A few weeks before a big expansion hits usually is the time for reflection on how well we have packed things together. In our case here, it’s all about having a final look at the ships we are tackling for Odyssey. And by “we”, I mean our team of rabid ship designing slave-monkeys, mainly CCP Fozzie and Rise.

So total, we are bringing you 40 revamped hulls in the next expansion, 4 of these being new – which fit as part of a Navy theme to complement the recent storyline events in New Eden, as requested by our evil CCP Soundwave and Seagull overlords.

Click to enlarge

So, let’s have a look at what’s changing for Odyssey and make sure our balancing boys worked properly – otherwise they aren’t going to eat for a while.

Skill Changes

As mentioned several times throughout the year, we are going change many skill requirements in Odyssey. Since this has been extensively covered beforehand, we highly recommend you read at the proper blog for more details so you can prepare accordingly, even if it is quite late at this point.

Short summary is that:

• Destroyers and Battlecruisers skills are being split in four racial versions and being reimbursed
• Skill requirements are changing for 23 ship classes (Rookie Ships, Navy Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Navy Cruisers, Battlecruisers, Battleships, Navy Battleships, Carriers, Supercarriers, Dreadnoughts, Titans, Electronic Attack Ships, Interdictors, Heavy Assault Cruisers, Recon Ships, Heavy Interdiction Cruisers, Command Ships, Industrials, Freighters, Mining Barges, Industrial Command Ship and Capital Industrial Ship)

Navy Frigates

For Odyssey we decided to revamp the full line of Navy faction ships, all the way from Frigates to Battleships, as well as adding the new Navy Battlecruisers.

To start off the process we did a balance pass on the four Navy Frigates, which are very popular for their moderate prices and generally strong abilities, especially in Factional Warfare space. These ships needed smaller changes than the others. The Republic Fleet Firetail received the most significant overhaul, getting a stronger damage bonus and significantly more HP. The other Navy Frigates received smaller tweaks, mainly to their fittings.

Navy Cruisers

The next step on the Navy overhaul was the eight Navy Cruisers. These ships were suffering very severely from all the problems inherent with the old Tier system. The higher tier versions (Omen Navy Issue, Caracal Navy Issue, Vexor Navy Issue, Stabber Fleet Issue) were decent ships in their own right, although overshadowed to a certain extent by the newly buffed T1 Cruisers. The lower-tier versions (Augoror Navy Issue, Osprey Navy Issue, Exequror Navy Issue, Scythe Fleet Issue) on the other hand, were terrible.

So we have given these ships the full Tiericide treatment, splitting them into Combat (Augoror Navy Issue, Caracal Navy Issue, Vexor Navy Issue, Stabber Fleet Issue) and Attack (Omen Navy Issue, Osprey Navy Issue, Exequror Navy Issue, Scythe Fleet Issue)

• The Omen Navy Issue is trading some hit points in to get a lot more speed and range. With new bonuses to Laser optimal range and damage it will zip around the battlefield skirmishing with the best of them. Pilots will need to manage capacitor carefully with this ship, but it will be deadly in the right hands.
• The Osprey Navy Issue will fly much like an improved version of the Tech 1 Caracal, using mobility, range and an exceptional six midslots to control the battlefield.
• The Exequror Navy Issue is doubling down on its old role as an all-in blasterboat. It’s keeping the double damage bonus that made it unique among blaster cruisers, and gaining a new turret to place it clearly at the top of the cruiser damage per second charts. However it will need to be in close to do that damage, so in the game of Exequrors you either win or you die.
• The Scythe Fleet Issue is the first in a grand project to redeem the Minmatar tradition of split weapon bonuses. Instead of the old system where pilots were pushed into using two different highslot weapons, the new Fleet Scythe has double-strength damage bonuses for both projectiles and missiles. This means that it is very powerful with either weapon system and an opponent will never know what to expect when they see a Fleet Scythe on scan.
• The Augoror Navy Issue is built as the ultimate cruiser brawler. With bonuses to armor HP and a huge 25% per level damage bonus for three turrets, it can take advantage of a strong buffer tank and two utility highslots to outlast its opponent.
• The Caracal Navy Issue is the first in a new tradition of Caldari Navy missile ships with bonuses to explosion radius. This bonus allows the ship to apply damage much more effectively than most, and it will be able to tangle with a wide variety of opponents.
• The Vexor Navy Issue is getting a big increase in drone bandwidth, making it the most nimble ship capable of fielding a full flight of five heavy drones or sentry drones. A bonus to drone velocity and tracking replaces the old blaster bonus, ensuring that a Navy Vexor focused purely on drone damage will be a force to be reckoned with.
• The Stabber Fleet Issue is receiving the smallest changes of all these Cruisers, as it is already the most effective and most used Navy Cruiser. Small tweaks to hitpoints and mass for polish is all this ship needs to remain balanced and desired.

