"If you like ships with lots of spikes that fly around and try to kill players, you’re in luck." – CCP Soundwave

The Invasions have begun and stalwart capsuleers have been vigilantly watching comm channels for the latest reports and sightings of The Nation’s forces. As with all combat in EVE Online, knowledge is half the battle, so we encourage all players that haven’t done so yet to read CCP Ytterbium’s devblog, The Nation Strikes Back to become familiar with the tools and information introduced in Incursion. Fly safe!

The Nation Strikes Back >>

With Incursion, we’ve taken the massive feel of EVE, and built a PVE feature around it. No more playing on your own, instead you’ll face challenges that require your friends and allies on a scale that EVE has never had before. In this particular case, bigger IS better. It’s going to be massive, awesome and I’ll be taking down Incursions when I can. You should too.

With Incursion, EVE Gate will get new enhancements to make it easier for you to connect and communicate with your fellow capsuleers. These are evolutions to the solid foundation we launched with Tyrannis and come directly from your experiences and feedback. Players wanted folders or better ways to organize their contacts, so we are adding contact labels. These are just like the labels utilized in the mail system so you will have a clear and consistent way of organizing your content. These are also better than a folder based approach because you will be able to label a contact with multiple labels (versus sticking them in one folder) giving you more flexibility in how you organize things.

Not forgetting our non-English fans, we’ve revamped all of EVE Gate for proper localization. With Incursion it will also be presented in German and Russian. The extensive work needed to localize the site has the added bonus of making it much more feasible for us to explore other language options in the future as well. This is selectable in your Profile Settings and will allow many more players to enjoy EVE Gate in their native tongue.

To make it easier for you to communicate, and to manage your content, we have put in a completely new Rich Text Editor. We launched with a pretty solid one with Tyrannis but it had conflicts with the malicious content filters meant to eliminate malicious scripts added to content. We have now implemented a version of the CK Editor, a heavily supported and widely used editor that offers very good support across browsers and devices and better support of content filtering and markup. In a nutshell this should make it much easier for you to create and edit your content the way you want.

And let’s not forget the ability to brag and gloat to our friends outside of EVE about our exploits and latest adventures. We have added public profile options, completely controllable by you the player, so that you can choose to allow the public to view portions of your profile page. This will allow you to send a link to your profile to non EVE players and show off your EVE alter ego. Of course, as with other EVE Gate information, you control who can have access to any of that information by way of your Profile Settings.

From Team Trilambda, our Art Team, players will be now able to see some nice results of the architectural changes we made a couple of releases ago, like the Incursion god ray effect using the new depth buffer technique. God ray is an example of crepuscular rays, or secondary shadow/light interactions. This effect is particularly complicated and is part of the EVE team’s ongoing commitment to keeping New Eden the beautiful and visually amazing world we all want it to be. Our continuing mission in Art is to push the edges of what can be done, making our own art show through in EVE. It is part of our vision and our commitment to our players and to ourselves.

The main focus of Team Stonehenge is character customization. We are busy putting the finishing touches on it, polishing the interface and making it as user friendly as possible. We have been taking into account all the feedback we have received from the community.  It’s great to see people out there using this already to create some very cool characters and we are enjoying the videos of what you are doing on YouTube such as this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas. We would love to see more and hear your feedback. 

Ever wished you could search the EVE Online forums?

Team Occam´s Razor, one of two dedicated EVE Gate teams, is working on bringing a brand new forum to EVE Gate. Our aim is to further embrace and empower the existing social network in EVE Online, and moving our beloved forum to EVE Gate has given us the opportunity to bring about vast improvements in this area for our players. We believe strongly that our players deserve a forum experience that is stylish, intuitive and easy to use.

So about that search button... yes, it works! It even comes with an advanced search option as well. We have a few other tricks up our sleeves for the forums, but more about that later in our upcoming dev blog.