Thread: Developers Blog

Alliance Tournament X will bring the final round of group stage matches along with last 16, quarter finals, semi-finals and final this coming weekend. The tournament this year has seen some fantastic matches, expensive set-ups and unexpected twists and turns as well as some technical difficulties on our new streaming platform. This blog will talk about some of those issues, what we have done to address them and what you can expect to see this coming weekend.

Stream issues
This year we decided to partner with own3D to bring the tournament to a wider audience as well as streaming to our players as normal. CCP and the EVE Alliance Tournament team understand the passion for the ever expanding field of eSports and this partnership allowed us to stream to players who have never heard of EVE Online before as well as veterans of multiple Alliance Tournaments. We have seen players starting to stream now and CCP Bro will be talking in the studio on Sunday, July 22 on how players can set up streams and get promotion of these streams.
We encountered several issues last weekend with the stream and we firstly wanted to apologize for interruptions to service. The ATX team wants to put on the best possible show for everyone and we were just as frustrated by these technical difficulties. As a result, this is what we are going to do to fix the problem:
The first issue we encountered was a problem with the screen going blank. We believe this was an issue with a bugged XSplit encoder on one of our machines which was dedicated to the stream. As a result, we have moved the streaming service on to new dedicated machines and have added back-up streams should anything happen to our main platform. This redundancy should ensure that any interruptions and it should be stressed that we do not expect any, will be kept to the absolute minimum of time. Moving to a backup stream will take a matter of seconds.
The second issue we encountered was with audio desync. This has been completely resolved and will not be an issue for the final weekend
The final issue was a complete drop of our network connection in the studio right before the Darkside vs. BricK sQuAD match. We will retain a network engineer at all times to quickly identify any network issues and resolve them as quickly as possible, should they occur. In addition we will also have a second account running on a cellular connection in the arena to ensure that all rules and boundary violations are spotted in the unlikely event that the network experiences problems at the studio.
Stress Test this coming week
To ensure that the stream is tested thoroughly before this coming weekend we are going to roll out some stress tests on the EVE TV channel which we hope you will tune in to and enjoy.
On Wednesday, July 18 at 15:00, the Alliance Tournament commentators will be streaming an impromptu roam and will bring some ships out and go looking for trouble. If you have ever wanted to see Michael Bolton III or kil2 get shot up in real time, then this is your chance.
On Thursday, July 19 the Alliance Tournament team will hold several exhibition matches on Singularity where we will invite tournament teams to come along and fight against an ATX All Stars team. These matches will use the current ATX rules and will be used to look for irregularities on the stream as well as to entertain you, the players. Naturally, the ATX team will probably win everything since we are just that good.
Upcoming guests
This coming weekend will see some fresh faces in our studio.
CCP Bro will be talking about streaming opportunities for players.
CCP SonicLover and CCP FlyingScotsman will be talking about upcoming designs for EVE.
CCP Omen will talk about the EVE/Dust 514 link and the tournament ships
CCP Punkturis will be speaking about the UI
CCP Guard will bring you details about EVE player events and other community news
CCP Unifex and CCP Hellmar will be in the studio to discuss the future of EVE and CCP in general.
As always, CCP Sunset will be taking player questions for the experts in this thread so pop in and ask something about the tournament.
Soundwave song competition

CCP Veritas announced a competition we would like to run during his guest spot on EVE TV last weekend. The Soundwave Soundboard was used during the qualifying weekends to bring the soothing tones of CCP Soundwave to players watching the stream. Due to popular demand we released the program which you can access by clicking here.
So what is this competition all about?
Simply compose a song using the Soundwave Soundboard, host it on You Tube or SoundCloud and post it in this thread. The song should be entertaining and fun and we will award prizes for the top three entries. The only rule that we will apply is that the song must not contain profanity as it will be broadcast on EVE TV.
The prizes we will offer will be a mix of PLEX and goodies from our friends at Logitech as follows:
1^st Prize: A G19s gaming keyboard, G600s mouse and G930s headset.
2^nd Prize: A G510s keyboard, G400s mouse and G35s headset
3^rd Prize: 5 x PLEX
Predict a winner with goodies from Logitech and MMM Publishing
In addition to the Soundwave song competition we will be holding a further 32 ‘Predict a Winner’ competitions over the coming weekend in which you can win a PLEX or some goodies donated by our friends at MMM Publishing and Logitech. These will include gaming keyboards, headsets and mice as well as EON subscriptions and copies of ISK, The Ultimate Guide and EVE Strategic Maps. Entering the competition is simple and you can post in any one of the many threads which will appear on the EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion section from 14:30 UTC on Saturday, July 21.
Finals weekend schedule
Our final match from last weekend saw Pandemic Legion bring an officer fitted flagship and four Malice’s (the Amarr frigates awarded for last year’s tournament) at a value estimated to be close to 160 Billion ISK against Rote Kapelle which they needed to win to ensure progress to the last 16. Rote Kapelle know how to put up a fight and dazzled us in a match which many have branded the best match of the tournament so far. With many groups still undecided we can expect to see some big matches and, potentially, some huge upsets on Saturday, July 21. Tune in to EVE TV from 14:45 UTC to make sure you don’t miss a moment of the action. Our full schedule of matches is available here.
On Sunday, July 22 we will bring you the last 16, quarter finals, semi-finals and grand finals starting at 14:45 UTC. This schedule will be posted as soon as the group winners and runners up are decided.
Finally, we want to thank you, the players, for your support and understanding during the breaks in our streaming service. Our number one priority this week is ensuring that our stream is stable and enough redundancies are in place to ensure uninterrupted and smooth coverage this coming weekend.

