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. In that case you will find fewer resources in your space but if you are consequently not utilising the existing resources anyway due to whatever reason, this may not be a bad thing.

Industrial Index

The industrial index is based upon two activities taking place within your solar system.  These are mining and mini-professions are based around the volume of ore mined and the successful use of hacking or archaeology modules within your space.

Military Index

The military index is based upon killing NPCs, a favourite past time of many of you and you get more points, the bigger the NPC is.  Simple and straightforward!

The Benefits of Resource Upgrades

Note the names for the upgrades are not final!

Pirate Magnets - add two additional guaranteed anomalies per level to your solar system

Ore Prospecting Array - adds one additional guaranteed hidden asteroid site per level to your solar system

Entrapment - increase the chance significantly of a DED complex being located in the depths of your solar system

Survey Networks - increase the chance significantly of mini-profession sites being located within your solar system

Quantum Flux Generator - increase the chance significantly of a wormhole being discovered within your solar system to w-space.

The Costs of Resource Upgrades

Resource upgrades cost a relatively small amount of ISK (we are looking at a range of 50-500 million ISK) to purchase and require a certain existing appropriate activity level.  The last and important cost is the effort to utilise the resource once it is unlocked and that is up to you to match the resource levels to your required solar system activity levels and how concentrated you want your space to be.

In Closing

With Dominion, you will have the power to improve your space as you choose and gain increasing power over these choices. In the future we are looking to add more upgrades as new content is developed and to create even more options and paths to upgrade your system along. 

As with anything in development, the final figures may change before release to Tranquillity.  Your feedback and questions are welcome as always.

Ave - Chronotis

Following are the results from the candidacy application period.

The statistics.

• We received 60 applications.
• We accepted 49.
• We rejected 11.

Like with CSM1, CSM2 and CSM3 candidacy applications, the main reasons for rejections were passport issues (either not supplied or expired), EULA violations and Internet lolsters.

• 1 female and 48 males are running. This is a decrease from the last election and lower than the overall player ratio, where the female population is 3.9% of the whole (according to user account information).
• The age range of the candidates is between 21 and 54 with the average age of 33 years.

The list of applicants will be published Friday, October 30, 2009 and will be viewable from this section.

We are truly looking forward to the campaign and we wish the best of luck to the candidates in the upcoming elections which will be open November 12 through November 26, 2009.

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. If I were you I‘d stop reading right now and go play with it!

Still here? Okay, fine, let's go through the highlights then.

One of the things you'll notice straight away is the new "Fleet" button on your NeoCom. This will allow you to access everything fleet related in a single window. We've combined the broadcast and the fleet window in one and added the Fleet Finder into it as well. This approach is much more user-friendly and should be helpful to newer pilots who are finding their footing in Eve.

You are able to completely close the Fleet window without exiting your fleet. I'm pretty sure that this will come in handy for people in large, 200+ man person fleets because updating the fleet member list is a bit laggy with that many people (this is something we're looking into).

Fleet Finder

The Fleet Finder allows you to advertise your fleet to your friends and allies. They can then join the fleet without requiring an invitation, or you can set up your advert in such a way that you will need to approve each application to the fleet, whichever way you prefer.

The Fleet Finder will be extremely useful for alliances and corporations as a way to gather people up for a war. No more "x up in corp channel" messages. :-)

You can set up your Fleet Advert to allow people in your corporation, alliance or even those outside your alliance to join (providing you have set their standing to positive). You can also use the standing constraint along with the scope constraint. This will allow you to open up your fleet to people in your alliance, but only those above a certain standing, for example.

Another play style which will benefit from the Fleet Finder is Factional Warfare. Few things are as frustrating as waiting a whole evening for someone to invite you into a FW fleet when you know there's pew pew'ing all around you but no one answers your 'x me up plz, lolz!' cries.

People looking for fleets can filter by distance to fleet boss, scope (corp, alliance, etc), and their standing to the fleet boss, making it easy to find a fleet in your vicinity. Not to worry though. For the paranoid out there the boss can hide his location and the size of the fleet.

The Fleet Finder usurps the old "Open fleet" functionality where you would set your fleet to be "open" to your corporation or alliance and could then paste a link into chat for people to join your fleet. This feature has now been removed.

However, if you register your fleet in the Fleet Finder you can drag it (either from the advert list or from the 'my advert' tab) into the chat window to achieve the same functionality that you're used to with the old open fleets. This is one of the many things that we added to this feature after getting feedback from you, the players.

