This blog will provide an overview and details on two parts of the new sovereignty system in Dominion.  The upgrade system which unlocks resources or the ability to anchor strategic structures and the upkeep system which is the fortnightly bill your corporation will need to pay for each solar system you are managing on behalf of your alliance. 

The Upkeep System

The Upkeep system is the fortnightly (14 days) sovereignty bill each corporation will receive for every solar system they are managing and replaces the role of starbase fuel costs in our new sovereignty system.  The base cost is currently 20 million ISK a day and mirrors the approximate current daily operational fuel cost of five starbases fuel cost.  On top of this base fee is an additional fee for the infrastructure hub and any strategic upgrade (the upgrades which allow you to anchor the current or future sovereignty limited structures).

This boils down to the table below when projecting your future bills:

Current Summary Upkeep Costs per Solar System

These values including the names are very much open to further changes!

When is upkeep paid?

You must pay your first bill whilst the Territorial Claim Unit structure is being brought online.  If the first bill is not paid during this period, the Territorial Claim Unit will not come online.  You will then need to pay for each solar system every 14 days after that which will be listed as the 'sovereignty bill' for each solar system in your corporation wallet.

What happens if we do not pay our sovereignty bills on time?

Your Territorial Claim Unit structure and Infrastructure Hub will go offline and therefore all your upgrades as you will effectively have lost sovereignty.  It should be noted that assembly array jobs will pause, not cancel, if the starbase or capital ship assembly array goes offline now and any sovereignty dependant structures will similarly go offline like cynosural jammers and the like.

A note on the automatic payment of bills improvement! 

Many of you are aware of this addition on Singularity but to draw attention to this enhancement to the rest of you since it is appropriate we mention it whilst talking about bills.  It will be possible with Dominion to have your regular rental bills of various sorts (office rental, alliance maintenance, sovereignty bills, war bills etc) automatically paid if you choose.  This is setup in your corporation wallet > Bills tab.  There you will see two new tabs: Automatically Paid and Automatic Pay Settings.  In the latter tab, you can select which bills you would like to be automatically paid and for all bills which wallet division you would like it paid from. 

Any current or future bills which you have setup to be automatically paid will then appear in the Automatically Paid tab as opposed to the regular Payable tab you are used to.  In there you can see which are queued for payment and opt to manually pay them anyway if you desire. 

The new system will try to pay the bill two days before the due date and then every four hours after this point.  A notification mail will be sent to the accountants in the corp that you do not have the funds available to make payment with each failed payment attempt so that you have a chance to transfer money between divisions for example in time.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the new corporation wallet tabs for autopayment

Upgrading your space!

If you have an infrastructure hub online in your solar system, you have the potential to install new infrastructure upgrades for that system.  The upgrade interface is accessed through the context menu of the infrastructure hub when in range.  There you will see a window detailing all the possible upgrades there are - the ones you have unlocked and can install if you so choose, the upgrades you have already installed and the upgrades you have not unlocked yet.

Installing the upgrades is easy, if it is unlocked, you can install it by being a station manager and dropping the upgrade from your cargo onto the upgrade in the menu as directed.  You will get a classic "are you sure" confirmation and then it will be installed.  If the upgrade is online, then it is providing the appropriate effects.  If the installed upgrade is offline for whatever reason then it will have a red offline indicator.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the Infrastructure Hub Management window showing where you can monitor and install upgrades to your solar system

Three flavours of upgrades!

There are three types of upgrade linked to the index which forms the biggest part of their pre-requisites to unlock them:

 - Strategic - allow the anchoring and onlining of the current and any future sovereignty dependant structures like jump bridges and cyno jammers

 - Military - allow your systems to have additional anomalies and other exploration dungeons within your space such as encounters and complexes and wormholes

 - Industry - allow your systems to have additional hidden asteroid belts and mini-profession sites

The three development indices!

You can see in the sovereignty dashboard and infrastructure hub that the three indices all have five levels.  The pre-requisites to installing any upgrade require that you have some level in one of these indices much like how the skill system works. 

Sovereignty Index

The sovereignty index is one you should all be familiar with which is identical to the current sovereignty level system you have now and is based on days you have held sovereignty for according to the following scheme

Lvl 1 = sov held for 7 days

Lvl 2 = sov held for 21 days

Lvl 3 = sov held for 35 days

Lvl 4 = sov held for 65 days

Lvl 5 = sov held for 100 days

The levels at which each strategic upgrade is unlocked is the same as the current sovereignty level limited structures.

