Odyssey nears with all its cool world shaping features and we want to employ every medium at our disposal to brief you on what is coming, and to give you a good idea of how it will affect the universe which you inhabit by choice.

So in that spirit, your favorite EVE TV crew will be hosting not one but TWO live streams featuring members of the development teams who've been busy preparing your Odyssey! They will join us on set to show off their features and answer your questions live from the Twitch chat!

Your host will be your favorite Community Developer, CCP Guard (*swoon* I wish I could be at home watching but ces't la vie!).

CCP's live streaming presence has been growing as of late like many of you have no doubt picked up on. We did four Q&As with developers to warm up for Fanfest and we did a whole evening of broadcasting on the 5th of May to celebrate EVE's birthday where we covered live combat roams with developers along with player run events. This is all an addition to the already succesful Alliance Tournament and other events of that nature.

This will be the first time we do live streams exactly like these to get you geared and prepared for an expansion and we hope we'll see lots of you on the Twitch chat channel.

Each stream will be two hours long and as usual we'll be streaming on our Twitch.tv channel. It'll be FREE, in HD and the place to be!

• Wednesday May 29 - 19:00 - 21:00 UTC (EVE time)
• Thursday May 30 - 19:00 - 21:00 UTC (also EVE time lol)

Please join us to hear about Odyssey, look at Odyssey, talk about Odyssey, ask about Odyssey and last but not least...to hang out with all your favorite devs! 

See you on the internet!

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My name is CCP Sharq and I‘m a UI designer for EVE Online. I‘m a part of Team Pony Express, that focuses on User Experience for EVE Online.

When looking at and playing EVE one day, looking for what to tackle next for our team, we noticed that the left mouse button is more or less underutilized when interacting with the client. Primary interaction pattern with objects in EVE are through a cascaded contextual menu that is better known to you the players as the “Right Click Menu“. That menu has been bloated with options and submenus upon submenus for the last 10 years and is often hard to find what you’re looking for and navigate to it without doing a lot of reading. The Contextual menu for a ship in your hangar lists out 20 options or more in some cases!

Found this in the backyard…               

When researching alternatives to Right Click as a primary interaction, we remembered the Radial Menu that’s available when flying around in space. That control was implemented a long time ago and hasn’t received any love since then so it was time for giving it a second chance. In fact the radial menu UI pattern is going through a bit of a renaissance these days due to touch screen interfaces and it is becoming the weapon of choice for many UI developers both for touch and mouse input interfaces. This fitted perfectly to the plan; We had found our silver bullet.

Prototype, best type

The development of the radial menu was done using rapid prototyping, working closely with UI programmer CCP Karkur. We made a crude radial menu, just to get the look and feel right and then we put it through numerous iterations, mercilessly throwing out ideas that didn’t feel right, and trying out all sorts of different things to tackle the issues we encountered (and sometimes to create new ones). We went through this process without creating any client-quality code so as to keep progress fast. Later we User-tested a more complete version of the menu internally and also at EVE Fanfest, from that process we steadily ironed out kinks and optimized the experience.

How it works

To call up the radial menu you need to hold down the left mouse button on an item for a moment like on the original Action Menu. That works on brackets in space, the overview and on your Targets.

Different from the old radial menu, there is no need to hit the little button to trigger options, with the menu open the screen is divided into segments allowing for quicker interactions using gestures. Your commands can now be made quicker than through the old radial menu or the Right Click menu.

Designing the radial menu using only 8 slices is constraining, yet liberating. We went through numerous iterations on the layout schema and ended up with something we were happy with.

• Primary actions are at the 12 o’clock position in the menu. Primary actions are actions we feel are most used or unique to a particular type of object. Some examples:

o   Jump for Star gates

o   Board for Ships (in space)

o   Dock for Stations

o   Open Cargo for Containers

You get the picture.

• Targeting is always at the 6 o’clock position. That allows us to keep that consistent across the board. We tried having it as the primary actions for some things, like ships, and then it had to be elsewhere for items with other primary actions. It became messy pretty quick.

• Show Info is always on the 9 o’clock position for a quick access to vital info.
   
• Plus / More options are at 3 o’clock. There are options like Bookmark and Look at. We made a conscious decision on not going all in on migrating ALL THE OPTIONS into that submenu, some things are better left in right click menu.
   
• Navigation options are placed on the 45 degree axis; Align, Warp To, Keep at Range and Orbit. The range of these options depends on the distance of the mouse pointer from the center of the menu. So all ranges can be set in a single motion, their placement is deliberate to minimize errors.

Radial menu beyond Odyssey

The idea is to implement the radial menu in more places if you guys like it and will use it. Examples: When using the inventory, interacting with your ship in the hangar even for options on your weapons in the ship HUD.

We have also been playing around with a different radial menu to use for navigating celestials within your current system instead of the deep, deep right-click in space menu. Let’s see if we get around doing that.

Just go to Singularity and test the radial menu out!

… And one more thing, Fly safe!

