World News

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

CCP Legion,
Team PE.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Internet Spaceship Fans,

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

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

 

MORE CONSISTENT UI PERFORMANCE!

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

 

BETTER FONT PROCESSING AND RENDERING!

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

 

MORE RESPONSIVE OVERVIEW!

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

BONUS GOODNESS:

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

 

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

 

Fly Fast,

~CCP Veritas

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

---

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

BONUS GRAPH!

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

BONUS STATISTIC!

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 - CCP Diagoras

 

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After the popularity of the statistics that I’ve been posting to twitter, I decided to take a look at 2011 as a whole. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering! Many stats, broken down into categories.

Planetary Interaction

There was an average of 64,840 planetary export transactions per day, or 2,701 per hour. Of that, 26,693 were in high sec, 6,936 in low sec, 15,844 in null sec and 15,366 in wormhole space. An average of 64,627 characters exported goods from a planet each month, with the annual total being 195,449 different characters.

The top five systems in empire space for planetary interaction and the average number of export transactions per day were:

Sobaseki

448.77

Perimeter

259.68

Maurasi

193.09

Muvolailen

156.79

Elonaya

153.17

Barren class planets were unsurprisingly the most utilised. Average number of export transactions per day per planet type:

Barren

20,386.70

Gas

11,441.06

Lava

11,072.17

Storm

6,419.07

Temperate

5,267.01

Plasma

4,456.42

Ice

3,473.48

Oceanic

2,323.80

Production

A lot was built! Just under 62 billion missiles. That’s an average of 7.08 million an hour. I’m pretty certain that’s more missiles than the Persians had arrows. 13.2 million ships, too - an hourly average of 1,506.

Average production per hour by hull size and tech level:

Hull size

Tech 1

Tech 2

Tech 3

Total

Shuttle

495.31

   

495.31

Frigate

391.24

80.96

 

472.20

Cruiser

110.06

33.79

13.15

157.00

Battlecruiser

105.59

4.00

 

109.59

Industrial

85.47

6.79

 

92.25

Destroyer

59.11

6.42

 

65.53

Battleship

60.61

2.39

 

63.00

Mining Barge

29.68

12.00

 

41.68

Capital

5.99

0.29

 

6.28

Industrial Command

2.72

   

2.72

Total

1,345.78

146.64

13.15

1,505.57

Average production per hour by hull size and race. This excludes any ships not belonging to the four main races, hence the lower totals:

Hull size

Caldari

Minmatar

Gallente

Amarr

 Total

Shuttle

143.54

93.60

144.22

113.95

495.31

Frigate

136.84

144.25

99.62

82.26

462.98

Cruiser

43.75

44.25

32.34

32.05

152.39

Battlecruiser

43.93

38.98

13.84

12.85

109.59

Industrial

19.91

16.13

25.57

14.75

76.35

Destroyer

10.30

33.38

13.67

8.19

65.53

Battleship

13.48

16.79

12.36

16.15

58.78

Capital

1.58

0.83

2.21

1.37

6.00

Total

413.34

388.21

343.81

281.56

1,426.92

Production of ships per hour by sec group:

High Sec

1,346.77

Low sec

34.39

Null sec

120.63

Wormhole Space

3.77

The top 15 ships built in 2011 and their total, excluding shuttles and frigates:

Drake

330,752

Hurricane

262,808

Thrasher

256,829

Noctis

139,330

Retriever

127,981

Catalyst

115,061

Covetor

113,702

Badger Mark II

110,761

Bestower

99,534

Caracal

97,565

Rupture

92,589

Vexor

90,300

Cormorant

81,749

Manticore

80,064

Stabber

76,372

Also, our congratulations to the mighty Dreddit corporation for producing more Rifters than anyone else in 2011! 7,829 of them to be precise.

People blowing each other up

In 2011, 5,381,636 kill reports were generated; that’s an average of 14,744 per day or one every 5.86 seconds. 65% of these kill reports were caused by damage inflicted by a player, whilst non-player controlled entities (from Serpentis to CONCORD) were responsible for the remaining 35%.

Average destruction rate in PVP of the various hull sizes:

 

Daily

Hourly

Frigate

2,315

96.48

Capsule

2,291

95.47

Battlecruiser

1,207

50.28

Cruiser

1,016

42.34

Deployable Structure

529

22.05

Battleship

523

21.81

Rookie ship

448

18.65

Industrial

403

16.78

Destroyer

371

15.45

Shuttle

208

8.67

Mining Barge

159

6.64

Capital

27

1.11

Industrial Command

9

0.39

By tech level:

 

Daily

Hourly

Tech 1

7,859

327.46

Tech 2

1,574

65.57

Tech 3

79

3.28

By race, excluding rookie ships and capsules:

Race

Daily

Hourly

Minmatar

2,041

85.05

Caldari

1,758

73.26

Gallente

1,172

48.85

Amarr

1,079

44.98

Other

721

30.04

Overall, 576,860 different characters lost ships to non-players in 2011, and 422,801 lost ships in PVP scenarios. 155,087 characters scored at least one final blow, too!
 

The Market

To finish this blog off - If there’s one big thing in EVE, it would have to be the market. In total in 2011, 348,483,735 market transactions were performed with a total combined trade value of 2,692,367,631,609,430 ISK. That’s a lot. To break that down, 2011 on average:

  Day Hour Minute Second ISK 7,376,322,278,382 307,346,761,599 5,122,446,027 85,374,100 Transactions 954,750 39,781 663 11

Here's hoping for an even more productive and explosive 2012! If stats like these interest you, don’t forget to follow my twitter account and the comments thread of this blog. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions that come up as I can.

 -  CCP Diagoras

 

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

After the popularity of the statistics that I’ve been posting to twitter, I decided to take a look at 2011 as a whole. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering! Many stats, broken down into categories.

Planetary Interaction

There was an average of 64,840 planetary export transactions per day, or 2,701 per hour. Of that, 26,693 were in high sec, 6,936 in low sec, 15,844 in null sec and 15,366 in wormhole space. An average of 64,627 characters exported goods from a planet each month, with the annual total being 195,449 different characters.

The top five systems in empire space for planetary interaction and the average number of export transactions per day were:

Sobaseki

448.77

Perimeter

259.68

Maurasi

193.09

Muvolailen

156.79

Elonaya

153.17

Barren class planets were unsurprisingly the most utilised. Average number of export transactions per day per planet type:

Barren

20,386.70

Gas

11,441.06

Lava

11,072.17

Storm

6,419.07

Temperate

5,267.01

Plasma

4,456.42

Ice

3,473.48

Oceanic

2,323.80

Production

A lot was built! Just under 62 billion missiles. That’s an average of 7.08 million an hour. I’m pretty certain that’s more missiles than the Persians had arrows. 13.2 million ships, too - an hourly average of 1,506.