Broadcasts

We're changing the way that broadcasts work. Previously the type of broadcast would dictate who would be able to receive it. Despite making perfect sense to us at the time the rules turned out to be extremely convoluted and no one really understood them. This time around, as CCP Greyscale so eloquently put it, "we're taking advantage of the fact that our players are not morons."

So, with that in mind we're putting the power into your hands. When you send any type of Fleet Broadcast you decide who should receive it. You can choose between superiors, subordinates and everyone. Your current broadcast mode is displayed prominently in the UI and you can assign a shortcut key to cycle between them.

Here is how the recipient rules will work for squad members for example:

• Superiors will send to your squad commander, your wing commander and the fleet commander.
• Subordinates will send to your squad mates (we must find a better name for that, maybe peers?).
• Everyone is pretty straight forward.

In addition, the type of broadcast dictates the range of the broadcast like before. The possible ranges are Proximity, Solar System and Global.

If you open up the broadcast settings window or look at received broadcasts in your history tab you will see the range of each broadcast type.

Since the broadcasts have been revamped in such a way that the broadcast sender chooses his/her recipients the scout role is no longer needed since all it did was allow a fleet member to send the "enemy spotted" broadcast to everyone. Therefore we have removed that role.

As before, the recipient can choose which broadcasts to listen to and it's much easier to manage your broadcasts than it was previously. All in all, the broadcasts should be much more useful than before.

Loot Logging

This is a pretty handy little feature that we're adding into Dominion. When you create your fleet you can set it up in Loot Logging mode. When this is active all loot events are sent to members of the fleet making it very easy to divide the spoils after that trip into wormhole space.

You can even export the loot log to disk so that you can collect all the info in excel and make pretty graphs of all the money you're making.

This is a completely optional feature and is something that the Fleet Creator specifies when the fleet is created. People don't have to use this feature if they don't want to but chances are that a lot of pilots will find this useful since trust isn't exactly something that New Eden is brimming with ;-)

Usability Tweaks

We have spent a lot of time tying the fleet feature together as a useful tool to manage in-space relationships. It should be much more user-friendly than before.

For example, every entry has a relevant right click menu and there are context-sensitive tooltips with additional information on many of the elements. In addition, we've added a new "Member History" tab which shows you the history of joins, leaves and role changes (added because of player feedback).

We are also working on the welcome page and will provide new wiki pages on how to use the feature from a-ö (a weird Icelandic letter at the end of our alphabet).

There is a lot of little things here and there that you might not necessarily realize when you're using the feature but all in all it's a smoother ride.

Future Music

As I said, we've received some marvellous feedback on the forums for the fleet feature and much of it has been incorporated into the system already.

Some of the things which you have asked for that haven't made it in yet include the ability for fleet members to see the location of the Fleet Commander or Boss, the ability for commanders to see the location and ship types of their subordinates and more usability tweaks here and there.

Another important addition is to allow people to quickly rejoin a fleet if they get disconnected (or try to activate an easter egg by holding down the control key and typing QWERTY).

These all seem very fair to us and is something that we are considering along with possibly new broadcasts and more usability tweaks.

Conclusion

We have been working on these new Fleet features based very much on player feedback. A lot of the usability tweaks that we did was done because you asked us to. This is one of those features that's there to make your lives easier. If there is something you want to add or change please let us know.

All this is either on Singularity now or on its way there in the next few days. Go there and play around with it, and give us feedback on the forums. Together we can make this feature better and better with each iteration.

So, step one: Go to Singularity and try it out.

Step two: Forum rage, and we'll see what we can do. :-)

Jon Bjarnason
Technical Director
EVE Online, CCP Games 

When they were first designed, it was believed they would be high in the food chain as they boasted improved performance over standard hulls at that time. However, as expansions passed, new vessels were introduced, mostly tech 2, but also higher tiers in the case of battleships, all of this turning faction ships into vessels nobody wants to fly because of their antiquited attributes next to their acquistion tag.

However here, we don't want you to upgrade to other ships or pay taxes by flying them (you are already going to do that by staying in some rookie corporations, remember?). We want you to keep using them, to reverse that obsolescence course, and that is why, with Dominion's release, most of your faction ships are going back to the factory for an instant, free-delivery-under-warranty upgrade package (batteries not included).

I just wish they would have done the same for my Ford Escort; scammers, all of them.

Generalities

Since the general attributes of these ships are already available on the Test Server Feedback forum channel, it would be redundant to list them here again; instead this blog will focus on explaining the reasoning implied to balance faction ships and provide answers for questions asked during the feedback process.

