Incursion release date

We imagine that you are starting to get excited over the Incursion expansion we've been working on for the past few months.

With all of the screenshots and videos of the new Incarna character creator we've seen filling up the intertubes, we can see that excitement is building for the upcoming Incursion expansion. The Sansha Incursion feature itself has had a lot of positive feedback through the mass tests we‘ve been running on Singularity and, with the host of smaller fixes (many requested directly by you!), this is going to be one epic expansion.

Based on a lot of great feedback we've gotten from the Singularity public test server, we see that both key features will benefit greatly from an additional level of polish.

We also want to do some usability changes to the Incarna character creator UI, and our artists are anxious to invest more time tweaking the assets you've been drooling over. For the Sansha Incursion feature there is some polish we want to get in, mostly on the socialization and UI front, but there is also some backend optimization that we want to do to get things to run more smoothly.

On top of that, we want to make sure our quality assurance department gets plenty of time with the more polished, final versions.

We discussed a few of the options we have with the CSM, and I think we‘re very unified that the best course of action is:  

1. Release a first-step patch with a collection of player requested improvements November 30^th.
2. Release a second-step patch before Christmas (Only Santa knows what will be in this patch!)
3. Release key features of this expansion such as the Incarna Character Creator and Sansha Incursions in January 2011

But CCP delivers Two EVE Online expansions a year!

That is our Deliver commitment.  However, we also have a commitment to make them Excellent.  In this case, we've chosen to Deliver parts of the expansion in November and December, and the two key features in January with Excellence to respect both commitments. 

November release (Precursor?)

We have a few options for contained changes we can put out in a beefy mini-expansion in November that may include (but are not limited to):

• 80 new story line courier missions
• Rocket balancing
• Tech 2 ammo balancing
• Adding faction ships to the market
• Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
• Anti-aliasing support
• Window resizing, camera offset
• Meta-item indicator icons
• UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
• Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
• Toggling probes in overview
• POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
• Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
• Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Not all of these may make it into the November update. Some may require additional testing or design, and will be included in future patches. But we’re confident the update on November 30th will have a lot of very exciting, highly requested changes.

We realize this is a bit out of the ordinary for EVE Online's standard two expansion a year policy but we're confident that the benefits will be obvious to everyone in the long run. More polished, more excellent features. More frequent and smaller releases. Less risky and long deployments.

• CCP Zulu