Average production per hour by hull size and tech level:

Hull size

Tech 1

Tech 2

Tech 3

Total

Shuttle

495.31

   

495.31

Frigate

391.24

80.96

 

472.20

Cruiser

110.06

33.79

13.15

157.00

Battlecruiser

105.59

4.00

 

109.59

Industrial

85.47

6.79

 

92.25

Destroyer

59.11

6.42

 

65.53

Battleship

60.61

2.39

 

63.00

Mining Barge

29.68

12.00

 

41.68

Capital

5.99

0.29

 

6.28

Industrial Command

2.72

   

2.72

Total

1,345.78

146.64

13.15

1,505.57

Average production per hour by hull size and race. This excludes any ships not belonging to the four main races, hence the lower totals:

Hull size

Caldari

Minmatar

Gallente

Amarr

 Total

Shuttle

143.54

93.60

144.22

113.95

495.31

Frigate

136.84

144.25

99.62

82.26

462.98

Cruiser

43.75

44.25

32.34

32.05

152.39

Battlecruiser

43.93

38.98

13.84

12.85

109.59

Industrial

19.91

16.13

25.57

14.75

76.35

Destroyer

10.30

33.38

13.67

8.19

65.53

Battleship

13.48

16.79

12.36

16.15

58.78

Capital

1.58

0.83

2.21

1.37

6.00

Total

413.34

388.21

343.81

281.56

1,426.92

Production of ships per hour by sec group:

High Sec

1,346.77

Low sec

34.39

Null sec

120.63

Wormhole Space

3.77

The top 15 ships built in 2011 and their total, excluding shuttles and frigates:

Drake

330,752

Hurricane

262,808

Thrasher

256,829

Noctis

139,330

Retriever

127,981

Catalyst

115,061

Covetor

113,702

Badger Mark II

110,761

Bestower

99,534

Caracal

97,565

Rupture

92,589

Vexor

90,300

Cormorant

81,749

Manticore

80,064

Stabber

76,372

Also, our congratulations to the mighty Dreddit corporation for producing more Rifters than anyone else in 2011! 7,829 of them to be precise.

People blowing each other up

In 2011, 5,381,636 kill reports were generated; that’s an average of 14,744 per day or one every 5.86 seconds. 65% of these kill reports were caused by damage inflicted by a player, whilst non-player controlled entities (from Serpentis to CONCORD) were responsible for the remaining 35%.

Average destruction rate in PVP of the various hull sizes:

 

Daily

Hourly

Frigate

2,315

96.48

Capsule

2,291

95.47

Battlecruiser

1,207

50.28

Cruiser

1,016

42.34

Deployable Structure

529

22.05

Battleship

523

21.81

Rookie ship

448

18.65

Industrial

403

16.78

Destroyer

371

15.45

Shuttle

208

8.67

Mining Barge

159

6.64

Capital

27

1.11

Industrial Command

9

0.39

By tech level:

 

Daily

Hourly

Tech 1

7,859

327.46

Tech 2

1,574

65.57

Tech 3

79

3.28

By race, excluding rookie ships and capsules:

Race

Daily

Hourly

Minmatar

2,041

85.05

Caldari

1,758

73.26

Gallente

1,172

48.85

Amarr

1,079

44.98

Other

721

30.04

Overall, 576,860 different characters lost ships to non-players in 2011, and 422,801 lost ships in PVP scenarios. 155,087 characters scored at least one final blow, too!
 

The Market

To finish this blog off - If there’s one big thing in EVE, it would have to be the market. In total in 2011, 348,483,735 market transactions were performed with a total combined trade value of 2,692,367,631,609,430 ISK. That’s a lot. To break that down, 2011 on average:

  Day Hour Minute Second ISK 7,376,322,278,382 307,346,761,599 5,122,446,027 85,374,100 Transactions 954,750 39,781 663 11

Here's hoping for an even more productive and explosive 2012! If stats like these interest you, don’t forget to follow my twitter account and the comments thread of this blog. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions that come up as I can.

 -  CCP Diagoras

 

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

Hi, CCP Alice here with the latest and greatest from web.

Last year we began a strategic journey of improving our web presence by launching a brand new Account Management website and new Forums. I’m here with the first dev blog in a series to come throughout 2012 that will detail important changes and updates to our websites over the course of this year.

Currently, the EVE website is a mixed bag. It's split between trying to offer an explanation of the game without really doing so, and trying to cater for our community's needs. Further, important information is distributed across many other websites, from EVE Gate to EVElopedia. We can do better.

Changes on large scale require a large amount of in-depth planning and development effort, so rather than taking on the whole web at once, we are going to do this in stages. 

Stage 1 - EVEOnline.com

The first part of these changes is taking the aspects of the current website that explain what the game is and creating a better front facing website for EVE Online. This means we will have a website that has information about the various elements of the universe, the rich gameplay, visuals and how passionate our players are. A website we will be proud to share with our friends, fellow gamers and potential customers.

The details

Some of the cool features that will be on the site include:

• Interactive star map with different view states where you learn about features of the universe
• Interactive 3D spaceship gallery showing a selection of spaceships ranging from capsule to titan 
• Popular gameplay styles like Pirate, Explorer, Fleet Commander, etc. represented as career paths 
• A short Personality Analysis quiz to help you determine what career paths may suit you
• Screenshots showcasing all aspects of in-game visuals
• Revised versions of popular EVE Chronicles downloadable in eBook format
• Community spotlights highlighting the passion and commitment of EVE players
• A Getting Started page where you can sign-up for a trial account and download the game without leaving the site

Here are sneak peeks of a screenshots page, starmap showing ship kills, an Absolution and the pirate gameplay style below:

This is ready and should go live next week. 

Stage 2 - Building for the future

Having moved the information valuable for potential customers and for all of us to show off the game to its own home, we can now focus on information needed by our current players and how we can improve your experience on our websites. We will be making changes that will bring together all the community related pages and functionality on the other sites under the umbrella of one EVE Community website. The long term goal here is for you as a current player to be able to go to the community website and from there access all the content, information and functionality relevant and useful to you.

The details

We are going to make changes to the now obsolete eveonline.com to re-brand it as the EVE Community website, allowing us to have a foundation to build on. This coincides with the launch of the new eveonline.com discussed above. It will live at community.eveonline.com, with the following tweaks:

• Replacing the header area with a Community branded logo and menu
• Adding the Login widget currently on Account Management to the top right of the site as a central place to login, go between eve websites and change language where applicable
• Re-organizing and simplifying the menu into a more logical structure where it's easier to find content without expanding and collapsing for an eternity
• Placing pages we don’t necessarily wish to remove yet from the old site into an archive section to be dealt with later

The site will be structured around these categories to start with:

Communication Player/Community EVE Information Support Archive News channels,
Patch Notes,
Dev Blogs,
Newsletters,
RSS Feeds, Fansites & toolkits,
CSM,
Volunteers,
Alliance Tournament Past Expansions,
Awards Client downloads,
Patches,
Policies Old screenshots, backstory, videos, music, forum archive, Fanfest history, etc.

Still tweaking these, so what you see above is subject to change before release.

We are finishing up these tweaks to be ready for next week as well.

What comes next for EVE Community

• Upgrade the hamster wheels behind the scenes (classic asp is not cool any more according to our hamsters) 
• Where it makes sense, we will merge content from other websites like Support, EVElopedia, EVE Gate, etc. into EVE Community in various phases
• Make site-wide UI and presentation changes so it looks and behaves like a modern, well designed website
• Add new content and features

More will be revealed in further dev blogs as we are working on the next stages.

We are really excited about these updates and looking forward to getting them live, teams Bitmap, Charlie Sheen and GForce have done a fantastic job over the past months (go team!). We will keep you posted with exact release dates and where you can give feedback as soon as we can.

Fly safe!

CCP Alice / Anne Walsh
Web Architect

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

Hi, CCP Alice here with the latest and greatest from web.

Last year we began a strategic journey of improving our web presence by launching a brand new Account Management website and new Forums. I’m here with the first dev blog in a series to come throughout 2012 that will detail important changes and updates to our websites over the course of this year.

Currently, the EVE website is a mixed bag. It's split between trying to offer an explanation of the game without really doing so, and trying to cater for our community's needs. Further, important information is distributed across many other websites, from EVE Gate to EVElopedia. We can do better.

Changes on large scale require a large amount of in-depth planning and development effort, so rather than taking on the whole web at once, we are going to do this in stages. 

