Ekchuah's Shrine Corporation

Our next mass test on the Singularity test server will occur on Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 20:00 UTC. We are looking for at least 300 pilots (500 is ideal) to help us test fleet/jump lag, module activation issues, and session changes. More information about the test, and previous testing sessions, can be found in this thread.

EVECAST.TV will be hosting monthly PvP tournaments that start the first Sunday of every month. These events will be video broadcast live at EVECAST.TV. For more details concerning the monthly PvP tournaments, visit the EVECAST.TV website. 

EVE is a beautiful universe, no doubt about it. If you find it inspiring, head on over to Starfleetcomms for your chance to win ISK and PLEX by writing a short story based on an image of a sleek Gallente ship warping through a system. Warp to Starfleetcomms for information on how you can enter.

Today, July 25 at 19:00 UTC I will be hosting a swap meet in Rens, Dodixie, and Amarr. Everyone is invited to fill up their industrials or freighters and fly out for some good times. Our friends at EVE University and EVE Radio have some fun planned as well. So tune into EVE Radio, come on down to see what EVE University has planned for you, and check out this forum thread.

What can be more fun that blowing up ships with Planetary Interaction products in their cargohold? Not much, according to Battleclinic, who are running a giveaway over the next few days in which pilots can earn EVE Store credit for ship kills. Full details are available here.

Known for creating animated avatars, EVE Avatar is giving away four $50 EVE Store gift certificates. Drawings will be held once a week from July 25 through August 15, 2010. To enter into the drawing click HERE. 

CCP will be attending Gamescom 2010 in Cologne from Thursday, August 19 to Sunday, August 22. We will have a booth available for player meet ups or for players to come and talk to us. Full details can be found in this thread.

CCP Zulu talks development and clarifies the near future of EVE with the latest dev blog.

On Tuesday, July 13, 2010 after Tranquility returns to service from its scheduled downtime, changes to the PLEX system will be engaged. Read all about the changes in CCP Zulu's newest dev blog.

The meeting minutes for the first CSM 5 summit at the CCP headquarters in Reykjavik are now available. Click here to take a look!

When a man of "unique" talents is saved from a savage beating by two mysterious gentlemen, he finds that perhaps being saved is more like making a deal with the devil. But does he have a choice?

"The Resurrection Men" is a new EVE Chronicle written by CCP Abraxas. Published every other Monday, Chronicles are intended to examine the various aspects of life in New Eden. The entire list is contained here, and a comment thread for this particular story may be found here.

Our next mass testing will take place Thursday, July 15, at 20:00 UTC, and CCP is seeking the help of alliances and all other players. CCP seeks a minimum of 300 pilots for this latest round of mass testing, 500 pilots or more is preferable, and the testing will last for one hour. We will be testing the overview, fleet jumping/lag, and brackets. See this thread for all info about how you can get involved.

Mondes Persistants has published an interview with Hjalti "Abraxas" Daníelsson, author of the new EVE Online novel The Burning Life and more Chronicles than there are stars in the universe. After you're finished reading the interview, be sure to check out their contest (English version) for your chance to win the official EVE Online novels and more.

Today Eva "Ankhesentapemkah" Jobse was removed from the Council of Stellar Management due to a breach of the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). We are deeply saddened but feel that it was the only possible solution in order to protect the integrity of the Council of Stellar Management. As this is a matter regarding confidential data we do consider this to be a private issue between Eva and CCP, therefore we are unable to comment further.

OnlineWelten takes their readers through a tour of the new content in EVE Online in their latest special article, Permission to Land Granted! Planetary Interaction, EVE Gate and the general updates introduced in the recent Tyrannis expansion are highlighted, along with a few words regarding the highly anticipated avatars in EVE and the ties to DUST 514.

"The Icelandic pay-to-play MMO is the game with the most and most faithful subscribers in Europe and North America, second only to World of Warcraft, breaking one record after another."

Read Permission to Land Granted! in German at OnlineWelten.de. German isn't your native tongue? Translate it here.

Hey all, I'm CCP Zulu (formerly CCP Zulupark) and as of about a month ago I've assumed the role of EVE's Senior Producer. CCP t0rfifrans has moved on to become EVE's Creative Director. This means you'll be hearing a lot more from me in the future.

After reading the many discussions following the publishing of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) 5 meeting minutes, I wanted to write this dev blog to clarify some things that have been floating around, rumors and half-facts that seem to have taken on a life of their own.

First off, Incarna

(9 teams, approximately 70 developers)

Development of Incarna is something that CCP has committed to for multiple reasons, but the most prominent one is fairly simple.

To achieve our goal of EVE being a complete sci-fi experience we must have full body avatars. When we talk to people who like the concept of science fiction games but aren't attracted to EVE, it becomes obvious that there is a need gap that can best be filled by having a character to associate with rather than a spaceship, and I would venture there are many existing players who want this option as well.

As of August 17th, there will be about nine teams working on Incarna. Of those, seven are on loan from other projects - to which they will return once Incarna is launched - and the remainder are EVE development teams. The EVE teams can work on both Incarna and in-space features, but they are assigned to Incarna for now. Actually one of the teams is spending one and a half releases on Incarna, the other about three releases. So the resource cost from EVE is very contained while the size and impact of the feature will be massive.

Dust 514/EVE link

(1 team, approximately 7 developers)

We‘re also committed to producing and launching an MMOFPS hybrid. What we‘re doing is unheard of in the gaming industry, namely linking together a console FPS (MMOFPS) with a classic PC MMORPG. Let that sink in for a minute. CCP is the first company in the world to do something like this. First. Ever. The „resource cost" on the EVE side for that is a team continuing on development of the Planetary Interaction feature (the primary link between the two) for the next three releases, delivering immediate, meaningful value into EVE Online and making game development history while they‘re at it.

