Who reads these days? Reading is for nerds (what, you're reading this? Shhhh! Don't tell anyone)! But seriously, everyone loves stories and EVE Online has a ton of amazing lore behind it. From stories of epic battles, to cruel betrayal, to dying old men and more, the EVE Universe is rich with fiction. But it's not always easy to sit down for a half hour or an hour and read everything you want, particularly if you're driving to work or taking a morning jog (and please do not attempt this!) That's why audiobooks have been growing more and more popular over the years. And while EVE does not have any audiobooks, two intrepid players have decided to produce audio readings of EVE's wonderful lore.

 

Diving into the Lore

Surprisingly, the two players do not work together to produce the Chronicle readings. Each one has come to the path separately and have produced wonderful work. They are Tryaz and Zendane, both of whom embarked on individual projects to do readings.

Zendane finds that lore in an MMO helps him feel that games mean something more than a diversion to kill an hour's time. Wanting to know the answers to questions such as “Why do the Minmatar hate the Amarr” and “What exactly is the Gallente democracy about?” Zendan looked to the Chronicles. The stories helped him fill the gaps and let the world breathe.

Tryaz started reading the lore back before he even created his first EVE account. To him, if a game mechanic has some rationale and story behind it, he finds he enjoys it more. He specifically remembers reading the article on cloning technology and liked the reasoning behind the necessity for the capsule. That turned what he considered a boring “egg-in-space” into something cool and engaging.

Back in February of 2013, after experiencing a short burn-out with EVE Online, Tryaz began to consider making recordings of the Chronicles that had engaged him so much. He found it was a way to bring his real life activities closer to his EVE ones, giving him a guilt-free way to engage more with EVE. Shortly after, he released his reading of CCP Abraxas's most recent chronicle, After the Fall, along with three other classic Chronicles.

Zendane, meanwhile, has been thinking of doing readings since 2010. At the time, he had an hour-long commute to work and audiobooks were his main weapon in the battle to keep his sanity during that long and lonesome road. It occurred to him that the Chronicles would fit perfectly into this format and would appeal to people like himself, who lacked time to read, but possessed enough to listen to a story every so often. In 2012, he eventually contacted CCP to get all his legal drakes in a row and, once he made sure no lawsuits would follow, he released his reading of Jovian Wetgrave as a trial episode.

So far, both have found overwhelmingly positive support from the community. Zendane was even recognized a few times at FanFest, while Tryaz received a shout-out on one of Delonewolf's videos. Both have received plenty of advice and support from other players and even a few offers of collaboration.

 

Behind the Scenes

Both men utilize Audacity to record their readings. Tryaz uses a ZOOM H2N microphone to record. Proving that he may well be a progenitor of the Minmatar, he has two empty soup cans as a makeshift mic stand.

Zendane started off with very humble beginnings, utilizing a webcam mic to record his first three Chronicles. While not terrible, it certainly wasn't optimal. From episode 4 onward, he upgraded to a PreSonus M7 condenser microphone and a PreSonus Audiobox 2 channel mixer. He additionally uses Studio One Artist for additional editing.

To choose a Chronicle, Zendane looks at several factors. Some Chronicles lend themselves better to audio due to story structure, narration, and level of dialogue. Once he finds a story he's happy with, he reads through it a few times to get the tone and flow of the story down.

Next, he lays the story out. He copy/pastes it into a text editor and looks for difficulty pronunciations of awkward wordings. If he comes across something that is pronounced in a way that's difficult for him, he'll replace it with a phoentic version that is easier for him to speak aloud as he reads. After that, it's just the recording. With a calm mind and relaxed breathing, the reading begins to flow after the first paragraph.

In all, he estimates it takes about 15 minutes of work for every minute of the reading. That includes reading the text, cleaning up the audio, applying filters and sound effects, and putting in the intro, outro, and any background music into place.

He considers each recording a learning experience. He has had to teach himself how to do things from tutorials and experimenting. One particular instance he recalls is working to get a voice for the rogue drones just right. It took him an afternoon to get that particular feel down.

Surprisingly, he does not have any sort of background in voice or stage acting. He'd like to take acting classes, for experience and critique, but his current schedule makes that difficult.

When Tryaz gets started, he looks for a chronicle that can be completed in one episode. Additionally, he looks either for the most recent story (as it can be relevant to the events currently occurring) or ones that shed light on an aspect of gameplay common to as many people as possible. For instance, he points to the Aura Chronicle, as he wagers not many people realize there's a backstory to the voice they hear every time they initiate warp.

He estimates it takes him roughly 4 times the length of each recording to produce them. He likes to do the live recording in one sitting, so he reads each story several times to ensure he understands the implications and all its content as well as how to pronounce names or portray a character. Then he dives straight in and starts recording. Editing is simply listening back to it and chopping out passages he mucked up and had to repeat.

Unlike Zendane, Tryaz is a classically trained singer. Thus the recordings are a way to make his skill-set relevant to his EVE gameplay.

 

The Future

It's been mentioned earlier that Zendane and Tryaz do not work together, but that might be changing! The two have started talking to each other and have discussed plans for a collaboration. They haven't quite decided on a project to tackle, but both are very agreeable to the idea. Tryaz sees it as a great way to open up access for their individual reader groups.