Before we go any further, it is good to explain that faction ships are sorted into two separate sub-categories with different roles and capabilities:

• Faction ships obtainable through high/low-security space based empires (Amarr, Caldari, Gallente and Minmatar) are named navy ships.
• Faction ships obtainable through low/null-security space criminal organizations (Angel Cartel, Blood Raiders, Guristas, Sansha's Nation and Guristas) are sorted as pirate ships.

• Q: Why are Rogue Drones not offering me ships?
  • A: Rogue Drones do not care about politics, marketing or profit and as such you can't have their stuff, no matter how cool they may look. More accurately, they literally are the ship they infest, so any cohabitation with a pod-pilot would be short at best.

• Q: Can we have ships from mini-factions like the Equilibrium of Mankind?
  • A: Offering EoM ships to players would either mean having them drop through loot somehow, which is not really acceptable, or require them to be a fully fledged pirate organization, with territory, asteroid belt infestation, LP stores, agents and complexes. Doing so is a tremendous task which is not planned or even considered at the time being.

Navy ships

Individual attribute changes are available here.

Enhanced for military duties, navy ships are improved combat platforms over their base tech 1 hull versions; they are meant to keep the same role (with some exceptions) than their regular versions when they have any, and only require their base race spaceship command skill set to be flown. Due to their acquisition method and general availability, we determined they should have attributes located between tech 1 and tech 2, mainly designed to be versatile in the functions they can accomplish. Which led us to the following:

     1. Navy frigates: the goal was to revamp them into a relatively cheap mix of interceptor and assault frigates, with neither the speed of the former or the firepower of the latter.

• Imperial Navy Slicer: wields good damage projecting capabilities, at the price of reduced tackling efficiency and CPU problems.
• Caldari Navy Hookbill: provides a good offense/defense balance with its 5 medium slots and 3 bonused launchers.
• Federation Navy Comet: delivers excellent close range damage supported by its improved drone attributes.
• Republic Fleet Firetail: almost comparable to an interceptor it terms of speed and agility, but lacks damage capabilities.

• Q: Why is the Caldari Navy Hookbill a missile instead of a hybrid platform?
  • A: We are aware Caldari ships offer more options than just missile platforms, like ECM and hybrids, but the Caldari Navy Hookbill is based on the crow, kestrel and Hawk to some extent, and supposed to be in line with the Osprey Navy Issue, Caracal Navy Issue and Raven Navy Issue which are designed to be missile ships.

• Q: Why is the Republic Fleet Firetail losing its 25% speed bonus?
  • A: It receives an in-built 15% speed boost with the changes and remains the fastest navy frigate. Increasing that bonus back to 25% would put it in line with Interceptors while having all the other boosts it receives now, which would not be in line with other navy frigates.

     2. Navy cruisers: already boosted for Empyrean Age and thus were not looked into for Dominion. We do not dismiss the possibility of having another pass at them in the future, but this is not planned at the time being.

     3. Navy battleships: we first boosted tier 2 navy battleships to justify their price tag, which means increasing their versatility a bit with extra fittings, drone bay and maneuverability when necessary. We also created tier 1 navy versions only obtainable through Factional Warfare LP stores in an effort to boost their rewards for participating players.

• Q: Why not keeping the Scorpion Navy Issue as an ECM platform?
  • A: First of all, we do believe a faction ECM platform would break the balance next to the Caldari Recons and Black Ops; also, would you really appreciate a faction ship, which has high chances to be called primary by itself, to carry even more importance to the enemy fleet commander by being E-War based, especially when it devotes most of it med slots to fit ECM modules instead of a tank? Finally, the Caldari battleship line was lacking a solo-platform which was asked for quite some time, that the 8 med slots of the Scorpion Navy Issue provides without sacrificing too much tank due to its shield resist bonus. Or you may use it as shield-tank wall for gangs. In all cases, we believe it provides more roles in its current version as it would as an ECM platform.

• Q: Why does the Dominix Navy Issue and all other navy ships only have 350 calibration points?
  • A: Rigs are supposed to help tech 1 ships to close the gap with more specialized and efficient ships like faction and Tech 2. That explains why faction ships have three rig slots but 350 calibration, and tech 2 only 2 rig slots.

• Q: Why nerfing Navy Battleship shield recharge rate?
  • A: We estimate keeping the current Tranquility shield recharge rate would make them imbalanced in light of the new changes, especially for the Dominix and Scorpion Navy Issue. While passive shield tanking is supposed to be possible with some ships with great efficiency (Drake, Rattlesnake...), navy battleships are not part of the lot.

