This blog is going to focus mostly on the backend and mechanical stuff. Later this week we will have another dev blog out about the ally system, with lots of cool pics. Until then, you’ll have to accept my verbal diarrhea hitting your palate instead (yes, be happy there is no pic here illustrating that).

As most of you hopefully know by now, the big ticket feature the team has been working on this release is refactoring the War system. You can see more about the thinking behind this in my earlier dev blog here, but to quickly re-iterate, we wanted to give wars a bit more structure, fix a few exploits and give players more options in conducting a war. The overall goal was to keep the war system as a tool for players to use as they see fit, rather than as dictated by CCP and to reinforce the concept that more lucrative avenues in the game (like those enjoyed by being in a player corporation) come with increased risk.

Since that dev blog, we’ve been busy iterating on the system, with a few notable changes. Let’s cover the most important ones.

The Cost of War

We’ve updated the war cost formula bit, from the ‘hey, let’s throw this in and tune it later’ version we discussed earlier.

The refined formula is: (log2.05831 N)^2 * 300000 * N^0.27, where N is the number of corp members (see also comments below). The minimum is 50 million.

Note that the cost is now the same when declaring on a corporation or an alliance.

Here is a graph illustrating the cost increase with the new formula.

This graph shows the cost of declaring war on a corp of up to 5000 members. There is no cap, but the cost continues to taper off, breaking the 500 mill barrier at a little over 7200. Pulling out a few number as the graph is a bit hard to grog:

- It rises above 50 million around 130.
- It breaks the 100 million mark at 374.
- At 1000, the cost is 177 million.
- At 3000, the cost is 320 million.
- At 5000, the cost is 416 million.

The increased cost reflects the easier access to multiple targets. There have been some worries having the cost scale in this way creates incentive to declare war on small entities. Griefing on small entities is not rampant now, and with the cost increasing from 2 million to 50 million, there is no reason to assume griefing on small entities will increase with these changes.

The Even More Cost of War

Couple of important points on the cost formula:

Trial accounts are not counted when counting corp membership. We considered extending this to inactive accounts too, but as this is a fairly low percentage overall, decided to not exclude them. Note also that members in corps/alliances allied to the defender are never counted.

As before, the number of non-mutual wars the aggressor has declared acts as a multiplier (for each war). New wars are created now when a corporation leaves an alliance (to get rid of the dec shield exploit), but these new wars are not counted as cost multiplier. As an example, Alliance A declares war on Alliance B, if 10 corporations in Alliance B leave the alliance, then a new war is created for each of these 10 corporations, but these new wars do not add a x10 cost multiplier to the war cost for Alliance A.

The Corp Hop Song

We’ve also implemented a good suggestion from Fanfest, which is that if you leave your corporation while it is engaged in a non-mutual war, then you will not be able to rejoin the corporation until that war ends, or until 7 days pass, whichever comes first. Note that this rule only applies for non-mutual wars – mutual wars do not prohibit players from entering or leaving corporations. The main reason for this change is to combat the popular alt corp hopping (this doesn’t stop it completely, but limits it a lot).

The Enemy of My Enemy

A final note on the war front, we tightened up the ally system (see previous dev blog for more info on ally system) a little bit by making it so that if an ally corp joins an alliance, the ally status transfers over to the alliance (i.e. the alliance becomes the ally). We also contemplated giving limits to the contract length of an ally, this is something we want to do, but didn’t have time to implement for Inferno. We’ll look into implementing this post-Inferno.

New Toys

A secondary priority of Team Super Friends has been creating and modifying modules. As tends to be the case with non-primary objectives, they are susceptible to the cutting knife. We set out with a list of 12, our haul is likely going to be 7.

Adding modules is always massive fun, as it can have such wide-ranging ramification for so many existing tactics and setups.

Let’s start with what is coming in Inferno. I’m not listing any stats here, as we are still testing these and they could change. Feel free to jump on the Singularity test server and join the fun.

Armor Adaptive Hardener I - Low slot. Armor Hardener that adjusts its resistance based on the damage received. Only one can be fitted. Just the tech I version now, but others will follow if this turns out well.

Extrinsic Damage Amplifier I & II - Low slot. A damage amplifier module for drones.

Small/Medium/Large/X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster I. Mid slot. A shield booster that gives a good boost, but has a very high capacitor need. Can use Cap Boosters as charge to negate the severe capacitor need. Only tech I version for now.

MagSheath Target Breaker I - Mid slot. A module that has a chance of breaking the lock of ships targeting you, the chance increases the more ships target you at one time. Also breaks your locks. Reduces scan resolution significantly as a downside. Only one can be fitted at a time and the can not be fitted to capital ships.  

Small/Medium/Large Overclocking Processor Unit I & II - A rig that increases the CPU output of your ship, at a cost of reduced shield recharge rate.

Light & Medium Web Drones -  Light and medium versions of stasis webifying drones.

Capacitor Battery edits - All capacitor batteries now also provide a defense against Energy Vampires (Nos) and Energy Neutralizer (Neut) effects. A portion of the effect is reflected back on the aggressor.

Future Toys

There are a few notable absences in the list above. We do have a version of the Micro Jump Drive ready, and new graphic effects to go along with it, but there are a few minor issues that we still have to iron out before we can launch it. The salvage drone is another module that we really wanted to finish, but didn’t have time for. The graphic assets are well on their way though, so hopefully we can make this in the near future (can’t promise dates though). We also wanted to update the Tracking Disruptors to affect missiles too, but the version we implemented was too limited (it only worked if you were flying certain ships and/or the enemy was using certain missiles). We haven’t found a good universal solution yet, so we’ll have to wait on this one.

There are loads of other interesting modules we’re looking into, many of which are based on player ideas. This thread here is a good place to post your ideas, as we read over it regularly and note down interesting ideas for the future. There are many excellent suggestions already in there, but feel free to add your own (don't worry of they're the same or similar to existing ones). We’ll see what we can get to next.

The module work for the upcoming release taught us a lot about what works and what doesn’t work in the implementation process, and is a good foundation to build on. The next step is crafting an overall vision and roadmap of what purpose new module work serves in the bigger picture.

Toys’R’Drop

The new modules are being seeded into the universe a little bit differently than often in the past. The original idea was to have this very varied, with one module being available only through LP store and another only through Invention. In the end, we decided to lump them together into a single seeding method, so as not cause too much discrepancy in their availability.

So, three of the new modules will not be seeded directly on the market. The Extrinsic Damage Amplifier, the CPU rig and the web drones will be seeded directly on market. Also note that to get the T2 drone damage module, you need to invent it using T1 BPCs.

For those new modules that won't be seeded, they will not have any BPOs. Instead, BPCs of them drop as loot in profession sites in normal space and as commander & officer loot. These BPCs have between 3 and 50 runs, depending on difficulty of site/enemy. The sites in question are the pirate faction archaeology and hacking sites.

The reasons for not just seeding the new modules directly to the market are several. Seeding on market has always been sort of a quick-and-dirty way of getting things out there that we've basically used too much in the past - it's much more fun to put the whole process in the hand of the players, so that there is gameplay involved every step of the way (finding BPCs, trading them, manufacturing items, sell items, use items). Also, as the thinking is to start to add modules on a regular basis, so we're looking into ways of how we can fight the potential issues associated with it, such as bloating the market too much and introducing power creep. Seeding through loot drops gives us better control over where and when and how much to seed, which is an important feature for us to have for the future.

This is the End, My Friend

Overall, we in Team Super Friends are really excited to see our additions and changes in the hands of the players and look forward to see what mischiefs you guys get up to (ab)using the new stuff.