CCP Sharq

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History

Crossing Zebras first went live on April 4th, 2012, with the first podcast going out on April 8th. The podcast originated in another, more general gaming podcast known as Sonic's Ring. Xander Phoena, one of men behind Crossing Zebras, is one of the hosts on that podcast and found that he was talking more and more about EVE Online, much to the chagrin of the non-EVE players on the team. Rather than continue forcing them to listen to tales of internet spaceships (though, really, who in their right mind doesn't want to hear about EVE?), Xander decided he should start an EVE-centric podcast.

Thus was Crossing Zebras born. Xander spoke with one of his longtime EVE copilots, Jeg Elsker, and suggested they create a podcast dedicated to EVE. The idea seemed to have merit, so they got to work.

The team got a lot of good, initial feedback from the community. Experienced EVE podcasters like Arydanika from Voices from the Void and Jade and Rundle from Lost in Eve offered up a great deal of assistance and advice, allowing Crossing Zebras to refine their content.

However, it seemed they had very few listeners in those early days. Though the team was putting out quality material, their audience remained small. Of course, you can't keep talent down forever, and around January, Crossing Zebras was getting mentioned in a variety of EVE-related blogs and websites. Soon, their traffic exploded and they had to rebuild their website from the ground up to handle the new influx of listeners.

The Team

Xander Phoena and Jeg Elsker, your hosts

Crossing Zebras is the labor of love of two men: Xander Phoena and Jeg Elsker. The two have been friends in the Milky Way cluster for twenty years, both originating from a small town in northern Scotland. They made their way through the EVE Gate in 2008 and participated in a limited amount of high sec shenanigans. Xander eventually got bored and left, but Jeg continued soldiering on and was eventually invited to an up-and-coming null sec corporation named Zebra Corp.

Thankfully for the people of New Eden, Jeg convinced Xander to come back. He found the null sec life completely different. The two of them have happily been a part of Zebra Corp ever since as it has moved between alliances before hopefully settling into Gentlemen's Agreement. Xander describes the two of them as "PvP grunts" and says they aren't alliance or corporate directors. But that's how they like it.

Back in the Milky Way cluster, Xander works in the oil industry and continues to live in northern Scotland with his wife and baby daughter. Jeg, meanwhile, has migrated somewhat southward, where he lives with his girlfriend and works in the IT industry.

The Podcast

Crossing Zebras releases a podcast roughly once every two weeks to a month, each time covering a variety of topics in New Eden. Xander tends to listen to several other EVE podcasts, reads blogs, keeps abreast of dev blogs, posts on the forums, and topics trending on #tweetfleet. Between this and general talk about the politics of New Eden, there's rarely a time when they don't have much to talk about. In those rare cases, a quick ping to #tweetfleet usually results in ideas from the community.

They usually prepare their topics a few days ahead of time so that when they discuss things, neither of them are caught by surprise. Once they get started, of course, things become much more free-flowing. Xander has a list of bulletpoints he'll want to touch on, but he prefers to let the conversation go wherever it will, particularly if they have guests.

When they do have guests, particularly when they're conducting interviews, Xander typically prepares a list of questions ahead of time and does significant research on his subject. While there is still scope for these interviews to range off-topic, Xander prefers to keep them fairly rigid so he can cover everything he feels is relevant to the guest.

These guests range from Council of Stellar Management (CSM) members to other podcasters to other notable members of the EVE community. Getting these guests hasn't been much of an issue. A quick line on Twitter, or perhaps an Eve mail, and the process begins. Of course, Xander prefers to deal with people he's already friendly with, so he rarely drops requests on people out of the blue. He's far too tricky for that.

More recently, Crossing Zebras has managed to pull several EVE developers into interviews. Thanks to a "super-sekrit" Skype channel (which everyone now knows about) set up by Arydanika for EVE podcasters, CSM, and CCP developers, the Crossing Zebras team has been able to get in touch with several CCP staffers. Additionally, numerous CCP devs are regulars on Twitter and Xander has found them all too happy to talk about EVE when given the opportunity. And when someone has proven a bit trickier to get a hold of, there's always CCP Manifest, CCP's Senior PR specialist, who can connect the strings.

Preparation

Normally, Xander and Jeg set a date for a recording and settle on topics a few days ahead of time. Each will then go and independently research the topics for several hours leading up to the recording time. Prior to the recording, they'll spend about a half hour discussing what they've discovered and make sure they have a good idea about where they want the topics to head.

Recording typically takes two to three hours. Once they're finished, assuming it is not too late in the day, Xander will begin editing immediately. This can take another three or four hours followed by adding text and images to the podcast and the site, uploading the audio and then posting it to the EVE forums and twitter. It's not a quick process.

Of course, if something huge happens, such as a CCP announcement or massive battle, everything can be thrown out of kilter. The timetable can also shift if guests are involved, as differing timezones must be accommodated.

Technical

Xander and Jeg record using Blue Snowball condenser mics with Samson pop shields. Xander is a Mac user and uses Audio Hijack Pro to record the conversation before importing the audio on to Garageband for editing before uploading the final product to the Crossing Zebras server. Whenever possible, they try and get together to record in the same room, but as they now live a five hour drive away from one another, more often than not they use Skype.