• Q: The Republic Fleet Tempest sucks.
  • A: The current Fleet Tempest changes are supposed to go on par with CCP Nozh changes to projectile turrets, so keep that in mind while doing your calculations. Also, due its current slot versatility (6 med/6 lows) there are always going to be people that prefer a certain setups over others, thus it is not possible to make everybody happy no matter how we change it. However, we feel the current slot changes (5 med/ 7 lows) and the shield/armor hitpoint swap will help more as the almost mandatory PvP med slot equipment would inevitably conflict with a shield tank.

• Q: Why are faction battleships are subpar next to pirate battleships?
  • A: That's intended as they are supposed to be more accessible and less specialized than the later. Furthermore, navy ships require only one set of spaceship command skills to fly, while pirates need two.

• Q: Why having camouflage skins on navy battleships?
  • A: The black and white skin you were used to on the Megathron Navy Issue has never been the proper Gallente Navy version paintjob and this is why it was changed. As some of you guessed, the correct one was already used on the EVE store Megathron Navy miniature. We are deeply sorry you may not like the new skins, however this unfortunately remains a matter of taste. But if you ask me, my preference would be that dreadnoughts in siege mode should transform into huge space robots with vacuum cleaners.

Pirate ships

Individual attribute changes are available here.

Pirate ships have focused, niche role they excel to. Due to their high acquisition cost and rarity, it was decided they should either be on par with Tech 2 ships of the same class or even slightly above them.

     1. Angel Cartel: the embodiment of speed, hit and run tactics.

• Q: Why removing the projectile tracking bonus of the Machariel?
  • A: The proposed changes make the Machariel as agile as a battlecruiser, and its primary role is supposed to be a hit and run vessel that "kites" its targets. In such circumstances, a falloff bonus will help more at medium ranges than a tracking bonus would.

• Q: Why does the Machariel not have a 8/7/5 layout?
  • A: This is quite a dilemma. While shield tanking would definitely help to keep the ship nimble by fitting low slots with appropriate modules, it would still conflict with PvP tackling equipment, which defeats the intended role of that vessel. Furthermore, it will keep a speed advantage even if armor plating a ship is your hobby.

     2. Blood Raiders: this pirate organization was always supposed to excel at capacitor warfare and movement impairing capabilities, while keeping a decent damage output.

• Q: Why removing one turret from the Ashimmu?
  • A: 4 turrets with 100% damage would be quite equal to a Phantasm while keeping its energy draining and webbing capabilities, which is out of balance. This is partly compensated by the added 10m3 dronebay.

     3. Guristas: a controversial change if there is one, the new Guristas ship line-up focuses on drones, excellent shield tank with some missile abilities.

• Q: Why does the Gila have a 400m3 dronebay when the Ishtar has 375m3?
  • A: Guristas in their new form are dedicated drone users, and remember we want pirate ships to be at least as potent as tech 2 attribute wise. While Gallente focuses on drone and close range damage, Guristas dedicate themselves to drone, shield tank and to a lesser extent, missiles. Furthermore 25m3 is hardly a noticable difference for the expected price difference between an Ishtar and Gila.

• Q: The Rattlesnake is as useful as an unplugged microwave in the Sahara desert.
  • A: While it does less damage than the other pirate battleships or even a close range fitted Dominix, remember it can project damage further with the missile velocity bonus, while having an amazing shield tank. On a passive tank configuration, it can hardly be stopped with ECM (drones and high Gravemetric sensor strength), sensor dampeners (still drones), tracking disrupted (no turrets), cannot be energy drained (passive shield tank) while itself using energy neutralizers and hardly feeling the side-effects.

     4. Sansha's Nation: combine energy weapons and shield tank in an mean-XL package

• Q: Why nerfing the Phantasm shield hitpoints?
  • A: This was part of the overhaul itself to bring all pirate factions on the same level and you may notice the Nightmare shield increased in the process. In exchange the Phantasm received a bit more capacitor, targeting range and radar sensor strength.

     5. Serpentis: deliver close range face melting damage at the expense of defense.

• Q: Why having the huge damage multipliers on the Daredevil and Vigilant?
  • A: When they were created, theses ships had a fixed number of graphical turret hardpoints set. Trying to raise that limit now would look cumbersome at best and create other issues, which is why we opted for this solution instead, so no, this is not a typo.

• Q: Why is the Vindicator is so close of the Kronos in terms of performance?
  • A: It is not. It has more agility, more speed, more Magnetometric sensor strength, more drone bay, more armor buffer, a different slot layout while its web bonus helps it reach its role at point blank range. The Kronos on the contrary is more aimed for PvE activities, even if its three spare high-slots may be used for capacitor warfare in PvP, we do not want to nerf it on that aspect since it is supposed to be part of a sandbox game to adapt a ship outside its original purpose. An armor repairing bonus may bring the Vindicator too close of a Hyperion, and force modules to be used when we again want to leave a bit of setup flexibility in its fittings.