Attack Battlecruisers

We felt those vessels were overstepping a bit on other classes, mainly Cruisers and to some extend Battleships. However, since Tech 1 Cruisers have been buffed in Retribution and Tech 1 Battleships are receiving the same treatment for Odyssey, only small tweaks are necessary. That is why we are only giving them small decrease in mobility, scan resolution and signature radius for now, even if we are going to keep watching them in the near future.

Yes, we do know Heavy Assault Cruisers are being overshadowed by them as well, and we will come to them in due time, oh yes my precious, we will.

Navy Battlecruisers

For Odyssey we wanted to give a strong emphasis on the four main Empire factions and we believe there is no better way to build excitement than releasing Navy variations of the already popular Battlecruiser hulls.

• The Harbinger Navy Issue was a tough call to balance. Going for a traditional Amarr combat philosophy of “slow inflexible brick with guns everywhere” proved to be disappointing during internal playtests. We thus opted to give this vessel something that often lacks in the Imperial Navy line, flexibility by giving it an additional 5^th medium slot and swapping its medium energy turret capacitor reduction bonus with a tracking bonus.
• As explained in our previous Blog, we did not wish to directly improve on the already good capabilities of the Drake, which is why the Drake Navy Issue instead offers extended flexibility with better mobility and damage application than its regular Tech 1 counterpart.
• Choosing between which hull to pick between the Brutix or Myrmidon proved to be tricky for Odyssey – we finally picked the former as we foresaw some heavy role overlap for a possible Myrmidon Navy Issue with the Ishtar, Vexor Navy Issue, Gila or even Dominix. As a result, the Brutix Navy Issue is a ship that directly iterates on the strengths of its predecessor, with improved low slot layout and better damage application.
• For the Minmatar, we decided to bring the old, pre-nerfed flexibility of the Hurricane back into the Fleet brand. As such, you will find the Hurricane Fleet Issue to be an extremely versatile and familiar ship, with many possible configurations to choose from.

Acquisition method:

• Regular corporation LP stores, blueprint offer: 200,000 LPs plus 100 million ISK for 1 run blueprint copy (BPC)
• Regular corporation LP stores, built ship offer: 250,000 LPs plus 1x built Tech 1 Battlecruiser plus two Cruiser sized Nexus Chips
• FW Loyalty Point stores, blueprint offer: for 100,000 LPs plus 10m ISK for 1 run BPC
• FW Loyalty Point Stores, built ship offer: 100,000 LPs plus 1x built Tech 1 Battlecruiser plus two Cruiser sized Nexus Chips

Tech 1 Battleships

Odyssey will forever hold a special place in that empty and black spot where our hearts used to be for rebalancing one of the most iconic classes of the game, Tech 1 Battleships. Next to other vessels we’ve tackled as part of the “Tiericide” initiative in the previous expansions, Tech 1 Battleships were relatively well balanced by stat, the problem laid in their role distribution. As explained below, some of them required creative thinking to rebalance, and we do hope the results will shift the meta-game in interesting ways for the upcoming months.