CSM Candidate Interviews

One of the more interesting and well-received series of podcasts Crossing Zebras recently produced were interviews with prospective candidates for the 8th CSM. The EVE community has been lucky in that several sites and podcasts have extensive coverage of the CSM and its candidates. However, what had never been attempted before was an attempt to conduct brief, concise, one-on-one interviews with each of the candidates.

Xander feels debates are a great way to get a candidate's views, but questions must be made generic enough to be applicable to all candidates, or you risk turning a debate into a forum for one candidate who is pro-issue and another who is anti-issue to argue without giving a chance to other topics that might be more relevant to the listener. Additionally, a listener might only be interested in one or two candidates, while a debate forces them to listen to several others they already know they don't care for.

What Xander wanted to do was interview every candidate for CSM8. While he wasn't quite able to reach that goal, he did conduct 36 interviews in total, including 27 out of the 31 who made the final ballot. The interviews were concise, 30-minute long podcasts which were stripped of any niceties and platitudes and cut to the chase. In the end, he got a concentrated blast about who each candidate was and what they stood for, giving voters the ability to learn in 30 minutes what might have taken hours scouring Twitter, Jita's Park, 3rd party forums, blogs, and many other locations to uncover.

Xander spent hours researching every candidate ahead of time so he would be prepared for the interviews. He wanted to ask the right questions and squeeze the most out of 30 minutes that he possibly could.

The biggest surprise Xander found from the interviews was how well prepared and reasonable most of the candidates were. While he attempted to find chinks in their armor, in most cases he discovered players who had thought extensively on their platforms and were genuinely interested in improving EVE Online. He had expected a far greater number of troll or joke candidates.

Of course, there were a few road bumps. One candidate had entered solely as a lark, having no knowledge of the CSM prior to running. Xander found it difficult to interview someone who had no platform and no real idea of what he had entered into. Another notorious candidate with controversial views caused Xander to break his neutral, everyman stance. Instead, Xander found himself incredibly angry during the entire 28 minute interview.

In the end, his effort was well worth it. His series on the CSM was very well received by both players and within CCP, as he created one of the most comprehensive and concentrated resources for voters searching for information on candidates in any CSM election ever.

Overcoming Hurdles

No project the scope and quality of Crossing Zebras goes off flawlessly, of course. Over the year they've been recording, several things have arisen that Crossing Zebras has had to overcome.

The first and most vexing to the hosts was one mentioned earlier: their lack of listeners. Xander and Jeg knew they were doing excellent work and were putting a lot of time and effort into the podcast. While they were never about generating page views, they naturally wanted people to enjoy their work. It became very frustrating as the two felt they were shouting into the wind. In the end, sheer preservation won out. They continued doing what they were doing and people took notice. The team finds it incredibly satisfying to get mails from people telling them how much their work is enjoyed.

The second major problem they ran into was their sudden popularity, especially around the time of the CSM Candidate Interviews. They originally launched on a tumblr blog, with minimal bandwidth that was just capable of supporting their then-small audience. Because they had to do so many of CSM8 interviews in such a concentrated period of time, they were outputting a lot of content and a lot of people seemed to want to hear that the candidates had to say.

The server hamsters Crossing Zebras had at the time quickly found themselves on death's door and they were left with no option but to try and get new server hosting and a new site up in a very short time frame. In two weeks flat while Xander was offshore, Jeg had a brand new site setup, tested and working on a brand new server with the necessary bandwidth. Xander says the work he did in that two week period to keep everything running smoothly in the background was just staggering.

The Future

Crossing Zebras has already hit a stride and is worthy of being one of the most popular podcasts for EVE Online. As such, the team doesn't plan to change their approach too much. They're going to continue aiming for a podcast out every two to three weeks, depending on if Xander is out on a mining op oil rig or not. They want to continue interviewing great guests from the community and CCP.

In the near future, Xander is looking to interview a few members of the CSM once a month to keep the community aware of what the CSM is doing and how their work is progressing. When significant events happen in the EVE community, Xander aims to continue approaching guests from the CSM, CCP, and community to get their reactions and thoughts.

Final Words

Crossing Zebras could not have reached the heights it has without the EVE community. As recently reinforced during his trip to Fanfest, Xander finds the EVE community astounding. In his own words, "It's such an interesting and vibrant community to be a part of and having people listening to what Jeg and I have to say about it is incredibly humbling. The support we've had from the podcasting community over the past 12 months has been staggering with people I have been listening to for years taking time out to help us get off the ground. To anyone who has encouraged us, offered advice, all the guests and anyone who has taken the time to listen to an episode of CZ, we just want to say a massive thank you."

Thanks to Xander, Jeg, and Crossing Zebras for their great work!

 

Can we have your stuff? (for a book*)

If you were watching the "CCP Presents" keynote at Fanfest this year you'll recall a slightly bulbous English fellow bumbling on about some book or other. Well that fellow was me, Richie Shoemaker (aka Zapatero, ex-EON), and the book I was bumbling on about was "Into The Second Decade*", one of many delights going into the Collector’s Edition box set that will hopefully be taking pride of place on your gaming shelf come October.