The Alliance Tournament X Team.


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Introduction

New Eden is wild with many uncharted and mysterious places, but as daring as all these places are, the true challenge of this universe is considered by many the boundless freedom of their inhabitants. Tools like EVE Files or DOTLAN would have nothing to report if it weren’t for actual people using their freedom to challenge boundaries and pushing limits and thus gaining fame and reputation.
As with a living and breathing universe the freedom of choice allows for complex social patterns and behavior to emerge; behavior which is often discussed within the community and by the citizens of New Eden. Some entities will try to copy and refine certain patterns – especially if it proven to be successful – while others will despise the involved strategies and tactics. These controversies reveal the incredible richness of cultures in New Eden based on the freedom of choice.
We want to show you an example of how structures emerge and evolve within New Eden and we would like to introduce you to the wonderful and amazing world of medium sized alliances, underground and open warfare, metagaming and pushing the limits. Let's have a look at Pandemic Legion!
Overview and history


Pandemic Legion (PL) is a medium sized alliance of currently 1300 members and with a strong focus on PVP. Pandemic Legion is famous for winning the Alliance Tournament three times in a row and also for using metagaming and spywork as well as their abundant resources in form of a sizable supercapital fleet and highly skilled pilots to reach their goals.
PL was formed early 2007 shortly before the Great War began. The Great War against the Band of Brothers alliance and allies solidified and focused PL. Shamis Orzoz, Leader of PL, explains key elements that allowed surviving the early times. Creating new strategies or improving proven tactics (for example Campaign Commanders, forum op timers, usage of cost effective fleets in early times, new fleet doctrines as long range heavy assault ships, remote repair Armageddon battleship fleets etc.) and the ability to successfully run Spy and CounterSpy programs was always important for PL. Shamis considers that the most important key to success were and still are highly dedicated alliance members.
Despite the almost infinite possibilities in New Eden with so many variables available to change, it appears that the human factor and the social interaction is the ultimate factor to consider. The alliance executor has to trust people with money, fleet commands, secrets etc. The executor also needs to build up redundancy in case that someone important is not available for days or weeks so that the whole alliance wouldn’t experience a fatal breakdown. Shamis thinks that complete financial transparency is also very important for an alliance and its survival.

PL is also known for mercenary business. Mercenaries can be hired for money or other assets to provide extra fire power at the frontlines or to create some diversion elsewhere to weaken the opposing forces. With a massive capital and supercapital fleet and the potential to disrupt even large 0.0 alliances, PL was hired as a mercenary group several times. Not all contracts were finished successfully according to Shamis, for example the contract IT vs. Goonswarm lacked the desired effects. Shamis mentioned that new mercenaries should be able to cover their own expenses and that merc payment should be more considered a bonus than a salary.
Alliance Tournament engagements

Pandemic Legion engaged several times in the Alliance Tournament with major success. The EVE Community saw Pandemic Legion for the first time in the Alliance Tournament IV where they were only beaten in the finals during an exciting match by Hun Reloaded.
During Alliance Tournament V Pandemic Legion made it to the quarter finals before being defeated by Ev0ke. This was the last loss for Pandemic Legion in an Alliance Tournament for the following three years as they won Alliance Tournament VI, VII and VIII in a row.
The Alliance Tournament IX was not so successful for Pandemic Legion as they couldn’t reach the quarter finals let alone the finals and this was considered by the general audience to be a surprise. However, this just shows how exciting and sometimes unpredictable the Alliance Tournament can be.
Shamis considers the most exciting match by far in the Alliance Tournament the AT6 finals where PL fought R.U.R. in an extremely exciting and close match. The battle was very intense with some of the pilots pulling off crucial kills while their shields and armor were completely wiped out and only a tiny percentage of structure remained. Another interesting match was observed in the AT 10 group stages where PL fielded an officer fitted Bhaalgorn battleship and several Malice class ships, estimated value together over 100 billion ISK, but Rote Kapelle took the victory in that match.
A key to PL’s success in the Alliance Tournament is the extensive testing and theory-crafting together with observations about other teams and making predictions about their tournament setups. Most of the past matches can be studied as statistics, match descriptions and videos from previous Alliance Tournaments are available in public for everyone to observe and to draw their own conclusion.
Videos and propaganda highlights

During their space holding and mercenary time Pandemic Legion released a multitude of videos. These videos enrich the EVE Community for showing the beauty of our beloved New Eden packed full with action. In this Spotlight we can only point to a few videos, more are available and can be easily found. A somewhat older propaganda video can be found here while more recent videos are available here and here.