To end with

Remember that due to the magnitude and nature of this change, you may fly a ship that has its slot layout changed during Dominion. If that is the case we highly recommend you to dock before the expansion downtime to minimize any issue that could possible arise after. For example, we don't want you to engage an opponent without realizing you have your microwarpdrive or turret moved into your cargohold, as this would have nasty consequences on your vessel life expectancy.

- CCP Ytterbium

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.   

A Diffuse Passive source would be the assembly line fees in a station, profits on manufacturing, for example, where it is a largely passive or low input activity providing diffuse income over a typically longer period.

Point Active sources in days gone by would have been things like the static 10/10 complexes. Point Passive are the moon mineral incomes or T2 production in pre-invention times.  

Diffuse versus Point Sources

As many of you know, and history has shown us, point source revenue streams have been a constant issue and one that plagues us today. Still, they end up being many magnitudes larger than the potential profit of the diffuse income streams, especially where the effort or cost is minimal and fixed.

Point sources do act as geographical conflict drivers, true, but in both cases the issues arose because they were infinite sources, but, more importantly, they required very few people to operate them proportional to the benefit they bestowed.

In a game where the focus is on the sandbox and social interaction, this is generally bad as you have proverbial gold mines held by the few who no longer need the diffuse income streams of the many to fund themselves with and a cost/benefit ratio which redefines strategic assets as practically disposable items. 

The ripple effects here are the most devastating in our eyes as it redefines how our precious playground is ruled and we need to ensure a stage where the props are fair and fun and anyone who tries can have a chance for great glory or astounding defeat.

But point sources are not the only problem!

The diffuse income sources are dependent upon things you cannot change currently.  Things like the true security class of your space and the number of celestial belts in the system besides the additional chance of exploration sites being present or proximity to pirate NPC regions and agents. 

This currently puts a limit on the amount of potential diffuse income as a function of the systems you occupy and the quality of those systems. You must either hold a lot of space or have alliance members fund themselves in various other ways beyond the lifeblood of the belts and the pirates which infest them.

Upgrading a solar systems material resources

With Dominion, we will allow you to increase the potential diffuse income sources in your space by allowing you to upgrade it. This will be explained in a far more detailed blog in the near future, but I can give an overview of it now.  

You will be able to purchase and install upgrades in an infrastructure hub.  These upgrades will unlock and add additional resources into your system, such as new hidden belts or encounters to complexes or escalation sites for you to find, thus increasing your potential diffuse income streams and theoretical member resource capacity of each system as a result.  

Each upgrade will have a build cost in creating the upgrade and the resource upgrades themselves will have different pre-requisites, some of which will be activity-based, such as NPCs killed or ore mined within the system itself, which will add to the development index of the system.  So in this instance, the more the solar system's resources are actively used, the faster your resource development will be, which in turn promotes you to properly invest in the space in terms of active pilots (whether concentrating your existing member base and allies, recruiting new members or making treaties with new allies) and make sure it is used to full benefit, depending on which upgrade level you are seeking or looking to maintain.

In the future, we envision that you will also be able to unlock more exotic types of resources. The system outlined above allows us to easily do this in the future as a great foundation of traditional bread-and-butter income streams combined later with, perhaps, some more exotic resource upgrades. We are sure many of you can imagine the possibilities we are thinking about, too (comets, dark matter, wormholes, space whales, etc.).

The moon mineral values and Tech II production still need some love though!

We quickly discovered the next bottleneck with Tech II production after invention was introduced was the static supply of moon minerals against a growing playerbase and a dynamic demand. The effect of this system has reared its ugly head with rapidly increasing prices and, therefore, moon values for the limiting factor materials. It is something we looked to tackle previously with the introduction of alchemy reactions. This was partially successful, but missed the mark in achieving the desired effect we were looking for.

The value of the moon minerals is based on two components: supply and demand.  We can change either of these to affect the value to a greater or lesser degree, and many of you have made excellent suggestions in the past on the forums covering core issues, ranging from the infinite supply in each moon. to alternative build routes, for example, to new sources of moon materials.

The core issue is the very high value of the promethium and dysprosium moon materials which create a massive point source passive income and, to some extent, uneven demand with the other relatively cheap moon materials. Our proposed changes, therefore, target the distribution of this demand in a more direct way than alchemy achieved.

Changing the moon mineral demand

As mentioned during the recent alliance tournament interviews, our initial focus and fixes focused around the quantities of construction components required in Tech II ships. The original values are holdovers from days gone by when agents used to hand out components as rewards. The exact quantities were very similar, however, this has played the largest part in determining the moon mineral values we see today and is something we can fix relatively easily and look to reducing the value of some moon materials whilst increasing others.