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Commentators

This year we had a wonderful group of players apply to be commentators and we were awed at their knowledge of EVE and enthusiasm. It was a very difficult choice for us as we want to maintain familiar faces that have done a great job in the past along with some fresh blood. As a result, the following will be your live on-air commentators:

Kil2

Raivi

Zastrow

Michael Bolton III

Lazarus Telraven

Format

Up to 64 alliances will be granted entry to Alliance Tournament X. The tournament takes places in three stages: Pre-Qualifying, Groups and Finals. See here for match rules.

Please note that both the format and match rules are subject to change. It is strongly advised that participants watch the EVE Alliance Tournament forum regularly for announcements.

This year we will split the entries into 32 teams entering through a random draw and 32 teams through an auction process. We understand that participating in the tournament is a highlight of the year for many alliances so increasing the number of auction slots allows every team a better chance of participating. The random draw will take place first and those 32 teams will be announced on the main tournament page. CCP Soundwave will then hold auctions on the following dates and times in the ‘Alliance Tournament ’ channel:

Thursday, May 24th @ 19:00 UTC - 8 slots

Friday, May 25th @ 17:00 UTC - 8 slots

Saturday, May 26th @ 16:00 UTC - 16 slots

The only eligible bidders at this time will be the CEO of the alliance executor corporation and the Team Captain as nominated in the sign up page.

Payment

This year we have decided to change how you pay for entry into the tournament. The entry fee for the random draw will be 10 PLEX per alliance. Each alliance that wishes to enter the draw must submit 10 PLEX – available in the redeeming system of the CEO of the executor corporation’s account – which will be withdrawn before the draw. All PLEX will be retained by CCP and teams who are not successful in the random draw can use these PLEX to bid for a spot through the auction. If you are not successful in either the random draw or auction, your 10 PLEX will be refunded to the CEO character of the alliance executor corporation.

So why PLEX instead of ISK? Quite simply, PLEX is just much easier to manage and allows us to create some revenue to fund this and future tournaments. As we intend to stream all four weekends, we obviously incur additional costs. Using PLEX allows us to provide a top quality stream and production throughout the entire event.

Competition Dates

• Random Draw Signup Period – Starts Thursday, May 10 and ends at 23:59 UTC on Sunday, May 20. The draw will then take place on Tuesday, May 22
• Auctions – 24^th, 25^th & 26^th May
• Participating Teams & Schedule Confirmed - May 30th
• Pre-Qualifying Round 1 - June 30th & July 1st
• Pre-Qualifying Round 2 - July 7th & 8th
• Group Stage - July 14th, 15th and 21st
• Finals - July 22nd

Tournament Entry

All entrants will be required to sign up via the Alliance Tournament section of the Eve Online community website. The link you need is here. Please note that all executor corporation CEOs will be required to have 10 PLEX in their redeeming system before the page will authorize your submission. Details on how to reverse redeem PLEX can be found here.

The 64 competing teams will be decided as follows:

• 32 teams will be drawn randomly. We will record the draw and host it on the CCP You Tube page.
• 32 teams will bid for a position in 3 separate auctions.
• Entry into the random draw will cost 10 PLEX.
• Auctioned slots will begin at 10 PLEX and have no maximum price.

Pre-Qualifying rounds

Of the 64 initial teams, 32 may progress from the pre-qualifying rounds to the group stage.

Round 1

The 64 competing alliances will be drawn against each other at random and will fight as scheduled.

Teams will be ranked by their match result (Win or Loss), and then by total points (see match rules). A draw counts as a loss for both teams.

Round 2

Teams fight in order of rank - 1v2, 3v4 and so on.

Results

Teams will be ranked by combined match results. All teams are ranked first by total wins, and then by points scored.

The top 32teams according to these rankings will progress to the group stage.

Group Stage

These 32 teams will be divided, at random, into 8 groups of 4 teams.

Within each group, teams will fight "round robin" to determine the top two teams in each bracket. (Round robin means that each team in the group will fight each other team in the group once).

Team rankings will be determined by Win/Loss/Draw and then by total points scored.

Finals

The top 2 teams from each group will advance to the final day, which will be a 16 team single elimination format. This will be seeded so that teams advancing from the same group will not be able to meet again until the final match.

During the finals, in case of a draw, the team which advanced from the qualifiers with a higher score will advance.

Additional Notes

Winning Team Points

The winner of each match gains a 25% bonus to the total ranking points scored. The points values for each ship are available in the match rules page.

Intentional Handicaps

If a team begins the match with less points value worth of ships than their opponent, and wins the match, they score extra ranking points equal to the difference in the two teams' values.

Pre-Qualifying Rankings

If at any point, teams are level in Win/Loss and also level in points scored; the following will be used in order to determine ranking position.

1. If the teams disputing rank have fought each other at any point, the winner is higher.
2. The current ranking (W/L, then points) of the last team that you defeated. Higher is better.
3. The current ranking of the last team that defeated you. Again, higher is better
   
    

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In a far far away land

It all began around Crucible release, as part of an effort to iterate on features that desperately needed some love. Factional Warfare was quite a high choice on that list, and thus we got to work; initial investigation by looking at player threads, CSM communication, various metrics and internal brainstorming’s lead to a high-level pitch that focused on improving rewards, consequences and visibility in Factional Warfare.

Fanfest was the perfect opportunity to present it to our player base. We really want to thank everybody that showed up for the presentation and round tables as these were great places for us to listen to incoming feedback. There was a lot of discussion on some controversial features, and as a result we had to reprioritize our plans. Some ideas were scrapped, others delayed as we chose to focus our efforts on points we were most confident in.

Standardization - one naming metric to rule them all

The first point we wanted to tackle is quite cosmetic. While we do recognize that players joining Factional Warfare do so for reasons that most often set them apart from 0.0, we were not satisfied with the lack of consistency EVE displays regarding its territorial warfare mechanics.

We feel having unified names and indicators in both Factional Warfare and 0.0 would be quite beneficial, even if actual mechanics should stay separate so as not to convert one into the other. Factional Warfare has very localized territorial mechanics that don’t carry so much perceived worth anywhere else, and that are confusing for being radically different with anything else EVE has to offer.

That is why we are renaming Occupancy, Control Bunkers into Sovereignty and Infrastructure Hubs. The point is to improve clarity, as anyone can quickly grasp and realize the tactical value of the following notions no matter to which security status they apply:

• Sovereignty: main territorial warfare control unit. Indicates who owns and controls a system
• Infrastructure Hub: structure used by the controlling party to own and upgrade the conquered system. Can be shot down to take over Sovereignty

As a side-effect, the previously numerous confusing Star Map Occupancy filters have been simplified and sorted under the Sovereignty tab.

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Visibility - opening the gates

We had a look into visibility issues as well, as we were quite not fond on how old the information was displayed. For starters, the Factional Warfare recruitment page was cluttered with a lot of text and wasn't clear about rules and consequences for joining up, all of which while trying to display statistics at the same time. This was a pain for new players trying to join, as they had little clue how Factional Warfare was actually working and it would often deter them from pressing the magic “join” button.

We changed that a bit by splitting information by tabs, cleaning the window in general, and defining the rules a bit better.

We also put a lot of focus on various UI enhancements to help make life easier, mainly the Infrastructure Hub, join up page and main system information. The results can be seen throughout the screenshots in this blog.

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Consequences - breaking the daily routine

Another field that needed iteration was related to the lack of consequences for participating. As its name implies, Factional Warfare is supposed to be an actual bloody struggle raging between the various factions. However it currently lacks proper reasons to do so, as little matters when a system is taken. That's a fact we want to tamper with, as to encourage players to be actively helping the war effort by fighting for their faction.

Stations denying docking

As such, with Inferno, all stations within a low-security Factional Warfare system will now deny docking to any factional enemy (neutrals will remain unaffected). That means restricting any kind of service or agent access to all pilots in opposing militias.