Individually, both have some interesting plans for the future. Tryaz has a few suggestions from the community he wants to tackle, such as the multi-part chronicles (good luck with Black Mountain!). He's also had a few offers of collaboration he intends to take up. Additionally, he's attempting to convince a friend of his to voice Jamyl Sarum for a reading of And I Shall Hide. While he has not given much thought to creating a multi-actor audiodrama style reading, he's open to the idea, especially if the community asks for it. He mainly plans to continue what he's doing and let the player base keep him on track. He hopes to remain flexible and respond to what people want.

Zendane, meanwhile, it working on the Methods of Torture series and has just released the Amarr piece. After he finishes these, he plans to go with the next request he can handle or one of the stories he likes personally and thinks will make for a good reading. As for a possible audio drama, he's only had multiple actors once, in Episode 2, when he asked corp members to provide quick three-second snippets. While the process would be daunting, it is also exciting and he thinks some of his favorite Chrons would benefit from the audio drama treatment. He singled out The Speaker of Truths as one possibility.

 

About the Readers

In EVE, Zendane is the CEO of Phoibe Enterprises and keeps himself busy with the details required to keep a corp running. He considers himself one of those odd people that actually likes these tasks and enjoys the role, even if it does turn his gray hair grayer on occasion. Out of game, he's lucky enough to be married to another EVE player and has a daughter who shakes her head at internet spaceships. He's a paramedic in a medium-sized town, so EVE is a way for him to relax from his job.

Tryaz is a PVPer in lowsec Gallente and Caldari space along with his brother, Rahknai. They keep it small scale, but are enjoying Factional Warfare at the moment, enjoying all the good fights. He finds success and failure in equally measure. Away from New Eden, he's a classical singing student at the RNCM in Manchester.

 

Last Words

Tryaz would like to give a shout out to his fellow reader (and spotlight subject!) Zendane, to Delonewolf, to Caled Ayrania and the team at eve-guardian.net, his proofreaders Rahknai and Josephine, and anyone who's been kind enough to offer words of encouragement or support. He'd also like to give props to RealX,  Kristján Guðjónsson,  Guðni Franzson and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra for an amazing project, the EVE 10th Anniversary Symphony. He's looking forward to owning his own copy soon. He hope this sets a precedent for large-scale professional music projects in EVE. He'd love to hear from players about anything he's talked about, so don't hesitate to convo/message him!

Zendane would like to let everyone know he's very open to feedback on how to improve future recordings, as well as suggestions for Chronicles to read. The last seven and next four episodes have all been suggested to him by the community and he would love to see it continue.

You can find Tryaz's readings on his Soundcloud channel, while Zendane's can be found in his regularly-updated forum thread on the EVE Fiction forum or his blog.

We have been working with NVIDIA on a fix to address a known visual issue (pictured here) on the NVIDIA 600/700 series GPUs. Initial testing of the fix looks promising but is still ongoing; users can expect the fix to be included in the upcoming NVIDIA driver update.

Workaround instructions:

• Open the EVE client Esc menu
• Go to the Display & Graphics tab
• Set the Shader Quality option to Medium

We will update you when we have a confirmed release date from NVIDIA, additionally we have created a forum thread where we encourage you to reply if you experience any additional issues after the driver fix is released.

CCP Vertex
Lead Graphics Quality Analyst

The Tranquility cluster has been taken offline as of 11:45 UTC in order to enable us to address several issues that have occurred this morning.

We currently have no ETA for the server to be brought back online, however we will update this forum thread as soon as more information becomes available.

We apologize for this unexpected downtime, and any inconvenience it may cause.

On June 2, 2013, the ISD STAR team will live stream and explain features of our coming summer expansion EVE Odyssey on their ISD STAR twitch.tv channel from 18:00 to 20:00 UTC.

Continue reading EVE Odyssey – Live presentation by ISD STAR on June 2 →

Greetings,

My name is CCP Spitfire; some of you might remember me from the forum days of old. I used to be a Russian community coordinator for EVE Online, and now I am a part of the CCP sales team. We work on setting up partnerships with game retailers and distributors to bring EVE Online to the masses, and also manage CCP’s ETC reseller and affiliate programs.

Today I would like to tell you about our new initiative that has been in the works for some time. We have just completed integration with the Steam gaming platform, and now people who buy EVE Online via this channel will have a slightly different user experience compared to the past.

First of all, tomorrow you might notice a new Steam icon on the EVE web login page. This means that you no longer need to manually create an EVE Online account after buying the game activation key on Steam; instead you use your Steam credentials to log into the game and the websites. This has been made possible by the Single Sign-On (SSO) technology developed by Team GForce.

Furthermore, players who have bought EVE Online on Steam from May 31 will be able to pay for their subscription on a recurring basis and buy PLEX packages directly via Steam, thanks to the back-end work done by Team Mammon.

 

Why are you doing this?

We first started offering EVE Online on Steam in March 2008. Since then tens of thousands of players entered the EVE universe though this medium, and we want to take this cooperation even further: after all, Steam is the world’s largest gaming platform. We also took an opportunity to clean up the product description for EVE Online, update the artwork, fix the client deployment process and introduce the new Starter Pack for new players instead of a generic game activation key.