Stage 1 - EVEOnline.com

The first part of these changes is taking the aspects of the current website that explain what the game is and creating a better front facing website for EVE Online. This means we will have a website that has information about the various elements of the universe, the rich gameplay, visuals and how passionate our players are. A website we will be proud to share with our friends, fellow gamers and potential customers.

The details

Some of the cool features that will be on the site include:

• Interactive star map with different view states where you learn about features of the universe
• Interactive 3D spaceship gallery showing a selection of spaceships ranging from capsule to titan 
• Popular gameplay styles like Pirate, Explorer, Fleet Commander, etc. represented as career paths 
• A short Personality Analysis quiz to help you determine what career paths may suit you
• Screenshots showcasing all aspects of in-game visuals
• Revised versions of popular EVE Chronicles downloadable in eBook format
• Community spotlights highlighting the passion and commitment of EVE players
• A Getting Started page where you can sign-up for a trial account and download the game without leaving the site

Here are sneak peeks of a screenshots page, starmap showing ship kills, an Absolution and the pirate gameplay style below:

This is ready and should go live next week. 

Stage 2 - Building for the future

Having moved the information valuable for potential customers and for all of us to show off the game to its own home, we can now focus on information needed by our current players and how we can improve your experience on our websites. We will be making changes that will bring together all the community related pages and functionality on the other sites under the umbrella of one EVE Community website. The long term goal here is for you as a current player to be able to go to the community website and from there access all the content, information and functionality relevant and useful to you.

The details

We are going to make changes to the now obsolete eveonline.com to re-brand it as the EVE Community website, allowing us to have a foundation to build on. This coincides with the launch of the new eveonline.com discussed above. It will live at community.eveonline.com, with the following tweaks:

• Replacing the header area with a Community branded logo and menu
• Adding the Login widget currently on Account Management to the top right of the site as a central place to login, go between eve websites and change language where applicable
• Re-organizing and simplifying the menu into a more logical structure where it's easier to find content without expanding and collapsing for an eternity
• Placing pages we don’t necessarily wish to remove yet from the old site into an archive section to be dealt with later

The site will be structured around these categories to start with:

Communication Player/Community EVE Information Support Archive News channels,
Patch Notes,
Dev Blogs,
Newsletters,
RSS Feeds, Fansites & toolkits,
CSM,
Volunteers,
Alliance Tournament Past Expansions,
Awards Client downloads,
Patches,
Policies Old screenshots, backstory, videos, music, forum archive, Fanfest history, etc.

Still tweaking these, so what you see above is subject to change before release.

We are finishing up these tweaks to be ready for next week as well.

What comes next for EVE Community

• Upgrade the hamster wheels behind the scenes (classic asp is not cool any more according to our hamsters) 
• Where it makes sense, we will merge content from other websites like Support, EVElopedia, EVE Gate, etc. into EVE Community in various phases
• Make site-wide UI and presentation changes so it looks and behaves like a modern, well designed website
• Add new content and features

More will be revealed in further dev blogs as we are working on the next stages.

We are really excited about these updates and looking forward to getting them live, teams Bitmap, Charlie Sheen and GForce have done a fantastic job over the past months (go team!). We will keep you posted with exact release dates and where you can give feedback as soon as we can.

Fly safe!

CCP Alice / Anne Walsh
Web Architect

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

Hi folks. I'm CCP Abraxas; you may know me from such dev blogs as "Hey, we're going to do a lore wiki" and "Oh wow, we did a lore wiki".

I'd promised that I would keep you abreast on future developments of our lore, and now that I've got a better handle on how it all went and where our priorities lie - including new parts that I hadn't announced in the last dev blog - I wanted to drop you a quick note to tell you where we're headed.

As a side note: While admittedly I am, like all fiction writers, basically a professional liar, I assure you that I will tell you the truth. Not those other guys, they can go to hell - but you and me, we've got a connection. We've seen things.

The Fiction Portal

I'm actually amazed at how well the Fiction Portal launch went. Most people seem really happy with it, which is a good thing to hear after you've devoted a year of your professional life to that very aim. The most important part of the launch, to me and Mercury and everyone else involved, was that nothing would break badly enough to put a major damper on your ability to access and enjoy our content.  So far, so good.

In the weeks since launch, we've done a ton of minor edits to various pages. This includes not only aesthetic ones (including spellchecks, style checks, and unifying the '(tag)' suffixes we used to differentiate our lore from similar pages), but also reviewing several dozen page comments on lore consistency and improvement suggestions. This is something we'll be doing constantly from now on. If you ever feel that a Fiction Portal page is in error, use its Discussion tab to let us know. If you have more general comments about the Portal, post on the Fiction forum section. I review all threads that have anything to do with the EVElopedia, and note down anything we can use to improve it.

What we haven't done is add a ton new content. We want to do so in strategic fashion, so that you won't always have to trawl through the extant thousand pages of lore just to see if anything new got added. For the most part we'll be adding articles alongside patches and expansions; there was a small bunch coming out with the January release, for example. In terms of future expansions, CCP recently nailed down what we'll be working on and releasing up to and including this summer, so Mercury and I are hard at work right now figuring out what new lore we want to write up for you guys to tie in with those features. If you ever want to see what's new, just head on over to the Updates and Credits page.

Aside from articles tying into expansion features, there is a lot of published content we haven't yet gotten around to writing up in wiki form. We have almost the entire news archive to go, plus the three EVE novels, various bits and pieces of other published work, and, of course, our in-game PvE content. Major aspects of our canon, including the factions and notable persons, also need a going-over soon. Moreover, we want to rewrite the entire chronology section so that it'll be event-focused rather than purely date-focused. And somewhere, over the horizon, there is the fabled in-game connection, which I'll be quietly working on in between other content projects.

(A side note on in-game content and live events: The Arek'Jaalan project is a special case, and CCP Dropbear and I plan to figure out a workable way to transition A'J info into official canon.  It'll happen, but it's probably going to take a while.)

There really are three major points I'd like all of you to take away from reading this part of the blog: Firstly, we plan to do a lot more for this project. Anything new will get announced on the Updates page.

Second, it's all going to get done, albeit at a slow but steady pace. It's a great deal of work, and most of us at CCP have a lot on our plates these days, but I have a pretty good track record when it comes to delivering what I promised (such as the Fiction Portal itself).

Third, and very importantly: All of this is only possible thanks to the amazing efforts of our Mercury volunteer team. If you want to help contribute to our fiction, you should defintely consider joining them.

The Chronicle Portal

So what's new? Well, here's a thing.

The EVE Chronicles are, for the most part, a collection of over two hundred short stories set in the world of EVE. I wrote about a hundred of those, over a period of four years - it was basically the biggest part of my day job at CCP before I switched over to doing the Fiction Portal and various other things - so I've been heavily involved with them for quite a while, and I want to make sure they're treated right.

Ever since beta times, they've been hosted several layers deep on the eveonline.com site. They have long since outgrown their place there, and now that eveonline.com is going to be given a total, streamlined redesign, we figured it was high time we moved them to somewhere that was a bit more amenable to EVE fiction. The natural decision was to create a separate portal for them on the EVElopedia.

Here's what this means for the chronicles from now on (not 'going forward', because I don't even know what that phrase means.) We'll need help from you, so look to the end part for that.

• Official CCP fiction (novels aside) will now be published and stored on the EVElopedia Chronicle Portal. Any publicity efforts will point you to that portal, not to eveonline.com

• There will not be any more chronicle artwork. I'm sad to see it go, but we have good reason to drop it. Art creation has always been a major bottleneck in chronicle production and a notable draw on the Art Department's resources. Moreover, art and thumbnails are not amenable to the kind of categorization we have in mind for the chronicles. It's easy to plonk down a thumbnail when all you've got is a 200-strong list of alike pieces; it gets progressively harder when you want to start reordering them in all sorts of ways.