In-space features

(3 teams, approximately 22 developers)

Currently, the plan is to have three teams working on EVE (the space parts): a feature team, the mission design team and an art/effects team. The feature team has chosen to work on a PVE related iteration. In short, they‘ll be expanding and iterating on PVE in EVE, bringing together players for immersive and engaging group content. The art/effects team will be finishing up on left-over work all the way back from Apocrypha and on some level even Trinity, where we have not fully taken advantage of new features of Trinity 2.0. This will mean prettier effects that perform better, especially in fleet fights.

EVE Gate

(1 team, approximately 10 developers)

We have one team (at this point) assigned to EVE Gate development and iteration, and that won‘t change for the foreseeable future. Note that this team is a dedicated Web development team. I had planned on using them to fix fleet lag but was talked out of it.

The others!

(4 teams, approximately 15 developers)

I‘ve now accounted for 14 teams, but we release plan for 18 teams. So what are the rest doing? Well, we have a team dedicated to testing automation. Currently they are focusing on "fleet fight in a can," which is a borderline sentient AI-testing automation feature that allows us to instantly simulate interesting aspects of massive fleet fights, getting tighter feedback loops to the expert team that is working on improvements on that front (we are talking MIT Ph.D. here). There is a team dedicated to making tools and reporting mechanism for the customer service department. The core infrastructure team (patch delivery mechanisms, among other duties) is in there, and then there‘s a another team dedicated to performance monitoring and improvements.

On top of that we have some (space) cowboys running around injecting code into Tranquility live to debug fleet battles and fix exploits (these are the same people that do code reviews and architectural integrity checks for the EVE codebase). This is where the MIT Ph.D. come into play. This doesn‘t fall under the classification of a development team but contains computer scientists, QA people, operational staff and others. They are hard-at-work (often well-outside normal working hours) profiling and diagnosing all sorts of lag-related issues or trying to catch fringe cases that are impossible to reproduce on our test servers. This team will be greatly assisted by the "fleet fight in a can" sentient AI.

And that‘s that.

We have an aggressive hiring plan, as evident by our job listings. When those positions are filled we will be able to fully staff two additional EVE feature teams. Finding the right people with the right skills so that they can further enhance something which we have been working on for a decade already isn‘t easy, but we have increased the priority on global recruiting. If you or someone you know is interested in working for CCP, now is the time to submit those CVs.

So what about prioritization? Where‘s the iteration on feature "x"?

We have seen a number of players talking about us moving from new feature development into iteration in the year 2012, but until then we‘ll be pumping new features into the system. This is not an accurate description of how a 200-person development team works. In the 2011 winter expansion we‘ll certainly focus more than ever before on iterating and polishing up all the features that EVE has expanded to in the then eight years. What those specific systems are, I don‘t know as we haven‘t started the planning phase for that yet.

That does not mean that we won‘t make any improvements until then!  We haven‘t started planning the Spring 2011 or Winter 2011 expansions yet (not to that level of granularity) but we do realize the urgency of revisiting certain key game features. Rest assured, the CSM will play a large role in identifying those.

Please, also keep in mind that our developers are constantly fixing bugs - small ones, big ones, important ones and obvious ones. But also bugs you‘ve never experienced, never seen and never heard of. The EVE code base is as big as the universe itself and we‘re constantly engaged in cleanup and backend work that the players will never notice unless something goes horribly wrong.

CSM you say?

Like many of you, I have read the meeting minutes from the CSM 5 meetings in Reykjavik last month. To be completely up-front about it, I have to say I‘m quite taken aback by the difference in the meeting minutes compared to my firsthand experience from attending the meetings.

For my part, I felt the discussions were very constructive and I had great dialogue with the council members.

Maybe I‘m completely delusional and it didn‘t go that way at all, but there‘s definitely something broken in the feedback loop we have with the CSM and I will be working closely with them to enhance our collaboration. When two parties have such vastly different perceptions of the same event, something is wrong and needs to be fixed. We have some suggestions in mind and we will be exploring them in the fall. I‘m confident that with the CSM‘s help we can take this to the next level.

Cheers,

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason

CCP Zulu

Senior Producer of EVE Online

Having undergone several updates since its initial release, the new and much improved repair tool has been released, leaving me with no reservations as I give myself a high five.

When EVE Online is installed you will notice that along with the Play EVE shortcut it creates in the start menu, it also creates a Repair shortcut. Running Repair will start the repair tool, verifying that your EVE Online install is correct and fixing any corrupt or out-of-date files it finds in your EVE Online install directory. However, if you installed EVE a long time ago, you might not have that Repair shortcut in the start menu. In that case,  you can browse to the directory EVE Online was installed to and execute repair.exe to start the repair tool.

The repair tool is mainly thought of as a backup if patching fails, as patch days can be very hectic where tens of thousands of players hit our file servers all at the same time. For a small percentage of our player base, patching the game client in some cases simply fails under these conditions. Now, if a patch fails midway, instead of having to download the entire game and reinstall, the repair tool can fix the problem faster and more efficiently. It will pick up where the patcher left off and close the deal, updating EVE Online to the latest and greatest.

The new version of the repair tool was completely rewritten from the ground up and is largely based on a very clever technology called Zsync. This bit of tech allows the repair tool to look at a corrupt or out-of-date file and, using magic that any self-respecting medieval inquisitor would consider utter herecy, calculates what data is correct and what is missing from the broken file. It then downloads only that missing data and voila! The file is fixed, combining the correct data already present with the missing data that was just downloaded. This is a considerable step up from the older version of the repair tool which would only download whole files no matter how tiny the changes actually required are.