Amarr Battleships

• As we started looking into this class, we realized the Armageddon was in a very precarious position; for being the former Amarrian Tier 1 Battleship, it made sense to provide a hard-hitting turret based option before moving into the Apocalypse and Abaddon. However, removing tiers made us realize it would compete with the Abaddon on the same niche, which motivated us to look for creative solutions to solve this problem. As a result, the Armageddon role is moving away from its standard combat turret platform to a more devious energy neutralizing drone ship.
• Until now the Apocalypse was renowned as a very comfortable hull due to its large capacitor, further enhanced by the Large Energy Turret Capacitor use reduction provided by one of its bonuses. However, it was judged quite dull by our balancing team, and as a result we have changed this previously mentioned bonus to favor turret tracking instead. For moving into the “Attack Battleship” role, the Apocalypse is also gaining mobility and is about to become a damage projection bully at its designated medium-long engagement range.
• The Abaddon was the Amarrian hull in the least need for change, as its role is already potent in multiple scenarios. As such there is not much to write about it, except the armor resistance decrease which is global to many hulls (see below for more details).

Caldari Battleships

• Overall we are pleased with the Scorpion for being the only purely Disruption focused Battleship. Thus its changes were minimal, mainly with a slight increase in hit points and the swap of a high slots in favor of a 5^th low slot.
• The old tactic known as “Cavalry Raven” that used that vessel in a speed setup may be coming back as this venerable hull is being moved into an Attack role. Literally, that means the Raven gains mobility and trades one of its two utility high slots for a 7^th medium slot. This change also has a very strong synergy with our Cruise Missiles boost, explained below, so who knows, this ship may even be used in PvP situations again. Time will tell.
• The Rokh remains a very solid choice for large engagements, or any kind of situation requiring what we internally call a strong “tank’n’spank” power. As such it’s not affected that much, except again for the shield resistance bonuses being slightly lowered.

Gallente Battleships

• The Dominix, also known as the old war shoe, the flying potato or even the space whale, has seen considerable service over the years. Adaptable in a myriad of ways, we nevertheless decided to swap its role from what essentially was a Turret plus Drones split weapon system to purely focus on the latter. It is now aiming to be much more efficient with Sentry drones than any other ship in-game, which is a distinct advantage.
• The Megathron is one of our favorite hulls in-game. Over the years though, it suffered setbacks as a Blaster platform, due to its poor mobility with plated setups and tight fittings. We want to emphasize its role as the Gallente main gunboat platform by moving it into the Attack role. Technically it means improved mobility, swapping the utility high slot for a 8^th low slot and replacing the Large Hybrid Turret Damage bonus with a Rate of Fire one to see further use in fleet engagements.
• The Hyperion has been one of the most delicate problems we had to tackle for Odyssey, as it suffered a role crisis – initially designed as a close range blaster platform, it overstepped on the Megathron, and was ill-equipped to fully use that active Armor tanking bonus with only 6 low slots. As such, we are moving it to be the flexible small gang stepchild of the Gallente Battleship line, by providing it with a versatile 7H / 5M / 7L slot layout and a good dronebay.

Minmatar Battleships

• The Typhoon was well known among our player base as the perfect embodiment of the “jack-of-all-trade, master of none” philosophy. While we acknowledge it provided an interesting role on the field, we did not necessarily agree with how niche it remained, or how much skill training it demanded to fly effectively. Instead, we are turning it into a missile launching monster by replacing the Turret bonus with a Cruise Missile and Torpedo explosion velocity, giving it 6 launchers and tweaking its slow layout to 7H / 5M / 7L.
• There was little need to alter the Tempest attributes as its role as a flexible Attack Battleship is well set in stone already. As such, only slight tweaks were made to it, mainly by slightly increasing its hit points, fittings and mobility.
• The Maelstrom role remains healthy and secure, and as such nothing is changing on it.

Price changes

As we have done with the previous Tech 1 ship classes that have gone through rebalancing, mineral prices for Tech 1 Battleships are going to be adjusted to meet the new “Tiericide” requirements.

• Former Tier 1 and 2 Battleships (Armageddon, Apocalypse, Scorpion, Raven, Dominix, Megathron, Typhoon and Tempest) are being increased to be approximately on par with the current Tier 3 Battleships (Abaddon, Rokh, Hyperion, Maelstorm).