However, due to CSM and player feedback, we do recognize this would be detrimental to players across various time zones, as going to sleep only to find out the station you docked at changed control during your absence is nothing but appealing. That is why we are reducing the number of Victory Points handed out from FW complexes by a factor of 5, thus increasing the average time to capture a system from 6-7 to 30-35 hours.

Upgrading space

Holding solar systems currently lacks appeal and we wanted to improve that fact. In Inferno, the faction controlling a Factional Warfare system will be able to donate Loyalty Points into the local Infrastructure Hub to gain benefits, like extra station slots, medical clone cost reduction (doesn’t apply to jump clones), and market taxes reduction. For now, all of this applies to neutrals as well in an effort to promote third party industrial activity to support your war effort; this may change in the future depending on how the alt farming situation will evolve, especially if and when we add new benefits.

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War zone control and LP store prices

On the bigger scale, we wanted to help participating players feel more like they were in the middle of a fluctuating war zone rather than just participating in a line of unconnected skirmishes. That is why progress will now be tracked by counting the number of solar systems held, how many upgrades are installed for each faction and compared to the faction's enemy over the regions being competed for.

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As individual factions conquer space and upgrade systems, their respective war zone control tier will increase to unlock several benefits.

First, the offer requirements in the respective faction LP store will decrease. As such, at the lowest tier, LP store offers will be 4x times more expensive as they are now, while at the highest tier, they will be 4 times as cheap. This only applies to ISK and LP requirements for offers, not tags or items. It also only counts for the 4 Factional Warfare militia LP stores; no other corporation will be affected.

Second, all members of a specific faction will receive bonuses to all Factional Warfare LP gains, varying between 0 to 20%. Such increases are not tied to a specific solar system and will be granted for any kind of Factional Warfare activity that grants LPs (PvP kills, complexes, missions).

Rewards - paying for a job well done

Another field that direly required some attention was the lack of benefits for actively participating in Factional Warfare. In the reward ladder, helping your faction in territorial warfare should reward the most, followed by PvP, and then finally PvE with missions. However, this actually is the opposite right now as missions pay the most while they impact the least in your faction territory. We really want to reward individual players that take risks and participate in PvP and conflicts, rather than promoting safe, passive incomes.

Capturing payout

We would like to improve payouts by giving LPs for capturing enemy complexes and Infrastructure Hubs:

• Minor sites: 10,000 LPs
• Standard sites: 17,500 LPs
• Major sites: 25,000 LPs
• Major Stronghold or Major Compound sites: 30,000 LPs
• Infrastructure Hub: 40,000 LPs

Please note such LP is split for all eligible members that meet all capture criteria; as such, 2 Amarr enlisted pilots capturing a Minor site would only receive 5,000 LPs each.

Capturing complexes will also cause half of the gained LP amount to be removed from the enemy Infrastructure Hub in the solar system, possibly causing the upgrade level to go down; this is part of an effort to encourage players to defend their space when attacked. However, defending dungeons do not yield LP for now, to avoid abusive farming in a single set of safe systems. This situation may be adjusted in the near future if the situation warrants it.

LPs for kills

In Inferno, we will also properly reward PvP kills, as we are not satisfied by the very small payout it delivers currently. The new formula now will correct this, by handing LPs proportional to the ship value lost, the exact formula being:

[Given LP] = ([Market value of target ship] - [Max. Insurance market value] + [Fitted mods, rigs and subsystem market value] + [Transported items market value]) / 10000

Please note that insurance is always counted as maximum value no matter what your ship actually has to avoid farming. If the killing blow belongs to someone in a fleet, all eligible members will receive a split share of the LP booty, even if they are in the allied militia.

Example: a fleet of 2x Gallente Federation and 2x Minmatar Republic members destroy a target enlisted in the Caldari State worth 4000 LPs. No matter who had the killing blow, each Federation pilot will receive 1000 LP for the Federal Defense Union, while each Minmatar capsuleer will gain 1000 LP for the Tribal Liberation Force.

Below are some examples on how the new formula pays out next with market values taken from our internal test servers:

• Destroying an Abaddon fitted with tech 2 mods: gained LP = ( 196m ISK – 161m ISK + 46m ISK + 0 ) / 10000 = 8100 LP (previous system would have paid 500 LP)
• Destroying a Machariel fitted with tech 2 mods: gained LP = (1.170m ISK – 95m ISK + 40m ISK + 0 ) / 10000 = 111500 LP (previous system would have paid 750 LP)
• Destroying a Providence with 1 b full of cargo: gained LP = (1115m ISK – 839m ISK + 0 + 1000m ISK ) / 10000 = 127600 LP (previous system would have paid 2000 LP)
• Destroying a Punisher with tech 1 fitting: gained LP = (450k ISK – 312k ISK + 100k ISK + 0) / 10000 = around 24 LP (previous system would have paid 25 LP)
• Destroying a Punisher with tech 2 fitting: gained LP = (450k ISK – 312k ISK + 7.8m ISK +) / 10000 = around 794 LP (previous system would have paid 25 LP)

Research agents and datacore changes

A change mentioned during Fanfest concerns datacores and research agents in general. While we do acknowledge that initial the initial period to train up for high-level research agents take times, effort and money, we are not particularly fond of the passive datacore income in general. Indeed, once the initial requirements are met, this is not so much of an active profession and more of a passive collection of items, which we want to look at.

As such, we are removing all field multipliers on research fields, while unifying RP amount to claim one datacore to 100. While this actually double amount of RPs to claim a datacore, we also are introducing a small 10,000 ISK fee per datacore to ensure there is a small cost tied to their retrieval.

We also are introducing datacores to the Factional Warfare LP stores, spilt into each individual faction so there is no market overlap. They are tied to the War Zone control effect on LP store prices, that means offers will dramatically change depending on which side is winning.

It is particularly important to emphasize here we are not planning for balanced outcomes, as we expect and endorse expensive prices coming from a crumbling faction. This however doesn’t mean we won’t act to make it more difficult in the future for each side to achieve total dominance if they already own a majority of systems (basically, implementing diminishing returns of some kind).

While our current intention is to turn datacore gathering into more of an active profession than it currently is, we will be following feedback closely to make sure players that invested time into Research corporations are not abandoned, most likely by making further changes to them in the next release.

A glimpse into the future

We have dedicated a lot of effort to improve Factional Warfare as a whole, and we hope all of this will contribute to better it in the long run. But don't take our word for it: save some cheap PvP fitted ships, and when Inferno hits, give it a shot. Go in there, shoot stuff, get killed and experiment with tactics - that is the point. When you have done all of that, come back and tell us what you think. We crave for feedback and we are not stopping here: we are committed into keep looking at Factional Warfare during next release as well and your feedback will ensure we are doing it right.

As a parting gift, here are some points for us to consider in the near future:

• Keeping an eye on the items mentioned here as the situation evolves – especially station docking and datacore changes
• The possibility of adding new advantages for upgrading a system through the Infrastructure Hub
• Having a look at complex and mission NPCs to make them balanced for all factions
• Revamping ranks in general, and how they fit as rewards
• Further improving visibility and barrier of entry by keeping the UI changes coming
• Iterating on the system capture gameplay in general, and implement ties with DUST 514

I’m CCP Nobody, from Team Core Graphics Tools and I’m here to tell you about some changes that are coming in the Inferno release for the Exported Data for 3^rd party developers. 

For the last few months, we have been changing the way static data is used in the client. Instead of using database tables, the client will be using yaml based structure for its static data.

This means that all of you 3^rd party developers need to change the way you read the exported data from the Eve Online Toolkit. Luckily for you guys this is quite easy since there is a plethora of yaml readers available on the internetz for the major programming languages.

However, since this will be an incremental procedure, we will only migrate a few database tables at a time with each release. This means that the data zip file that is available on the Toolkit webpage will include yaml files (for migrated systems) and a database backup file (for un-migrated systems).