Currently the repair tool only works on Windows, but development on a new and improved version of the repair tool that will also work on Mac machines has already started (another high five). It will be more efficient so that less data needs to be downloaded and might also have additional options like clearing the cache or updating bulk data files. If you have your own ideas of what might be useful to have in the repair tool, post a reply in the comments section and tell us all about it!

Over to you - CCP Mandrake

Hey all,

We're planning on making some changes to the behavior of the PLEX (Pilot's License Extension) in-game item and, at the same time, the redeeming system. I wanted to take a minute to explain what is being done and why so that we can give everyone a chance to digest the changes before they go public. There is no TL;DR version of this, so if you're interested in this subject please take the time to read the entire blog.

A bit of history

When we introduced the PLEX item there were serious (and legitimate) concerns that this new item would be so volatile in the players mind that it had to have certain boundaries. So we implemented a few restrictions on this one item that made it behave differently from all the other items in-game. The biggest one of those was the fact that you couldn't undock with PLEX in your cargohold. It was in fact bound to the station you initially redeemed it in, only available to put on the market there (or use or whatever). We also restricted PLEX from courier contracts as they couldn't be couriered to anywhere anyway.

Now what?

These safeguards were entirely valid and necessary for PLEX's introductory period--so that we could test the waters, so to speak. Since then we've been very vigilant in monitoring the status of PLEX in-game, its usage and potential. We are at a point where we've been looking at the pool, measuring the depth, estimating tactics and now it's simply time to dive in. Therefore we'll be removing all the special casing surrounding the PLEX items and have them function and behave as any other regular item. At the same time we're changing the behaviour of the Redeeming system a bit so that items can be redeemed in any station (you could only redeem items in NPC stations before).

What does that mean specifically

• We will remove the restriction on undocking from a station with a PLEX in your cargo hold

• We will remove the restriction that PLEX cannot be put into courier contracts

• We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be redeemed into NPC stations

• We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be reverse-redeemed from NPC stations

• We will remove the restriction that ETC can only be converted into PLEX while inside an NPC station

If you blow up a ship that happens to be carrying PLEX, it may drop the PLEX as loot or it may be destroyed in the conflagration (much like any other item in a ship's cargo hold). The refund policies for PLEX will not be any different from any other item.

What did not change?

• If you redeem a PLEX into a station and then reverse-redeem it back into the item redeeming system, the PLEX is now locked to that that particular station. Every time you redeem it, it will only redeem into the same station.

• You can only sell or give away PLEX while they are redeemed into a character's inventory.

Are you crazy? Do you know how many people will emoragequit when they're ganked with PLEX in their cargo?

Maybe we're a little crazy, yes, but we truly think the benefits outweigh the risks here. One of them is to combat the perception that PLEX is a more valuable item than others in the game which, of course, it isn't (anyone who has lost a titan/carrier/T2 BS/etc knows this full well). Among the risks of course is that people will start losing PLEXs' en masse and cancel their subscriptions. We will be monitoring that extremely closely as well as all other aspects of PLEX trade/usage patterns. Remember, we're not forcing anyone to undock with PLEX, in fact we're making things a little bit safer (if people choose to use the option) by allowing redeeming of PLEX to all stations instead of just NPC stations. The choice and risk is always at the discretion of the player, just like it should be.

No really, why?

Well, really, we don't like items having "special status" in the game. Their value should be determined by the player demand (isk bid price) at any time. Placing artificial restraints on any item automatically makes it more special to people so we're removing those. 

So When?

The changes are planned to go live next Tuesday, July 13, 2010.

And then?

And then we sit back and wait. Your feedback on this is appreciated and I'll try to answer questions that arise.

Cheers,

CCP Zulu(park)

Introduction

Part of our job is to seek ways to improve performance, and as there's always room for improvement; this is a continuous process.

During the Tyrannis production cycle, we organized a few mass fleet fights at regular intervals on the test server (Singularity) in order to investigate and scrutinize any performance issues by actively monitoring these massive engagements. Nearing the launch of Tyrannis, it was clear that client performance in fleet fights had gotten pretty bad. We had reports of very high client memory usage as well as some probable performance bottlenecks.

Resource Loading

During the Singularity mass test on May 15, 2010, we noticed that our resource caching system was at times reporting negative memory usage. When this happened, resources were never released and the client would continue to accumulate them until it ran out of memory.

The negative resource usage was quite puzzling and was not experienced by everyone in the fleet fight. When we closely examined the resource manager we found a couple of issues.

It turned out that there was an issue with the way the resource manager assigned a size to textures that had not been fully loaded. This caused the resource manager to hold on to too much memory; this was fixed shortly after it was discovered. We also found and fixed a memory leak in the module responsible for reading resources. At that time, during internal testing, we started noticing that some objects from our physics simulation weren't being cleaned up as well as they should have been. We fixed that, as well.

As we went into the mass test on Singularity on May 20, 2010, we knew we had made some progress but were still not sure whether the weird negative memory issue would again rear its ugly head. We saw very early on in the test that the changes to the resource manager had not done the trick.

When the client had just started up, the resource usage was correctly reported. However, something was causing it to turn negative as time went on. After the mass test, we noticed that warping to a small fleet of ships with a fresh client could reproduce the issue. We also noticed that one of the ships was a Tengu, a Tech 3 ship. By stalking the poor pilot for most of the night we were fairly sure that the Tech 3 ship was somehow causing this problem, and at midnight we finally had solid reproduction steps.