 

I already bought EVE on Steam, why can’t I use the new features?

Initially the new features will be rolled out to new users only. Once we evaluate the feedback and data from the first stage of the program, we will look at taking the next steps and adding new features to the integration. EVE Online subscription and PLEX packages on Steam are priced in the exact same way as on our own website, so all players are on equal footing regardless of the way they pay for their subscriptions.

 

What’s next?

We will evaluate the performance of the new options over the coming months and see what makes sense to do next: as mentioned above, one opportunity would be to open new subscription options and PLEX purchases to existing EVE Online users on Steam. We would love to hear your opinions on this; please leave your questions and feedback in the comments thread.

Other aspects of Steam we are potentially very interested in are the Community Hub and Steam Workshop – our community team has already started looking into the possibilities here, and we would love to hear your feedback on this as well.

Cheers!

Hi all,

I'm back to tell you about a few Little Things we are changing in EVE Online: Odyssey.

OK, to be honest, I'm a little embarrassed to even mention the first one because it's such a tiny tiny change, but since you guys have been asking for it I should tell you about it: you can now make the input field in chat a single line and gain like 20 extra pixels! Yay! :)

You also wanted to be able to open more than one stored fitting window at a time, so now if you SHIFT-click a fitting link, the fitting will open up in a new window.

If you ever use the Notepad you will have noticed that the order of the notes is very random. For some reason you guys thought it should be in some sensible order, like alphabetical or something clever like that. After thinking about it for a while, I finally started to agree with you so I changed it so the notes are sorted in alphabetical order.

Has anyone else found themselves in this situation:

You are shooting at a ship, about to take it down and excited you watch the target very closely as the health bars become more and more red. Then all of a sudden the target is just gone from your target list and you have to ask your friends if you got it, hoping they were paying attention to what was actually happening in space.

Well, I find this extremely ungratifying when I kill someone, and also very disappointing to find out that  someone got away in 10% structure when I thought I just killed them, and I know many of you experience the same thing.

So we made a small change so now when the ship is popping off your target list because it's dead, it will blink a few times before it disappears so there should no longer be any confusion about whether the ship went down in flames or managed to warp away. Tl;dr: It blinks: "He's dead, Jim." It disappears: "She got away, captain."

Ever jump into a system and wanted to check out the locals real fast and see if you have any "friends" there?

Then go to the Local chat channel and carefully scroll down the list. In Odyssey you will be able to just select the list and use the Page Up and Page Down keys to scroll real fast through that list and see at a glance if there's anyone "super friendly" there. And by "super friendly" I mean your mortal enemies if the quotes were confusing you...

This will of course not only work for the Local member list, but also for other lists such as the Overview, market item list, lists of mails and pretty much any lists we have in the EVE Client.

The Page Up/Down keys function the same way they do in pretty much any other program so I'm not going to go into details on their functionality here.

To be able to make this change, we needed to take over the Page Up and Page Down keys. So if you were using them to Zoom In/Out, we urge you to go to the shortcut settings and find yourself new shortcuts for Zoom In/Out. Even if you were not using them at all, you might need to visit the shortcut settings to clear any shortcuts from these keys if you want to make use of this feature. Yeah, we could have messed with your setting, but we know how happy that makes you so we'll let you take care of changing the shortcuts this time :)

With fresh settings, Zoom In/Out are not bound to any shortcut keys by default.

After I made the fleet changes the other day someone asked if we could allow you to copy the fleet composition from the window with CTRL+C (like you can do in many other windows) and I thought "Sure, why not?"

So I started on it, and it was simple enough to add the ability to copy all the nodes in the list. And I was done, right? Not really, because I realized that wouldn't be enough since it only worked if your fleet was fully expanded and it would be very tedious to expand every wing and squad manually to be able to copy the fleet, so something more had to be done to allow you to expand your fleet more efficiently.

Currently on Tranquility you have the "Open All Squads" and "Close All Squads" in the menu for the fleet commander, but “Open All Squads” only works for squads where the wing is already expanded. The first thing I did was to rename those options "Expand All Squads" and "Collapse All Squads", and then changed it so “Expand All Squads” will actually expand ALL the squads. If some wings are collapsed, they are simply expanded too.

So to copy your fleet composition, just expand all the squads and copy it with CTRL+C.

Then, in order to help you manage the fleet list, I decided to add two new useful options: "Expand All Wings" and "Collapse All Wings". These options should be pretty self-explanatory.

As I was adding stuff these new options to the already long menu for the fleet commander, I decided to clean the menu up a little bit. When you are working in the fleet and Watch List windows, you probably rarely need very fast access to the "Edit Contact", "Give Money" or “Capture Portrait” options or any of the other "Pilot" options, so I moved them into a "Pilot" submenu, which is consistent with how these options are presented in the Overview.

This way you should have an easier way to find the relevant options for your fleet members.

Additionally, I changed the text "Kick Member" to "Kick Member from Fleet" so CEOs and directors should no longer have to worry about kicking someone from their corporation when they only intended to kick them from the fleet.

If you have read my older dev blogs, you might have noticed that I like dragging and dropping... a lot. So the other day I changed it so when you drag the picture of the station in your Show Info window, you will create a link to that particular station rather than the type of the station.