Currently we have deployed a zip file of how the data will look in the upcoming Inferno release to the EVE Online Toolkit website so you guys can be ready for the switch. This zip file contains the typeIDs.yaml file, the graphicIDs.yaml file and the usual database files (for un-migrated systems). You can access this zip file on the EVE Online Toolkit.

• graphicIDs.yaml contains data that used to live in the ebs_DATADUMP.dbo.eveGraphics table
• typeIDs.yaml contains the mapping between typeIDs and graphicIDs (which was in the graphicIDs column in ebs_DATADUMP.dbo.invTypes)

That’s all for now!

CCP Nobody 

We are CCP Optimal and CCP Arrow and between the two of us we should be able to make excellent projectiles, but let’s keep this focused, shall we? Instead, and more importantly, we try our best to make your experience in EVE good through various UI improvements. In this dandy little devblog we want to tell you about the latest developments coming from our dear team, Game of Drones  (patent pending).

What do all EVE players have in common? They need to use Inventory windows. A lot of them...

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As we mentioned before, we are on a crusade against the amount of open windows it requires to pull off any given operation in EVE. A little research, as well as our personal experience, made it clear that the inventory UI was, and to this date is, a big offender in that context. There are tens of different types of inventory location in the game, and in many cases you will find the need to have many of them open at the same time. We also recognized that there were many usability issues to be encountered by users of the inventory system, so spending time improving it made a lot of sense. Additionally, the nature of the inventory system means that all players use it more or less every time they play the game. It doesn’t matter if you are a carebear, a diehard PvP player or a casual corpse collector (wait, what?), the need to manage your items is always present.

The remedy

So, what’s the opposite of multiple windows? After weeks of research and multiple rejected hypotheses we came up with what we are certain is the correct answer: a single window (please tell us it’s the right one). So, instead of opening up multiple windows from multiple locations spread throughout the UI, you now have a single Inventory button in the Neocom. Once pressed you will be presented with a little something like this:

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The most obvious change to the inventory is the new tree view, which automatically populates with all inventory locations accessible to you at a given point in time. As if that wasn’t a tough enough job, the tree view is also populated with any sub inventory location, so under your active ship you will see all bays present, under Ships you will see all your assembled ships and under Corporation you will see all the divisions accessible to you (the ones that you don’t have read access rights for are hidden). Oh, yeah, it also shows containers, effectively making them quite usable, as opposed to the biggest usability violators in the history of videogames. It should be obvious that you can now move items between inventory locations without opening the destination window; just drop it to the relative tree view entry instead. If you prefer, you can drag and hold an item over the tree view entry to switch over to that inventory location to see the item appearing safely at its destination, although there is also a confirming blink when dropping onto an entry. You can also drag containers between locations within the tree, making life even easier.

If this “One window to rule them all” doesn’t sound like the thing just for you then don’t panic, you can still open up multiple windows if you want to (either through right-click options or SHIFT clicking tree entries), but we are hoping the need to do so is all but eliminated with the introduction of the tree view.

What else is in the goodie bag?

Another big usability issue we noticed when analyzing the inventory was the lack of inventory management related information. To amend the situation, we beefed up the capacity bar, which now not only shows the used and total volume of an inventory location but also the volume of the selected items, both the absolute volume and proportional amount (as a second bar on the gauge). When dragging items between locations, the bar will also show you how much volume the items will take up, and turn red if the items won’t fit, before you even drop the items. On a similar note, we now also show the total number of items as well as the number of items selected, in the bottom-right corner. Since we’re there (the bottom right corner that is) you may have already noticed the number of items’ jolly neighbor, Estimated ISK price. That’s right, we finally came to the conclusion that we had enjoyed watching you all jump through flaming loops to figure out the worth of your stuff for long enough. It was fun while it lasted. When you have items selected, the number will represent the summed up value of those items, but when nothing is selected it will be the entire bunch. The ISK price of individual items, as well as of the entire stack, can also be enjoyed by hovering over that item. The estimated ISK price is based on the items’ average market price and will therefore probably not represent the exact value you’ll get for it on the market, but it should be pretty darn close.

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Filter heaven

As you seemed to like when we added the quick filter box to the inventory not so incredibly long ago, we figured you might enjoy if we introduced more advanced filtering as well. Just to avoid confusion, we kept the Quick Filter box which has its use for quickly filtering things by name, but for more advanced filtering we added a new feature we call Smart Filters. These are powerful filter rules that can be configured in multiple ways and saved to be used again at any point. Heck, they are even persisted to the server, so you don’t have to re-create them on every god forsaken PC you may end up logging in through. Currently, the conditions available in a filter are:

• Assembled
• CPU Usage
• Estimated unit price
• Group
• Meta group
• Meta level
• Name
• Power usage
• Slot type
• Stack size
• Volume

It is effectively possible to create a very simple or complex filter, depending on your needs. While the filter creation window remains open, the filter in construction will be applied and updated as you mess around with it, so you can do complex filter operations without saving anything. If you do manage to build a filter that would make your parents proud, you can name it and save it, making it accessible under My Filters for some quick filtering action until you decide to send it to Filter Heaven (or Filter Hell, depending on its behavior) by removing it. A green diode will light up when any of your filters are active. You can click that very same diode to quickly disable all filters. When filtering is active, the number of items filtered out will also be displayed in green in the bottom right corner. There will be a couple of pre-defined filters present when you first open the window which you can butcher at will through the Right-click edit option. We have a hunch that some of you might want to change the 100k threshold of the “Valuable items” filter...

Click to enlarge

Inventory in space

Most people know that in space, no-one can hear you scream. What you might not know is that in space, there are also Inventory locations/holds (ok, to be fair you probably knew). We quickly realized that the tree view promise of always displaying all inventory locations accessible to you at a given time would become a bit fuzzy when in space. Should we populate the tree with items outside of reach that are still on grid? What about ship corporation hangars and ship maintenance bays? What about situations where there are hundreds of wrecks or other inventory locations, most of which you might not be interested in at all? After a lot of thought, we decided to hand the power to you. In-space inventory locations will not automatically pop up in the tree, but require you to open them up yourself as before. Once an inventory location has been opened, it will appear in the tree where it will reside until you decide you’ve had your fun with it and click the little white X to remove it. The only exception to this are POS structures, that are automatically appended to the list under a POS Structures category once you’re on the same grid, which we felt made much more sense as those inventory locations are in a sense way more permanent than wrecks and floating cans.

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I love it when you get all technical

Well, who’s blaming you? The biggest reason we hadn’t brought you any of the above improvements earlier was the fact that the client inventory code had fallen victim of some serious code rot. Being one of the fundamental systems of the game, that also makes it one of the oldest and this oldie was long overdue for some refactoring. So, refactor we did. Once that was done, we had solved a couple of key issues such as properly separating data from UI as well as making the Inventory UI way more modular than it was before. Without this foundation work the Unified Inventory window would never have been feasible. Another thing we looked at while the hood was open was performance. As any large scale item possessor will tell you, dealing with more than a couple of items would bring the frame rate through the floor. But no more! Having hundreds of items within the same location now works fine. The time it takes the Inventory to load up for the very first time has also been reduced, plus we’ve added loading indicators to make it clear that your client is waiting for its data, which should be especially useful in a ‘laggy’ situation.

The Inventory of the future

As the inventory system is one of the most heavily used systems in the game, and most games for that matter, it cannot be stressed enough how important proper functionality and usability is. Keeping that in mind, it is easy to argue that time put into improvements is time well spent and we don't want to stop there. We value your input and would like to know how you feel about these changes. What more can we do to improve the experience of managing your inventory? To name a few things we would like to iterate on in the near future; some even smarter Smart Filters, such as “Skills training met”, “Can be fitted to active ship” and so on (give us more ideas please). We plan to break out a lot of the per-item options that are now hidden in a right click menu to proper icon buttons. Among those options are functions like ‘Sell’ (multi-sell anyone?), Assemble, Trash and so forth. Right-clicking is fun and all but … yeah.