This is quite mandatory for several reasons:

• There is no need to have price differential within ships of the same class if tiers are gone. If all of them have an equally valuable role, price should match.
• We cannot decrease overall costs of Battleships due to the mineral consumption linked with the production of the current Tier 3 Battleships. Doing so would affect the market adversely.

After studying various metrics at our disposal, we concluded increasing the price on such fashion would not affect Battleship acquisition that much due to inflation and increasing wealth generation over the years.

So, in practice:

• The most expensive Battleships are going to be Combat related, with an estimated price around 150m-180m ISK. This includes the Armageddon, Abaddon, Rokh, Dominix, Hyperion and Maelstrom.
• Other Battleships whose role is either Attack or Disruption will settle with an average price of 100-130m ISK. Thus the Apocalypse, Scorpion, Raven, Megathron, Typhoon and Tempest.

As usual, the increase in mineral requirements will be done through Extra Materials that won’t be obtained through refining. All the prices stated above are rough estimates, your mileage may vary depeding on market speculation, conspiracy plots, backstabbing schemes and alliance drama.

Navy Battleships

As part of something we hinted in our previous blog, Navy Battleships also are receiving some love in Odyssey. As with their Tech 1 counterparts, we are dead set into removing tiers from them so each has a unique purpose.

• The Armageddon Navy Issue performs well and we believe its current role as a laser brawler to be adequate. As a result it is not changing much, except for slightly more hit points, fittings and 25m3 additional drone bay.
• The Apocalypse Navy Issue inherits the same traits as its Tech 1 variation by being moved into the Attack role. This means better mobility, reduction in hit points, but swapping the Large Energy Turret Capacitor reduction with the tracking bonus.
• With the Cruise Missile boost and the gain of an extra low slot, the Scorpion Navy Issue has potential to become an extremely dangerous hull to cope with, and we are going to keep an eye open on this one to make sure it does not asphyxiate other Battleships.
• Inspired from the Drake Navy Issue, his bigger cousin the Raven Navy Issue now provides extended flexibility with 8 launchers combined with a missile explosion radius and velocity bonuses. It also follows the same pattern than its regular Tech 1 counterpart by being moved into the Attack role: more mobility, a 7^th med slot at the expense of slightly less hit points.
• The Dominix Navy Issue roughly keeps the same attributes as before, as we wished to keep it unique and were not willing to change it on the same pattern than its Tech 1 counterpart. For being a Combat ship however, it gains some hit points at the cost of mobility and signature radius.
• The Megathron Navy Issue will iterate on the strengths of its new standard variation for being switched to an Attack role with fast mobility and good damage with its new Rate of Fire bonus. It also has room for a utility high slot and more drones in general than its Tech 1 variation.
• We wanted to keep a unique flavor for the Typhoon Fleet Issue by preserving the split weapon bonus, but trying to make it right this time around. As such, this vessel has 7.5% bonus to Cruise and Torpedo damage and 7.5% to Large Projectile Rate of Fire per level, while boasting 8H / 5M / 7L with 6 turrets and launchers.
• Finally, with the Tempest Fleet Issue we wanted to experiment on maintaining a hull flexible enough for multi-purpose situations. As such, while being officially sorted as a Combat this hull offers a good enough mix of hit points, mobility and low signature radius to be considered as an Attack-Combat hybrid.

LP offer changes:

Just like the Tech 1 Battleships, Navy versions are going to be consistently unified in price all across the board. Not only does that mean their Blueprint Mineral requirements are going to be closely matching the prices indicated above, but it means that LP offers for the former Tier 1 Battleships is going to be leveled at Tier 2 prices.

• The Armageddon Navy Issue, Scorpion Navy Issue, Dominix Navy Issue and Typhoon Fleet Issue LP offer costs are going to be increased to 250,000 LPs in the 24^th Imperial Crusade, State Protectorate, Federal Defense Union and Tribal Liberation Force LP Stores.