I then pulled the ever popular "while I was at it...", and changed it so you can drag all sorts of locations from Info windows to chat and other similar fields. These include locations from tabs such as "Adjacent Regions", "Orbital Bodies", and "Related Solarsystems" and many more.

And if you bookmark a lot, and like to use some other names for them than "Spot in WhateverSystemYouAreIn", I have a nice little change for you: now when the bookmark window pops up, the location name text is preselected for you, and if you want to change it you will just have to start typing to replace it. If you happen to like the old “Spot in…” text, you can, as before, just hit Enter to save the bookmark with that location name.

Until next time,

-CCP karkur

Today during downtime we deployed an update to the EVE Launcher that will fix several bugs and improve handling overall. Today's deployment includes the following fixes:

• Fix to ensure the installer for the EVE Launcher doesn't start with the incorrect path
• Fixes to shutdown issues on Windows XP/2000/Server 2003
• Correct handling of the initial focus event so that it's correctly directed to the input boxes in the EVE Launcher at startup
• Fixes to the progress bar for downloading and installing updates to the EVE Launcher
• Fixes to several permission issues
• Better handling of cancel requests during updates to the EVE Client
• Several fixes for errors encountered during updates to the EVE Client
• Reductions of several log messages

If you are having an issue with downloading and applying the update, you can download an installer here. Further issues can be reported in the discussion thread.

Hello sportsfans! It is once again that most wonderful time of year, Alliance Tournament Season! It is once again time for the alliances in New Eden to pit themselves against their peers in epic combat, where they fly ships out of their own hangars so each loss matters . Last year we had a spectacular tournament capped off with Verge of Collapse's victory in the finals, and I'm certain this year will be even better.

We've been requesting commentator applications for the past few weeks and we're now moving on to the interview stage to select the best possible team to bring you the action. In the meantime we are ready to unveil this year's full rules and format, as well as the process by which alliances will sign up and enter the competition.

I'd first like to quickly comment on the previously announced rules surrounding which players are allowed to compete on behalf of their alliances. Quoting the blog linked above:

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

This rule is intended to ensure that players compete on behalf of the alliance which they belong to during both tournament season, and the off-season (their home alliance) and to allow us to more efficiently protect from B-teams without needing to resort to draconian measures. It is not intended to punish players who may have been caught outside their home alliance for some minor reason. For this reason we have been considering request for exceptions, as mentioned in the discussion thread for the last blog.

The vast majority of our granted exceptions so far have all followed the exact same set of criteria:

• The character in question was not in any alliance at the time of the cutoff on May 15th.
• The petitioning player wishes to rejoin the alliance that the character was most recently a member of.
• The character in question has spent a significant amount of time in this alliance over the past year.

We have not been granting exceptions for corporations or players who were members of alliances on the 15th, as they are encouraged to compete with that alliance.

If you think that you qualify for an exception please send a petition to the Community category with as much detail of your situation as possible. We will be considering all requests that are sent to the Community petition queue before June 9th 2013. If you have already sent in a request, then CCP Gargant will either have already sent you a response or will be sending you a response very soon.

 

For any alliances looking to gain an edge by entering a competitive tournament before the big event, we highly endorse the Syndicate Competitive League, a player-run tournament series which will be holding its fourth tournament on June 22nd and 23rd. The SCL is an excellent opportunity for teams to get real tournament experience and since it is held on the Singularity test server you won't need to dip into your Tournament savings fund to compete! The SCL tends to fill up early so get in touch with them as soon as possible if your team is interested in competing.

 

Below you will find the full Tournament Format and Rules document, including match rules, ship points and signup procedure.

Major changes from previous years that you shouldn't miss include:

• Tournament format has been converted to one 64 team double-elimination tournament, with no pre-qualifying or group stages.
• Minimum entry payment has been reduced to 5 plex, as we pass our cost optimization improvements on to you.
• We will be providing a dedicated tournament practice server for competing teams.
• We have a new tiebreaking system that takes advantage of time dilation.
• Several ship point changes, remote reps allowed on T1 Support Cruisers and Support Frigates, and a limitation of one remote energy transfer module per ship.
• Number of identical ships allowed reduced back to three.
• Hardwirings beyond 3%s are not allowed (Leadership mindlinks are an exception)
• The ship banning system from the New Eden Open is being introduced into the Alliance Tournament during the second and third weekends.
• Flagships are immune from banning.

 

Format

Death to all complicated points math!

Up to 64 alliances will be granted entry to Alliance Tournament XI. The tournament takes place in one stage, a 64 team double elimination bracket with random initial seeding.

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

The team entries will be split; 32 teams in a random draw and 32 teams through a silent auction process. The random draw will take place first and those 32 teams will be announced on the main tournament page. We will then hold a silent PLEX auction for the remaining 32 slots via EVEmail. If multiple teams submit equal bids for the last spot in the silent auction, the choice of teams will be made randomly to ensure exactly 32 team entries from the silent auction.

If a team drops out of the tournament for any reason, their spot will be offered to the next highest auction bidder that was not successful in the auction.