Click to enlarge

That’s all for now from Game of Drones. All of the things above will be hitting our test servers very soon, so stay tuned and have fun doing Inventory stuff.

This year we will have 64 teams participating in the tournament which runs over four consecutive weekends starting on June 30, 2012. As well as changing some of the rules to ensure the tournament brings new tactics and set ups, we have also added rules to ensure that the spirit of the tournament remains competitive and entertaining.

Next week we will be going into more detail about how you can participate in the random draw and how to apply for an auction spot. Today we want to look at tournament rules and what we wanted to achieve with these. While a full listing is available below for your perusal, and will be updated on the new Alliance Tournament page next week, we would like to take a moment and highlight some of the important changes:

• We are increasing the number of ships you can field in the qualifying rounds from five to six.
• We are increasing the number of ships you can field in the final two weekends from 10 to 12.
• Match times have been reduced from 15 minutes to 10 minutes.
• We will be actively removing those alliances that try and add a ‘B’ or ‘C’ team. We want everyone to have a fair chance but stacking the deck in this manner will not be permitted. This removal will also include the main alliance if we detect anyone trying to field more than one team.
• Ship point values have been changed with some ships going down in cost.
• Alliance Tournament referees can now call a match null and void or declare a result if they feel a team is not competing or throwing a game. This will be entirely at the discretion of the tournament referees.

These are some of the main rule changes which we feel will add to the overall betterment of Alliance Tournament. Below is the full rule list for your information.

Match Rules

Tournament Rules

1. This is a three stage tournament, with 64 alliances allowed to enter.
2. There will be two pre-qualifying rounds, followed by a 32 team group stage and a 16 team final day.
3. All competing pilots must have been members of the alliance for which they are competing, and be a member of that Alliance by downtime on May, 05, 2012.
4. All alliance members are eligible to compete in any match in which their alliance is taking part, subject to all applicable rules; teams do not have to remain the same between games.
5. To ensure that all Alliances get a fair opportunity to participate we will be checking on team entries and will disqualify teams who we consider to be ‘B’ or ‘C’ teams for bigger Alliances.

Please note that both the format and match rules are subject to change. It is strongly advised that participants watch the EVE Alliance Tournament forum regularly for announcements.

Match Rules

1. Alliances can field up to twelve pilots on the battlefield.
   • During the pre-qualifying rounds, this will be limited to 6 pilots.
2. Fights are limited to 10 minutes in pre-qualifying rounds and group stage, and to 10 minutes on the final day. If a fight reaches time, it will be stopped and whichever alliance has the higher total points value will be declared winner. See "Victory Conditions", below.
3. Intentional pod killing is NOT allowed and may result in the offender being punished. All podkills will be reimbursed.

Penalties

A player found breaking any rules can be penalized to various degrees, depending on the severity of the offence. All penalties are incurred at the tournament organizer's discretion. Decisions are final. Penalties may be levied against a player or team and may include but are not limited to:

• Points deduction
• Reducing the offending ship(s) shield / armor / hull / capacitor to 50%
• Removal from the fight
• Ban from competing for one or more matches.
• Ban from competing for the remainder of the tournament, and/or any future tournaments.
• For Alliance Tournament X the referees can call a match null and void or declare a result if they believe that one of the teams is not competing. This tournament is designed to showcase the talents of pilots and should be entertaining.

Place & Tactics

1. Participants should be prepared, in their chosen ships and in a fleet, 30 minutes before their scheduled fight time. Teams will be brought by a GM to a star system in uncharted space and designated as Team 1 and Team 2. If you are not ready with this time allocation you will be disqualified from this match and the opposing team will receive maximum points as a result.
2. There are eight beacons in the system, which serve as start off points. Four beacons are marked for Team 1 and four marked for Team 2. The teams must assemble at any of the four beacons designated for their team.
3. Once the word is given, teams warp in to the at a range of their choosing, up to a maximum of 50 km. Team members are allowed to warp in at different ranges.
4. The arena will measure 125 km radius around the central beacon.
5. The host will begin a countdown. When the countdown ends, the host will break target locks of all ships in the arena
6. If a player warps out/leaves the arena, his/her ship will be destroyed. This includes disconnection emergency warps.
7. Warping within the arena is NOT allowed.
8. Dropping cargo containers or other anchorable items is NOT allowed. Dropping regular jettison containers is allowed.
9. Locking players before the match starts is NOT allowed.
10. Activating aggressive or targeted modules before the match starts is NOT allowed.
11. Launching drones before the match starts is NOT allowed.
12. Moving before the match starts is NOT allowed.
13. Boarding a ship during the match is not allowed.

Ships & Points

1. Each team has 100 points with which to select their ships. Teams must use a minimum of 50 points.
   • During Pre-Qualifying rounds, teams have a total of 50 points to select ships. There is no minimum number of pilots or points a team needs to field during the pre-qualifiers.
2. Each team may have up to 12 ships on the battlefield.
   • During Pre-Qualifying rounds, teams may have up to 6 ships.
3. Teams may field no more than 4 of a given ship. This applies to specifically named ships only, and not ship hulls. For example, 4 Curses, 4 Pilgrims, and 4 Arbitrators would be legal.
4. Teams may field no more than 1 logistics ship.
5. Unused points will be added to the opponents score.
6. Ship points values are as follows. Ship types not listed in the table are not allowed.
   • Battleship, Faction - 20
   • Marauder - 17
   • Battleship - 17
   • Black Ops Battleship - 17
   • Command Ship - 16
   • Strategic Cruiser - 16
   • Cruiser, Faction – 14
   • Recon Ship – 14
   • Heavy Assault Cruiser - 13
   • Battlecruiser (Tier 2) – 13
   • Battlecruiser (Tier 3)  - 12
   • Heavy Interdictor - 12
   • Logistics Cruiser - 12
   • Battlecruiser (Tier 1) - 10
   • Cruiser - 8
   • Bomber - 6
   • Electronic Attack Frigate - 5
   • Frigate, Faction - 4
   • Assault Frigate - 4
   • Interdictor - 3
   • Interceptor - 3
   • Destroyer - 3
   • Tech 1 Industrial Ships - 3
   • Frigate - 2
7. The definitions of 'Tier 1', 'Tier 2' and ‘Tier 3’ Battlecruisers are as follows: Tier 1 Battlecruisers are: Cyclone, Brutix, Ferox, Prophecy. Tier 2 Battlecruisers are: Hurricane, Myrmidon, Drake, Harbinger. Tier 3 Battlecruisers are: Oracle, Naga, Talos and Tornado

Fitting Restrictions

1. All T1 and T2 modules are allowed, with the following exception:
   1. All Remote Armor Repair modules and Remote Shield Transfer modules are NOT allowed, EXCEPT on ONE of EITHER a logistics ship or a strategic cruiser.
   2. Faction, COSMOS, deadspace and officer modules are NOT allowed.
2. T1 Rigs are allowed. T2 Rigs are NOT allowed.
3. All T1 and T2 ammunition, missiles and charges are allowed. Faction ammunition, missiles and capacitor boosters are allowed.
4. All drones are allowed, including Logistics drones. Augmented drones, which were previously banned, will now be permitted.
5. Attribute Enhancers that give bonuses to anything other than perception, intelligence, willpower, memory, and charisma are NOT allowed.
6. All Hardwirings are allowed.
7. Boosters are NOT allowed.
8. Cloaking is NOT allowed.
9. Cap Boosters are allowed.
10. New modules introduced with Inferno will be valid during the qualifying rounds. The Alliance Tournament team will monitor their use during qualifying rounds and potentially ban or restrict the use of certain modules if we feel they are reducing the overall quality of the tournament.