Module and general changes

Sometimes only looking at ship hulls is not enough to fix specific issues and crippling gameplay. This is particularly true for Odyssey, as we had to closely look at a certain number of attached problems to ensure our Tiericide changes were healthy as a whole.

Cruise Missiles

Long have Cruise Missiles been waiting for some attention – we found them sobbing in their little corner, reminding us of the now extinct age of the ‘Arbalest’ Cruise Missile Launcher I Raven. They begged for mercy, claiming they suffered enough and that they won’t insta-pop Frigates ever again, promise.

And so CCP Rise came forth and said, “fear not, my child” then basked them in his balancing light. And they were grateful:

• Cruise Missile Launchers Rate of Fire has been increased by 5% (they fire faster)
• Velocity of all Cruise Missiles has been increased to 4700m/s
• All Cruise Missiles base damage has been increased by 25%
• To compensate, Cruise Missile Launcher Powergrid requirements have been increased by 200
• Cruise Missile base flight time has been decreased to 14 seconds and their explosion radius has been increased by 10%

As a result, all Cruise Missiles should now hit harder, faster at the cost of slightly tightened fitting requirements and reduced damage application to smaller targets. In all cases, they will complement your Raven or Typhoon setups well and shall blot out the sun. Treat them well.

Large Energy Turrets

When rebalancing the Apocalypse and its Navy evil twin, we realized Large Energy Turrets were not only difficult to squeeze in, but also quite capacitor hungry. Since using wrench and duct tape to fit things remains the dedicated area of Minmatar engineers, we decided to soften them up a bit.

• All Large Beam Laser capacitor needs have been decreased by 20%, powergrid requirements have been reduced by 10%
• All Large Pulse Laser capacitor needs have been decreased by 10%

Navy hull rig calibration increase

As miscellaneous note, we realized only having 350 calibration on Navy hulls didn’t make much sense since they are supposed to be improvements over Tech 1 ships. As such, with Odyssey they will autoretromagically have 400 calibration instead. These were not the rigs you were looking for.

X-Large Weapons

Balance between the different Dreadnaughts has been an issue for a long time, and their vast increase in use since Crucible has made the problem more pronounced. We want to be very careful with these ships to ensure that none of them get broken, so we are starting a process of small iterations to capital weapons to help bring the class into balance. For Odyssey we are reducing the tracking of capital blasters and autocannons, reducing the range of capital blasters and increasing it for capital pulse lasers, and significantly improving the Phoenix by removing the explosion velocity penalty from siege modules. These changes do not go the whole way, but they are a step in the right direction and we are committed to take those steps carefully and correctly.

RSB and TEs

Two more modules that will be receiving tweaks in Odyssey are Remote Sensor Boosters and Tracking Enhancers. RSBs are too good for supporting “instalock” gatecaps with large ships, and are seeing their scan resolution bonus lowered slightly. TEs are receiving a reduction in their optimal range and falloff bonuses, to bring them in line with other similar modules such as Tracking Computers.

Ship Resistance changes

We are also turning our attention to ship resistance bonuses in Odyssey. These bonuses are among the most powerful in the game, and have been overshadowing other defensive bonuses to a large degree. We have chosen to make a small adjustment to the resistance bonuses on all applicable ships, reducing the per-level bonus from 5% to 4%. Resistance bonuses will still be extremely powerful after this change, but the adjustment opens up some room for us to do more interesting things with other defensive bonuses and create more interesting choices in fitting and combat.

And that’s pretty much everything we are delivering to your doorstep for Odyssey - that is quite some heavy package to carry around. We do hope you will enjoy those changes as much as had crafting them and we can't wait to see how EVE tactical gameplay will shift as a result. Stay tuned for more blogs on what's to follow on the ship balancing menu, and may the pew pew be with you, always.

Battleclinic, the popular killboard, fitting respository, and forum for EVE, is sponsoring a Loadout Challenge with great prizes. The first round of their month-long contest is happening this week and runs through June 7th. The rules are simple, design an Executioner or Atron fit usable by someone no older than 45 days! Up for grabs are 60-day and 30-day timecodes as well as plenty of ISK. Check out the full details of the contest here.