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Ahahaha just kidding moongoo is completely broken and we’re going to fix that starting in Inferno 1.2.
Disclaimer: Everything in this dev blog (just like every game change we make) is open to being changed at any point. If you dump all your isk into speculation around this blog and lose it all because we changed something again, you have only yourself to blame. Always speculate at your own risk. So by way of introduction, I’m CCP Fozzie the new game designer here at CCP. I’ve been playing EVE for years and am very excited for the chance to work alongside the great team here and in partnership with all you passionate players to make Eve Online: A Progressively Improving Game.
For those of you who are interested in how I look, I have included a picture of myself below:

Now if I’ve learned anything about prison from television (and who hasn’t), it’s that the first thing you should do when you arrive is find the biggest guy around and beat the living daylights out of him so everyone knows not to mess with you. Since I figure most imaginary prison advice should be fairly transferrable I came in here looking to find a big game problem and smack it around a bit.
Many of you will be familiar with this graph:

Over the past several months the price of the moon mineral Technetium has risen sharply, bringing some pre-existing game design issues into sharper relief. The value of these moons combined with the fact that they exist completely in one distinct region of the game has caused wealth transfers that are simply too large for the effort and risk involved. So we are going to kick Technetium in the balls.
There are more problems with our current system of moon mining and tech two production than just the price of Technetium, which is why we now have a comprehensive plan to address these issues over multiple releases. The end goal is for the materials for tech two production to come from player activities that require group gameplay and risk taking, and that provide appropriate rewards. This will eventually involve changes to both resource collection and the build requirements for construction of tech two materials and items. A responsible first step in this plan is to ensure that as much as possible the tech two components market is shielded from unnecessary price shocks.
Those of you who have been playing for a while may remember that there was a system introduced in 2008 for this exact purpose called Alchemy. It allows players to replace one moon mineral type with another in a reaction; simulating the innovation that occurs in the real world when supply of a resource is tight (the fuel conservation innovation that resulted from the 1970s oil crisis springs to mind). The details of the system are available at CCP Greyscale’s original alchemy devblog for those who are interested.
Our first step in fixing the moon mineral and tech two production economies is to expand alchemy to every applicable reaction. You will soon be able to create Platinum Technite without using Technetium if you so desire.

Most of these reactions will sit unused at any given time, and that is by design. Alchemy will kick in as a pressure valve in case prices of any moon mineral spike. As long as prices remain low there is no need to bypass the original mineral.
Since enterprising individuals will soon be able to find the details of the reactions from test patches, I’ll give the technical details of the reactions below for your perusal. Like I said above, speculating on these changes is to be done at your own risk as we reserve the right to change anything anytime should we see a good reason. You will notice that we are starting these reactions at the same conversion rate as the original alchemy instead of the conversion rate of current boosted alchemy. These ratios can and likely will change over subsequent releases as we adjust the system.
I will also repeat that this change is only the first step in our plan to revamp the methods by which the materials for tech two ships and modules are collected and used. We will be taking the time we need to do it right, but that process starts very soon in Inferno 1.2 with these alchemy changes.
If you aren’t interested in the gory details feel free to skip this next part, but for those of you who have skipped over the whole blog looking for numbers here are the most recent set of planned reactions for your mathematical enjoyment:

100 Titanium	and	100 Vanadium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Vanadium Hafnite	refines into	10 Vanadium Hafnite	and	95 Vanadium
100 Cobalt	and	100 Platinum	reacts into	1 Unrefined Platinum Technite	refines into	10 Platinum Technite	and	95 Platinum
100 Scandium	and	100 Chromium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Solerium	refines into	10 Solerium	and	95 Chromium
100 Scandium	and	100 Cadmium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Caesarium Cadmide	refines into	10 Caesarium Cadmide	and	95 Cadmium
100 Evaporite Deposits	and	100 Atmospheric Gases	reacts into	1 Unrefined Hexite	refines into	10 Hexite	-	-
100 Atmospheric Gases	and	100 Tungsten	reacts into	1 Unrefined Rolled Tungsten Alloy	refines into	10 Rolled Tungsten Alloy	and	95 Tungsten
100 Evaporite Deposits	and	100 Titanium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Titanium Chromide	refines into	10 Titanium Chromide	and	95 Titanium
100 Hydrocarbons	and	100 Scandium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Fernite Alloy	refines into	10 Fernite Alloy	and	95 Scandium
100 Silicates	and	100 Cobalt	reacts into	1 Unrefined Crystallite Alloy	refines into	10 Crystallite Alloy	and	95 Cobalt

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this and all the other changes we have planned for Inferno 1.2.
CCP Fozzie

P.S. If you like this change you should click the link to the comment thread at the top of this page, find my first post in the thread and hit like.


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PART ONE: WHAT'S GOING ON

It's always been a core principle of EVE that the more active, engaged players we have, the better the game will be. EVE is a deeply social game at its core, and having more people to interact with gives more opportunities for interesting outcome (see: Metcalfe's Law).
One of the major benefits to EVE of DUST514's upcoming launch will be the increased awareness of and interest in our shared universe, and we're expecting an influx of new players as a result of this, which is great (see above). And then someone said "yeah, but won't they all have to play through the tutorial?", and we all thought back to our own experiences playing the EVE tutorial at various points over the years, and went "uhhhhhhhh... yeah..."
In *totally unrelated* news, Team Five 0 was recently tasked with a one-month mission to improve the tutorial as much as possible. This is the story of that mission.
Stage One: Analysis

The first thing we did was to look at the overall problem and determine scope and goals. Our data experts rolled out their graphs, we pored over them and asked lots of questions, and it quickly became clear that the biggest pain point right now is the initial tutorial arc, which loses an awful lot of people before they've even begun to play. The career path missions aren't perfect either, but players who've got to that point have usually already decided that they enjoy the game and want to keep playing.
Confining ourselves to just this initial tutorial string gave us some useful limits on our work. Based on our knowledge of previous tutorial adjustments, we quickly came to the conclusion that rewriting it from scratch wouldn't yield good results in the time available, so we added the further constraint that we didn't want to change the actual tutorial missions more than strictly necessary. This gave us a clear framework to follow, while giving us the flexibility to make adjustments within that framework.
With those goals and restrictions in place, we next pursued two avenues of research. The first was to dig into the existing metrics for tutorials to look for obvious statistical issues. Here, for example, is a graph of the existing tutorial string, showing approximately how many people quit after each tutorial stage.