Flagships

1. Any standard T1 or Faction battleship hull may be designated as a flagship.
2. Flagships are able to fit faction, officer, cosmos, and Deadspace versions of the following modules, ignoring tournament rules to the contrary:
   • All Highslot Modules (not including remote armour repair modules, remote shield transfer modules, or cloaking devices)
   • Electronic Warfare Modules
   • Weapon Upgrade Modules
   • ONE Shield Booster or up to TWO Armour Repairers
3. All flagships must be given an appropriate name, which must fall within Eve Online's standard naming policies. It may not be renamed during the tournament. You may NOT name any ship in your tournament teams with the same name as your submitted flagship.
4. Flagship ship types must be created in advance and their ship hull and name submitted to CCP Alliance Tournament via Evemail no later than 01/06/2012. The fittings for a Flagship do not have to be disclosed. Fittings may also be changed from match to match.
5. All flagship names and hull types will be published in the Flagships section of the Eve Online Alliance Tournament site following the deadline date.
6. A flagship may be fielded in any match and counts as a normal ship in every way other than the ones defined above.
7. A flagship costs the same points value as for a normal ship of its type.
8. You are under no obligation to field your flagship in any given match.
9. If your flagship is destroyed, it may not be fielded again during the tournament.
10. Flagships may not be fielded during pre-qualifying rounds.

Victory Conditions

1. During a match, a team scores points for each enemy ship it kills, equal to the tournament points value of that ship. The team that has scored the most points at the conclusion of the match, or that destroys the entire opposing team, is the winner.
2. If a team chooses to field less than 100 points, non-fielded points count towards the opponent's score.
   • This rule applies to the 50 point limit during Pre-Qualifying, not 100 points.

WHAT IS JITA?

For quite some time, the Jita solar system has been the most populated solar system in EVE Online on a sustained basis, having organically risen as the main player trade hub in game due to its location and the basic human need to gather together and trade stuff.

It's had a varied reputation as [wretched hive of scum, villainy and scammers], [representative product of EVE's emergent sandbox game design], [indefatigable cog of economic prosperity], and [rallying point for impassioned protestors].

And, starting last Friday, it was on fire.

Actually, Jita itself wasn't on fire, but thousands of players who normally find it a "safe" haven of trade and economic gameplay found their ships on fire - everything from a lonely hauler on up to the simply massive, highly-armored freighters moving thousands of USD equivalents of ships and goods.

As you can see from the below "kill" heatmap of the EVE universe (where each dot is one of the 5,431 solar systems in EVE's known universe), it was a pretty big deal.

Click image to enlarge

And it all happened because a few players wanted to make it happen and then, after convincing thousands of others to join them from around the world, they made it happen.

"BURN JITA"

For several months now, a coalition of thousands of players have been planning the "Burn Jita" event, aimed at disrupting the biggest trade hub in game in order to wreak some terrific, universe-wide changes by shaking the very pillars of EVE's economy at its metaphorical heart. Surely there was some sort of larger, meta-economic objective that likely would cause them great profit. This planning happened both in game and outside of game, via voice over IP chat, secret forums, Twitter and more. A sci-fi plot of the new information age if there ever was one.

Using game mechanics and some very impressive logistics, the coalition, lead by a group known as Goonswarm, amassed a tremendous amount of manpower and ships in a concentrated effort that would probably make many real life military strategists jaw-drop. Bravado-saturated propaganda was also a pretty big part of their plot.

Fast forward to Friday:  Player fleets comprised of high-damage-dealing ships began to destroy high-value industrial ships during a sustained campaign with single, coordinated volleys, sacrificing themselves in waves because the in-game "police" warps in almost immediately with harsh, reprimanding justice.

Amidst this orchestrated chaos, opportunistic salvagers profited from the wrecks left behind and EVE's deep, talented player community began blogging about, filming, screenshotting, livestreaming and celebrating/decrying the event. Some opposing fleets rose up to fight the invading hordes as well - to mixed success.

All of it occured in the same framework of unrestricted player movement and limitless player choice in a single, shared game universe. As our senior producer put it "f*cking brilliant". As a participating player put it: "There’s just something special about building 15,000 spaceships and loading their guns with 1 round of ammo to shoot. And doing it right in front of the police."

As developers we watched in awe at another amazing thing our players brought to the universe we created. Yet there was a lot more going on behind the scenes on our end besides popcorn and a comfy chair...

THE VERY TECHNICAL SIDE

Since the "Burn Jita" event was announced well in advance and CCP wants to support player-driven events (as long they are within the rules of the game), we reinforced the Jita solar system on our beefiest hardware, further reinforced all neighbouring systems and set out to monitor the event and provide the best experience we could to willing (and unwilling) participants.  Then things started to unfold a day earlier than announced on Friday morning. We gathered data and fine-tuned the systems and as CCP Veritas put it: "It's okay, didn't want that Friday night anyway."

As we talk about the players' experience, I want to give you a bit of an insight into two projects in EVE in relation to the "Burn Jita" event: A different perspective on Time Dilation and a brief introduction to EVE Metrics.

We introduced Time Dilation to be able to handle large-scale fleet fights in a more graceful manner.  Basically it slows down overall "game time" to make sure each player action is properly handled and executed in order by the servers - keeping it fair and orderly. CCP Veritas of the EVE Dev group called Team Gridlock was the driving force behind Time Dilation (TiDi) and has written a number of devblogs on TiDi:

• Introducing Time Dilation (TiDi)
• Time Dilation Video Demo
• Time Dilation – How's That Going?

Time Dilation was born from the need to better support large-scale fleet fights in 0.0, the lawless area of space where player alliances fully rule and frequently battle in numbers that dwarf entire server populations in other online games. While we have had Time Dilation kick in in low-sec (slightly less lawless area of space) then this is the first time that Time Dilation kicks in for any sustained periods in high-sec (where the police show up) and it's been very beneficial for us to observe TiDi in this environment - a digital gold mine of sorts for our dev team.

The server CPU profile and general usage profile of Jita has always been very different from the rest of the universe. There are 4 large groups of server-load profiles:

1. 0.0 fights - where players typically bring big numbers to the dynamically shifting battlefields of lawless, alliance controlled space
2. mission hubs - where lots of players are running missions for popular NPC agents for fun and profit
3. market hubs - where the financiers, traders and manufacturers do a lot of collective business (Jita, Amarr, Rens and more...)
4. general solar systems - just your "average" solar system

We configured Time Dilation to deal with 0.0 fights although those same parameters mostly work for trade hub server loads like Jita - but could be improved.  As a specific example: TiDi has to kick in very aggressively and very quickly during large fleet jump-ins, where a fleet simultaneously transfers between two solar systems.  This "use case" doesn't typically apply to Jita. Instead we have to deal with Crime Watch monitoring (i.e., who is "allowed" to kill whom, which also applies to low-sec but not 0.0) and CONCORD response (i.e., the police, which doesn't apply to low-sec or 0.0) for short-burst smaller engagements (but potentially multiple such activities). Different code and different usage profile.

So we reconfigured TiDi specifically for Jita, only on the node hosting Jita.  CCP Veritas provides the details:

Here's how we handled the server load of a few hundred murderous savages valued customers making ships explode in the most populated system in EVE Online.

Having a lot of people in Jita is nothing new.  Being EVE's main market hub these days, many folks come to sell their produced goods or fit out their spaceships for adventures elsewhere.  Sometimes, the strain from all that commerce has been enough to overload the server it runs on, and so we've made a single exception in our "no population caps" rule so that things can remain nice and orderly.  This is generally considered an okay thing, since preventing someone from jumping in to make some deals isn't nearly as bad as preventing people from jumping into a huge fleet fight.  I'm just giving some historical perspective, of course, because ever since the Inventory Setification optimization that accidently halved Jita's normal load profile, we haven't really been at the cap very much.

In any case, going into this event we had two dials to adjust - the application of Time Dilation and where the population cap is set.  Let the graphs begin!