Greeting capsuleers, this is CCP Frellicus from Team Five 0 here to introduce our latest addition to the exploration of space in the universe of New Eden.  I’m talking about a system that has been aptly dubbed “the sensor overlay”.  Before we delve into the specifics of the sensor overlay let’s have a few words from my good teammate CCP Greyscale about the general premise of the feature.

So as part of the overall "exploration" package for Odyssey, we (ie Team Five 0, with UI-design direction from CCP Sharq) were tasked by CCP Seagull with creating a feature to make exploration more organically accessible. There's a wealth of content hidden out among the stars, and other teams have been working on improving that content and the surrounding tools, but it all relies on you knowing to launch some probes to track it down. If you're unfamiliar with the probing system it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever find this content, and even if you do know about the necessary tools in principle, you still have to do a lot of scanning (or a lot of wiki-reading) to figure out what's actually out there. Our initial goal with this feature was to give neophyte explorers (of all character ages!) a less disjointed pathway into exploration.

We fairly quickly homed in on creating a simple, visual tool to give characters a sense of what's out there, and to set them off on the path to finding their first "jackpot" moment. We also knew that we wanted something that could be discovered without prompting during the natural course of play; that it had to have a proper sci-fi feel; and that we wanted to avoid increasing, and hopefully even decrease, the game's overall complexity without sacrificing sophistication.

Where we've ended up for this initial release is a feature that's mechanically light-weight, ever-present but - hopefully! - smoothly integrated with existing play flows, and visually and thematically attractive. It's been designed and implemented in a way that lends itself to future extension, but equally can stand on its own as a finished product. As with every feature, there's a bunch of additional things that we'd like to do with it in future, but as it is right now we're pretty happy with how it's turned out.

Right, now that we have gotten that out of the way we can take a look at how the sensor overlay actually works.  You will first notice the sensor overlay moments after you enter space in whatever vessel you have decided to take for a spin whether it be a pod or a the fancy new and mysterious Gnosis.  An automatic sensor sweep will take place stretching across your space view moving horizontally.  The sweep will reveal all the cosmic anomalies and signatures present in a system as the sweep passes over their estimated location in space.  Now I say estimated because for the signatures these locations are wildly inaccurate and need to be scanned down using scanner probes. More about that later.  During the sweep the scanner button in the ship HUD will light up and animate showing the nice little scanner spin around in sync with the scan sweep.  In addition there are spatialized sounds triggered when the sites are revealed along with the scanner button flashing white.  At the end of the sweep there are also different sounds depending on whether we found something or not in the solar system we just entered, so you don’t necessarily need to pan around to learn of the presence of sites or not.

The sensor overlay is controlled via the scanner button in the ship HUD (Head's Up Display).   When you press the button you encounter a new radial button menu.  From there you can enable or disable the sensor overlay by pressing the eye icon on the top.   You can also access all the specific scanner tools directly from there; probe scanner, directional scanner and our beloved moon scanner as well (which may be in high demand in the coming days and weeks).  The radial scanner menu works as a pop up menu as well as a gesture tool like the new radial menu for ship actions where you can press the button and drag in a direction to select a button and release to select it.

The icons for the sites that appear on the overlay are different for anomalies and signatures.  They differ both in color and in shape.   Common to both is the rough diamond shape and a label showing the scanner identifier code and the estimated distance to the site. The anomalies appear as green diamonds and also show the name of the site although capped since the names can become really long and just clutter the screen.  The signatures are red and have animated circles around them indicating the uncertainty about the site both in terms of location and content.  The pixelated haze around the signature sites indicate roughly the area in space where the true location lies, the bigger the circle the less certain we are… or it’s just closer to you. The haze is limited to never become too big on the screen.  When you scan down a signature to 100% signal using scanner probes the location will update, the haze will go away and you get the name of the site like for the anomaly icon.