• Also, you see how one of those Chronicle Portal categories is 'Flashfic'? Flashfic means really short fiction, and that means that if I have an idea for a Chronicle but I don't have the time to turn it into a full-fledged story, I can ninja it into that category without forcing myself into some hapless artist's schedule and waiting for him to produce a picture. To rephrase this bit in more high-level terms: While we plan to release short stories only around expansions and such, the Chronicle Portal's organization gives us far more leeway in adding fresh fiction without having to tie it in with a release schedule.

• (You're all subscribed to our twitter feeds, right? The official one is @ EveOnline, Dropbear is at @ccp_dropbear, and I'm @cloisterphobe. If we do something cool, we'll undoubtedly mention it there.)

• From now on, 'Chronicle' refers to any published story by us, of any length, and the terms "EVE Chronicles" and "Chronicle Portal " refer to the entire bulk of our online fiction. Also, the long stories (like Ruthless and Saccade) will now be called Novellas, while the short stories will simply be called 'short stories', not 'chronicles' - because employing the same term both for a particular type of story and for the entire bulk of all types of stories is a silly thing to do and leads to misunderstandings.
   
•  The categories will overlap. One chronicle can belong to many categories. If a story involves both the Caldari State and the Guristas, it'll show up both in the Empire and the Pirates category.
   
• The categories will be manually updated. The wiki tag system is too unwieldy in design and insecure in appilcation for us to employ at present.
   
• The categories aren't fixed. This is where you come in. Do you have ideas for new or different categories? For subcategories? (For instance, Empires is  going to split the stories up along the four-empire axis.)Tell us. Comment on the forum thread for this dev blog, or start a new thread on the Fiction forum.

 

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

Hi folks. I'm CCP Abraxas; you may know me from such dev blogs as "Hey, we're going to do a lore wiki" and "Oh wow, we did a lore wiki".

I'd promised that I would keep you abreast on future developments of our lore, and now that I've got a better handle on how it all went and where our priorities lie - including new parts that I hadn't announced in the last dev blog - I wanted to drop you a quick note to tell you where we're headed.

As a side note: While admittedly I am, like all fiction writers, basically a professional liar, I assure you that I will tell you the truth. Not those other guys, they can go to hell - but you and me, we've got a connection. We've seen things.

The Fiction Portal

I'm actually amazed at how well the Fiction Portal launch went. Most people seem really happy with it, which is a good thing to hear after you've devoted a year of your professional life to that very aim. The most important part of the launch, to me and Mercury and everyone else involved, was that nothing would break badly enough to put a major damper on your ability to access and enjoy our content.  So far, so good.

In the weeks since launch, we've done a ton of minor edits to various pages. This includes not only aesthetic ones (including spellchecks, style checks, and unifying the '(tag)' suffixes we used to differentiate our lore from similar pages), but also reviewing several dozen page comments on lore consistency and improvement suggestions. This is something we'll be doing constantly from now on. If you ever feel that a Fiction Portal page is in error, use its Discussion tab to let us know. If you have more general comments about the Portal, post on the Fiction forum section. I review all threads that have anything to do with the EVElopedia, and note down anything we can use to improve it.

What we haven't done is add a ton new content. We want to do so in strategic fashion, so that you won't always have to trawl through the extant thousand pages of lore just to see if anything new got added. For the most part we'll be adding articles alongside patches and expansions; there was a small bunch coming out with the January release, for example. In terms of future expansions, CCP recently nailed down what we'll be working on and releasing up to and including this summer, so Mercury and I are hard at work right now figuring out what new lore we want to write up for you guys to tie in with those features. If you ever want to see what's new, just head on over to the Updates and Credits page.

Aside from articles tying into expansion features, there is a lot of published content we haven't yet gotten around to writing up in wiki form. We have almost the entire news archive to go, plus the three EVE novels, various bits and pieces of other published work, and, of course, our in-game PvE content. Major aspects of our canon, including the factions and notable persons, also need a going-over soon. Moreover, we want to rewrite the entire chronology section so that it'll be event-focused rather than purely date-focused. And somewhere, over the horizon, there is the fabled in-game connection, which I'll be quietly working on in between other content projects.

(A side note on in-game content and live events: The Arek'Jaalan project is a special case, and CCP Dropbear and I plan to figure out a workable way to transition A'J info into official canon.  It'll happen, but it's probably going to take a while.)

There really are three major points I'd like all of you to take away from reading this part of the blog: Firstly, we plan to do a lot more for this project. Anything new will get announced on the Updates page.

Second, it's all going to get done, albeit at a slow but steady pace. It's a great deal of work, and most of us at CCP have a lot on our plates these days, but I have a pretty good track record when it comes to delivering what I promised (such as the Fiction Portal itself).

Third, and very importantly: All of this is only possible thanks to the amazing efforts of our Mercury volunteer team. If you want to help contribute to our fiction, you should defintely consider joining them.

The Chronicle Portal

So what's new? Well, here's a thing.

The EVE Chronicles are, for the most part, a collection of over two hundred short stories set in the world of EVE. I wrote about a hundred of those, over a period of four years - it was basically the biggest part of my day job at CCP before I switched over to doing the Fiction Portal and various other things - so I've been heavily involved with them for quite a while, and I want to make sure they're treated right.

Ever since beta times, they've been hosted several layers deep on the eveonline.com site. They have long since outgrown their place there, and now that eveonline.com is going to be given a total, streamlined redesign, we figured it was high time we moved them to somewhere that was a bit more amenable to EVE fiction. The natural decision was to create a separate portal for them on the EVElopedia.

Here's what this means for the chronicles from now on (not 'going forward', because I don't even know what that phrase means.) We'll need help from you, so look to the end part for that.

• Official CCP fiction (novels aside) will now be published and stored on the EVElopedia Chronicle Portal. Any publicity efforts will point you to that portal, not to eveonline.com

• There will not be any more chronicle artwork. I'm sad to see it go, but we have good reason to drop it. Art creation has always been a major bottleneck in chronicle production and a notable draw on the Art Department's resources. Moreover, art and thumbnails are not amenable to the kind of categorization we have in mind for the chronicles. It's easy to plonk down a thumbnail when all you've got is a 200-strong list of alike pieces; it gets progressively harder when you want to start reordering them in all sorts of ways.

• Also, you see how one of those Chronicle Portal categories is 'Flashfic'? Flashfic means really short fiction, and that means that if I have an idea for a Chronicle but I don't have the time to turn it into a full-fledged story, I can ninja it into that category without forcing myself into some hapless artist's schedule and waiting for him to produce a picture. To rephrase this bit in more high-level terms: While we plan to release short stories only around expansions and such, the Chronicle Portal's organization gives us far more leeway in adding fresh fiction without having to tie it in with a release schedule.

• (You're all subscribed to our twitter feeds, right? The official one is @ EveOnline, Dropbear is at @ccp_dropbear, and I'm @cloisterphobe. If we do something cool, we'll undoubtedly mention it there.)

• From now on, 'Chronicle' refers to any published story by us, of any length, and the terms "EVE Chronicles" and "Chronicle Portal " refer to the entire bulk of our online fiction. Also, the long stories (like Ruthless and Saccade) will now be called Novellas, while the short stories will simply be called 'short stories', not 'chronicles' - because employing the same term both for a particular type of story and for the entire bulk of all types of stories is a silly thing to do and leads to misunderstandings.
   
•  The categories will overlap. One chronicle can belong to many categories. If a story involves both the Caldari State and the Guristas, it'll show up both in the Empire and the Pirates category.
   