Click image to enlarge

The event kicked off in the very early morning on Friday, 27 April.  We weren't entirely sure when exactly it was going to happen, so we had Jita configured just like any other normal day, with a 2,300 player cap and generic TiDi parameters.  I probably would have lowered the population cap once things got down into the 20% range, but I was getting my ANSI Standard amount of sleep(), so that didn't happen.

However, if you showed me this graph without the title and said it was from a fleet fight out in 0.0, I would believe you.  The only thing that looks out of place is that the load was 60% before the fighting opened.  TiDi is set up to keep the fleet fight load profile in the 80-100% CPU utilization range, which as you can see here it did quite well.  From what I hear, the early hours of the event were heavy with counter-play, so I suppose it makes sense that the performance looks like a fleet fight.

Fast forward a few hours 'til after downtime (and coffee), and we're back up with a much more aggressive population cap - 1,850:

Click image to enlarge

We wanted to keep things fairly low at this point as we had found a few bugs in how Crime Watch worked under Time Dilation.  It's not something it's asked to do very often so these issues hadn't come up since TiDi's introduction months ago.  However, even with such a low cap (1,850 is low these days, how far we've come...), TiDi is kicking in.  Unfortunately, it's not keeping load in the nice 80-100% band like I like to see, it's holding around 60-90%, with just a couple spikes here and there keeping it down.

Later that afternoon, CCP Masterplan hot-patched Jita with a fix for the nastier issue we had found with Crime Watch and I got to work tweaking TiDi and upping the population cap.  Essentially, we're looking at a load profile with high ambient load and small spikes.  The trick was to find the sweet spot that would keep the ambient load at around 80% CPU and have TiDi be less sensitive to spikes as they were almost guaranteed to be small.  Normally we have to be much more aggressive when a spike starts because it could be a huge jump-in or a really effective bomber run, but in this particular use case we're limited to ganks or smartbombings involving tens of ships, not thousands.

Basically speaking, I made TiDi's tendency to slow down time more relaxed and less frequent, and made its mechanism to speed back up slightly more aggressive.  Here's the results from Saturday with a 2,200 player cap:

Click image to enlarge

Sweet spot achieved!

So how was the experience in Jita?  Lazarus Telraven, one of Goonswarm's main Fleet Commanders, says "This weekend has been a milestone for EVE, the first time anyone has declared war on a solar system. The game worked wonderfully. Among the Jita Burners complaints are few and praise is plentiful, but we all agree that without TiDi none of this would have been possible. In fact, after asking all of our allies what they thought I only received one complaint!  The only real problems that I was asked to mention was blackscreening on undock and not being able to make a war target only overview. When I asked our fleets to offer comments on the performance the response was overwhelmingly positive. GSF member Bagdon said that "opinion on performance for ccp: fucking brilliant. all brackets on, all effects on, I might even start playing more after this!"  The number of people in Jita spiked between 1500-2300 pilots the entire weekend with fighting, fleet warping, fleets undocking, and just loads of everything in the system but it all worked beautifully as TiDi was up and down in prime times. With everything being said we can't wait for the rest of the changes coming with Inferno."

The comments on the client performance ("fucking brilliant. all brackets on, all effects on") were heart-warming to us since we have recently put a lot of effort into client performance, per CCP Veritas' devblog Your Client, Made Gooder, starting with the release of EVE Online: Crucible 1.2 in February.  In part, that effort focuses on increasing the client performance but we are also spending good time on identifying and removing frame rate spikes and drops; making the client run more smooth, i.e., be more responsive and more consistent.

THE METRICS

For those that are interested in some numbers here are some statistics about the weekend in Jita gathered using a new system, called EVE Metrics, that is currently in development.  CCP Atlas provides the details:

First off, the top 20 weapons/ammunition used over these three days:

Next, let's compare weapon module activations this past weekend with the previous weekend:

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Note that these graphs do not show how often these modules fired but rather how often people clicked the button to start them cycling.  The total damage inflicted over these three days amounted to 45,117,952 hit points delivered in 249,021 distinct hits.

Here are the damage and hits timelines this past weekend:

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Note that in all the graphs above we're looking at one hour moving averages.

Finally, here we see the number of market orders placed in Jita per day since the beginning of March until this past weekend:

Click image to enlarge

The red dotted line signifies what we would have expected to see during a normal weekend.

So while many ships were destroyed this weekend, it sure feels good to be the hosts of such massive amounts of spaceship carnage. We'll always be prepping for the next big event our players throw at us.

Make your stories happen!

- CCP Explorer  //  Software Director  //  Follow on: Twitter / Google+

(Devblog co-authored by CCP Atlas, CCP Manifest and CCP Veritas)

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SciFiMagically, each year brings more pilots living, warring, trading and socializing in the EVE universe than the year before. “SciFiMagically” because, well, that’s not really happening in other MMOs.

And later this year we’re adding some dudes on those planets around you—dudes that you will be able to shoot at. It’s like the biggest universe in gaming is going to get bigger without actually expanding? SciFiMagic.

Each year also adds more layers of depth, richness and nuance to the EVE experience. Not quite like a fine wine. Not like stanky aged cheese. And definitely not like “preserved” hakarl.

More like this:

EVE Online: Crucible brought us back into the Important Internet Spaceship Business, and IISBusiness is good. Watching those well-designed tools of destruction move betwixt such a sexy nebulae backdrop feels quite nice, doesn’t it my spacebros?

This lush, limitless environment full of epic battles, clever tactics, camaraderie, and antagony is built upon three basic, humble pillars.

• Death must have meaning.
• Everyone plays in the same shardless universe
• Sandbox design fosters human interaction that creates emergence that fuels a limitless storytelling engine

And that’s basically the formula to get EVE to this point.

Yet the structure misses a single crucial material. It lacks the catalyzer that CCP, the Mostly-Benevolent Space Gods, could not design in all of our omniscient, omnipotent omniVikingery.

A terrifying, powerful ingredient thrown into the mix nearly nine years ago to the day…

...The pilots themselves

We don’t want to get too into the philosophy of games and social organizations and all those academic shenanigans, so let’s just pause to remember that you, through the individual and collective forces of your imagination and will, have made your own EVE experience.

In doing so over time, you have made EVE.

YOU ARE EVE.

mind. blown.

And that’s a gorgeous thing. More gorgeous than shader model 3, tessellations and upcoming missile effects*

*barely.

That’s why, not far behind the most awesome Fanfest ever and in preparation for one helluva expansion in Inferno (I know, how punny!), we’re expanding that same level of player choice over the gifts we’re handing out to thank You, Our Pilots. OurEVE.

In much the same way as the 2011 Holiday Gift, we’ll be giving you a choice beginning May 4^th, a couple days ahead of the May 6th 9-year-birthday of EVE Online.

Here’s all the options. In their own special way, they each celebrate changes that just came in the Escalation to Inferno patch.

• Fire All Lasers (with Dignity) - Omen and Maller (Cruisers) + Medium Energy Turret and Amarr Cruisers (Skill Books)
• Duty, Honor, State (and Missiles) - Caracal and Moa (Cruisers) + Assault Missiles, Medium Hybrid Turret, Heavy Missiles, Caldari Cruiser (Skill Books)
• Deadly Elegance (Drones Extra) - Vexor and Thorax (Cruisers) + Medium Hybrid Turret and Gallente Cruisers (Skill Books)
• Heavy Iron (Rusted) - Stabber and Rupture (Cruisers) + Assault Missiles, Medium Projectile Turret, Heavy Missiles, Minmatar Cruiser (Skill Books)
• Plug and Play - Full set of +2 Attribute Implants (Limited Ocular Filter Beta, Limited Neural Boost Beta...etc...)
• Refine Your Skills - Memory Augmentation Standard and Cybernetic Subprocessor Standard (Implants) + Scrapmetal, Ice and all other ore Processing (Skillbooks)
• Drill Bits - 10x each ore mining crystal I's (10x Arkonor Mining Crystal I, 10x Bistot Mining Crystal I...etc...10 x Veldspar Mining Crystal I)
• A Paxist Treasure - Pax Ammaria - Collector's Item

The offer will go live on May 4th and be live until June 4th, 23:59:59 UTC. In order to redeem them you should go here. Your choice will then be put into the redeeming system, which you can use to redeem the gift to the character of your choice.