When you mouse over a site icon in the sensor overlay a popup hint appears by the icon giving you more details on the site.  The amount of information depends on how good a scan signal you have.  For anomalies you always get a perfect result.  Here you always get the full name and the faction of the site I provided the signal quality allows for it.  You also get a distance to the site.  Also we provide a few instant actions if applicable such as a Warp-To button taking you to 0 km or a button to save the location for later use. For the signatures we also provide a probe scanner button that automatically launches probes, opens the scanner and switches to the solar system map.

As this feature is intersecting the probe scanning mechanics as well as serving as an introduction we have tried to integrate these features a bit.  To begin with we are priming the probe scanner with all the anomalies as well as crude signature results that you can view in the probe scanner result list right after jumping into a new solar system.  This allows us to retain a list view of all the sites and also gives us an interface to view all the sites in the solar system map as results from the probe scanner.  When you open the map with the probe scanner window active in a new system, even with no probes deployed, you immediately see the anomalies as green warpable results and the signatures as red spheres indicating their approximate locations.  In addition we update the icons in the sensor overlay as you improve your scan results.  The signal gets better and the name and faction gets filled as appropriate.  Finally when you have a perfect hit we update the location and enable the warp and save location buttons on the overlay site hints.  You also have access to the options to ignore sites in the probe scanner from the overlay icon context menu.

To wrap thing up CCP Greyscale has some concluding remarks.

In order to integrate this functionality smoothly into the existing tools, we've made a number of decisions that change elements of EVE. We have, for example, changed the gate-jump process to include an extra, non-blocking step: the overlay running a quick scan sweep in the new system to give you a glimpse of what might be hiding in deep space. We've changed the way that information about new sites appearing in a system can be accessed, which is particularly relevant in wormhole space. We have, in conjunction with Team Superfriends and as a side-effect of other work, made it harder to rapidly determine exactly what classes of site are present in a given system.

These things, and more, will be different when Odyssey hits, and we're fully aware of that. There were some changes that we were considering making that we backed away from, because they were not just different, they were also bad. The significant changes that are left are the ones that we have kept because we believe that they will, in aggregate, make the game better. We will of course be keeping a careful eye on things post-release to see how these changes end up working in practice, and making adjustments where necessary. For now though, we encourage you all to embrace - or at least tolerate! - the changes, and see how they work out in practice before settling on a final opinion.

There are also some areas where we certainly want to expand and improve at a later date.  Specifically we want to address how to go about selecting overlapping icons in the overlay which we acknowledge can be a bit of a pain in very site heavy systems.  Currently the probe scanner integration mitigates that to some extent but we want something nicer closer to home.  We are also looking into moving more content into the overlay but more on that when the time comes that in itself will compound cluttering issues requiring a solid solution to that.  

But enough future music, here you have it, the sensor overlay.  I hope you will enjoy the changes and find them useful and enlightening in your journeys across New Eden.

Due to the events that transpired over the weekend, detailed here, we are delaying the opening of sign-ups for Alliance Tournament XI by one day. 

The sign-ups are now scheduled to open tomorrow, June 4th. Further information will be made available once the page goes live.

At 02:05 UTC June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 UTC, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, at 14:51 UTC we became aware of additional information that led us to re-evaluate our decision. With the highest sense of precaution we took the decision to take Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure.

What we can now confirm is that a person was able to utilize a vulnerability in one of the back-end services that support the operation of the Tranquility server. This vulnerability has now been secured and thoroughly tested.

We would like to stress that at no time was customer data compromised or accessible in any way.

The effort of returning the complex server structure of the EVE Universe and associated websites to service in a methodical and highly-scrutinized fashion began hours ago and Tranquility has now been brought online (at 10:13 UTC). Our teams will monitor the situation carefully in the coming hours to ensure that our services are accessible and that all customer data remains secure.

We will be looking at ways to compensate players in both EVE and DUST for the outage and expect to announce what that compensation will be very soon.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our players on EVE Online and DUST 514 for their patience and understanding during this unexpected downtime and the investigation. We are grateful for your support, as always.

Regards,
Jón Hörðdal Jónasson,
Chief Operating Officer
CCP

The Tranquility cluster has been taken offline as of 03:06 UTC in order to enable us to investigate several network 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 and when more information becomes available.

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