CCP Inspired by Iceland

Hi, I'm Hellmar. You may remember me from such blogs as Born Global and PLEX aid for Haiti. I am here today to talk to you about volcanoes and how we have unusually little activity on that front here in Iceland right now.

We recently were not in that situation with Eyjafjallajökull erupting in April. Even though the pictures were quite spectacular then, the subsequent air travel disruption was not. During all of this, CCP employees and EVE Online were quite secure as Reykjavík is located in a geological safe area and Tranquility is housed in the Docklands area of London along with a good parts of the world's IT infrastructure. However, with offices in Atlanta, Shanghai and the UK, many CCPers had places to go and people to see and, of course, those quick trips turned into a less-than-comical version of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" - and boats. So the travel issues did affect us in that regard. We can sympathize with everyone else who was inconvenienced by cancelled flights.

With the worst of it behind us, the areas around EyjafjallaJökull are recovering and being cleaned by an army of volunteers. It can be said that everyone in Iceland now has a whole new appreciation for "Planetary Interaction."

As a result of all of this, the tourism industry in Iceland has taken quite a blow. During the eruptions a good number of people had cancelled their plans to visit Iceland and, similar to the volunteer effort of cleaning the ash around farms and villages in the vicinity of Eyjafjallajökull, friends of Iceland are banding together to help send out the message that it is perfectly safe to visit. In fact, it's probably better than ever with very competitive rates and offers out there.

A web site has been created around the initiative,  www.inspiredbyiceland.com, where you can find some members of CCP talking about their inspirations.  From seeing so many of you in Iceland each year around Fanfest, we know there are quite a number friends of Iceland within the EVE community, so I wanted to make you all aware of this effort so that the 340,000 strong EVE community could help the 320,000 person community in Iceland that helped create all of this back in the day.

In other news, I hope everyone is enjoying Tyrannis. Judging from the numbers, we can certainly see an incredible amount of interest as witnessed by the a new all time high peak concurrent user (PCU) record of 60,453. I have also seen a good number of threads on the forums celebrating the increased frame rate in various scenarios following a lot of refactoring of the resource management in EVE. Make sure to check out AT8 over the weekend, it is going to be the best one ever (the last two weekends are available on YouTube).

• CCP Hellmar