faster.

In addition to the many small fixes and improvements we’ve deployed, we have also released a completely revamped eveonline.com website, designed to lead new pilots into the wonders that await them in the game. Poke around with it if you haven’t yet. It’s complemented by a simultaneous release of an ever improving community website for those who have been in the game for a while longer.

That’s actually quite a bit when you consider it has only been two and a half months since Crucible launched. However, it is time to look to the future and see what it brings.

EVE’s developers are really getting into their stride for our upcoming releases. I recently emerged from many demos where the teams have been showing off their progress from their second sprint (short development cycle). I have to say that even at this early stage I think we have some great features, content and improvements for you coming up over the next 4-5 months. We are hoping to have a number of small releases as we go through February, March and April culminating in our major, war-themed release coming just before the summer, EVE Online: Inferno

The next few months will be spent reinvigorating Concord-sanctioned warfare, giving tools and a framework to groups who wish to take advantage of these conflicts both directly and indirectly. We are also looking to introduce many new things which will mix up all forms of combat in a way not seen for a long time. Factional Warfare will also be seeing changes to make it much more relevant and fun by giving real reasons to fight for your faction.

As we continue development there will also be smaller changes, improvements and usability fixes, and we will not forsake our game performance focus. We will be making some changes and additions to our avatar technology and many other parts of the game. The websites will continue their metamorphoses and there may even be sight of more developer events on TQ.

Finally, we will revealing more concrete steps in the link between EVE and DUST 514, bringing an unprecedented level of collaboration, conflict and purpose to both games living in the same EVE Universe.

Am I playing my cards close to my chest? Of course. I’m keeping details light right now as it is still early on in the development process. I’d also much rather let the people putting all the hard work into making these features a reality have the chance to unveil things. Expect dev blogs, forum posts, interviews and video blogs packed full of information in the coming weeks and months.

Of course, if you want to witness the next big reveal of plans for EVE Online: Inferno, then you can hear it in person by coming to Fanfest in March. There you will be able to get quite cozy with your favorite devs and find out the real lowdown on EVE. This year Fanfest will be at a bigger, better venue right in the social epicenter of downtown Reykjavik, allowing us to bring MOAR EVE to Fanfest than ever before as well as some sneak previews of DUST 514, including the first-ever hands-on demo.. I can’t wait for the event and I hope to talk spaceships with a lot of you in person.

Time to sum up what has become a giant tease of a blog. A lot of work was put into YourEVE by everyone at CCP over the last few months and we all hope to continue momentum into what is shaping up to be the best year ever for EVE Online. The changes we painfully  undertook appear to already be paying dividends via the Crucible releases.. More importantly though, I hope each one of you is experiencing benefits from our recent releases and that our plan going forward will bring even more of the same.  I thank you for being here with us as we co-develop EVE with you, the greatest gaming community ever assembled. I trust that, come EVE Online: Inferno, you will be having the grandest time blowing each other up and/or profiting from it.

CCP Unifex
Jonathan Lander
Senior Producer of EVE Online

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

Most of us still remember our first time in EVE and that special feeling of piloting our very first ship. We didn't have the comparison to the infinitely more powerful vessels we would soon command so to our fresh and unspoiled minds we were the king of the stars for a little while and the rookie ships were our chariots of destruction. At least until we met Tank CEO at a gate and were „gently“ removed from the throne.

Apart from the obvious fact that the Impairor, the Velator, the Ibis and the Reaper hold great importance being the first ships any new pilot is granted upon being born into the EVE Universe, they hold a special place in all our hearts.

The rookie ships are being re-designed and given a long overdue makeover. This is part of our ongoing effort to continously update the art assets in EVE Online and making sure it remains the most beautiful MMO out there.

We wanted to show you the new rookie ships, and use the opportunity to give you a little insight into the process behind adding new assets to the game. Enjoy!

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

The new player experience in EVE has vastly improved since the early days and was last changed for the Incarna expansion. There are still many things to do and we’re looking to further improve the way new capsuleers learn about EVE and its many possibilities.  As a part of the refocus on the basics of EVE, a new team has been put together to tackle this important task, consisting of CCP NerfHerder, CCP Feyhr, CCP Dropbear and CCP Legion (the undersigned) and we would like to hear your feedback regarding the new player experience.

EVE is a very unique game and it enables players to have a lot of fun even if they have never touched some game mechanics. We want to give new players the best possible experience from the very beginning and lay the groundwork for an enjoyable time in New Eden.  As you can see in the below scientific graph, EVE rewards those who accumulate “EVE knowledge” in a way other games do not.

This Player Experience team will focus on making EVE more accessible to players without dumbing down the game. So the main area for us is naturally the tutorial and everything around it, but we will also be focusing on what happens before a player logs in and after the player completes the tutorials and wishes to explore the universe during their first few months in New Eden.