• The categories will be manually updated. The wiki tag system is too unwieldy in design and insecure in appilcation for us to employ at present.
   
• The categories aren't fixed. This is where you come in. Do you have ideas for new or different categories? For subcategories? (For instance, Empires is  going to split the stories up along the four-empire axis.)Tell us. Comment on the forum thread for this dev blog, or start a new thread on the Fiction forum.

 

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

The subject says it all! Ok, it actually doesn‘t so I‘m going to write some more words about this.

We are adding the option for every corporation in EVE to have it‘s own Corporation Forum, on the EVE Online forum.

Why are we doing this?

There are two reasons basically. We are very interested in providing corporations, particularly new and smaller corporations, with a community enhancing tool which boosts communication and corp cohesion without all the hassle of starting their own external forum. We also have DUST approaching and this will provide corporations with a cross-game platform where both their EVE members and their DUST members can talk and discuss whose planet to curbstomp next.

How will corp forums 1.0 work?

Once we launch this feature in the coming days, every CEO who goes to the forums will have the option to activate a Corp Forum. We know that not every corporation is interested in, or needs, a private forum on the EVE forums, so your CEO will have the option not to activate them and you will never even notice their existence in the code base. If, however, your CEO curiously chooses to activate them because he likes pretty buttons, they are there to stay and will become visible at the top of the category list for every corp member with your corporation logo next to the title. They will be collapsable much like every forum category so even if your CEO is a button-happy-son-of-a-gun and you have no interest in corp forums, they shouldn‘t get in your way too much.

Acme "Awsome" Corp has been extra "awsome" after getting its own forum

Tell me more about how these forums work, Guard? Tell me more!

All right, since you ask so nicely.

There will be three channels in your Corp Forum.

• Corporation Announcements will be the place for corp directors or your CEO to post announcements about upcoming ops, wars, or just whatever the heck they please! Nobody tells them what to do after all. Regular members will have read-only access to this section of the corp forum.
• General discussion will be the public area where every member of the corporation will be able to start threads and post replies.
• The Board Room will be the private area for the directors and the CEO to discuss business amongst themselves, far from the prying eyes of their minions.

Access will be determined by in-game roles.

Click to enlarge (but don't click the green cross unless you´re ready for corp forums)

 

CEOs have to have the ability to make informed decisions on serious matters

But who‘s going to moderate when someone posts ASCII penises and stuff?

Not us! Neither CCP Staff nor the Volunteer Forum Moderators will monitor your Corp Forums. As the proprietors of the database, CCP staff will have emergency access in case something terrible happens that we need to verify, but Volunteer Moderators will under no circumstances be able to gain access.

Your corporation should have all the tools necessary to maintain order and to discipline rowdy members who just can‘t stop posting ASCII penises for some reason. But additionally to the ability to simply kick people from your corp, we decided to add limited moderation roles for directors. They will be able to lock topics, move them between channels, delete all your badposts and the like. These are somewhat similar tools to the ones our Volunteer Moderators have, apart from the fact that they will only work in your own corp forum (sorry).

While I‘m slow-clapping, is there anything else I should know?

Only that this is the first version of Corp Forums and that both the Community Team and the Web Team will be listening to your feedback very carefully. We decided to launch a rather streamlined version to begin with, while including a few options that give you the control you need to enjoy your new corp forums. If there‘s anything else you really need or if you notice something that we may have missed, let us know.

The current expected launch date is February 8th, which constitutes as "soon" in every sense of the word I believe.

All the best,
CCP Guard

 

 

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

The subject says it all! Ok, it actually doesn‘t so I‘m going to write some more words about this.

We are adding the option for every corporation in EVE to have it‘s own Corporation Forum, on the EVE Online forum.

Why are we doing this?

There are two reasons basically. We are very interested in providing corporations, particularly new and smaller corporations, with a community enhancing tool which boosts communication and corp cohesion without all the hassle of starting their own external forum. We also have DUST approaching and this will provide corporations with a cross-game platform where both their EVE members and their DUST members can talk and discuss whose planet to curbstomp next.

How will corp forums 1.0 work?

Once we launch this feature in the coming days, every CEO who goes to the forums will have the option to activate a Corp Forum. We know that not every corporation is interested in, or needs, a private forum on the EVE forums, so your CEO will have the option not to activate them and you will never even notice their existence in the code base. If, however, your CEO curiously chooses to activate them because he likes pretty buttons, they are there to stay and will become visible at the top of the category list for every corp member with your corporation logo next to the title. They will be collapsable much like every forum category so even if your CEO is a button-happy-son-of-a-gun and you have no interest in corp forums, they shouldn‘t get in your way too much.

Acme "Awsome" Corp has been extra "awsome" after getting its own forum

Tell me more about how these forums work, Guard? Tell me more!

All right, since you ask so nicely.

There will be three channels in your Corp Forum.

• Corporation Announcements will be the place for corp directors or your CEO to post announcements about upcoming ops, wars, or just whatever the heck they please! Nobody tells them what to do after all. Regular members will have read-only access to this section of the corp forum.
• General discussion will be the public area where every member of the corporation will be able to start threads and post replies.
• The Board Room will be the private area for the directors and the CEO to discuss business amongst themselves, far from the prying eyes of their minions.

Access will be determined by in-game roles.

Click to enlarge (but don't click the green cross unless you´re ready for corp forums)

 

CEOs have to have the ability to make informed decisions on serious matters

But who‘s going to moderate when someone posts ASCII penises and stuff?

Not us! Neither CCP Staff nor the Volunteer Forum Moderators will monitor your Corp Forums. As the proprietors of the database, CCP staff will have emergency access in case something terrible happens that we need to verify, but Volunteer Moderators will under no circumstances be able to gain access.

Your corporation should have all the tools necessary to maintain order and to discipline rowdy members who just can‘t stop posting ASCII penises for some reason. But additionally to the ability to simply kick people from your corp, we decided to add limited moderation roles for directors. They will be able to lock topics, move them between channels, delete all your badposts and the like. These are somewhat similar tools to the ones our Volunteer Moderators have, apart from the fact that they will only work in your own corp forum (sorry).

While I‘m slow-clapping, is there anything else I should know?

Only that this is the first version of Corp Forums and that both the Community Team and the Web Team will be listening to your feedback very carefully. We decided to launch a rather streamlined version to begin with, while including a few options that give you the control you need to enjoy your new corp forums. If there‘s anything else you really need or if you notice something that we may have missed, let us know.

The current expected launch date is February 8th, which constitutes as "soon" in every sense of the word I believe.

All the best,
CCP Guard

 

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

As hundreds of players from all over the world prepare for the trip to the Harpa center in Reykjavik for Fanfest 2012, we here in the Community team wanted to give you an insight into some of the community events we will be hosting this year.

The aim of community events at Fanfest is to provide players with non-EVE activities that they can participate in outside of the normal roundtables, presentations and panels. This also ties in to our drive to enable players to raise funds for our charity of choice, Get Well Gamers.

Get Well Gamers President, Ryan Sharpe, will be attending Fanfest this year and will be making a sizeable donation of toys to the hospital in Reykjavik on behalf of EVE Online players.

Office Tour

Every year we offer Fanfest attendees the opportunity to win a VIP tour of the CCP offices and a lunch with the Developers. Historically this event worked by inviting players to submit a minimum bid of $1000 and the highest bid would win the tour. A $1000 bid or more in this economic climate is a huge request of any one player so we are going to change how you, a Fanfest attendee, can win the office tour.