It turned out that the size variable of the geometry was uninitialized. This meant that we would get unpredictable values, even negative ones, when generating a mesh, such as the Tech 3 ships. This was fixed and another mass testing was scheduled on Singularity that same day, May 21. The negative resource problem was fixed!

Before fix

After fix

With the resource usage fixed we saw that we still had our work cut out for us as there were objects still being left in the memory, even after warping away and docking.

Dead Balls and Destiny

Memory leaks in EVE are always difficult to debug. Because of the way our graphics engine and physics simulation interact, we actually rely on circular references. Also, by looking at specific objects you are invariably increasing the references to them, making them hang around longer.

A primer on Destiny:

  Destiny: Our physics simulation system.

  Balls: An atomic in our physics solution.

Behind the scenes we have these "Destiny balls" (yeah, I know) which we use to determine among other things the position and velocity of everything in space. We attach our graphics to the Destiny balls and rely on them being removed to clean up any related graphics assets. An example would be when ships explode or warp away.

During the fleet tests, we noticed that not all Destiny balls were being removed as expected and there were a lot of them left in memory, even though the ships they represented were gone. These extra Destiny balls exist only in the client and are commonly referred to as dead balls. Having these objects that we attach our graphics to hang around and never get cleaned up can obviously have a noticeable memory impact.

When you warp into a gate camp, aggressive ships are loaded before others to better help you realize what is going on. There was a bug in this part of the loading code that could result in multiple instances of graphics being added to the scene. When these ships were removed, only one of the instances was removed and the others were left behind. This meant that the extra graphics were referencing Destiny balls which were supposed to be gone, making them become dead balls. The error was not easy to spot, but thankfully easy to fix.

We have also changed the way Destiny removes Destiny balls so now there are no references back to the ball from the graphics when the ball is removed. The first mass test on these changes was on May 22 and the results were as we had hoped for, as no dead ball was discovered after a 200 ship fleet fight.

These changes were included in Tyrannis 1.0.2

Overview changes

During these Singularity tests, the top issues reported by players were that the overview was updating too frequently and felt too "jerky," and that the fleet window was causing client lag. Upon investigation, we found out that fleet changes were causing a lot more UI updates than were necessary. Every time a player joined or left your fleet, your flat fleet member list and the overview were reloaded, and, in addition, all the brackets were refreshed as well as all the overview entries.

This was only discovered a few days before Tyrannis was released, so we did not want to change too much at the time. What we did change was to stop reloading the overview when a player joined/left your fleet, and instead just added or removed the player from the overview (based on the overview settings you had for fleet members). This change introduced a bug where the overview stopped updating correctly (oops), but that was fixed very shortly after the release. In the case of the fleet member list, we found a way to reload it 6-8 times faster than before and chose to leave it at that since it was a rather risk-free change that dramatically improved the fleet window's performance.

After Tyrannis was released, we kept working on these issues. In Tyrannis 1.0.2, we deployed changes that do more targeted updates of overview entries and brackets when a player joins/leaves your fleet, rather than updating them all. The fleet window performance was further improved by adding/removing the player from the member list rather than reloading the whole list.

The Star Map

When opening up the star map the graphics were loaded and generated and kept around for easy access later. This resulted in a bit of extra memory usage, but allowed the map to be opened up quite fast.

It turned out that by throwing away the graphics when closing the map and regenerating them when opening it, we could release 80 Mb of memory. The change we made means that the map takes a bit longer to start up, but the benefit is that you are not using additional memory for the map when it is closed.

Renovating old systems

We are always trying to improve upon and refactor old and slow code. We have started using a new rendering scheme, but as we haven't been able to renovate everything in EVE, some of the things in EVE are still using our original scheme.

The dust fields, the particles that pass your ship when you are flying at sub warp speeds, were one of those things. The old implementation was heavily CPU bound and did not scale well. By using our newer particle system we decrease the time updating and rendering particle systems by a third than we did before.

The old inefficient particle system was also used for the old suns and we moved the suns into the new rendering scheme for performance reasons. We still do not consider them renovated; they will get their chance to shine in the future. 

Although these changes aren't huge, every millisecond saved helps with your FPS, and thus the smoothness of your experience in EVE.

There's more to come!

There has been constant performance improvement work going on since Tyrannis was released and more changes are on their way. We're replacing our old math library with a new version that's many times faster and old systems are still being renovated.

All the changes mentioned in this blog are client-side only, and will not solve any server-client lag that might exist. However, that should make playing a more stable, faster and more enjoyable experience.

We would like thank everyone that participated in the mass tests on Singularity and encourage everyone to participate in future tests. We couldn't have done it without the Singularity community.

- CCP Blaze

We wanted to give you some details about what happened on June 23, 2010, when we performed the Tranquility server move, why the move took much longer than we scheduled and what we are doing to prevent the issue that caused the extended downtime from happening again.

First, what did we get done? 

Everything.  The new Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches were installed, the servers were moved to the new larger and cooler space, redundancies were put in place, etc.  We actually got most of the work we had planned done in the timeline we had originally announced.  Despite rumors and criticisms to the contrary, our plan included a significant time buffer for the work. We‘d been prepping the space for about three weeks prior as well--testing power and cooling, putting in place all the backbone cable systems for servers and switches, and getting external network connectivity verified and tested.  To some it seemed that we randomly chose „six hours" as our total time frame, however at no time would we make up numbers we didn‘t wholeheartedly expect to meet.

So what happened? 