This graph shows, for each tutorial stage, how many players quit after starting that stage but before starting the next one.

As you can see, the current tutorial string has some good spots (most notably fitting and the bit where you're blowing things up), and some bad spots (most notably the bit right at the very start where we try to teach the skill queue before you've even undocked). Data like this gave us a pretty good sense of where our trouble spots lay.
While this data-gathering was taking place, we were also spending time digging into our other avenue: playing the tutorial. Alongside this, we also printed out every page of the tutorial and storyboarded the entire string in one of our meeting rooms. The notes from our playthroughs were then stuck onto the storyboard, so we could get a clear visual sense of where we were identifying lots of issues, and what was problematic at each stage.


Stage Two: Planning

With both our own analysis and a big stack of data in hand, we quickly collected a pretty long list of assumed problems with the current tutorials. From this, we began sketching out the major changes we wanted to make. Some sections needed to be moved or broken up, some dropped entirely, and additional teaching needed to be added in some cases. We decided to try and focus the tutorial as much as possible on teaching you how to use the game client and the core tools (piloting, fitting, skill training and so on), relying on the career paths to teach more specific skills.
The end product of this was a lot of additional post-its on our storyboard outlining the changes we wanted to make, and then a short written task-list of things to change. These tasks were split up among designers and programmers, and then we got to work.

Stage Three: Implementation

Everyone put their heads down and worked through the task-list. This is the unglamorous bit of game development!

Stage Four: Evaluation and adjustment

Once we were done with the main implementation work, we went through several rounds of user-testing with external volunteers. As you'd expect, we learned an awful lot from this, and came away from each session with long lists of adjustments to make.
A key example of this is how we teach in-space commands. We'd assumed initially that using visible UI functionality would be better than relying on context menus, so we endeavoured to teach with the Overview and Selected Item as much as possible. Repeated user testing showed that new players were far more comfortable right-clicking on everything, to the point where later tutorial steps that forced players to rely on Selected Item were tripping them up because they had no idea how to use it. This experience led us to rework our teaching throughout the tutorial to use right-click and the context menu, which subsequent testing confirmed as a much smoother experience.

Stage Five: Release it and see what happens

These changes will be released as part of Inferno 1.2, at which point we'll get to see what actually works in practice, and whether there are any trouble-spots that need further improvement. We've beefed up our logging capabilities as part of this work, so we should be able to see very quickly if there any problems, and react to them as needed.

PART TWO: WHAT WE'VE CHANGED

Overall Approach

• Voiceovers are gone for now. We really like them, but as soon as the text stops matching up with the audio it's incredibly distracting, and it's not feasible to continually re-record them as adjustments are made. Until such time as we can get a really good text-to-speech implementation (which we are actively looking at), they're out.
• >We're now attempting to teach everything one way (right-clicking stuff where applicable, for example), and reinforcing that method as often as possible.
• We avoid teaching keyboard shortcuts. We use icons and pictures where applicable.
• We highlight important things in the text. We always ensure that we have a clear header describing what's on the page.
• We always have a line at the bottom telling you when to click Next.
• We've removed automated progression and progression limits entirely from the initial string, and tied all the tutorials together in a single string: you can now use Back and Next to page through the entire string with no breaks or restrictions.

Tutorial Structure

• At the start, we now tell players roughly how long the tutorial will take and what they'll get out of it.
• We no longer teach Incarna-specific functionality, as right now it's not necessary to play the core game.
• We've split skill training up into two sections, moved it to later in the tutorial, and are no longer attempting to teach the skill queue interface.
• We now teach camera controls outside the station (where there are lots of other players to see) rather than on your own at an acceleration gate.
• We've removed the first acceleration gate from the first mission, as the double gate in that mission was confusing our playtesters.
• We've removed the huge stations from the end of the first mission, as they were making it very hard to locate the cargo rig objective.
• We're more careful to teach basic UI stuff like closing windows you don't need.
• We now explicitly teach the Overview, Selected Item and brackets.
• We've adjusted shield regen on Rookie Ship a little, so that tutorial NPCs no longer have any chance of killing them.

Changes to Tutorial UI

• The tutorial window has been completely overhauled:

• The look and feel is all-new, and now relies on a nice green hue rather than bright yellow everywhere.
• The tutorial window now auto-resizes for each new page, to eliminate scrollbars. This can be disabled by manually resizing, and re-enabled using the settings button on the window.
• The tutorial can now be minimized.
• The tutorial now has its own button on the Neocom; if you close the tutorial, this button will re-open the tutorial at the point you left off. As a result of this, we've also got rid of the "are you sure" pop-up and replaced it with a (closeable) tooltip on the Neocom button explaining how to reopen it. The Help button on the Neocom is now a big blue question-mark; the old "Aura" icon is now used for the Tutorial button.

• The pointers have had a visual overhaul, bringing them in line with the new tutorial look; they also now have a shimmer effect to draw visual attention.