This year we will hold a draw and allow every attendee, plus a friend, the opportunity of winning for as little as one PLEX. We have set up the character ‘CCP Office Tour’ and in order to be in with a chance of winning, simply contract a PLEX to this character. The cutoff date for all contracts to this character will be Thursday, March 16 at 17:00 UTC and the winner will be announced in a CCP video on our You Tube channel on Friday, March 17. The winner will then be invited to attend the Office Tour starting at 11:00 UTC on Wednesday, March 21. Naturally, we will contact the winner by mail and arrange to get them to the office.

Ok, ok that’s all well and good but why do I want to spend part of a day in an office? Offices are boring! In many ways, that is true but these are the offices of CCP and you will be one of the few players who will ever get to take part in such an event. If that is not enough, let’s sweeten the deal a little more. CCP Soundwave, the Lead Game Designer for EVE Online, will allow the winner to pitch a game design idea of their choice in a 20-30 minute private meeting. This design idea can touch on any aspect of EVE Online. We cannot guarantee that the idea proposed will make it into the game. For example, if you propose that every Gurista Despoiler has a bounty of 20 Billion ISK or that Titans can go to High Sec space, chances are Soundwave will nod and smile while thinking about dangerous animals. Should your idea be well presented and thought out, who knows!?

No Limit Poker Tournament

The poker tournament at Fanfest has grown over the past few years and it is one of the events that players love to participate in. Each year we have been making the prizes bigger and better and this year, we will push it through the stratosphere. The tournament will take place on Thursday evening in a special area in the Harpa center and will be limited to the first 80 players who purchase tickets and tickets are available at the Fanfest 2012 site.

The format for the poker this year will be a knockout tournament and each player will have their initial buy-in of 5,000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona. An additional buy-in is available for all players of 5000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona before the end of the first break. A full rule set will be available at the venue.

So enough about the buy-ins and format how about you tell us about the amazing prizes on offer for the winners?

Ok so prizes will be awarded to the final three players placed in the tournament and we are giving away 60 PLEX, the first Ishukone Scorpion skin in-game and the winner will have their name on the show info window of this ship for eternity, T-shirts and other goodies.

P-P-P-POKERFACE-P-P-POKERFACE!

Wait a second; I think I should explain a little more. The 60 PLEX will be broken down as 30 for the winner, 20 for the runner up and 10 for third place.

Unique T-Shirts will be issued for the winner, runner up and third place

The first in-game Ishukone Scorpion skin will be awarded to the overall winner as well as having their name added to the in-game description of this ship. We need to stress at this point that the winning name is subject to approval and we may ask that you create an alt or use an alt name if we find your name unsuitable to be added to the permanent lore of EVE Online. For example I opened a thread today and names like Chribba, Kronossan, Ion Rubix and Zagam would be completely acceptable. Other names like 243636 or lol buttes would not be considered acceptable. The final decision on naming will be decided upon by the Lead Game Designer, CCP Soundwave. Should you have the name of a dangerous animal in your player character, you are pretty much fine.

Click to enlarge

This leads on to another question, does this mean we will be seeing ship skins for sale in the NeX store or by some other method? That is currently not the plan and is not in development so the short answer is no. The Ishukone Scorpion was already created as the first prototype and Game Design plan to release it to everyone at some stage. The winner of this event will just be granted the first one, before anyone else has ever owned it, along with the bragging rights of having their name in the lore.
 

Silent Auction

Every year we hold a silent auction which allows players to bid for extremely rare or unique items. In previous years we have auctioned off the famous Banhammer, hand painted ship models and EVE/Dust art. This year will be no exception and we are hearing rumors around the office of some very, very cool stuff if we can arrange to get it on time. I will not go in to any more details but you are all invited to drop by the Community area at Harpa and check out everything on offer.

Battle of the Bands

We initially started this project using Rock Band for players to compete against each other and it has turned into quite a big draw for many, simply for the many lulz it provides. Goonswarm have been dominating this event in recent years and remain undefeated so the gauntlet is thrown down. We have witnessed vocal powerhouses like Zastrow destroying all comers while Michael Bolton III has treated us to a partial striptease. Who knows what this event will bring this year but everyone is invited to take part. If you wish to sign up, drop by the Community area and we will be happy to have you listed.

 VIP area at the ‘Party at the top of the world’

The final part of the community events will be inviting the top three placed players in the poker tournament, the winner of the Battle of the Bands and Office Tour along with the player who buys the most expensive item at the silent auction to a VIP area at the main Fanfest party. This area will include table service all night, your own private seating area and security guard. Nothing quite says, ‘I won’ as much as lording it over everyone else like the rich pimp you are.

So that’s all from the Community team. If you have been debating whether to come to Fanfest then this is the ideal time to visit the Fanfest 2012 site and check out the early bird specials which are on sale. If you have already signed up to attend Fanfest, sign up for our poker event here and be quick as tickets really are selling out fast.

 

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

As hundreds of players from all over the world prepare for the trip to the Harpa center in Reykjavik for Fanfest 2012, we here in the Community team wanted to give you an insight into some of the community events we will be hosting this year.

The aim of community events at Fanfest is to provide players with non-EVE activities that they can participate in outside of the normal roundtables, presentations and panels. This also ties in to our drive to enable players to raise funds for our charity of choice, Get Well Gamers.

Get Well Gamers President, Ryan Sharpe, will be attending Fanfest this year and will be making a sizeable donation of toys to the hospital in Reykjavik on behalf of EVE Online players.

Office Tour

Every year we offer Fanfest attendees the opportunity to win a VIP tour of the CCP offices and a lunch with the Developers. Historically this event worked by inviting players to submit a minimum bid of $1000 and the highest bid would win the tour. A $1000 bid or more in this economic climate is a huge request of any one player so we are going to change how you, a Fanfest attendee, can win the office tour.

This year we will hold a draw and allow every attendee, plus a friend, the opportunity of winning for as little as one PLEX. We have set up the character ‘CCP Office Tour’ and in order to be in with a chance of winning, simply contract a PLEX to this character. The cutoff date for all contracts to this character will be Thursday, March 16 at 17:00 UTC and the winner will be announced in a CCP video on our You Tube channel on Friday, March 17. The winner will then be invited to attend the Office Tour starting at 11:00 UTC on Wednesday, March 21. Naturally, we will contact the winner by mail and arrange to get them to the office.

Ok, ok that’s all well and good but why do I want to spend part of a day in an office? Offices are boring! In many ways, that is true but these are the offices of CCP and you will be one of the few players who will ever get to take part in such an event. If that is not enough, let’s sweeten the deal a little more. CCP Soundwave, the Lead Game Designer for EVE Online, will allow the winner to pitch a game design idea of their choice in a 20-30 minute private meeting. This design idea can touch on any aspect of EVE Online. We cannot guarantee that the idea proposed will make it into the game. For example, if you propose that every Gurista Despoiler has a bounty of 20 Billion ISK or that Titans can go to High Sec space, chances are Soundwave will nod and smile while thinking about dangerous animals. Should your idea be well presented and thought out, who knows!?

No Limit Poker Tournament

The poker tournament at Fanfest has grown over the past few years and it is one of the events that players love to participate in. Each year we have been making the prizes bigger and better and this year, we will push it through the stratosphere. The tournament will take place on Thursday evening in a special area in the Harpa center and will be limited to the first 80 players who purchase tickets and tickets are available at the Fanfest 2012 site.

The format for the poker this year will be a knockout tournament and each player will have their initial buy-in of 5,000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona. An additional buy-in is available for all players of 5000 chips for 5000 Icelandic Krona before the end of the first break. A full rule set will be available at the venue.

So enough about the buy-ins and format how about you tell us about the amazing prizes on offer for the winners?