When we attempted to fire up the Tranquility database we experienced some failures on the new storage area network we had just put in place.  These issues were not discovered until we started running our normal cleanup jobs (these jobs touch just about every part of the database) on the database and started putting actual load on the storage area network.  Once under load the problems were discovered, but not before the database and many of the vital tables needed to operate EVE were found to be heavily corrupted.

Why did it take so long to get TQ back online?

In order to recover the database after finding the root cause and fixing it, we had to go through the process of replacing the logical database with a new copy. A backup of the Tranquility database was deployed: we began recovering the corrupted transaction logs, and replaying them to fill in any missing data.  You can think of this process much like your credit card statement.  You can see the current balance that may not reflect the burrito buying spree you went on last night.  In order to get the statement to match what you actually owe you will also need to add in the transactions for the burritos, soda and antacid you bought last night. Then comes the integrity checks, To verify the database is in good shape a number of very slow and CPU intensive programs have to be run.  This helps ensure that we are not going to cause further damage and the database is in fact all there. These can take hours to do and we started with the most vital tables (such as the Inventory Items Database that makes sure the Raven in you ship hanger is yours and exists in game) and worked our way down in parallel with our QA team, who did a very thorough job of testing EVE in VIP Mode. VIP Mode is when Tranquility is up, but accessible to CCP staff only (many of you noticed and were curious about why 30+ others were on TQ while you couldn‘t login).  While rolling back the database and losing transactions was an option, we chose the longer recovery path and testing to make sure no player actions in the game were lost due to the corruption.

What are we doing to prevent this? 

As you may know, EVE‘s database is a fairly big and powerful thing.  In order to maintain it and reduce the recovery time in situations like this we are putting a project in place to modify nearline recovery and establish faster rebuilds of transactions should gaps exist.  The team is currently working on the specifics of this new database architecture.  Once we have the new design plan in place and tested, we‘ll post more details and some drawings of the changes.

We all really appreciate the understanding and kind words... and even the harsh ones we needed to hear.

Let us know if you have more questions and I‘ll do what I can to keep up and answer for a few days here.

Fly Dangerous.

-- CCP Yokai

During the last Council of Stellar Management (CSM) visit to Iceland, the Council presented issues that players brought forth regarding Customer Support (CS). The most prominent were that the customer support system itself could be improved and that there was a feeling of distance between CS and the community. We seriously considered the suggestions we received, sat down and brainstormed, and then embarked on a series of changes. Some of these will be immediately visible to the players, others will be felt in the quality of our services.

To increase our visibility, we initiated a series of dev blogs (see for instance Senior GM Spiral‘s excellent entry here, and specifically the comment thread that followed) that are meant to both inform the playerbase as to how EVE CS operates and to shine a light on our continued and on-going efforts to provide the high quality of service our players both expect and richly deserve. Additionally, we‘re also in the process of revamping and improving many of our procedures and tools to ensure that we‘re squeezing as much juice out of them as possible.

One of the things we‘ve improved recently is the Customer Satisfaction rating system. This is the survey you receive after your petition has been closed and the resulting data that we gather from it. As we are the first contact that you usually have with CCP, it‘s extremely important to Customer Support that a functional mechanism exists that shows in transparent terms exactly where we can improve our services while also indicating trends that players are unhappy with in the overall gaming experience.

GMs file a large number of defects and a substantial percentage of wonky game functionality is discovered and pushed through the development pipelines by the Support department. We try to be constantly aware of our responsibility in this area. Although we usually know just from the petition text itself and subsequent dialogue with the player what‘s causing issues, the results of the survey often reinforce and further narrow down these trends. Used properly, this simple tool can be very powerful, allowing for a sharper focus on the relevant specifics.

Also, the CSM mentioned a degree of player disconnect with EVE Support. We were initially a bit surprised about this point, since our satisfaction rating from our customers was, and has always been, high. However, we value the representative voice of the CSM and trust their judgement and anechdotal evidence. The elegant redesign of the Satisfaction survey gives us a greater overview and a better way to shift our focus to these problem areas. Our intent is to continually improve...and we will.

Internally, this is a positive step as well. The old rating system allowed only a single score from a petition, meant to encompass the performance of the GM working on it, the resolution of the case at hand and the response times. This numbering system  often misrepresented the competancy of individual GMs, especially in more "high stakes" categories such as reimbursement or account dispute cases. In those, the ratings are typically more loaded towards satisfaction (or disatisfaction) with the "resolution" as opposed  to the behaviour and communication of the GM delivering the resolution when compared with, say, the Stuck category.  The new layout splits the overall score into four components, being reply time, resolution of the petition, courtesy and professionalism of the GM and finally the overall mean score that emerges.

We are now in a much better position to accurately gauge and evaluate the metrics, derive more specific feedback from the data pool and take more targeted action than we‘ve ever been able to before. We‘re going to try and take advantage of the opportunity. That‘s where you come in.

Currently, about a third of our users fill out the survey. While that‘s statistically significant enough for meaningful data to emerge, we‘d still like to hear from more of you. Therefore, we would like to ask you, the EVE community, to fill out the survey when next your petition closes, essentially helping us help you. We‘re aiming to make 2010 our banner year, and we hope that you‘ll be right there with us.

All the best,

Lead GMs Ender and Fate.

Today, Outer Ring Excavations [ORE] CEO Afait Assette surprised New Eden with an announcement in what seemed to be an impromptu but well-orchestrated press conference from the normally tight-lipped executive. She led off her prepared statement with the following message addressed to all capsuleers.

"ORE has prided itself on being at the cutting edge of the multiple industries based on extraction and refinement of natural materials. We have provided capsuleers with the ships, knowledge and materials to retrieve innumerable resources, from some of the rarest minerals in the universe to the humblest chunks of Veldspar. Now that tradition continues. I am here to unveil the Primae, a technological marvel capable of catalyzing the recent, burgeoning industries on the planet surfaces of New Eden.