• We now have dead-sexy in-space pointers that we can attach to things like ships and acceleration gates to help players locate them. They attach using a pretty cool bungee effect, and also highlight the item on the overview so you can find it there too.

• You can now drag tutorials into chat for other players.

Supporting UI Changes

• Constellation chat is no longer active by default.
• Overview is now sorted by distance by default, rather than by icon.
• Hybrid Charges are now referred to as Charges everywhere ingame, rather than as Ammo in some places.
• You can now talk to agents using a button, rather than having to right-click.

• You can now get information on mission objectives using a handy panel in the HUD, allowing you to warp to locations without having to rely on the Journal or context menu.

• Module tooltips have been substantially revised to show just useful information that isn't already clear from the module icon. (And yes, these include module and charge damage, and work with turrets, missiles and other ranged modules such as EW or remote repair.)

• Full Speed and Stop Ship icons on the HUD are now + and - rather than two triangles; this does not strictly describe their function, but should make them much more easily discoverable by new players.

• You can now warp/jump to the next stargate from the Route panel in the HUD

PART THREE: WRAPUP

Most of this should be on Singularity as we speak; we're continuing to make minor adjustments as small issues come up, but at this point we're pretty much done. Please go and experiment, and give us any feedback you can think of!
-Greyscale


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Hi,
I just wanted to write a short dev blog on the changes Team Super Friends (your best friends) have made to saved fittings. Mostly because it's my first day back after a really long summer vacation (and this day mostly gets wasted with reading e-mails, syncing branches, watching the Olympics and other stuff, but also because I thought you guys should know).
We've had some requests from CSM6 and CSM7 to make things nicer for those who have the great job in corporations/alliances to mass-fit ships. The changes we're making should benefit those people in particular but also everybody else.
FIRST THING!
The biggest annoyance appeared to be that rigs in saved fittings aren't fit. To solve that in such a way people don't accidentally fit expensive rigs they didn't want to fit we've added a question asking if you really want to do that. That question is suppressible so if you're confident you'll never make a boo-boo, you can just check that box and never see the question again.
We also decided that if there are already rigs fit on the ship, no rigs will be added or destroyed (you'll get a notification saying why your rigs weren't fit).
SECOND THING!
Giving newbies ships with ammo in their cargos can help everybody. The ship fitting person will be quicker while newbies can see how much ammo they should bring when doing something in their new ship. So we made it so charges in cargo get saved in the fitting, and fit when fitting from said saved fitting. This works for both cap boosters and all kinds of ammo.
There have been some requests on saving Liquid Ozone in cargo too, I'll see if I can do something about it – no promises.
THIRD THING!
If you had a saved fitting with some module or rig you don't have skills to fit, it would just fail silently and not fit anything. We fixed that, so now everything you have skills to fit, gets fit.
Oh! Here's a picture:

Hope these changes will make your lives in New Eden easier, party on!


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Introduction

In space no one can hear you scream – or so they say. While that might be true or not, the internet space of the EVE Community is far from being dead silent. Quite the contrary! It is filled with music, interviews, live discussions and interesting information hosted and broadcast over several online radio stations.
Since the early beginnings of EVE Online players have been able to listen to live internet radios and broadcasts that supplied New Eden with a variety of entertainment and interesting discussions. The EVE community has grown significantly since those early years, and with it so has the popularity of radio stations dedicated to EVE Online.
One of the most popular MMO-themed internet radio stations is made by EVE players for EVE players. Let’s tune in to EVE Radio!


Dreams and Dreamers

EVE Radio was originally created by Diaego in early 2003 for EVE Online beta players and run by early ISD volunteers playing music and discussing the game live on air. EVE Radio had broadcast major game events, as well, including the first and second EVE Online Alliance Tournaments. A guiding principle of EVE Radio was, and still is, to inform EVE players and entertain them. The structure of the station is managed by QgazQ who handles the role of Operations & Technical Manager
According to MrBlades, Network Director at Gaming Radio Network, the early days could be described as fun and creative chaos with little to no automation, lack of direction and a limited schedule. But the passion of the early broadcasters pushed EVE Radio forwards and into more organized states so that the early audience of maybe 30 regular listeners turned into the average of 250-350 listeners with peaks around several thousand listeners during special events.
EVE Radio is run by a team of enthusiastic EVE players. Each DJ brings their own personal style and individuality to the group. A team of operators works behind the scenes to keep the 24/7 radio stream running smoothly for its listeners.. Internal guidelines, recruitment, advertisement, finances, public relations, listener trends, feedback … EVE Radio’s team of dedicated players puts a remarkable amount of work into bringing EVE Radio to the community, and it shows.
So far EVE Radio has had over 200 people working on the project since 2003, the oldest was in her 60's and the youngest started when he was only 14.
Broadcast now!