Ok so prizes will be awarded to the final three players placed in the tournament and we are giving away 60 PLEX, the first Ishukone Scorpion skin in-game and the winner will have their name on the show info window of this ship for eternity, T-shirts and other goodies.

P-P-P-POKERFACE-P-P-POKERFACE!

Wait a second; I think I should explain a little more. The 60 PLEX will be broken down as 30 for the winner, 20 for the runner up and 10 for third place.

Unique T-Shirts will be issued for the winner, runner up and third place

The first in-game Ishukone Scorpion skin will be awarded to the overall winner as well as having their name added to the in-game description of this ship. We need to stress at this point that the winning name is subject to approval and we may ask that you create an alt or use an alt name if we find your name unsuitable to be added to the permanent lore of EVE Online. For example I opened a thread today and names like Chribba, Kronossan, Ion Rubix and Zagam would be completely acceptable. Other names like 243636 or lol buttes would not be considered acceptable. The final decision on naming will be decided upon by the Lead Game Designer, CCP Soundwave. Should you have the name of a dangerous animal in your player character, you are pretty much fine.

Click to enlarge

This leads on to another question, does this mean we will be seeing ship skins for sale in the NeX store or by some other method? That is currently not the plan and is not in development so the short answer is no. The Ishukone Scorpion was already created as the first prototype and Game Design plan to release it to everyone at some stage. The winner of this event will just be granted the first one, before anyone else has ever owned it, along with the bragging rights of having their name in the lore.
 

Silent Auction

Every year we hold a silent auction which allows players to bid for extremely rare or unique items. In previous years we have auctioned off the famous Banhammer, hand painted ship models and EVE/Dust art. This year will be no exception and we are hearing rumors around the office of some very, very cool stuff if we can arrange to get it on time. I will not go in to any more details but you are all invited to drop by the Community area at Harpa and check out everything on offer.

Battle of the Bands

We initially started this project using Rock Band for players to compete against each other and it has turned into quite a big draw for many, simply for the many lulz it provides. Goonswarm have been dominating this event in recent years and remain undefeated so the gauntlet is thrown down. We have witnessed vocal powerhouses like Zastrow destroying all comers while Michael Bolton III has treated us to a partial striptease. Who knows what this event will bring this year but everyone is invited to take part. If you wish to sign up, drop by the Community area and we will be happy to have you listed.

 VIP area at the ‘Party at the top of the world’

The final part of the community events will be inviting the top three placed players in the poker tournament, the winner of the Battle of the Bands and Office Tour along with the player who buys the most expensive item at the silent auction to a VIP area at the main Fanfest party. This area will include table service all night, your own private seating area and security guard. Nothing quite says, ‘I won’ as much as lording it over everyone else like the rich pimp you are.

So that’s all from the Community team. If you have been debating whether to come to Fanfest then this is the ideal time to visit the Fanfest 2012 site and check out the early bird specials which are on sale. If you have already signed up to attend Fanfest, sign up for our poker event here and be quick as tickets really are selling out fast.

 

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

The sixth Council of Stellar Management’s term is due to end on April 4th, and as such it’s now time to start up the machine that is the CSM election cycle!

CSM election results announced at Fanfest 2011

This CSM term will see a change to the election process where upon being approved by CCP, the candidates must prove a certain level of support in order to be included in the final candidate list. This initial nomination stage will be assessed based on the number of “likes” given to the initial post for that candidate’s forum thread; if the number exceeds 100 then they will be included in the final list.

The schedule for the elections is as follows:

February 8th to 22nd – Candidacy application period opens
February 22nd – Publication of the list of approved candidates; nomination stage begins
February 29th – List of candidates who passed nomination stage published
March 7th – Voting opens
March 21st – Voting closes
March 24th  – Results announced during Fanfest keynote.
April 4th – CSM 7 take office
April 3rd, 2013 – CSM 8 take office

The requirements to be able to run as a candidate in the CSM7 elections are as follows:

• You must have an active EVE Online account that is older than 30 days.
• You must be aged 21 years or older as of April 4th, 2012.
• You must provide your address and an e-mail address where you can be reached, which will not be made public.
• You must provide a scan or reasonable quality photograph of a valid passport to verify your identity and that you can travel internationally to the CCP HQ in Reykjavik, Iceland.
• You must be willing and able to sign a non-disclosure agreement with CCP as the CSM are regularly provided with information that is not for public release.
• You must be willing for your real name and country of residence to be made public alongside your character name on the EVE Online website. No other personal details required for candidacy will be made public.
• You must provide a reasonable campaign message stating your reasons for running, in no more than 200 words.
• You must have up to date and accurate account ownership information on all of your EVE Online accounts.
• You should be willing to actively engage in forum and chat room style discussions with CCP and the other members of the CSM.

In addition to the above in accordance with the CSM white paper, any serious violations of the EVE Online EULA may void your eligibility to run. All applications will result in an audit of the accounts belonging to the applicant. In cases where EULA violations have occurred, the application will be assessed on the basis of the severity of the violation and the length of time since the violation occurred. More information on candidate eligibility can be found in the CSM white paper.

Should you have any queries regarding the CSM election process, please head over to the comments thread or if you would like more private issues addressed, you can contact us via e-mail at csm-contact@ccpgames.com.

 - CCP Diagoras

 

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First up, if numbers like these interest you and you’re a twitter user, you may also be interested in my twitter page! Now that my shameless plug is out the way, with this blog I thought I'd respond to several requests that have been received for statistics relating to CONCORD/law enforcement losses. It turns out that CONCORD don't have much free time for eating doughnuts.

From the beginning of 2008 until the end of 2011, excluding rookie ships and shuttles, sentry guns and CONCORD were responsible for destroying 567,304 ships. That’s 11,818 a month, or 388 per day. 16.2 ships an hour, or one ship being removed from service every 3.7 minutes. New Eden is evidently a high-crime neighbourhood.



Month by month you can see spikes from events such as hulkageddon and the recent “Gallente Ice Interdiction” campaign by the Goonswarm Federation alliance. The green line only shows Hulks, but is still a good indicator of what all the people who were getting blown up by CONCORD were doing.

Where are these all taking place? Well, aside from a few sentry gun kills in NPC null security space, it’s of course all in empire space.


The map above shows a bubble chart for the empire regions, with the size of the bubble being relative to the number of losses to CONCORD. Whilst it does look cool, it probably isn’t quite so clear, so here are the top 10 regions for 2008-2011.

The Forge

86,680

The Citadel

82,306

Lonetrek

56,569

Domain

54,121

Sinq Laison

48,494

Heimatar

42,373

Metropolis

31,625

Essence

30,743

Genesis

14,435

Verge Vendor

13,817

What does this mean? From what I can tell, Caldari space must be full of criminals. It could also be due to the vastly higher population, but I think I’ll go with the criminal thing.

Looking into what ships people are using to break the law, the results weren’t exactly shocking:

 

Total

% of total

Thrasher

59,490

10.49%

Rifter

30,942

5.45%

Catalyst

27,933

4.92%

Raven

21,923

3.86%

Brutix

17,645

3.11%

Kestrel

17,486

3.08%

Armageddon

17,271

3.04%

Caracal

16,451

2.90%

Thorax

14,369

2.53%

Hurricane

13,060

2.30%

The alliances who have lost the most ships to CONCORD/sentries and the number of unique ship losers (different members of that alliance who lost ships) are as follows:

2011

Losses to police

Unique ship losers

Goonswarm Federation

3,602

832

Test Alliance Please Ignore

3,489

969

Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service

2,551

145

General Tso's Alliance

1,157

80

Important Internet Spaceship League

966

234

 

2008-2010

Losses to police

Unique ship losers

GoonSwarm

6,331

1,518

Pandemic Legion

2,336

485

Against ALL Authorities

2,281

732

Triumvirate.