Activity Indexes

The industry and military indices are activity based, where the level you reach and the rate you reach it at are based upon maintaining a certain activity level within your solar system.  It does not matter who performs the activities in your space though we do show in the sovereignty dashboard who the top contributors are.  These index levels are required for the Military and Industrial upgrades so if you are looking to increase the resource levels within your solar system then you need to be performing the related activity to begin with.

If your activity rate decreases or stops then the activity indices may decay to the point where some of your upgrades may go offline as you no longer meet the prerequisite activity level.

The election of the fourth CSM in EVE has drawn to a close, and the application period has now been concluded.

Following are the results from the candidacy application period.

The statistics.

• We received 60 applications.

Now, where did I put that fleet?

One of the features that I am personally most excited about for the upcoming Dominion expansion (well, not counting the new browser, the sovereignty changes, the awesome new graphics...).

Let me try that again: A thing that I'm reasonably excited about is a cute little feature that we call the Fleet Finder.

What's even cooler is that we took the opportunity and worked on the overall fleet UI and some of the basic fleet functionality like the broadcasts.

This is something we've been iterating on for a while and it‘s running on Singularity as we speak.

I have always been fond of my old Ford Escort. Sure, it was creepy old, slow, bulky, cumbersome and remained some sort of unwanted ancestral legacy passed away from generation to generation in my family, but it was doing what is was supposed to do: leading me where I wanted to go with no "electronics" or any other fancy stuff they put in our cars today just to make them light up like fragile Christmas trees and costing a spleen to replace when they eventually break up.

However due to its decaying age, it wasn't keeping on par with modern standards anymore, especially with their so-called "security", so I sadly had to get away from it before they would start taxing me extra for driving a car that was morally painted as a hearse.

By now, we hope you have had a chance to read Greyscale and Abathur's blogs introducing the driving goals behind the sovereignty changes in Dominion as they both introduce what we want to talk about more in this blog and shed some more light and detail on some changes we are looking at to help us towards achieving our goals for null sec.

The focus of this blog is on streams, not the wet kind, but the revenue kind and how each of you, whether the alliance member exploring the depths of space for rich bounties, the alliance leader looking to fund your next big outpost/capital ship program or the empire dweller looking for a piece of the null sec pie will each be affected by Dominion. 

The Revenue Streams of Null Sec and Alliances

Broadly, the revenue streams you will know are of two types: diffuse or point.   They can be further categorized into Active or Passive.   

A Diffuse Active source is the corporation taxes many of you may be used to in your own corporation.  Here you are providing your corp with income from something you are actively doing, like hunting NPC pirates or reprocessing loot and ores in their stations.

Your story, next year:

I woke up excited to go to work this morning; never thought I‘d say that before this job. I get in a bit early to the office. My team needs me and the pressure is on. We‘ve busted our butts these last couple of sprints to get our baby fine-tuned and ready for Sisi, and the deadline for the new build looms.

Is it that time once more?

Yes it is!

Soon we will open the candidate applications page for the fourth term of the CSM (details of dates below). Like the three terms before, the full name and location of the candidate will be published, along with the candidate's character name, URL and campaign message.

COSMOS is an ambitious project and as such is many things to many people. Though the description "social networking tool" is fitting, "EVE away from EVE" is much closer to our long-term vision. In order to be a bit more concrete, I thought I'd give you a quick run-down of what exactly we expect COSMOS will be in its first of many incarnations, and how the pieces fit into the bigger picture.

On the core feature list we have: home, profiles, improved contact list and an improved mail system.

tl;dr

With the release of EVE Online: Dominion this winter the minimum system requirements needed to run the EVE client will become Windows XP Service Pack 2.  We will at the same time officially support Windows 7.

Updates, updates, updates, ...

The history of EVE is the history of continuous enhancements, updates, upgrades, and new and improved technology; both client and server software updates as well as hardware upgrades.

I'm CCP Ginger, Volunteer Manager for EVE Online.

Last weekend external resources related to the Interstellar Services Department (ISD), EVE's volunteer program, were compromised which led to the theft of some volunteer program related data but also information about specific volunteers.