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

 

Payment

Entry for the random draw will be 5 PLEX per alliance. Each alliance who wishes to enter the draw must submit 5 PLEX, in the redeeming system of the CEO of the executor corporation, which will be withdrawn before the draw. All PLEX will be retained by CCP and teams who are not successful in the random draw can use these PLEX to bid for a spot through the auction. If you are not successful in either the random draw or auction, your 5 PLEX will be refunded to the CEO character of the alliance executor corporation.

 

Competition Dates

• Alliance Signup Period – June 3rd until June 9th at 23:59 UTC
• Live stream of the 32 team random draw - June 11th
• Silent Auction Period – June 12^th to the 16^th at 23:59 UTC
• Participating Teams & Schedule Confirmed - June 19th
• Tournament Weekend One (Non-studio, no banning) - July 20^th & 21^st
• Tournament Weekend Two (Studio, Banning active) - July 27^th & 28^th
• Tournament Weekend Three (Studio, Banning, Finals) - August 3^rd and 4^th

 

Tournament Entry

All entrants will be required to sign up via the Alliance Tournament section of the EVE Online website. The 64 competing teams will be decided as follows:

• 32 Teams will be drawn randomly. The draw will be held live on CCP’s official Twitch.tv stream on June 11th, and recorded.
• 32 Teams will bid for positions with a silent PLEX auction over EVEmail. All silent auction bids will be sent to CCP Gargant ingame.
• Entry into the random draw will cost 5 PLEX, auction slots will begin at 5 PLEX and have no maximum price.

 

Practice Server

This year we will be dedicating the Duality test server as a dedicated Alliance Tournament practice server. This will allow us to more easily tailor our updates and mirrors to the needs of tournament teams. Access to this server will be restricted to a list of pilots and/or corporations provided by each team captain or alliance executor CEO.

We expect this server will significantly streamline the tournament practice process and allow more alliances to take advantage of team practices in the lead up to the tournament. It will run the same version of EVE that will be used for the live tournament, it will not be mirrored during practice season, and it will have no daily downtime.

More information about the Duality Practice Server will be coming soon.

 

Tournament Format

Alliance Tournament XI will be held as one continuous double elimination tournament with random initial seeding. There will be no pre-qualifying rounds, and no groups rounds.

The match rules and format will remain largely the same throughout the entire tournament, with the following exceptions:

• To save time and complication, there will be no ship banning for the matches taking place in the first weekend. Ship banning rules will be in effect for the second and third weekends.
• The final three matches of the winners bracket, as well as the final two matches of the losers bracket, will be best of three series.
• The finals will be a best of five series, with the team entering from the winners bracket starting one win up.

 

Since this format is much simpler and far superior, there are no additional notes and we don’t need to split important rules across two pages!

 

Rules

Tournament Rules

This is a single-stage, double elimination tournament with 64 teams allowed to enter.

As a player, you may only compete for a single alliance, regardless of how many player-accounts you own.

All competing pilots must be members of the alliance for which they are competing, and have been a member of that alliance by 11:00 UTC May 15^th 2013.

All alliance members are eligible to compete in any match in which their alliance is taking part, subject to all applicable rules; teams do not have to remain the same between games.

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

 

Match Rules

Teams can field up to twelve pilots on the battlefield.

Fights are limited to 10 minutes. If a fight reaches time, it will be stopped and whichever team has the higher total points value will be declared winner. See "Victory Conditions", below.

Intentional pod killing is NOT allowed and may result in the offender being punished. All podkills will be reimbursed.

The match simulation is taken as is. Teams are advised to spend the pre warp-in time to verify that their ships are completely operational.

 

Penalties

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

• Points deduction
• Reducing the offending ship(s) shield / armor / hull / capacitor to 50%
• Involuntary moving of the offending ship(s)
• Removal from the fight
• Ban from competing for one or more matches.
• Ban from competing for the remainder of the tournament, and/or any future tournaments.

The referees can call a match null and void or declare a result if they believe that one of the teams is not competing. This tournament is designed to showcase the talents of pilots and should be entertaining.

 

Place & Tactics

Participants should be prepared, in their chosen ships and in a fleet, 20 minutes before their scheduled fight time. Teams will be brought by a GM to a star system in uncharted space and designated as team 1 and team 2. If you are not ready within this time allocation you will be disqualified from this match and the opposing team will be given an automatic win.

For matches in the second and third tournament weekend, captains must be online and available 45 minutes prior to the match to make their ban choices. Further details on bans can be found in the subsection Ships and bans.

There are eight beacons in the system, which serve as start off points. Four beacons are marked for Team 1 and four marked for Team 2. Teams will be moved to the beacon of their captains choosing.

Once the word is given, teams warp in to the beacon at a range of their choosing, up to a maximum of 50 km. Team members are allowed to warp in at different ranges.

The arena will measure 125 km radius around the central beacon.

The host will begin a countdown. When the countdown ends, the host will break target locks of all ships in the arena.

If a player warps out/leaves the arena, his/her ship will be destroyed. This includes disconnection emergency warps. This rule is in effect before and during the match.

Warping within the arena is NOT allowed.

Dropping cargo containers or other anchorable items is NOT allowed. Dropping regular jettison containers is allowed.