Just to recap, the book aims to tell the development history of the EVE universe; not just the making of EVE Online and DUST 514, but the influence of the players in shaping New Eden and the community that has served it. A significant part of the book we’re planning is a chapter, tentatively called "This Is New Eden", in which we hope to show just how vastly creative and important the New Eden player base is, so that when you flick through the glossy pages in 2023 as EVE enters its third decade, your brain will be awash with glorious memories that might otherwise have been lost (on account of the ravages of middle age).

You can contribute to this time capsule-publishing endeavour in one or both of two ways: by submitting words and/or sending in some lovely pictures.

The words are easy. We want to compile your predictions for the EVE universe during the second decade. You can second guess gameplay changes, lore developments, advances in technology that might impact the game or the community, and you can be a bleak or as upbeat as you see fit. Don’t go writing sweeping essays though, 30 words on a matter of your choosing will suffice.

As for the pictures, you may need to do a bit of digging around on an old hard drive or the internet, but here’s the kind of thing we’re after:

• Pictures of important in-game events from the last 10 years, such as fleet fights, either as screenshots or grabbed from hi-res video footage.
• Pictures from current and old websites and apps, such as skill trainers, killboards, ship-fits, blogs, etc.
• Ads, motivational and propaganda posters and other bits of eye candy from ages past.
• Pictures from tournaments and other in-game sporting events.
• Fanfest photos from over the years
• Photos from player or corp meets (inc. player weddings) you may have attended.
• Anything else that doesn't quite fit into any of the above not-quite categories, such as EVE cakes, etc.

When you’ve assembled your words, pictures and/or links, simply email them to intotheseconddecade@gmail.com before Saturday, 1st June. I will then sift through everything and pick out the best stuff for inclusion. Don’t worry about copyright and all that gubbins for the time being. I will ask permission from the necessary parties if and when necessary once all the required assets are assembled. So if you recall something from long ago that someone else who no longer plays EVE created, remind me about it and we’ll see what we can do about getting it in.

Alas we can't offer payment for your contributions, but you name will forever be noted in the annals of EVE history, likely on the same page as Brendan Drain (Massively), Alex Gianturco (The Mittani), Michael Lastucka (Warp Drive Active), Jim Rossignol (Rock Paper Shotgun), Bryan Ward (Eveoganda), Mat Westhorpe (Freebooted) and Robert Woodhead (CSM) - in other words some of the brightest and best commentators ever to devote themselves to understanding EVE. Exalted company, indeed. Oh, and some guy called Richie Shoemaker.

Thank you in advance for your contributions. I look forward to getting as many of your thoughts and memories into the book as possible so that the story of the EVE universe can be told in as full a way as possible.

- Richie "Zapatero" Shoemaker

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As previously stated, there are rewards for the five top voted stories:

• 1. prize: Round trip for two to Reykjavik, Iceland, including airfare and hotel accommodations. A visit to CCP headquarters to meet senior developers and 10 years subscription of EVE Online. In PLEX if you like.
• 2. prize: 10 years subscription to EVE Online. In PLEX, if you like.
• 3-5. prize. One year subscription to EVE Online.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about the trip to Iceland, or the decade of PLEX, or marveling at the stunning Icelandic nature. It’s about the stories themselves.

We highly encourage you to browse through the site, check out stories that both have been voted highly already and also those that may not have had the exposure or promotion that the top ones have had, but may be great nevertheless and well deserving of being upvoted. You can of course downvote as well, if you think a story does not have merit.

Notice that there is only one vote per account. If you vote for the same story with multiple characters on the same accounts, those votes will be consolidated into one.

You can now see which stories are at the top:

https://truestories.eveonline.com/ideas/top

We also suggest that you make use of the points system, that allows you to add positive or negative points on a story. This allows you to explain your vote, helping others to make up their minds on a story.

As we announced at Fanfest, the Dark Horse comic book True Stories will draw inspiration from some of the stories on the site, as well as the upcoming EVE TV series. Thus it matters greatly that we get a fair, balanced, objective review of the stories submitted on the site. Well, perhaps not perfectly fair. And come to think of it, not quite balanced.  And not objective either. Well, in any case, it’s good if you vote!

CCP t0rfifrans

Creative Director, EVE IP development

Many of us here have been playing EVE long before we started working at CCP. As such, a lot of ideas and improvements come from our own experience and (sometimes) frustrations with EVE. Alt accounts play a large role in EVE so training and keeping them shouldn't be a hassle. Take these two cases for example: 

• Case 1: You have an alt and you just need a few days or weeks of training but you can't be bothered with logging into your main, pausing the skill training, logging out and then back in again to resume training on your alt. That or you simply don't want your +5 implanted, carefully EVEMon-planned main character to stop training. 
   