And, now that full production of this robust vessel is underway, I can safely announce that our agents will be delivering one Primae ship to each capsuleer in all corners of the universe, free-of-charge, to try out for themselves. We firmly believe in the proven technology ORE has to offer and trust that pilots everywhere will come to as well, having been given this unique, unprecedented gift to fly for themselves. No strings attached."

With that, Ms. Assette unveiled a marvelous work of concept art for the ship for the stunned crowd, reproduced below.

Following the announcement, Bougale Baille, Survey Manager for ORE, was quoted as saying, "It's astonishing how quickly pod pilots have adapted to planetary production models. Some are turning record profits when compared to industry benchmarks, pushing the limits of what our brightest scientists thought possible."

It is clear that Outer Ring Excavations [ORE] has been closely following the effects of the recent CONCORD decision to lift the universal ban on capsuleer involvement in planetary affairs, searching for opportunities to modify our business to complement the "immortal" pilots and their proven financial and industrial acumen. Further insight into the design process of the Primae project has become available, shedding light on ORE's brilliant business move.

The Primae is a repurposed ORE design intended to ease the task of extracting resources from planetbound environments. Initially devised as a deep space salvage vessel for large-scale ore retrieval from destroyed ORE fleets in pirate-occupied areas, its previous incarnation was made all but obsolete by the arrival of capsuleers on the interstellar scene. Realizing that the ship could, with a few minor modifications, be made into an efficient resource harvesting aid, ORE wasted no time in revamping the design.

A low signature radius (a holdover from its earlier manifestation) adds a layer of defense to the Primae‘s already decent plating. In addition, the ship‘s two large bays have been re-engineered to hold equipment for planetside resource extraction and processed materials, making it an especially useful complement to any planetside harvesting endeavor.

The Primae ship hulls are being transported under contract by Interbus, and are scheduled to arrive in hangars across New Eden beginning next week.

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Beginning June 29, 2010, you will find the ability to redeem it on your account login screen. You can then assign it to a particular character and a friendly ORE agent will deliver it to your hangar bay. You will be able to redeem the Primae once per active (not trial) account and will no longer be available after downtime on Tuesday, July 13th 2010, so make sure you log in to receive yours.

Furthermore the Primae does not require any special skills to fly, but training at least a minimum of planetary interaction skills and beginning your planetary exploration would help to make the most of its abilities. You may find the planetary interaction tutorial video helpful before you jump in the Primae.

Here‘s how to redeem it:

• Log into the EVE Online client.
• At the character selection screen there will be a Redeem Items button in the lower right corner. Select the character you wish to receive the Primae and press the Redeem Items button.

• Check the box next to the Primae in the confirmation window and press the Redeem Selected Items button.
• You will receive a confirmation window that informs you which character is receiving the Primae and in which station it will be deposited. They are always deposited at the character's current location. The ship can not be redeemed if the receiving character is not docked in an NPC station.
• Click Yes to accept the confirmation window if you are happy with your decision
• Log in to that character and jump in your new ship!

Enjoy! And fly safe.

- CCP Zinfandel

Alliance Tournament month is my favorite time of the year. It lets me get away from everything and just focus on playing with my spaceships. Having the pleasure of watching absolutely everything that goes on, I thought I'd share some observations from the tournament this time around. It's the first time I've posted something like this, but who knows: if you guys like it, I'll keep them coming. I hope you've all enjoyed the tournament so far, I know I have. Here are a few of the things that stuck out to me:

Event that was not entirely legal but still pretty funny

HYDRA RELOADED camping Pandemic Legion's testing system in an effort to prevent them from running their practice session. Pandemic Legion are known for their metagaming, with members claiming that they know what every single opponent fields ahead of time. HYDRA RELOADED decided to pay them back and bubbled their station on the test server to prevent them from getting practice time. I'm not a GM, but I'm pretty sure that's not allowed. It is, however, pretty funny.

Impressive but not much talked about alliance we constantly mispronounce

Legiunea Romana have been bringing some effective setups using ships that other teams have decided to keep out of their lineups. During their first match, they brought Cruors, during match two, Maelstroms, both ships that aren't very common. They are traditionally a good team and probably deserve a little more hype than they are getting. They also deserve to have their name pronounced right once or twice.

Hilarious setup that was both entertaining and effective

Dystopia brought a quirky setup that centered around a Blokh, two Bloahs and a Drake. The Drake was selected by Tyrrax purely to spite yours truly. Regardless of which, Tyrrax is an underestimated planner when it comes to the Alliance Tournament setups, showing that comedy setups can be as effective as they are funny if orchestrated by the right person. Dystopia continue to be a quality team that knows how to entertain.

Strategy that no one really understood, probably because it wasn't very good

Death From Above had the simple task of having to accumulate 16 points in a fight. To put that into perspective, they'd need to kill a T2 ship, a command ship or a frigate and a BC. Even the most ragtag DPS setup should be capable of putting up 16 points (even if it loses), but DFA showed up with a supertanked setup that focused much more on survivability than racking up points. They were, to put it differently, not dressed for the occasion.

Hilarious setup that was entertaining but not that effective

Arbeitaholics Anonymous fielding a nano-disco setup that went down in flames. Arbeitaholics Anonymous are first time contenders, that by their own words don't have a lot of skillpoints or money. We thank them for competing, and we hope to see them back next year once they've run a few missions so they can afford more ships. It's always fun to see a team or two who are just there to have a good time.