The following restrictions are in place after teams warp to the arena beacon, until the match begins:

• Locking players before the match starts is NOT allowed.
• Activating aggressive or targeted modules before the match starts is NOT allowed.
• Launching drones before the match starts is NOT allowed.
• Moving before the match starts is NOT allowed.

Boarding a ship during the match is not allowed.

 

Ships & Points

Each team has 100 points with which to select their ships.

Each team may have up to 12 ships on the battlefield.

Teams may field no more than 3 of a given ship. This applies to specifically named ships only, and not ship hulls. For example, 3 Merlins, 3 Hawks, and 3 Harpies would be legal.

Teams may field no more than 1 logistics ship, or 1 tech one support cruiser, or 1 support frigate.

Ship point values are as follows. Ship types not listed in the table are not allowed.

• Battleship, Pirate Faction - 20
• Marauder – 19
• Battleship, Navy Faction - 19
• Battleship - 17
• Black Ops Battleship - 17
• Command Ship - 16
• Strategic Cruiser – 16
• Recon Ship – 14
• Battlecruiser, Navy Faction – 14
• Battlecruiser (Including Gnosis) – 13
• Logistics Cruiser - 13
• Cruiser, Faction - 12
• Heavy Assault Cruiser - 12
• Heavy Interdictor – 12
• Tech 1 Support Cruiser - 10
• Cruiser - 7
• Bomber - 5
• Electronic Attack Frigate - 5
• Frigate, Faction - 4
• Assault Frigate – 4
• Tech 1 Disruption Frigate - 4
• Interdictor - 3
• Interceptor - 3
• Destroyer - 3
• Tech 1 Industrial Ships - 3
• Frigate - 2

 

Fitting Restrictions

All T1 and T2 modules are allowed, with the following exceptions:

• All Remote Armor Repair modules and Remote Shield Transfer modules are NOT allowed, EXCEPT on ONE of: a Logistics Ship, a Strategic Cruiser, a Tech 1 Support Cruiser, or a Tech 1 Support Frigate.
• Only ONE Remote Energy Transfer module is allowed per ship.

Faction, COSMOS, deadspace and officer modules are NOT allowed.

T1 Rigs are allowed. T2 Rigs are NOT allowed.

All T1 and T2 ammunition, missiles and charges are allowed. Faction ammunition, missiles and capacitor boosters are allowed.

All drones are allowed, including Logistics drones and Augmented drones.

Attribute Enhancers that give bonuses to anything other than perception, intelligence, willpower, memory, and charisma are NOT allowed.

Genolution "CA-" implants are NOT allowed.

With the exception of leadership Mindlinks, only Hardwirings that have a name ending in "1", "2" or "3" are allowed.

Leadership Mindlinks are allowed.

Boosters (drugs) are NOT allowed.

Cloaking is NOT allowed.

Cap Boosters are allowed.

Micro-jump drives are allowed.

The Ancillary Shield Boost module will be restricted to one module per ship for those pilots who wish to fit them.

 

Flagships

Any standard T1 or Faction battleship hull may be designated as a flagship.

Team captains must indicate to the GM managing their match if they intend to use their flagship in any given match, and which pilot is flying the flagship.

Flagships are able to fit faction, officer, cosmos, and Deadspace versions of the following modules, ignoring tournament rules to the contrary:

• All Highslot Modules (not including remote armour repair modules, remote shield transfer modules, or cloaking devices)
• Electronic Warfare Modules
• Weapon Upgrade Modules
• ONE Shield Booster or up to TWO Armour Repairers

Flagship ship types must be created in advance and their ship type submitted to CCP Alliance Tournament via EVEmail no later than July 14th. The fittings for a flagship do not have to be disclosed. The names of flagships do not to be disclosed or remain constant this year, unlike previous tournaments. Fittings may also be changed from match to match.

All flagship hull types will be published in the flagships section of the EVE Online Alliance Tournament site following the deadline date.

A flagship may be fielded in any match, even if its ship type has been banned, and counts as a normal ship in every way other than the ones defined above.

A flagship costs the same points value as for a normal ship of its type.

You are under no obligation to field your flagship in any given match.

If your flagship is destroyed, it may not be fielded again during the tournament.

 

Victory Conditions

During a match, a team scores points for each enemy ship it kills, equal to the tournament points value of that ship. The team that has scored the most points at the conclusion of the match, or that destroys the entire opposing team, is the winner.

If a team chooses to field less than 100 points, non-fielded points count towards the opponent's score.

If a fight is tied after 10 minutes, time dilation will be used to progressively speed up the tournament solar system and encourage a prompt end to the match.

In the very unlikely case that a fight is tied after 15 minutes, the victory will be awarded to the team that had more collective potential team DPS at the beginning of the match, as measured by the tournament automated “attack bar”.

 

Ships and Bans

Banning of ships will occur during all matches in the second and third tournament weekend. The matches in the first weekend will not include banning.

Team captains must be online and available to conduct ship bans 45 minutes before the start of each match in the second and third weekends. At 44 minutes before each match if the captain is unavailable their team’s bans are forfeit.

Each team gets two bans.

The way the banning phase works is as follows:

The team which starts the banning phase is decided randomly

All ships that are eligible for competition are eligible for banning.

Bans are done in 1 – 2 – 1 order rather than the 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 that we saw in the New Eden Open. For example Team A will take the first ban, Team B will take the second and third ban, and Team A will finish the banning phase with the fourth ban.