We want to give the new players a smooth and consistent online gaming experience, where they are comfortable with the game mechanics and know what they wish to be in New Eden. We aim to teach new players how to play EVE in a way which is gripping, exciting, clear and most importantly FUN. We want players to have increased social interaction with the community and corporations in the beginning. We wish to give new players more direction and the understanding of what they can become, and guide them towards that goal. We want to give the players a chance to experience the coolness of EVE even in the beginning and make them understand all the potential within the game. In short, we want to make the first days, weeks and months in EVE enjoyable and not just something ‘you have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff’.  Having said that, we have no intention to make the game easier in any way, we are not looking into simplifying EVE Online, nor do we want to tell the players exactly what they should do or give them a step by step guide for wormhole mining for example. Rather, the approach we are taking is to make it easier for new players to learn and understand the different mechanics and features of EVE.

To begin with the Player Experience team will do research to identify where and why people lose interest in EVE. We will look at a wide range of statistics, player and trial surveys, conduct focus group tests and we would also really like to hear ideas from within the EVE community as well. Some problems are very obvious whilst other factors are more subtle. In the short term we might be able to do small changes to the current new player experience, but long term we are aiming to overhaul and redesign the whole experience.  

We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems. Both small and big ideas are welcome, especially if you have your first weeks freshly in mind. What small things do you think could be done to the current tutorial or do you think it should be binned and a new one built from the ground up? What would your ideal EVE tutorial look like? Let us know what you think.

Once we have a solid plan together we will be sharing them with you for more feedback. Till then, fly safe and go easy on the new guys.

CCP Legion,
Team PE.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

Guest blog by Zapatero from EON, the Official EVE Online Magazine. Enjoy.

There have been a few rumblings out there in the social ether, with concerned minds suggesting that all was not well inside Outpost EON. It's true that we've been rather slow in getting the new (26th) issue sent out, but that's not because production is about to cease on the longest-running internet spaceship magazine. Far from it. The truth is that there have been some quite significant changes going on, about which we've had to remain quiet... until now.

Let me take you back to Thanksgiving 2011 and the announcement of an EVE Store sale offering 50%-off all EON stuff. It was a sale that was uncommonly generous, but it was also one that for various reasons did not go quite as intended. The layers of code that have been the foundations of the EVE Store have served it well over many years, but things like flash sales and bulk codes have never worked out faultlessly even at the best of times. Given all that had been going on in the weeks and months previous to the onset of winter, Thanksgiving 2011 was anything but the best of times, as CCP, undergoing extensive reorganization, wasn’t able to react to technical issues as quickly as before.

It was suggested then that perhaps the best way to manage stock and create sales within the new CCP reorg paradigm was to create our own retail outlet, one that could be built purely around EON and our particular requirements. So that's what we went and did.

Though it looks different, the just-opened store offers exactly the same EON items as were available in the EVE Store. The big difference is that because we can't transfer accounts over to the new system, buyers and new subscribers will have to register their details at the new site. This is because, quite rightly, the terms and conditions you agreed to as an EVE Store customer preclude the wholesale transfer of your customer information, and since the new EON Store is owned and maintained by us at MMM Publishing rather than CCP Games, obviously we all have to abide by the rules. Rest assured however that if you have a current active subscription it will be honoured. When it comes to re-subscribing, however, you will have to register at the EON Store.

The good news is that with the EON Store up and running we will be able to offer more deals and special offers at short notice (you might want to join our Facebook page or follow our Twitter feed @EonMagazine in case a 50%-off deal kicks off. All the usual credit cards and PayPal are accepted through our trusted payment gateway (WorldPay) and you can select between US bucks, UK quids or EU 'roes. Oh, and we have re-evaluated postal costs to be a little fairer to those ordering from the economic black hole that is the UK and Europe, which is where Outpost Eon is located.

Another significant development with regard to EON is that we have - at long, long last - gone ahead with digital editions of the magazine. I blogged and commented a couple of times last year about our frustrations in trying to force integration of digital magazine sales within the EVE Store, but as spring became summer and Incursion became Incarna, it became increasingly obvious that CCP had more important things to worry about. To be fair to CCP, the issues were more complex than I realized at the time and went far beyond the technical—so our independence from the EVE Store actually has turned out to be a good thing, especially with how fluid things are with regard to digital reading trends.

Right now we only have the current issue available in digital form, but the rest of the magazines will follow over the coming weeks and months. Sadly we're not quite in the position to offer digital editions for direct sale via the EON Store, but if you have an account with Zinio.com, who will be distributing digital editions, you won't need to worry about that anyway.