More Plates, Less Reactors

The approach being taken is to reduce the quantity of construction components such as reactors, shield emitters and thrusters derived from dysprosium and promethium moon materials, for example, whilst increasing the quantities required of the more common and very cheap materials such as armor plates.

An example of the approach of this change is below, demonstrating a quantity change to our friend the enyo.  (Note the numbers are only as a demonstration of the change and are not final!).

The effect ripples down from here to the simple and raw moon materials as a result of the change in advanced materials when applied to all the ships.

Coping with Increased Demand for the Common Materials

There will be more changes to come which build upon the core changes outlined here, such as adjustments to component build times and some adjustment to the armor plate materials to ensure that the system can cope with the increased demand for the most common materials without them becoming the new bottlneck. These changes will be detailed further in the test server forum and here in the comments to this blog later on.

Alchemy will be boosted

The profitability of alchemy and the initial values are all determined from current market value in reality (it is either profitable or not).  With the above changes, alchemy reactions become unprofitable. The output will be changed, although this will need further tweaks to ensure there is an effective overflow pipe to respond to future market changes.

Future additional sources besides moons

Beyond Dominion, we are looking towards adding new sources of moon materials so that we will have a dynamic supply which can respond to the changing needs of the marketplace and help resolve the static supply issues we currently see. Some potential routes we have already mentioned previously here and are common suggestions on the forums. We are definitely looking hard at doing something cool here in the future along these lines.

In closing

We hope you better understand that our goal is to allow each solar system in null sec to have the potential to hold many more people per system in material resource terms (perhaps 50-100 when fully upgraded).  As a result this will lead to the formation of micro-communities and diversity of life in each colony in effect and null sec being able to hold many more people which leads to a much more interesting political scene and ensuing drama.

Coupled with this focus on allowing you to upgrade the solar systems material resources, we are looking to reduce the value of in particular dysprosium and promethium moons through changes to Tech II production so alliances are once more reliant on more traditional income diffuse revenue streams and encouraged to recruit members and form treaties or hold less space.

Constructive feedback is welcome as ever on the proposals and overview of our goals for revenue streams in null sec.

Ave - Chronotis

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. Just a few more tweaks and tests and we are there, and the team is pounding away, working together like a fine-tuned machine...

A whirr reminiscent of a gatling gun and the booming laughter of a large German fills the air just as the polystyrene projectile strikes my head, another following it to the chest. Injured but not down, I push forward with my team‘s single-minded goal, of course after defending my honor with a few choice words for the crazed gunman.

Chatter in the team: we‘re looking at a fringe test case that seems a bit odd, the only hurdle left on this steeplechase. We all gather around, talking about the issue, being critical and proving to ourselves that our work is rock solid. All agree, we are Done.

I look at my team. Back home, I was always ahead of the pack, but then so was every one of them as well. Here I am surrounded by the best and brightest from all over the world, and I am one of them. The button is pushed, our final submission for this sprint. Now just to wait for the build to complete and see our work on the public server, get tons of awesome feedback from our players and volunteers, and perhaps bask in a bit of glory (or flames) on the forums. But no time for basking now, the next challenge awaits as we get to do it all over again. But first, lunch (I heard rumors of lamb steaks and cake today) and maybe a match or two in the game room. I may even sign up for a massage this afternoon. And then tonight there‘s that party, or I might just play some games with the guys here at the office, or join some others at the gym, or all of the above...

But what I am most looking forward to is seeing our work go live. And after a few more iterations, I want to hand this awesomeness over to the guys downstairs that keep the universe running - to see it up on Tranquility. I want to see our mark on New Eden and the hundreds of thousands that inhabit it, to hear the shock of the players months later when they realize that some of our absolutely insane ideas were actually brilliant in ways that they had never even imagined.

And I want to do all of it with this collection of nerds, freaks and geeks and flat-out geniuses that is CCP.

Are you one of the best and brightest in your field of expertise? Do you have what it takes to join CCP? Are you fearless?

Apply for the biggest adventure of your life. I dare ya.

- CCP Heimdall

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. All candidates have to submit a scan of their valid passport in order to be considered eligible candidates and be 21 years of age or more. Furthermore, it is very important to have 100% correct and up to date ownership information on all of your user accounts, as all of them will be checked.

Why should you run for the CSM?