2,209

547

BricK sQuAD.

2,057

493

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people of Goonswarm have managed to top both categories. To wind this blog down, I thought I’d take a look at the rate of these losses since the launch of Crucible. I was somewhat expecting a decline due to the change to insurance payouts, though apparently the number of people carrying around high-value goods has been tempting enough to actually cause a slight increase:



Lastly, the number of tier 3 battlecruisers lost to the police during 2011:

Naga

38

Oracle

89

Talos

49

Tornado

1,634

Total

1,810

It will certainly be interesting to see the long term trends in overall losses from the removal of insurance payouts from CONCORD related deaths, as this has a significant impact on the cost of “suicide ganking”. As usual, I’ll watch the comments thread and answer questions that I can.

- CCP Diagoras [Twitter]

No Hulks were harmed in the making of this dev blog.
 

I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first, random reader on the internet?

Let’s go with the bad news:

Team Best Friends Forever and Pink Zombie Kittens have been disbanded. In memory of their service to the internet, a small statue was erected in Reykjavik today, following a lengthy parade which also had cake. It’s been a fun ride and we hope you all enjoy the features the teams got to make.

Now it's time for the good news:

The teams were disbanded because the influx of developers making spaceships was too great, so we had to be split them into three teams (or as I call them, friendship-bands). Please welcome Team Super Friends, Team Game of Drones and Team Five 0. All three teams are full of good looking men and women, with some familiar faces and some new ones.  Hopefully we can introduce you to some of the people on the teams at a later point, but right now, let’s focus on spaceships (and safety).

To celebrate this transition, Team Best Friends Forever and Pink Zombie Kittens decided to do one last push to get features out and we’re happy to give you this list of items on January 24th:

• We’ve rebalanced small, medium and large Null ammo. I came back from vacation and Tallest had done this. He’s a pretty cool dude.
   
• We’ve changed the CPU on cap shield transfers. Much needed, high five.
   
• Assault ships have been rebalanced. We’ve wanted to do this since forever and were originally planning to do it for Crucible. It fell out due to time constraints, but has been completed for the coming release.
   
• We’ve buffed some of the modules launched in Crucible. You can now whine about how overpowered they are.
   
• When one of your friends logs on and get an annoying pop-up with his picture, you can now click the picture and start a conversation, telling him how annoying the pop-up is.
   
• The skills list now has a filter box so you can track down your individual skills. This is pretty great if you have a lot of them.
   
• Starbase fuel notifications are now shown in your calendar. You know why? Because it makes goddamn sense, that’s why.
   
• Overheating can be done by shift-clicking a module. This is a viable alternative to clicking the worlds smallest button.
   
• The agent list inside a station will now display your current status with an agent (mission offered, accepted etc). Hopefully less people will be cursing after undocking without pressing “accept” on a mission.

Before we go on, here is a brief intermission for some animal safety advice:  If you’re having issues with mosquitos and other bugs, rubbing garlic all over yourself is a natural repellant. If you are lost in the wilderness, this has the added effect that you can call for help once you locate an Italian restaurant to get garlic.

• The chat member list can now be condensed and have been given some more intuitive icons. This should be more in line with the actual chat, which you can already condense.
   
• Shield bonuses are now applied like armor bonuses. Remember when you got a shield bonus and LOST shield? Yeah that, we fixed it.
   
• The session change has been lowered from 20 seconds to 15 and hopefully we can adjust it even further in the future. Death to session changes.
   
• The watchlist now holds 15 people and you can drag and drop to re-arrange them. If you don’t have any friends, this isn’t relevant to you.
   
• We’ve started re-naming modules (missiles and ABs/MWDs) in a schema that tells the user what they do, while still maintaining a lot of the sci-fi feel. The aim is to make everything make sense, instead of today where everything is as confusing as possible.
   
• Meta 11, 12 and 13 Invulnerability Fields have been added to the game. We stumbled on them in the basement of CCP one day. Someone must have left them there.
   
• We’ve iterated on locations. You can now choose if it’s a personal or corp location when you create them. This means less dragging and clicking.
   
• Alliances can now join faction warfare. This is the first of a series of Factional Warfare iterations CCP Ytterbium is working on. We’ll tell you more as we get closer to fanfest, but we’re working on Factional Warfare. In other news, a flying pig just passed my window.
   
• The old Neocom has been replaced by a younger, prettier model. It’s customizable and has a ton of cool features you can play around with.
   
• We’ve added autocomplete and search hints to the asset search function from Crucible. SEARCHING HAS SUDDENLY BECOME REALLY EXCITING. Or not, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, that’s what we have for you here. Thanks from Team Best Friends Forever and Team Pink Zombie Kittens.
 

Toodles,

Soundwave

 

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Some of you may have heard about the re-organization that is ongoing within EVE development led by CCP Unifex. A part of this re-organization is the formation of a group of developers within a larger segment called EVE Service Quality.

EVE Service Quality includes Customer Support, Community Relations, Virtual World Operations and now a dedicated group of EVE ‘Live’ developers. Some of these developers will be familiar to you as parts of the old Engineering teams Gridlock, Sleeper Cell, Pi and Riding Mower. The EVE Live team is led by CCP Zulu and has the specific mandate to work on raising the quality of your experience playing EVE.

I am CCP Masheen, I have worked on teams BFF and Pi since 2010. Together, myself, CCP TomB and CCP Highlander will be identifying, researching, testing and prioritizing those issues which adversely affect your EVE experience so that EVE Live developers can work on improving them.

We are kicking the year off with a focus on Client Performance, how the client behaves and areas where we could show it some love. Over the past year Team Gridlock and EVE Operations have refined and overhauled both the server software and hardware to reap huge performance gains. This year, in the name of making your EVE experience even better, a series of client optimizations are on the way.

We are looking for the type of issue that might not normally be reported. For example:

This happens because it takes a few seconds to summon all the ships and display them on your EVE client. However, the initial appearance that the hangar is empty can be a little scary if you’re not expecting it. So, perhaps what we could do is add some way of letting you know that the list of ships is being fetched so that you don’t panic momentarily and since it may have been a while since one of our clever people took a look at the hangar code, we can check to see if there is any way to speed up the process.

If you would like to promote something which you believe is worthy of a performance tune-up please tell us in the comments what things about the client you would like to work just that bit better, but... for-the-love-of-CONCORD…be specific!

Including a summary of your PC’s vital statistics is extra helpful and clicking ‘Like’ on the posts of other players whose suggestions you support will help us to determine how popular improving something would be.

Developers in the EVE Service Quality group are already working on client optimizations to the Overview (yes indeed), more about that exciting development in an upcoming Dev blog. 

 

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The sixth CSM and CCP had their second scheduled summit from December 7th to December 9th, 2011. A wide variety of topics was covered during the summit, as can be seen from the table of contents listed below. The full meeting minutes can be found here: http://www.eveonline.com/council/transcripts/2011/CSM_CCP_Mettings_7-9_12_2011.pdf

• Meeting with the Senior Producer of EVE Online             
• The CSM
• EVE veterans/loyalty program
• The economy
• The PLEX
• Security
• Crucible wrapup
• Incursions
• Null sec –stations, sov, resources
• Little things –Factional Warfare, Wormholes
• Game balance
• Future highlevel discussions –War
• Future highlevel discussions –Fixing broken systems
• Web cell
• Microtransaction Microsummit
• New Player Experience
• A meeting with the Art department
• UI discussions
• The CSM and Hilmar CEO

This is quite the wall of text to read through, and there are bound to be many comments from players regarding many of the issues. Please feel free to place your comments in the related thread, it will be monitored both by CCP and the CSM.