Team which fielded a setup worth more money than I'll ever have

Circle-Of-Two fielding not only a flagship, but also three Frekis. One of the charming things about the Alliance Tournament is seeing alliances that don't have a lot of skillpoints or money come in and do well. Another charming thing about the Alliance Tournament is seeing terribly rich alliances with a lot of skillpoints put billions on the field. The entire Alliance Tournament crew were standing up and yelling/pointing/panicking when that one Freki dipped into structure. Fantastic match and CO2 demonstrating that they have testicles the size of bowling balls.

Team not named Pandemic Legion which might actually win the tournament this year

WE FORM VOLTRON have been living up to their (posting) hype and been solid this entire tournament. The team looks well-funded, their setups look solid out and they are even confident enough to release replays with their voice communication. After Star Fraction put on one of their most disappointing showings in their proud tournament history, Jade Constantine remarked that he thought the competitive level of the Alliance Tournament was constantly going up. I think he is right: we see more and more good teams enter, such as WE FORM VOLTRON. Band of Brothers won several tournaments with the same setup; today, it's difficult winning two matches in a row doing the same. Pandemic Legion is still the team to beat, but this time around, there are actually teams which may be good enough to do it. WE FORM VOLTRON is one of them.

Team which was confident enough in their own abilities to take a dive in round one and still make it to the finals

HYDRA RELOADED had a surprise up their sleeves in Round One, when they suddenly stopped firing at the last Agony ship on the field. As it turns out, HYDRA felt they had accumulated enough points that they'd happily lose the match if Agony paid up. I'm not entirely sure the full payment was ever made, but HYDRA at least stuck to their part of the deal and self destructed their remaining ships. Does this go against the competitive and fair spirit of competition? Yes. Does it also fit perfectly into the EVE universe? Hell yes.

Strange but absolutely true excuse for not being able to commentate

During the first weekend, one of our commentators had to give up their slot because their building was on fire. We expect our commentators to do their best to be available to us, but hearing fire sirens in the background would make the broadcast less enjoyable. No commentators were lost during the making of this Alliance Tournament.

Surprising victory that I did not see coming

CVA lined up with a seven-ship setup (that statistically does relatively poorly) against an EW heavy Manifest Destiny setup. On first glance, it looked like this was a fight where CVA would struggle to even get a lock, much less take Drakes/Rooks down that were supported by Scimitar. What I did not know of course, was that Manifest Destiny had built their jamming with knowing that CVA don't traditionally bring a lot of Amarr ships. An observation that has some historical merit, but not for this fight. Welp.

Surprising ship statistic #1

Kitsunes are usually seen as a good value for points. They are a small EW platform that teams have traditionally used their leftover points on. During this tournament, though, the Dramiel and Daredevil have been the preferred frigates, with an abysmal six Kitsunes being fielded (as opposed to 26 last year). The Alliance Tournament is always full of trends: this year the flavor is Dramiels and Daredevils.

Surprising ship statistic #2

Abaddons are by far the most popular battleship, followed by the Dominix. This may not surprise you, but it surprised me. Missile setups always stick out as the "standard" setups these days and I would have suspected more Ravens, or just a better mix of ships. I looked up last year's Alliance Tournament and to my great surprise (I was surprised twice in a very short period), it was exactly the same last year. Go lasers.

Unsurprising ship statistic #1

The Curse remains popular. This is completely unsurprising as it is a solid ship that fits into a lot of different setups. It's versatile, has respectable DPS and helps teams deal with logistics. It's not the most used ship overall, but that's because it's used as a single ship compliment instead of a ship you bring three of and build your team around. 35 have been fielded so far this year, which is a solid number.

Unsurprising ship statistic #2

With the introduction of Flagships, we anticipated a higher use of faction battleships. Last year, 29 faction battleships were fielded. This year we've seen 68 already, with a full weekend left. The strange thing here, though, is that we haven't seen a lot of them used as flagships. They might just be more accessible, the alliances competing might be throwing more money into the tourney budget, or the idea of flagships could have gotten the strategists thinking about faction battleships when they previously haven't.

Statistic which may or may not surprise you depending who you are and what predictions you've made #1

Alliance Tournament 7 had 26 pirate ships. That's not a great deal spread over a tournament. So far, Alliance Tournament 8 has seen 194. That's a massive increase, which shows that the total pirate ship contribution is actually higher than the total Gallente ship contribution. People apparently more excited by pirate ships than French ships.

Anyway, those are few observations I did along the way. We hope you've enjoyed the tournament so far, and hope you tune in Saturday and Sunday at 15:00, when we have the final rounds of tournament action.

Hello ESports fans it's CCP StevieSG!

It's finally here, 64 of EVE Online's best Alliance teams have spent endless amounts of time practicing, tons of ISK and two whole weekends battling it out to make it to this weekend's Universe Cup: The EVE Alliance Tournament. The qualifiers kicked off to an incredible start; not only did we witness comedy setups, metagaming and some seriously talented FC's we also reached a new milestone in EVE Online when 60,453 pilots logged in during the second day of matches shattering EVE's PCU.

The finale will be broadcast LIVE via EVE TV on June 19 and 20 from 14:50 UTC. Throughout the weekend, you can join CCP Soundwave, special developer guests and a host of PvP experts in the studio, and watch the matches each day in glorious High Definition. You can Tune In Here to catch all the action!

Must view matches for Saturday include the #1 ranked Alliance Rote Kapelle fighting at 15:00 GMT, a rematch of last weekend's slugfest between Circle of Two and Red Overlord at 16:20 and defending champions Pandemic Legion at 20:00. The elimination schedule is available here. Will they take it again this year?  Tune in to find out...