Each ban has a time limit of 30 seconds; if no ship is selected within that timeframe the ban is forfeit.

Each ban targets a specific ship type and not a ship class or other hull. For example, banning the Harpy would not exclude the Hawk or frigates in general.

Flagships can be used even if their ship type has been banned for a match.

Teams should endeavor to have multiple ship setups available as bans may impact your primary team setup. No additional time will be given if teams do not have eligible ships available.

During the final day of competition, some matches will require teams to be ready within 15 minutes after the completion of banning. We expect that many teams will find this time limit challenging. The best teams in New Eden will be the ones that can adapt quickly.

 

That covers our rules and format for this 11th Alliance Tournament! As mentioned above, these rules are all subject to change if needed, so we advise competitors to periodically check the EVE Alliance Tournament section of the official forums for any news.

We will be broadcasting the whole tournament live and for free on our CCPGames twitch.tv page, so subscribe there to be updated instantly when the action starts! To watch past tournaments, head on over to the CCP Games Youtube channel!

We are very excited to work alongside all of our viewers and competitors to bring you another exciting Alliance Tournament, and we wish all the competing alliances the best of luck with your preperations.

As discussed in this dev blog, we are introducing Single Sign On (SSO) to more of our websites; the EVElopedia, EVE Gate and the EVE Online Forums will be updated to use SSO in the coming days.

This update does not affect your username and password; the change is simply that you will be directed to the new log in page which functions the same as the old one. After logging in once you will not need to re-enter your credentials when you visit another EVE Online website that also uses SSO.

We will also be doing some behind-the-scenes upgrades to the EVElopedia software and updating the Item Database to the latest version.  This will require the EVElopedia to be locked for editing for a few hours while the update is in progress.

There may be a short down-time for each website while the updates are being deployed, but we do not expect it to be for very long.

Hello capsuleers!

This is SoniClover from team Super Friends, telling you about some of the things the team has been working on for EVE Online: Odyssey's June 4th release.

The team took part in the theme-conception work overseen by CCP Seagull earlier in the year. From that work the exploration theme emerged as something we wanted to focus the expansion on. Super Friends part in this work was looking at the current probe scanning system to see what changes were needed to fit the overall vision.

What is this overall vision? The overall vision for exploration is to make it a more noticeable part of the game and lower the barrier of entry. Exploration is something that appeals to a lot of players, but because it is so obscure it was rarely something that newer players entered early. Instead, newer players tend to go for easily accessible systems like missioning or mining as their first careers. The goal was to try to make exploration as easily accessible in the early stages as those two, as exploration allows players to experience better the unique flair of EVE than mining or missioning does.

This is no easy task, as this has to be accomplished while at the same time retaining the functionality of the scan probing as a whole for other users of the system, such as veteran explorers, wormhole dwellers and scouts. While the focus this time around was on accessibility and basic mechanics, we feel this is only the tip of the iceberg and the changes we’re making now give us an opportunity to expand the exploration mechanic at the higher end, adding more depth of gameplay, in the future.

 

It’s full of probes!

With the vision discussion out of the way, let’s delve into the meat and bone of this dev blog – the changes coming in Odyssey.

So let’s start with the changes we’re doing for probe scanning:

• You launch all probes in your launcher at once, regardless of how many you currently have loaded. You can have a maximum of 8 probes in space at the same time. All players can use 8 probes now by default as the Astrometrics skill no longer limits the number.
• There are two pre-set formations coming in Odyssey for players to use – Spread (probes aligned to cover a large area) and Pinpoint (probes aligned to focus on one point). These are not intended to be the absolute best possible formations, but rather a solid starting point for budding explorers.
• The probes launch into space next to your ship, but the formation view in the solar system map is centered around the sun and is not indicating the current position of the probes until you hit scan and they warp to the positions you've determined.
• The default method for moving probes is a single handle for all probes you have out. Holding Shift will give you an individual handle for each probe, same as the current default. Holding Alt allows you to move your probes closer together.
• Probes will also resize together by default, holding Shift allows for individual resizing. Note that this is the opposite of the previous system. Resizing probes keeps them centered. We’ve also made the celestial brackets be less in the way when moving/resizing probes.
• The recall and expire options have been changed a bit – recall is now instantaneous and happens automatically on system jump or dock. Probes still have a timer, but instead of being lost when the timer is out, they automatically recall instead. The system remembers your last probe setup before they were automatically recalled so they can be quickly deployed again in the same pattern (by activating the launcher). No more forsaken probes in space!
• On the visual side, the scanner window is changing a bit. Apart from some basic polish, we’ve added the buttons for setting formations. The formations only work if you have 8 probes total, they do not support fewer than that at the moment.
  