As always, any exploits or gaming of the redemption system during this time will result in all exploited items being removed from accounts and those accounts being considered for bans. It's free stuff. Act nice :) Eligible pilots who do not select a gift during this time will receive the "Plug and Play" set by default at the end of the offer timeframe. 

Thanks again, and fly safe o7!

The EVE Online Dev Team

PS. Did you know that “tin” is the traditional tenth anniversary gift material? (I know, how punny!)

While I doubt we’ll be making new ships out of it (ok, the Minmatar maybe), I can guarantee that EVE’s Tenth year will be even more amazing than this past year.  Like any good capsuleer corporation, we’ve got some plans and machinations in motion behind the scenes…

New to EVE? Start your 14-day free trial today.
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Letter from the CSM:

CSM 7 took office on April 4th, and we are already off to a very good start. We have a much broader base of experience on the CSM this time than ever before, with nearly every play style represented. From 0.0 to wormholes to faction warfare to high-sec (miners as well as suicide gankers), we have people on the CSM with direct experience in every part of the game. Despite this, we believe that direct input from the community is more important than ever before, and one of our first projects will be to improve communications between the community and CSM. We want to make sure you know what we're working on, and make sure we know what you want us to work on.

CSM 7 Officers
Our first action as CSM representatives was to elect officers, as laid out in the CSM white paper. As reported here Seleene has been elected Chairman of CSM 7, Trebor Daehdoow is the Vice-Chairman, Two Step is the Secretary and Hans Jagerblitzen is the Vice-Secretary.

Upcoming Summit
The top 7 voted members of CSM 7 will be travelling to Iceland for the first CSM 7 summit between May 30th and June 1st. The summit will be a major opportunity to provide community input as CCP develops their plans for the Winter Expansion. We will be publishing the list of summit topics as soon as they are finalized and we will create comment threads for each summit topic to get community feedback. These threads are very helpful in making sure we are prepared for the summit, and we would greatly appreciate it if you would participate in them.

One of the topics for this summit will be potential changes to the CSM white paper, including but not limited to changing or eliminating officer positions and improving the election system. This should be a process that includes everyone, and we will be looking for lots of feedback from the entire EVE community.

Communication
One thing that CSM 7 will be doing differently than past CSMs is directly communicating with the players as much as possible. That communication will be taking place in many different mediums, including in-game chats using EVE-voice, EVE Mail, CSM member blogs and Twitter accounts, posting on the official forums and many more. To help you, we have started a thread on the forums listing the means to get in touch with us. Be sure to investigate those links and if anyone has any suggestions for other means to keep in touch, please feel free to suggest them in the thread.

If you are interested in what the CSM is doing, be sure to keep your eyes and ears open. Many of us have already done several podcasts and interviews and we intend to keep that pace going.

First "Town Hall" May 19th, 1700 EVT
We will be having voice chats open to all players to give you a chance to ask us questions and intend to do these on a regular basis. Our plan is to have a Town Hall meeting before each summit, after the release of summit minutes, and also in-between the summits, approximately every month or two. The first meeting will be held in-game using EVE-voice with support from CCP and will be recorded for those unable to tune in. We will have more details as we get closer to the date of the meeting.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions about how to make the CSM a better advocate for the interests of the community.

Fly safe o7o7

The members of CSM 7

Earlier this month we announced a crackdown on RMT which began with a single circle of actors. With those gentlemen out of business we've been able to focus our sights on some new sources and I'd like to share some numbers with you. This isn't going to be my longest blog ever but it is going to contain some numbers and things that are sure to please most (heh) of you and give you some thoughts about how we're going to proceed.

After the first wave of action we've improved our methods a bit. Because of our focus on this subject we've seen some anecdotal things around the internet that aren't exactly scientific but do point somewhat towards impact.

• We've seen the cost of illegal isk go up
• We've seen illegal isk sellers having supply problems

Apparently, despite the chest-beating protestations of self-professed internet "experts" on the subject, when you buckle down hard enough on the supply-side of the problem you do indeed create ripples in their capacity to operate. When you ban all the suppliers the sellers need to look for new ones. When you increase the risk by taking out the sellers people are less likely to do so. In many cases we've been able to not just take out the supply networks, but immediately key in on the new supply networks and take those out as well. We have done this over and over and over again for the past 3 weeks and the results are telling:

• 1268 accounts of both sellers and suppliers have been banned permanently. Of these 90% or so are accounts that are very young. This is important because it helps to underscore the fact that these aren't good customers who have been tempted over to the dark side. These are illicit businessmen who could really care less about their impact on New Eden so long as they can buy a new tiger skin rug or a pair of signed purple Jordans.
• 524 accounts have had their illegal transactions reversed.
• No exact number here but we are seeing a great many customers realize the error of their ways, reversing the transaction to the illicit seller, then spending the cash on PLEX, which is absolutely the only right way to do this. For whatever reason people take risks, but when they are ultimately found out and have their proceeds taken they want to "go legit".
• Number of account cancellations due to reversal is around 10. People are understanding what they did was wrong but they still love EVE and tend to want to stay engaged.
• 1.5 Trillion isk has been reversed from people's accounts because they purchased it illegally.
• 4.2 Trillion or so isk in assets has been seized from RMTers or suppliers.

The lesson that begins to appear from this is one that starts to put a real dampner on the "common" "wisdom" that it's not profitable for us to crack down on this activity. While 1268 accounts had to be permanently banned they were not what we would qualify as "EVE Players". Buyers tend to be people who make a poor decision and try to save a couple of bucks by doing something illegal, but still want to be engaged in the game. We negative this activity and give them an opportunity to continue enjoying the game and they stay loyal customers, which helps to make New Eden a more enjoyable place for everyone. Instead of people sending cash to some shady dude running a sweat shop out in *insert country name here*, they purchase a PLEX, which can be used by you to fund your game time and the money goes into developing a better spaceship game instead of buying the equivalent of a digital drug dealer a cool new diamond-covered blingy case for his beeper.

Going forward we're going to keep twisting the knife on the sellers. Ultimately we do not believe this activity should continue and we will focus and do every single thing in our power to ensure that they are no longer able to take advantage of our customers and try to profit from our hard work. We're also exploring opportunities for how to get this messaging out to new players of the game. One of the things people mention fairly often is that they're concerned that new players can fall into this trap of "easy" isk by being targeted by these terrible isk sellers. Along with going after the supply-side of the problem we're doing a deep dive on what the best ways to reach out to new players is so that this never becomes a problem from the beginning. Part of this is word of mouth and dev blogs such as this, but we'll probably also see things like splash ads on login, news items, things in the launcher and some other stuff that's been thought of but is still being tweaked.

We're really hoping that by taking a layered approach to this we can solve this problem which will in turn have a net positive impact on both New Eden's economy and our ability to devote proper resourcing to the things that matter to you as a customer and, if I may say so... Internet Space Friend. Please feel free to post in the associated thread and let me know if you have any comments or anything. Unfortunately RMT tears are a bit harder to harvest but if you can find a way feel free to share (don't link the site) and I will give you a virtual hug in my head.

Until next time Space Friends!

Sreegs

ps. I need to give a shout out to Team Security, CCP Arkanon, CCP Peligro and CCP Stillman. They put a lot of hard work into this stuff and they deserve a hi five.

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