• Case 2: You need an alt, you create a new account, pay a signup fee, a month, two or three, then train the alt. After all requirements are met for the alt to do it's new job efficiently, you transfer it to your main account, i.e. consolidate, and pay a transfer fee. Sooner or later you're facing Case 1 because after all, your industry alt will need to invent new things, your market alt will need higher order capacity and your cyno alt could be turned into a covert cyno alt. Then later a covert recon cyno alt... then later, well you know where this is going.  

A simple solution to this is to offer users to enable secondary training slots on their accounts using PLEX. Changes made to subscriptions need to be taken seriously so we in Research and Statistics teamed up with Team Game of Drones to analyse the feasibility of such a solution and shipping it with Odyssey on June 4th.  The research on our part involved detailed scenario analysis of the effects on the in-game PLEX market, subscription changes due changing payment patterns, and needless to say, effects on our revenue. After we had conclusive results that this did not pose any serious operational risks to CCP or the EVE economy we finally ran the idea through the CSM and got really positive feedback from them. Team Game of Drones took the ball from there, did careful analysis on different scenarios, edge-cases and estimated the total implementation work needed to be done on their end. Soon after they were ready with an implementation, so this feature will ship with Odyssey! 

Now over to CCP Ytterbium of Team Game of Drones for details on the implementation itself. 

How to enable Dual Character in Training?

There are several ways to activate this feature. The first, and most obvious one is to right-click any PLEX you have in your account possession and select “Activate Dual Character Training”. Dual Character Training is account based, not bound to an individual character, so there is no harm enabling it from any character so long as you are sure this is the account you want to apply it for. Just remember time will count down as soon as it is enabled.

If you don’t have a PLEX as an item available in-game, another option is to go to the EVE Online “Account Management” website, log in and activate the service from there, with the same particularities as mentioned above.

Alternatively, attempting to start skill training on an account´s second character will cause a notification to appear. This message states if you wish to enable Dual Character Training by using a PLEX you already have, or by acquiring one from the EVE Market or account management.

How does Dual Character in Training actually work?

Activating Dual Character Training on your account allows two characters to be trained at the same time for 30 full days. However, an important point to note down remains the system doesn’t care which individual characters are trained, as long as the simultaneous limit is not reached.

• For instance, you could have 3 characters named A, B and C on the same account; activating Dual Character Training allows any combination of A+B, A+C, B+C to be trained at the same time. This provides extra flexibility for the user wishing to train up several alternate characters.

Is Dual Character Training Time the same as my account main game time?

No, and this is a crucial detail to keep in mind. Buying 30 days of Dual Character Training will not extend your account expiration date at all – it will just enable this extra functionality during the specified period. If your account main game time expires while this new feature is running, Dual Character Training remaining time will be paused, so nothing will be lost until your account is re-activated again.

• As an example, if you activated 30 days of Second Character Training while 13 days of regular account game time is left, you would have 17 days remaining of this feature paused when your account expires.

Which character training do we prioritize when Dual Character Training time expires?

By default, we always favor the most experienced character. That means in the event Dual Character Training time expires, the character with the least skill points available will be stopped. We advise you to plan accordingly.

Can Dual Character Training time be purchased several time at once and stack?

For being a new and somewhat experimental feature coming out for Odyssey, we did not wish to allow Dual Character Training time to stack up indefinitely for now. In practical term, that means that for the time being, it is not possible to renew Dual Character Training on an account until you have 7 or less days remaining for it. This may be changed in the future if and when we feel comfortable enough with this feature to allow full queuing.

For improved visibility, please note that activated and remaining Dual Character Training time may be seen at any time in the Account Management page.

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Firstly, we will do away with the usual format of qualifying rounds and group stages and go for a double elimination bracket format from the start. This raises the stakes significantly for all participants as all matches will matter!

Secondly, Alliance Tournament XI will run over three weekends instead of four as has been the common practice.

Thirdly, we will be introducing bans into the Alliance Tournament from the second weekend onwards. Team captains will ban out two ship types each before the match starts so that neither team can field that specific ship type in the match. The effect of the bans will be the same as the New Eden Open, while the format will become a 1 - 2 - 1 type rather than the 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 that we saw in the NEO. With this added to the mix, matches will be more varied and exciting.

Lastly, to fly with an alliance in the Alliance Tournament XI you will need to have been a member of that alliance from downtime this morning, at 11:00 UTC May 15th. Each alliance may only field one team.

There will be future Dev Blogs in the coming weeks which cover the rules, broadcast schedule and sign up details, so stay tuned! For those who missed the previous ones - the matches from Alliance Tournaments IX and X are available on CCP's YouTube channel.

EVE TV's Player Commentator Team

We will once again be opening up the application process for players who would like to be PVP commentators. These elite players are handpicked by us to fly out to Iceland for the tournament finals played over the final two weekends, joining the team here at CCP HQ to help us run the live broadcasts.

As a commentator you'll be on the set discussing the tournament, tactics, teams and talking with developers about EVE live on air. You'll also take shifts in the commentary booth providing live commentary on the matches themselves. You need to know your PvP and you need to know how to keep on talking!