Because you affect EVE, both in the short term and in the long run. The best example of that is the upcoming changes to 0.0 sovereignty (here and here)-- the first two CSMs have laid the groundwork for a complete overhaul of that mechanic and is now showing the fruits of that labor. The third CSM was directly involved in a brainstorming session regarding the current ideas and possible future additions to the mechanics of 0.0.

Furthermore it needs to be noted that roughly 60% of all issues brought up by the CSM have either been already added to the game or are on the horizon; changes to the UI and Factional Warfare being the largest groups of items not yet slated for release while having been injected to the backlog where they are ready to be processed when the resources are directed to those venues.

What has the CSM done so far?

·         The skill queue. The CSM convinced us to just do it.

·         The new probing system. It has been fine-tuned based largely on CSM's comments.

·         The new ship fitting tool. Where would we be without it?

The unique approach of democratic elections as a selection process for a player council is unheard of -- together we can make history and make EVE a better place for all. 

The CSM white paper and the summary of it can be found if you chase these links.

Following are the important dates for the fourth CSM:

October, 5^th. Opening for candidacy runs for the fourth CSM.

October, 19^th. Closing for the candidacy applications.

November, 12^th. Voting for the fourth CSM opens.

November, 26^th. Voting for the fourth CSM closes.

December, 2^nd. A permanent announcement made about the results of the fourth CSM elections.

December, 5^th 2009, Saturday. The fourth CSM will meet online for the first time.

February, 24^th - 28^th 2010, Wednesday to Sunday. The fourth CSM arrives in Iceland to speak with CCP.

Throw your hat in the ring - make history.

On the core feature list we have: home, profiles, improved contact list and an improved mail system. Both the improved contact list and the mail system will also be made available in-game, finally giving a much needed overhaul to the arcane and archaic in-game mail system.

Before I go into more detail on the features themselves I wanted to tell you about our revised release plan.

RELEASE PLAN

Dominion: The first iteration of the all new in-game mail system along with all the back-end wizardry to make it work.

Post-Dominion (Likely early in 2010): The first iteration of the COSMOS web application, with all the features outlined below plus the Calendar.

We think that this delay for the web application is the right move because we have always had our sights set on the long game for COSMOS. The first release, while crammed with good stuff, was always intended to lay the basis for the ground-breaking innovations to come. Rushing COSMOS out with less polish didn´t make sense in this context, we want to impress from day one. CCPOveur will have a lot more to say about this in his FanFest presentation and there will be chance for discussion and feedback in the COSMOS roundtable also planned for FanFest.

Another positive of this approach is that we now expect to be able to get the Calendar into the first COSMOS web release. Personally this is one of the COSMOS features I am most excited about, it´s going to make scheduling corp and alliance ops a lot easier. Add to that the new mail system, corp status updates and the future release of integrated corp and alliance forums and COSMOS will significantly reduce management overheads for all corps and alliances. 

The asynchronous release is made possible because COSMOS is a web application and is not as interwoven with the EVE Client as most of our other features. This will make it possible for us to continue to release smaller batches of COSMOS features outside of major TQ releases in the future, when it makes sense to do so.

Now onto the features themselves:

HOME

Initially COSMOS will have a status update system similar to that in Facebook for sharing messages with your friends. The feeds section of COSMOS aggregates all the status updates of your friends and colleagues and allows you to organize the feeds. Later extensions of COSMOS will hook into this system for other types of feeds you can subscribe to, such as news and blogs. All these feeds will be displayed in Home.

PROFILES

Profiles in COSMOS are the equivalent of character show info in-game, including bio, corporation history and other relevant information. Additionally, the profile includes the status update feed for the character. When viewing your own profile, you will also have access to limited character sheet info. Initially this will only include trained skills and the training queue, but it will expand in the future.

CONTACTS

Contacts is an extension of the current in-game buddy list that supports two-way friendship connections. When adding a person to the contact list, you have the option whether to silently add the person to a ''Watchlist'' (which has no relation to the fleet Watchlist!), or send a friend request. In addition to formally recognizing each other, adding someone as a friend gives them access to more information about you than would otherwise be accessible, such as status updates and what friends you have.

In order to keep the current functionality from the in-game buddy list, enemies or neutral acquaintances can be silently added to the "Watchlist" section of the contact list. Doing so does not require the added person's permission nor does it notify the added person - as with the in-game buddy list, anyone can be added to the Watchlist regardless of whether they want to or not. The Watchlist functions just like the buddy list, i.e. it allows you to see the online status of the person, but it does not grant any permissions you would not otherwise have.