We actually put a lot of time into researching the best platform and we liked Zinio by far the best. The service works across a greater range of devices (PC, Mac, Android, iOS) and you can download the mags as many times as you like to however many devices you own. No doubt there are some of you asking why we don't just sell pdfs from the EON Store, which is a fair question, but we almost see Zinio as the Steam of the magazine world. It has ubiquity, ease of use, a nice switch between portrait and landscape modes (and a text-only mode that we'll be eventually supporting), relatively small file sizes for each magazine compared to hi-res pdf files, and the aforementioned support over a range of devices - which, we're informed, will soon include Kindle Fire. Oh, and there's a nice preview feature too.

So, to recap, EON has vacated the EVE Store and set up shop anew, while the process of going digital is well underway. In celebration we're offering 50%-off everything in the EON Store until midnight on Sunday 26th February.

Rest assured that just because sales and administration has moved to an out-of-town purpose-built facility, EON remains an official EVE product, with all the benefits that entail. EON has and always will remain fully-embedded within the CCP collective consciousness. Thank you for reading. If you have any questions or concerns, please either comment here, via Facebook or send an email to eon@mmmpublishing.com. We'll do our best to respond.

Dear Internet Spaceship Fans,

CCP Veritas here from the BRAND NEW Team Gridlock.  I know, I know, it was just a couple days ago when I was here blogging about Time Dilation which is a thing that the old Team Gridlock did, but there was a period where there wasn’t one but now there is again and let me tell ya we’ve been busy, folks.  We’ve got a couple new faces – CCP Snorlax and CCP Colgate, both experienced veterans when it comes to all things client. The servers are doing much better these days, so the performance target has moved over to that little piece of tech you all use to fly spaceships around with, making them excellent additions to the crew.

CCP Masheen posted up a blog asking for ideas on how we can make the client better, which has given us some fantastic targets to go after.  But while that was going on, we were already busy hacking at some overgrown forests in the UI and the results are coming out in Crucible 1.2.  Highlights include:

MORE CONSISTENT UI PERFORMANCE!

If you’re a fan of having a helluva lot of windows open, man is this patch going to own for you.  Using something akin to magic, we’ve made it so setups like this have about the same load as only having a couple windows open:

BETTER FONT PROCESSING AND RENDERING!

So yeah, there’s a lot of text in a lot of places.  It’ll process and render faster now, which is like a fine glazing of winsauce over everything.

MORE RESPONSIVE OVERVIEW!

This beasty had a big target painted on its back and we’re not very sporting so we kicked this thing around a lot.  The overview is now much less of a performance hog, so folks doing large fights and such should see a respectable boost to their FPS.  And in case you’re feeling left out ‘cause you’re not into blobs and stuff, we upped the overview’s target refresh rate from .4hz to 1hz - that’s from once every 2.5 seconds to once per second for you non-hertz-aware types.  It’s a hell of a lot less spiky too, which makes being around lots of things a lot less like being punched in the face repeatedly.  It feels pretty good bro, you’ll see.

Allow me to use the communication form of my people: the graph.  This here is a raw frame-time clock in millisecondsbefore and after our improvements– lower meaning faster:

These charts come from a laboratory-style setup where there's just a few hundred random ships sitting about with no special overview settings at all. The improvements are even more noticeable when the ships around you have pilots in them with relationships to you causing various colors to be splatted all over your screen like a Pollock painting.

With the increased update rate, we made one super tiny functional change which you’ll probably notice and hopefully like – the sorting of the overview will lock when you hover over it.  Previously it would freeze if you held your lock button, but with things moving around quicker it felt better to lock sooner than that. 

BONUS GOODNESS:

Since the overview and brackets share a lot of code, we made them a bit faster by accident.  I hope you don’t mind.

All this is headed your way very soon. Like, really soon. Okay fine it's Thursday the 16th of February, 2012. Stay tuned for more coming from us as we march our way towards a smoother more gooder client that shows you information faster.

Fly Fast,

~CCP Veritas

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

Since Time Dilation (TiDi) was activated fully on Jan 18^th, we’ve seen it trigger in many different places, from Jita to some of the biggest spaceship slugfests we’ve seen in some time.  In all cases, it has kicked in appropriately when the server node has become overloaded, keeping things running responsively and sanely.

I want to share my favorite two graphs of the past few weeks with you folks.  They display the amount of time dilation in red against the right axis with how delayed module processing is in blue along the left axis, in seconds. 

F-9F6Q on 20Jan:  >1,300 pilots on a reinforced node (4 solar systems, supernode hardware)

92D-OI on 21Jan:  >1,350 pilots on a normal node (83 solar systems)

The thing to notice here in both cases is that modules were not allowed to lag very much.  When the delay spikes up, TiDi kicks in, then the delay goes away.  Happy news for anyone interested in making lazors go pewpewpew or reppers go, well, whatever they go.  In both huge fights here, the module response time was kept under one second for the vast majority of the action, which is a tremendously large improvement over the 20, 40, 600 seconds we’d sometimes see in fights of this scale.