The regular 24/7 EVE Radio schedule consists of several live DJ’s playing a wide range of music but that is just where the fun begins. Especially during Christmas time – but not only then – EVE Radio bustles with extra activity. Events like “Pod the DJ” combine story driven adventures with in game actions performed by the listeners. Special “missions” from the Eve Radio website with fully voiced briefings provide various goals that listeners can attempt to complete in order to win epic prizes. Countless ad hoc events to win prizes such as ISK, Game Time Cards or even fully fitted faction ships.
EVE Radio also covered special events like the CCP Dev Caravan, interviews with CCP developers and other official CCP and player driven events. The most popular events, often attended by several thousand concurrent listeners, are also available as standalone podcasts. Due to upgrades EVE Radio now can support up to 25,000 concurrent listeners.
During the years of EVE Radio's existence there have been numerous improvements and upgrades in the format, an automated DJ scheduler (getting rid of a manual countdown on a third party chat to provide a smooth handover of streams), running different shows simultaneously and lot of other improvements especially in overall quality and uptime.
In 2005, EVE Radio hosted a gathering in Pontefract, UK where over 150 fans, DJ's and devs attended. The event was broadcast live on air for those who couldn't attend. In 2011, EVE Radio collaborated with Veto corp to broadcast their first full HD video coverage of Veto Summer Camp featuring DJ Funkybacon and ginger Seth Rogan. EVE Radio was also present at EVE Vegas with DJ Brett Adams covering both days.
Player Requests and Developer interaction

DJ's love to play requests and a good tip to get your song played is to request one in the genre currently spinning. And if a live DJ can't help you, they have a variety of jukeboxes setup for each of the separate channels, featuring a wide range of music you to choose from. As for discussion topics, those DJ's who run specialty talk shows (DJ Funkybacon and DJ BigCountry spring to mind) generally have their own stuff to talk about but are always willing to entertain suggestions from listeners.
CCP Developers regularly appear on air, most recently when the Alliance Tournament team came for a Q&A before Alliance Tournament X.
The Future

While the past and present of EVE Radio already looks quite impressive, EVE Radio is far from resting on its laurels, with strong plans for the future. After successfully upgrading the available bandwidth (thanks to Premium Supporters) and with the availability of a dedicated video system, EVE Radio has brought their video efforts to fruition. The first stream went live in 2011, with the coverage of the Christmas CCP Dev Caravan . Over 1,000 concurrent fans watched this video stream and hundreds more listened along on the radio. Plans to offer better in game streaming and also to offer stand-alone EVE Radio TV promise an interesting future.
Another plan is to become financially more self-sufficient and independent as currently a major part of the whole EVE Radio project is financed by a single person. The introduction of Premium Supporters is helping to eliminate the need for donations entirely by introducing services for those that want to get a little bit extra out of EVE Radio and those who just fancy supporting them with a low cost subscription.

EVE Radio's motto:
We broadcast for the love of the game, love of the community and to support our friends at CCP. If we ever lost any of that, we'd shut up shop overnight.
Postscript: DJ Sarge is also a fine fellow, with over 200 shows last year! (This message brought to you from the EVE-Radio channel in game) ~CCP Manifest


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The seventh CSM and CCP had their first scheduled summit from 30th of May to 1st of June, 2012. A wide variety of topics were discussed during the summit in Reykjavik, and the table of contents is listed below. The full meeting minutes can be found here: http://www.eveonline.com/council/tra..._June_2012.pdf
Summit Sessions:

• CSM: Introduction and White Paper Discussions
• What is a Stakeholder?
• Winter 2012 Wxpansion
• EVE Future
• The State of Incarna
• Live Events
• Industry and Mining
• Starbase Rework
• EVE/DUST Link
• EVE UI
• Null sec
• Corporation Management
• War Decs and Crimewatch
• Player Experience - Launcher
• Factional Warfare
• Art
• Ship Balance and Iteration
• 'Player to Player Contracts' (Feature Working Title)
• Content
• Security
• (New) Player Experience
• EVE Economy

Some notes:
As you can see by downloading the meeting minutes, they were no small undertaking. The Seventh Council decided to change the format to increase visibility and accountability of their representation, and the page count rose to meet their commitment (165). CCP would like to thank the CSM for their tireless work in this endeavor and for the considerable effort put into preparation for the summit and communication of its results afterwards. The format will be further refined for future meeting minutes.
Please feel free to place your comments in the related thread. It will be monitored both by CCP and the CSM.
Theorycrafting, tinfoilhattery, speculation and all such activities are to be expected and even praised, but until something is deployed to the Tranquility server, please keep in mind it could quickly vanish into nothingness not unlike the pebble-sized meteor trails when entering Earth's atmosphere. With that, may the discussion of these minutes commence!
On a related note, thanks in advance for your patience of our possible silence on future plans--the NDA is a terrifying, un-nerfable overpowered NPC.
And finally, a special thanks to CCP Xhagen for helping to coordinate these minutes from vacationland, from whence he shall shortly return.
o7. CCP Manifest, paltry stand-in.


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The seventh CSM and CCP had their first scheduled summit from 30th of May to 1st of June, 2012. A wide variety of topics were discussed during the summit in Reykjavik, and the table of contents is listed below. The full meeting minutes can be found here: http://www.eveonline.com/council/tra..._June_2012.pdf
Summit Sessions:

• CSM: Introduction and White Paper Discussions
• What is a Stakeholder?
• Winter 2012 Expansion
• EVE Future
• The State of Incarna
• Live Events
• Industry and Mining
• Starbase Rework
• EVE/DUST Link
• EVE UI
• Null sec
• Corporation Management
• War Decs and Crimewatch
• Player Experience - Launcher
• Factional Warfare
• Art
• Ship Balance and Iteration
• 'Player to Player Contracts' (Feature Working Title)
• Content
• Security
• (New) Player Experience
• EVE Economy