Alliance Tournament XI will take place over three consecutive weekends starting on Saturday, July 20 and ending with the grand finale on Sunday, August 4. Flights (from all Icelandair destinations) and accommodations are supplied by us. All you need is a little spending money.

So you're interested? The next step is to check this short list and make sure you match what we're looking for!

• Can you come out and play? Selected players will need to hold a valid passport (we will require scans to confirm this at a later stage) and be available to fly to Iceland on Wednesday, July 24 and return home on Monday, August 5.

• A sense of humor is a must: commentators will need to be sharp-witted, knowledgeable, presentable and comfortable with talking on camera and into a microphone. To increase your chances of getting through, we highly recommend submitting any pre-made or purpose filmed video you have of yourself (link to a YouTube clip!) as part of your application.

• You need to know your PvP: We don't despise industrialists, mission-runners and miners but as this is a PvP tournament and you need to be well versed.

• You must be 21+ in order to apply.

If you are interested in taking part, please email us at evetv@ccpgames.com by 23:59 UTC (Eve Time) on Sunday May 26, 2013 with the following information. Those lucky enough to be selected for the second round of eliminations must be available to attend voice chat interviews on Saturday, June 1, 2013. The chosen commentators will be announced by June 5, 2013.

• Character and real name.

• Date of birth.

• Nationality and current country of residence.

• Tell us about yourself, both in game and out. Remember what you're applying for and sell yourself to that effect.

• Confirm you are available between the 24th of July to 5th of August to fly to Iceland. If you need to book time off work / school please don't do it until we accept you; but please check that it is possible, if there is any doubt here please let us know.

• Remember your applying to be on TV! Include any multimedia you think shows you off, all of the people chosen for the last Tournament had sent in video clips/links to YouTube!

• Applications close on May 26, so get mailing!

  A final note: The Tournament from the perspective of a commentator is an amazing experience. You get to take part in a unique production, fly to Iceland, get a tour around the CCP office and chat to developers like almost no other players will ever get the chance to. But with great power comes great responsibility; planning and promotional shows take place during the weeks up to the final show and you may not be asked to fly to Iceland if you fail to take part or become unavailable during this time!

On behalf of the Tournament Team,

CCP Gargant

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If you've been paying attention to our plans for DUST 514 you may be aware that we are about to launch a new feature in DUST called Planetary Conquest. The basics of it are that corporations with DUST mercenaries will be able to conquer districts on temperate planets in the low security space of the Molden Heath region. DUST corporations owning districts on these planets will provide bonuses to all capsuleers in EVE Online that are in their corporation or alliance. I am here today to talk to you about those bonuses and a few other small changes. :)

If you would like to know more about how Planetary Conquest will work see these resources:

• The original announcement dev blog: http://dust514.com/news/blog/2013/03/planetary-conquest/
• An update about Planetary Conquest dev blog: http://dust514.com/news/blog/2013/04/an-update-dev-blog-for-planetary-conquest/
• Fanfest presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIdn8IVczVM

Bonuses

Corporations that own districts can choose from one of three district types. Each one offeres different bonuses to EVE or DUST, two of them offering bonuses to both. 

Research lab district bonus:

• A decrease in POS fuel usage
• 5% per district owned to a maximum of 4 districts or 20%

Cargo hub district bonus:

• A decrease in manufacturing time at Player Owned Starbases (POSes)
• 10% per district owned to a maximum of 4 districts or 40%

Both of these bonuses apply to any POS owned by the corporation that owns the district, or any corporation in the alliance of the corporation that owns the district. They also only apply to POS anchored at moons around the planet which the controlled districts are on.

We did have plans for a third bonus based on planetary interaction. Specifically an increase in extractor output. We will not be doing that at this time. For now the production facility will not offer a bonus to EVE. That is not to say it will not ever, just not right now.

A final note on the bonuses. Planetary Conquest goes live on Tuesday May 14th, we will not however enable the bonuses until Thursday May 16th.

Factional Warfare

There are a few minor changes to Factional Warfare and it’s link with DUST that actually went live on May 6th.

The first change is that in order to do an orbital bombardment you now need to be within 10KM of the district beacon instead of 100KM.

The second change is that instead of DUST players choosing where the battles take place they are dynamically created based on where Factional Warfare complexes in EVE are completed. We base everything off of the completion of a complex. The side that completes a complex gets a sort of point towards taking districts in that system. We then spawn battles for each side based on where they have the most points.

So for example if the Minmatar own all the districts in a system and they complete a bunch of complex in that same system but the Amarr are not running any complex we won't spawn battles for the Amarr to attack there.

Corporations

As a member of a corporation you can now quit a corporation instantly without waiting the 24 hours after dropping roles. This applies to both DUST and EVE players. When we released DUST leaving a corporation worked the same as in EVE, drop roles, wait 24 hours, leave corporation. When we started getting feedback from the community about how bad this was and we looked into it what we could do abou it, we realized that this was initially done way back in the day for technical reasons. Upon more research we realized those technical restrictions no longer applied. So we removed this requirement from DUST... and EVE. Because why not.