The Studio Show

Not only will we be showing every match complete with commentary, post-match analysis and up-to-the-minute statistics provided by ISD, alongside our studio show we have flown five EVE Players to our studio in Reykjavik, Iceland, to commentate on the event. We will also have several of CCP's key developers in studio to talk about their projects, including Lead Game Designer CCP Hammer and the Creative Director of EVE Online, CCP t0rfifrans. We will also be showing some exclusive featurettes including a sneak peak at CCP's incredibly talented Video Production team.

But wait, there's more!

For the participants, a lot is at stake, with CCP giving away 50 unique ships to the first and second place teams, as well as 50 Billion ISK for the winners. Check out this dev blog for more information!

To celebrate the Alliance Tournament and for a limited time only CCP is also waiving the $5/5 Euro activation on new Buy EVE Now accounts (this does not apply to current trial accounts). You can get all the benefits of having a full EVE online account, such as all skills being available for training, whilst saving money to spend on snacks to eat during the finals broadcast.  We will also be giving away two beautiful NVIDIA GTX 280 graphics cards to two lucky viewers who tune into the stream and a full set of EONS issues 1-20.

For those of you who can't tune in...

The match replays will be available on CCP's YouTube Channel within a couple of days of broadcast and you can see some of Winterblink's incredible pictures of the events here.

For those who want to discuss the upcoming matches, head on over to our Alliance Tournament Discussion channel. You can also join us on Tournament Twitter and keep an eye on the Official EVE Online Facebook page. You can also join us in the #eve-online IRC channel on irc.coldfront.net. Check the Coldfront website for information on using IRC and how to use their built in chat interface.

Who will fight for the glory and honor of their Alliance, and take home the Golden Adrestias?

Find out, this weekend.

Images courtesy of Winterblink. For more amazing images, check out Winterblink's Alliance Tournament 8 Flickr set!

What makes up the live EVE Cluster and how it's all done is something of a mystery to many who have speculated what it's made of and how it's all connected together.

As you may know the Tranquility (TQ) cluster will be down for maintenance on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 from 0900 to 1500 UTC.

With a migration and a bit of a redesign on the way I thought it was about time to deliver the facts on what it is and will be.

Step one: A cozy new home

TQ has morphed and adjusted over the years as much as EVE Online has.  It's gotten to the point were a couple of cabinets simply don't handle it anymore.  So, this first step is to move TQ to a bigger place.  We'll still be in the same datacenter and connecting to you from multiple networks to ensure the best performance, but this time with a lot more space and power and room to grow.

The new space is a whopping 79kW of power across 12 cabinets.  With the larger space and added power, we can now aggregate TQ, Singularity, and the ancillary EVE Services (web, forums, account management, etc.) into a single location in the datacenter.  This will provide better network connectivity, fewer intermediary devices and increased capacity.

As with any dense computer solution like our blade servers, heat is always a major concern.  Sure, we get great management tools and reduced physical space requirements, but we still have to cool the servers.  To do this we've moved from an ambient cooled system (basically the open room temperature is managed but not funneled direct to server intakes) to a completely self-contained, closed aisle cooling system.  Cold air from the center of the aisle is force-fed into the cabinets reducing the loss or wasted cool air significantly and helping to focus cold air where it's needed most.  This takes the industry standard "hot aisle/cold aisle" designs a step further without having to do anything crazy like running servers under nitrogen pools (although that is pretty cool).

Step two: Networking to 9000

Most of the traffic on the network in TQ is happening between the servers on the internal network.  While the routers we use are quite powerful (Cisco 7600's with the RSP720 route processors), our internal switching needed a kick in the pants.  With the move we are going to be adding about 800% capacity to our side to side network along with some really nice Cisco Distributed Forwarding Cards (DFC3) to the network blades themselves to help reduce the latency and reduce burden on the supervisor cards that run the switches.

Step three: Pics or it didn't happen

We are going to continue the information sharing about the infrastructure that makes EVE work on the next installment.  Although not everyone gets excited about cabinets and a datacenter, there are a few that do.  I personally keep them posted on my wall at home.  This is meant to be the first of many installments as we continue to improve the infastructure that EVE runs on.

Step four: But, how does this help me get my ship back?

The increase in Layer 2 switching capacity, reducing in latency through Distributed Forwarding, and the extra cold hamsters will have an impact on the ability to reduce overall latency in EVE.  It is not a single solution, but a good foundation where core infrastructure can be eliminated as a possible concern.

The next tech installment will have more details on Remapping EVE, the next level of Fleet Fighting and better prediction of hot spots for dedicated nodes.

TQ Tech Details: (Not the whole system, just what runs TQ)

Servers
                64 x IBM HS21
                2x Dual Core 3.33GHz CPU's
                32GB of RAM Each
                1x72GB HDD Each
               
                2 x IBM X3850 M2's
                2x Six Core 2.66GHz 
                128GB of RAM
                4 x 146GB HDD

Cores
                - 280 total Cores
                - ~1 THz
               
RAM
                - 2.3TB of Total RAM

Storage
                - 4.8TB of Local Storage
                - 2TB of SSD SAN
                - 256GB of RAM SAN

Network
                - Gigabit Ethernet
                - 4Gb/s Fiber Channel

So what will June 23 look like?

Here's our current downtime schedule for when TQ will be offline:

0900:     All EVE Services go offline. (Web, Forums, Test Servers, EVE Gate, TQ, basically everything hosted in London)

1200:     EVE Online web, secure and Test Servers come back online.        (all network services reestablished in London.  Only TQ should still be down at this time)

1500:     TQ back online