• The scan result list is seeing the biggest amount of changes. The progress towards getting a warpable signature has been made much more visually clear, as well as indicating the difference between your current and last scan results. This allows players to get a better sense of how well they’re progressing towards the signature they’re focusing on.
• As mentioned above, the Astrometrics skill no longer dictates the number of probes you can use. Instead, it now gives a bonus to all of the relevant areas of probe scanning (scan strength +5%, scan deviation -5% and scanning time -5% per level). The specialized skills (Astrometrics Rangefinding, Astrometrics Pinpointing and Astrometrics Acquisition) instead give lower boost per level (5% instead of 10%). Another change is that Astrometrics is now a starting skill for new players, same as Mining for instance. The skill was given out in the exploration career agent chain, but it is much more straightforward to have players start with it, plus it aligns better with the vision of making entry into exploration be on equal footing to mining.
• We’re adding new modules that affect scan probing. These are three types of modules that affect the same things as the specialty skills (scan strength, scan deviation and scanning time). Each module type has a tech I and tech II versions, the tech I version has BPOs on market, the tech II versions can only be acquired through invention and they require a new ingredient only found in archaeology sites to build.
• Deep Space Probes (DSP) are being removed. With the overall changes to scanning (not just probe scanning, but also the addition of the Sensor Overlay), players are getting a fairly good overview of non-ship objects in a system. Combat probes exist to track down ships and are intended to become the new main avenue of scanning down ships. The other changes and additions coming in Odyssey speed up scanning down ships and removing the DSP counters this a bit. This means that on the whole, scanning down ships is going to take approximately the same as before, but with greater variations depending on circumstances. Existing DSPs will be changed into their corresponding combat versions.
• The career agent missions and tutorials have been updated with the changes coming in Odyssey.

 

The Name of the Game

We’re changing the terminology of a few things, plus adjusting distribution somewhat.

• We changed the terminology of some of the exploration sites:
  - Radar sites become Data sites
  - Magnometric sites become Relic sites
  - Gravimetric sites become Ore sites
  - Ladar sites become Gas sites
  - The Unknown type has also been split into Combat and Wormholes.
• The main reason for this change is that the Radar/Ladar/etc. terminology is already in use elsewhere in the game and having the same term for two different things can only lead to confusion.
• We’re also changing the name of the hacking and archaeology modules:
  - Codebreaker becomes Data Analyzer
  - Analyzer becomes Relic Analyzer
• The main reason for this name change was to tie the two module types better together and reduce confusion, especially when it comes to the Analyzer name.
• A final name change is for decryptors. The old decryptors had thematically strong, but very random names. The new naming scheme is easier to grok, while retaining a bit of the thematic appeal.
• We’ve removed Salvaging as a thing of its own in exploration sites. No salvaging sites will be distributed post-Odyssey and there are no special salvaging containers.
• As part of the work Team Five-0 is doing, Ore sites (aka Gravimetric sites) are being made Cosmic Anomalies instead of Cosmic Signatures, meaning you no longer need probes to find them.

 

Finders Keepers

We’ve made several important changes to loot drops in exploration sites:

• To compensate for salvaging sites no longer appearing, archaeology sites drop more salvaging materials now than before (there was no special salvaging-only loot in salvage sites).
• Because players are no longer guaranteed to receive all the loot when opening a profession container, loot drops have been increased to compensate. This is a combination of increased drop chance, increased quantity, higher number of runs, etc. On average, a solo player should receive loot of equal value post-Odyssey as he receives now.
• We’ve added some new loot into the mix to make exploring a bit more interesting:
  - Three new decryptors, one has similar drop rate as existing ones, two (with the prefix Optimized) have a lower drop rate.
  - Capital rigs, tech I and tech II versions. Tech I is seeded on market, tech II BPCs you get from exploration sites or through invention.
  - Faction POS structures, BPCs for both versions (i.e. Blood/Dark Blood) can now drop in exploration sites. These have a very, very low drop rate.

 

Market Mania

We’ve made a few changes to market groups, to make it easier to find some items:

• Decryptors are now listed in a more rational way. Instead of being under faction groups in Prototypes and Datafiles under Research & Invention, it is now listed under the empires and the group name is Prototypes and Decryptors.
• There are two new groups under Ship Equipment, named Scanning Equipment and Harvest Equipment:
  - The scanning equipment group has the ship, cargo and survey scanners as well as the hacking (Data Analyzer) and archaeology (Relic Analyzer) modules. This group also has the probe launchers. The survey probe launchers now have their own sub-group.
  - The harvest equipment group has all the different mining equipment (lasers, ice, gas, etc.), as well as salvagers and mining upgrades.

 

Some POS work

In addition to the exploration work described above, Super Friends also did a couple of POS stories:

• We added Personal Hangar Array. This is similar to the Corporate Hangar Array, but, as the name implies, is for personal storage only. The PHA has a storage capacity of 50,000.
• We adjusted the arrows and camera when positioning POS modules, to make it less of a hassle.

 

Future Maybes

There are a few things that we want to get in, but aren’t able to in Odyssey. We aim to get these things in for a point release, but can’t promise it. Here are the most pertinent ones:

• Custom formations – Odyssey will only have a very basic formation setup. We want to expand this and allow players to save their own formations and support formations with variable number of probes in them.
• Scan history – the colored bars in the scan result list give an indication of whether a specific result got better or worse from your last scan. We want to take this further and allow players to essentially ‘go back’ to a previous result.
• Improved visual clues – we want to make it clearer in the scan result list what results are at maximum signal strength for the current scan range set.

 

That’s it for Team Super Friends, we hope you enjoy these changes and have a great summer!

 

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