The other restrictions, such as being docked, do still however apply when attempting to quit a corporation.

Kicking someone still requires removing their roles and waiting 24 hours, and you must still be docked in a station to quit a corporation.

This corporation change also shipped on May 6th.

Conclusion

That is all for now, just a short update on the link between DUST and EVE. If you have any questions ask away in the comments thread. I and the others from True Grit will attempt to answer as best we can. :)

CCP FoxFour

Team True Grit

Update May 16: Planetary Conquest bonuses had to be slightly delayed and will be implemented on TQ on Wednesday May 22.

Update May 22: Two of the bonuses for the Cargo Hub and the Research Hub were reversed. The dev blog has been corrected with the proper information.

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How Hacking Will Work

Our approach to this task was to start with what we know best, prototype creation. This let us come up with ideas for mechanics without investing an awful lot of time. Our final feature design came together as a card game. The feature itself takes the mechanics similar to those found in exploration based dungeon crawlers, roguelikes, etc., and gives them a hacking twist. We like this because it furthers the feeling of exploring unknown, hazardous places in the computer system controlling the object you are hacking. We hit most of the roguelike tropes, with procedurally generated levels, turn based combat and "permadeath" - albeit on a scale that is suited to shorter games.

This work in progress image shows a Hacking attempt in progress, although the hacker in this case faces a pretty stiff challenge to defeat this System Core (click to enlarge).

The player begins by activating their Hacking or Archaeology module on the appropriate target and is then presented with the UI window for their module. The gameplay remains the same between both Hacking and Archaeology with the latter being appropriately themed as an older computer system both visually and aurally. The window shows the user the computer system mapped out as a network of interconnected nodes. One of the node's contents is already visible as this was the penetration point of the activated module. Users hack a system by exploring the nodes adjacent to the nodes that they have already explored. Their goal is to find the core or cores in the system and taking them over by destroying them. Once the core is destroyed the system has been hacked and the module forces the site to scatter its contents from the cargo hold into the vacuum of space. The hacker, his friends and anyone else around can then collect the scattered contents. We'll be releasing another devblog shortly that will go into details of how the contents of the site are distributed and how they are collected.

Along the way users are going to encounter a variety of different subsystems:

Defense Subsystems – These are the protectors of the system, once uncovered they prevent the module from spreading to nodes adjacent to it. Some advanced defense subsystems also have other abilities to confound attackers.

Utility Subsystems – Scattered throughout the computer system are various utilities that the user can take and either use to bolster their module or attack defense subsystems and the cores.

Datacaches – These encrypted nodes are typically benign. The user can choose to decrypt the node to discover its contents. This might uncover a great utility or it might bring some particularly nasty defense subsystem online.

Cores – Mentioned above already these are the heart of the system being hacked. Destroy all the cores in a system and you gain control.

The modules, defense subsystems and cores have attributes that define their coherence (hit points) and strength. Combat is resolved through the attacker going first. The defender's coherence is reduced by the attacker's strength and visa-versa if the defender survives.

Modules also have a number of utility slots, this limits the number of active utilities that a module can have at a time.

A hacking attempt is failed when the module loses coherence in the system. Fail too many times and the system will self-destruct the object destroying all its contents. Hacking attempts can also be failed by flying too far away from the object being hacked, by taking too long and being kicked out of the system or by closing the module UI. On top of which only one person can hack an object at a time.

Modules and Skills

EVE's Team Superfriends are working on broader changes to Exploration and are supporting us in updating the modules that you will be using. All existing modules and skills have been mapped over to this new system so those who have already trained them will have similar advantages that they currently enjoy.

The Future

This first release of changes to Hacking and Archaeology are just the tip of the iceberg. In the future we hope to add in much more variety into the subsystems you encounter whilst hacking. We would like to add some rare, unique things for hackers to find and interact with.

We also need to tie the Hacking activity much closer into the EVE Universe. To do so we are going to find a way for hackers to pre-prepare themselves for hacking and gain items useful for Hacking from engaging in the activity itself. This may be allowing hackers to retrieve unused utilities and sell them on the market or create them themselves through some form of production line from data resources gathered whilst hacking. Either way we want to open up the Hacking experience to the economy of EVE.

We'd also like to expand the variety and complexity of things that you can hack in EVE to bring it out of its current niche and into the wider world, allowing us to create situations where hackers are valuable for more than just their ability to gain ISK.

Lots of people have asked about competitive or cooperative hacking and that's something that we may well explore but for now we wish to deepen the current experience and how it connects into EVE.

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With the changes in this years election system to using the Wright Single Transferable Vote (Wright-STV), we at CCP thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the important statistics regarding voter behavior and how ballots were counted. In the new voting system, voters were able to fill out up to 14 slots of their ballot, or "vector", in order of preference. The ballot if then processed by the Wright-STV code to ensure that it is optimally used to elect candidates in the voters order of preference without wasting the vote on those who can't use it or who do not need it, until there are no more candidates on their ballot (this is reffered to as exhaustion of a ballot). The percentage of the ballot exhausted to elect candidates is equivalent to the ballots "strength" in the election in comparison to other ballots.