Another thing the attentive amongst you will notice is the large pile of load at the end of both fights, corresponding to large jumps out of the system.  Jumping being expensive is one of the first things we identified back when Team Gridlock was formed, so we’re very familiar with that problem and why it exists, but it’s not easily dealt with.  This load has always been there, it’s just now very explicit and visible to you folks where before you’d just notice it by sometimes being black screened or at e-warp distance from gate or other such tomfoolery.  In any case, the work to be done to remedy this has been identified and is awaiting being the worst problem we have so we can tackle it.

While I’m here, I want to address another common criticism of TiDi – that it’s a node-level thing, which causes solar systems potentially far away from the fight to be effected.  Ideally, we could have a clock per solar system and just slow down the biggies and that’d be just swell.  Unfortunately we’re very far from there just based on how our software is set up, there would have to be some pretty fundamental changes in order to keep track of all that.  Given the choice between not doing TiDi and doing it on a per-node basis though, I believe I made the right call.

But enough about all this negative stuff.  TiDi is going quite well and big fights have been quite enjoyable as late.  Or so I hear.  I actually haven’t been in any personally, I just watch.  Let me defer to Lovelocke's exhilarating battle report from EVE Swarm about the battle of 92d:

"As an estimate I believe we had around 650 – 700 people, not including capital ships. Understand that this is an approximate figure – it was far too difficult to pinpoint an exact amount due to a mixing of friendlies and hostiles in local. I have to be honest and say I expected to be ‘blue balled’ as such an amassing of sub capital ships would surely put most people off.

I was wrong, very very wrong. A cyno went up in system and local began to spike. “Spike” doesn’t sufficiently explain by how much local went up in so much as local actually more than doubled! Levelling off at around 1350 – 1400 the TiDi indicator quickly turned red..."

...

"...The scene was magnificent; to the left were well over 30 Raiden titans and many more super carriers that were saving their Tech moon tower, up above were Goon Titans doomsdaying the lone trapped Erebus that had been surrounded with bubbles and all around were hundreds of Maelstroms fighting a fierce battle against the Drake horde. As the Dreadnoughts were sieging Raiden Titans began doomsdaying them in a horrifying yet beautiful lightshow of brilliant greens and vibrant yellows, followed by massive explosions. A calculated sacrifice.

This, my fellow readers, was the opening minutes of a battle that would rage for approximately three hours..."

...

"...We carried on fighting, many of us died and we killed many. But do you know what was most remarkable about this fight? The lag was barely noticeable. 1400+ in local, super capitals with fighter bombers swarming, doomsdays, Drake missiles, etc, yet with TiDi in full force there were no crashes, no unresponsive modules, no MWD’s that wouldn’t turn off. Astonishing. I still don’t fully understand what TiDi is, its explanation far too technical for my fragile little mind, but whatever it is CCP have certainly struck gold. This was by far a huge improvement over even smaller battles I’ve encountered in the past."

---

Right then.  Going to chalk this up firmly in the “win” column.  Next up – we’re hitting the client!  Expect some pretty bigtime improvements there in the coming months.  You can check out the first round of them *right now* over on Sisi! There's also some information on the Crucible feature page.

BONUS GRAPH!

This shows the cluster-wide average amount of time dilation for the given time on the clock for the period mentioned.  Unsurprisingly, most of the usage sits in the EU & US primetimes.  The spike down at the end there is our new TiDi-enabled shutdown routine, which pauses the universe while shutting down.  It’s kinda neat like that.

BONUS STATISTIC!

In that same period of time, 12.87 hours of simulation time in total have been dilated out of existence – 45 minutes per day on average across the entire universe.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

The candidacy period for the next CSM election will open at midnight, and if you’re interested in running for a seat on the council you will be able to apply here. A list of criteria can be found in the previous election blog.

With this election we’re introducing the new preliminary nomination stage, where each candidate will have to post a campaign thread introducing the platform they are running on in the Jita Park Speakers Corner forum. In order to be eligible to appear on the final ballot, the candidate must gain 100 “likes” on the initial post in that thread..

In order to facilitate this we will be changing the approval process from the CCP side. Instead of waiting until the end of the candidacy period before letting candidates know that they passed the vetting process, we will aim to provide a final approval or refusal within three working days of the application being made. Upon this approval being provided, candidates can feel free to start their forum thread to work on their campaign without worrying about being rejected during the audits.

On the 29^th of February, we will post the final list of candidates who passed this stage.

Good luck to everyone running; we’re certain that this will be an interesting election!

 - CCP Diagoras

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

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

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

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

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.

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.

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
Returning pilot? Visit Account Management for the latest offers and promotions.