The notion of ''labels'' (private tags) is used throughout COSMOS to classify and control content. In a sense, labels are your view of the content. In the contact section of COSMOS, contacts can be assigned labels, allowing you to group your contacts. Each label is represented Gmail style with a corresponding folder, containing all contacts with that label. Creating a new label and assigning it to one or more contacts creates a new folder in the contact list. Contacts can be moved between folders by swapping one label for another.

The privacy settings define what information and how much of it you expose and to whom. In the initial release of COSMOS, the privacy settings are most likely going to be hardwired, but the intention is to implement a system that gives you full control. The privacy settings will be implemented as a role based access control system, using labels for assigning roles to persons in your contact list. Every permission in the privacy settings (e.g. "may view my profile") has an associated list of labels that define who are granted that permission: The permission is granted to a given user if the user has any of the listed labels.

Access to labeled content that you own (such as, in future releases, videos) can also be granted based on the label. The general access policy, which applies to all content of that type, can be extended with clauses for content with specific labels. For instance, if you have uploaded some videos labeled "awesome", then you can change your privacy settings to only allow your "awesome" contacts to view the "awesome" videos, while in general allowing everyone to view the rest of your videos.

Down the line, the plan is to use a similar system for security settings for corporations and alliances. The policies would be augmented with optional side conditions for their use, e.g. requiring a vote within some member group or approval of higher ranking members, such that separation of duties can be implemented for sensitive permissions.

MAIL

The mail system is implemented similarly to Gmail, using labels to organize mail just as for contacts. The first release will have simple hardcoded rules for labeling corporation mail etc. With later releases, the functionality will be extended to custom mail rules and archiving.

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. When writing this dev blog I compiled a list of technical dev blogs since 2007 that relate to new or improved technology:

• Common technology
  • Stackless Python 2.5
  • StacklessIO
  • Engineering updates
  • More engineering updates
• Client technology
  • EVE Voice
  • Trinity, the first graphics update
  • Client performance enhancements
  • Apocrypha, the second graphics update
  • Audio update
• Server technology
  • EVE64
  • Server performance enhancements
• Hardware
  • Server hardware upgrades
  • More server hardware upgrades
  • Network upgrades
  • Database upgrades
• Community technology
  • EVE API
  • Static Data Export Database

Why do we constantly update EVE? "Why can't you just keep it the way it is?"

We update EVE because EVE needs to be fresh, vibrant and cutting-edge. EVE should be immortal, just as you, the pod pilot.

With the release of EVE Online: Dominion this winter we are yet again adding more new technology. Dominion will be the third graphics update and then, as CCP Pleognost detailed in his dev blog on the new in-game browser, we are updating the IGB in Dominion using the Chromium browser toolkit.

Increased minimum system requirements

Introducing new technology has at times required that we update the minimum system requirements needed to run the EVE client. Adding new technology sometimes entails that old technology must be left behind.

Currently the minimum system requirements are Windows XP but with Dominion they will become Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is due to Chromium's dependence on Windows HTTP Services version 5.1 (winhttp.dll).

The increased minimum requirements will affect 0.4% of our Windows XP users. There is a direct update path for these users: To update to the latest Service Pack, currently Service Pack 3, at the Microsoft Update website. This update is free of charge for Windows XP users.

Other options include upgrading to Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Official Windows 7 support

With Dominion we will be officially supporting Windows 7. We have been testing Windows 7 since December last year and our bi-weekly platform tests are run on several Windows 7 configurations.

Microsoft has announced Windows 7's general retail availability on 22 October but already about 8.8% of our Windows users use Windows 7. The majority of our Windows users are still using Windows XP, or 49.5%, with 41.7% using Windows Vista but the increased Windows 7 usage has been at the expense of Windows XP.

Here is an overall breakdown of all operating systems in September 2009:

- CCP Explorer

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. As a result, we are being extra careful here, as this first and foremost pertains to the volunteer program and has no effect on our EVE Online operations or any customer data whatsoever.

It is important to highlight for the avoidance of any doubt that this information was stolen from areas operated outside CCP´s infrastructure and is therefore not related to anyone's EVE player account data. Player billing information, personal information, and character/game information all remain completely secure and unaffected, as well as CCP corporate pathways and e-mail, Tranquility, databases, etc.

All players, particularly those who are or have been in the EVE Online volunteer program, should be aware that any e-mails sent from the @eve-crc.net domain are bogus and have been sent from someone pretending to be an official representative of CCP.

We are taking this issue extremely seriously and have launched a full investigation. In the meantime, to be on the safe side, we have shut down all ISD servers and services to protect our volunteers and the integrity of the program and are now working diligently toward strengthening and improving our practices and policies pertaining to the volunteer program to ensure its ongoing success and valuable contribution to the EVE Online experience.

Thanks,

Ginger