Some notes:
As you can see by downloading the meeting minutes, they were no small undertaking. The Seventh Council decided to change the format to increase visibility and accountability of their representation, and the page count rose to meet their commitment (165). CCP would like to thank the CSM for their tireless work in this endeavor and for the considerable effort put into preparation for the summit and communication of its results afterwards. The format will be further refined for future meeting minutes.
Please feel free to place your comments in the related thread. It will be monitored both by CCP and the CSM.
Theorycrafting, tinfoilhattery, speculation and all such activities are to be expected and even praised, but until something is deployed to the Tranquility server, please keep in mind it could quickly vanish into nothingness not unlike the pebble-sized meteor trails when entering Earth's atmosphere. With that, may the discussion of these minutes commence!
On a related note, thanks in advance for your patience of our possible silence on future plans--the NDA is a terrifying, un-nerfable overpowered NPC.
And finally, a special thanks to CCP Xhagen for helping to coordinate these minutes from vacationland, from whence he shall shortly return.
o7. CCP Manifest, paltry stand-in.


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Ahahaha just kidding moongoo is completely broken and we’re going to fix that starting in Inferno 1.2.
Disclaimer: Everything in this dev blog (just like every game change we make) is open to being changed at any point. If you dump all your isk into speculation around this blog and lose it all because we changed something again, you have only yourself to blame. Always speculate at your own risk. Note: The details of the reactions have changed since the blog was originally published, see below for the most up to date numbers as of the release of Inferno 1.2 So by way of introduction, I’m CCP Fozzie the new game designer here at CCP. I’ve been playing EVE for years and am very excited for the chance to work alongside the great team here and in partnership with all you passionate players to make Eve Online: A Progressively Improving Game.
For those of you who are interested in how I look, I have included a picture of myself below:

Now if I’ve learned anything about prison from television (and who hasn’t), it’s that the first thing you should do when you arrive is find the biggest guy around and beat the living daylights out of him so everyone knows not to mess with you. Since I figure most imaginary prison advice should be fairly transferrable I came in here looking to find a big game problem and smack it around a bit.
Many of you will be familiar with this graph:

Over the past several months the price of the moon mineral Technetium has risen sharply, bringing some pre-existing game design issues into sharper relief. The value of these moons combined with the fact that they exist completely in one distinct region of the game has caused wealth transfers that are simply too large for the effort and risk involved. So we are going to kick Technetium in the balls.
There are more problems with our current system of moon mining and tech two production than just the price of Technetium, which is why we now have a comprehensive plan to address these issues over multiple releases. The end goal is for the materials for tech two production to come from player activities that require group gameplay and risk taking, and that provide appropriate rewards. This will eventually involve changes to both resource collection and the build requirements for construction of tech two materials and items. A responsible first step in this plan is to ensure that as much as possible the tech two components market is shielded from unnecessary price shocks.
Those of you who have been playing for a while may remember that there was a system introduced in 2008 for this exact purpose called Alchemy. It allows players to replace one moon mineral type with another in a reaction; simulating the innovation that occurs in the real world when supply of a resource is tight (the fuel conservation innovation that resulted from the 1970s oil crisis springs to mind). The details of the system are available at CCP Greyscale’s original alchemy devblog for those who are interested.
Our first step in fixing the moon mineral and tech two production economies is to expand alchemy to every applicable reaction. You will soon be able to create Platinum Technite without using Technetium if you so desire.

Most of these reactions will sit unused at any given time, and that is by design. Alchemy will kick in as a pressure valve in case prices of any moon mineral spike. As long as prices remain low there is no need to bypass the original mineral.
Since enterprising individuals will soon be able to find the details of the reactions from test patches, I’ll give the technical details of the reactions below for your perusal. Like I said above, speculating on these changes is to be done at your own risk as we reserve the right to change anything anytime should we see a good reason. You will notice that we are starting these reactions at the same conversion rate as the original alchemy instead of the conversion rate of current boosted alchemy. These ratios can and likely will change over subsequent releases as we adjust the system.
I will also repeat that this change is only the first step in our plan to revamp the methods by which the materials for tech two ships and modules are collected and used. We will be taking the time we need to do it right, but that process starts very soon in Inferno 1.2 with these alchemy changes.
If you aren’t interested in the gory details feel free to skip this next part, but for those of you who have skipped over the whole blog looking for numbers here are the most recent set of planned reactions for your mathematical enjoyment:
These reactions were adjusted on July 24th 2012 and therefore have changed since this blog was originally published.

100 Titanium	and	100 Vanadium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Vanadium Hafnite	refines into	20 Vanadium Hafnite	and	90 Vanadium
100 Cobalt	and	100 Platinum	reacts into	1 Unrefined Platinum Technite	refines into	20 Platinum Technite	and	90 Platinum
100 Scandium	and	100 Chromium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Solerium	refines into	20 Solerium	and	90 Chromium
100 Scandium	and	100 Cadmium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Caesarium Cadmide	refines into	20 Caesarium Cadmide	and	90 Cadmium
100 Evaporite Deposits	and	100 Atmospheric Gases	reacts into	1 Unrefined Hexite	refines into	20 Hexite	-	-
100 Atmospheric Gases	and	100 Tungsten	reacts into	1 Unrefined Rolled Tungsten Alloy	refines into	20 Rolled Tungsten Alloy	and	90 Tungsten
100 Evaporite Deposits	and	100 Titanium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Titanium Chromide	refines into	20 Titanium Chromide	and	90 Titanium
100 Hydrocarbons	and	100 Scandium	reacts into	1 Unrefined Fernite Alloy	refines into	20 Fernite Alloy	and	90 Scandium
100 Silicates	and	100 Cobalt	reacts into	1 Unrefined Crystallite Alloy	refines into	20 Crystallite Alloy	and	90 Cobalt

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this and all the other changes we have planned for Inferno 1.2.
CCP Fozzie

P.S. If you like this change you should click the link to the comment thread at the top of this page, find my first post in the thread and hit like.