First up, we looked at the length of the ballot and examined how much value got exhausted per length

Graphs of the last two columns:

We also found it interesting to look at which slots on the ballots were used to elect candidates: This shows on average, how powerful each preference slot from 1-14 on each ballot was at electing a candidate to the council.

Here are some interesting high-popularity ballot orders and how they got applied. These are what many would refer to as "bloc votes". We bolded the bits that we found interesting.

3964 votes followed this vector:

['mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'Awol Aurix', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget']

43.65% of your ballot expended to elect mynnna

39.48% of your ballot expended to elect Kesper North

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Sort Dragon was elected before your vote got here

15.87% of your ballot expended to elect Sala Cameron

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

Malcanis was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

0.99% of your ballot expended to elect James Arget

1639 votes followed this vector:

['Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Awol Aurix', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Travis Musgrat', 'progodlegend']

74.47% of your ballot expended to elect Sort Dragon

Sala Cameron was elected before your vote got here

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

mynnna was elected before your vote got here

Kesper North was elected before your vote got here

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

22.90% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis  ß This explains the bump in the Strength/slot graph at #9

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Travis Musgrat was eliminated in round 10 with 1103 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

2.63% of your vote was exhausted

595 votes followed this vector:

['Ripard Teg', 'Malcanis', 'Trebor Daehdoow', 'Ali Aras', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Nathan Jameson', 'Korvin', 'Corebloodbrothers', 'riverini', 'Roc Wieler', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'progodlegend']

63.40% of your ballot expended to elect Ripard Teg

32.82% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis

Trebor Daehdoow was elected before your vote got here

Ali Aras was elected before your vote got here

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Nathan Jameson was eliminated in round 17 with 2430 votes

3.77% of your ballot expended to elect Korvin

Corebloodbrothers was eliminated in round 12 with 1575 votes

riverini was eliminated in round 9 with 992 votes

Roc Wieler was eliminated in round 8 with 895 votes

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

James Arget was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

The 1-vote vector peeps broke down like so:

577 "Greene Lee"

469 "Mangala Solaris"

454 "Corebloodbrothers"

410 "Korvin"

280 "progodlegend"

258 "Ripard Teg"

247 "Trebor Daehdoow"

239 "Psychotic Monk"

234 "Nathan Jameson"

225 "Chitsa Jason"

207 "Malcanis"

180 "Steve Ronuken"

176 "Mike Azariah"

175 "Sala Cameron"

169 "PsychoBitch"

156 "Ali Aras"

107 "riverini"

102 "Travis Musgrat"

82 "Ayeson"

82 "James Arget"

82 "Unforgiven Storm"

75 "Banlish"

67 "Roc Wieler"

62 "Sort Dragon"

55 "Kesper North"

48 "mynnna"

47 "Cipreh"

28 "Artctura"

25 "Awol Aurix"

21 "DaeHan Minhyok"

10 "Kaleb Rysode"

When we ran the STV-2 election to find the two most widely supported CSM members to be the new 2 permanent summit attendees in the 2+5 system we found that Mynnna and Ripard Teg were victorious, but that the difference between the 2^nd and 3^rd place candidates for the 2-seat guarantee was 299.11 votes between Ripard and Mangala (with Ripard winning).

Finally, let’s take a look at how many votes actually affected the outcome of this election in comparison to the CSM7 elections.

For CSM8 this number is easily found. The equation looks a little something like “candidates straight up elected + remainder votes for each person elected by default”, or in number form “10 * 3106 + 3091 (Korvin) + 2885 (Mike) + 2651 (James) + 2612 (Chitsa) = 42299 Votes”. This means that of the 49702 votes cast in the election 85.1% of them had a direct effect on the makeup of the council.

Finding this number for CSM7 is a little more difficult. 14,813 votes were cast for candidates that did not make the top 14. These are "under-votes" and had no effect on the final council. The more difficult area is determining “over-votes” (votes cast for a victorious candidate that did not affect their standing and could have been used to elect a different candidate). If you consider being in the top 14 to be “unaffected standing” then there were 26,348 over-votes cast in the CSM7 elections. If you feel that being one of the top 7 delegates is "unaffected standing" (as many do) then there were 12,495 votes cast for those in the top 7 that did not affect the election outcome. This means that of the 59,109 ballots cast in the election, 31,801 ballots affected the outcome of the top 7 and 17,948 ballots affected the outcome of the top 14; That comes out to be 53% and 30.3% enfranchised votes respectively.

This drastic improvement from 53% enfranchisement to over 85% is exactly what we were looking for when we made the move to Wright-STV. Now that a voters opinion is more likely to actually count towards the results of the election, our next big push will be towards visibility and voter turnout for the CSM9 elections.

If you would like to do your own analysis of the votes you can find the full list of ballots cast in .blt format here and the ballots we used in the STV-2 election here. Also, you can find the previously published Wright-WTV code used to process the ballot here.