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The big picture

This summer we will be revamping the Mining Barges and Exhumers, hereafter collectively referred to as barges. This is part of a larger initiative, spearheaded by CCP Ytterbium, where we revamp ship classes one by one.
Here is Ytterbium's initial blog about the initiative: Rebalancing EVE, one ship at a time
In his update blog, Ship balancing summer update, he goes into some details about the barges.
For those of you who didn't read that, here's a quick summary of the mining part of the blog:

• Current mining frigates are no longer going to be mining frigates.
• We are going to make a new ORE mining frigate.
• Mining Barges and Exhumers are getting the "tiericide" treatment, where they will have specific roles rather than being a linear progression from worst at mining to best at mining.
• Procurer and Skiff will have good defence.
• Retriever and Mackinaw will have large ore holds.
• Covetor and Hulk will have good mining output.

The goal here is to allow players to choose a barge that fits their specific play style rather than lead them on a journey from the worst barge to the best one.

• The Covetor and Hulk cater to group mining operations due to their large mining capability, low EHP and storage, forcing them to rely on others to haul and resupply them with mining crystals.
• The Retriever and Mackinaw are specifically designed for autonomy purposes, as their large ore bays allow their pilot to stay inside an asteroid belt for longer without having to dock.
• The Procurer and Skiff are made for protection against suicide gank, or NPCs, by giving a large enough buffer to react to incoming attacks, while paying for that with a lower mining yield.

Mining

The barges are primarily mining ships, which means that regardless of what else they do, they have to be good at mining. The difference between the lowest and highest mining output was way too much, so the first thing we did was to bring the mining outputs of the different barges closer together. Hulk is still the king of yield, but the others are not so far behind as to be redundant.
With the new roles of cargo, tank and yield, the old roles had to be reconsidered as well. Without changing those, the Ice and Mercoxit bonuses of the Skiff and Mackinaw would have meant that Ice miners would be forced to fly the ore hold barge and Mercoxit miners would be forced to fly the tanking barge. That would have gone against the goal of giving players more options, so we decided to move those bonuses away from the ships. Now you can choose which barge you want to fly and then put on rigs that boost your Ice or Mercoxit mining efficiency.
Here is the end results of the changes to mining bonuses. For each type of ore/ice this is assuming perfect skills, fittings, implants and fleet bonuses (mining drones not included). I'll leave it to you to figure out exactly what those are.

Ship	Veldspar/hour	Mercoxit/hour	Ice/hour
Hulk	1,739,139	2,749	73
Covetor	1,578,043	2,492	69
Mackinaw	1,505,059	2,377	68
Retriever	1,433,390	2,264	64
Skiff	1,380,788	2,185	61
Procurer	1,315,038	2,078	58

Tanking

All the barges are getting their tanks adjusted to favor shields rather than structure hit points. Skiff and Retriever are getting hit points comparable to a battleship, while the others are closer to cruiser level hit points. With the increase to shield hit points, the shield resistance bonus of Exhumers was making the gap between Mining Barges and Exhumers a bit too big, so we reduced the bonus from 7.5% per level to 5% per level. Here are the new total hit point and EHP numbers:

Ship	Total Hit Points	EHP
Hulk	6000	8713
Covetor	4500	5771
Mackinaw	8000	11625
Retriever	6000	7691
Skiff	19625	29091
Procurer	18000	23252

Cargo

All the barges are getting most of their storage capacity moved from the cargo hold to a new ore hold. This allows us to give them substantial storage capacity for their mined ore without invalidating Industrial ships in the process. Retriever and Mackinaw being the storage barges, will now be able to store more ore than a jet can. Covetor and Hulk are meant to be used in a group, so while they have the highest mining output, they also have the smallest ore bays. The reduction of the cargo holds does have an unfortunate side effect for miners; there is much less space for mining crystals. We alleviated this slightly by cutting the volume of mining crystals in half, but it is now something that miners have to plan for before they go mining.
Here are the new cargo numbers. The spare crystal sets numbers assumes that you leave 50m3 of space free (you need at least 25m3 free to be able to switch crystals). Again, the numbers assume perfect skills, implants and fleet bonuses.

Ship	Ore hold	Mining cycles	Cargo hold	Spare crystal sets
Hulk	8500	1	350	4
Covetor	7000	1	350	4
Mackinaw	35000	6	450	10
Retriever	27500	5	450	10
Skiff	15000	3	350	12
Procurer	12000	2	350	12

End

Finally, we reduced the skill requirements of Mining Barges and Exhumers. Mining Barges now require Mining Barge level I and Astrogeology level III. Exhumers now require Mining Barge level V and Exhumers level I. Hopefully these changes will benefit the mining profession in EVE. They might not make it any more exciting, but at least miners will have to make some meaningful decisions before they undock.


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