What a great way to start out 2009--a new PCU (Peak Concurrent User) record of 45,186! While we've made tremendous serverside changes in the EVE Online infrastructure with the EVE64 and StacklessIO initiatives, it is truly a testament to our loyal fans that 5 years into EVE's existence we are still breaking records and more people are flying in New Eden than ever before.
We know we'll be trying to find leftover champagne from New Year's EVE to celebrate. When we do, we'll toast to you!
Several weeks ago, our server room was hit by a freakish snowstorm. While there was no overt damage to our hardware, capsuleers reported the appearance of snowballs in their clone stations.
We have been working closely with weather specialists regarding this matter. They have been ceaselessly running weather prediction simulations since the mysterious arrival of these snowballs. According to their models, temperatures will rise .0001 K on 8 January 2009*. This slight temperature change will result in the complete melting of all snowballs in New Eden, regardless of their location. Our specialists have also concluded that capsuleers who bid on snowball contracts before this date, yet receive them after, will find themselves owners of a pile of melted snowballs upon delivery.
These scientists have assured us that this weather fluctuation is due not to universal warming but is a result of seasonal temperature variations.
* Please note the new date.
The holidays are always a special time in New Eden, filled with family, good food, slavery and the occasional state-sponsored execution. It's a wonderful time of the year, and our two newest Chronicles bring the warmth directly to the heart of any capsuleer.
In his newest Chronicle, "Chained to the Sky," CCP Gnauton liberates more information about life as a slave in the Amarr Empire. Something is afoot, and it may have far-reaching consequences for the certain members of the slave population in the Amarr Empire.
In CCP Abraxas' "Two Deaths," we witness the warm, passionate homecoming of New Eden's two most notorious traitors, Anvent Eturrer of the Gallente Federation and Chamberlain Karsoth of the Amarr Empire.
These are two new EVE Chronicles. They are short-stories written by CCP staff and are intended to examine the various aspects of life in New Eden. The entire list is contained here.
There is currently a phishing email circulating that claims to be sent from EVE Customer Support. This email claims that we had a database issue and lost some customer information and it asks you to login to make sure your information is still there. They conveniently provide their very own login link. This is of course not true; we have not lost any account information.
We'd also like to add that our knowledge when it comes to English grammar and spelling is far better than what is in the phishing email.
We have an update on the Starbase exploit. Please go here to read the latest news on the status of the investigation.
As some of you may have heard, a freak snowstorm hit our server room earlier this morning causing a brief, extended downtime. While we were able to minimize the effects of the storm on our hardware, our current estimates is that the effects of said storm will be in effect until downtime January 6, 2009. Capsuleers should be advised that their clone stations may have been affected by the snowstorm. Again, we are aware of the issue, and hope that you enjoy this burst of winter in New Eden.
As in the past, we are offering advertising slots for players to use during the live broadcast of the Alliance Tournament finals. These advertisements will be played between studio and in-game feeds and will reach a massive live audience of EVE players. Simply put: this is the biggest ad space available for EVE players and yet again it will cost you absolutely nothing to submit an advertisement.
Read the instructions below and submit your advertisement!
General Rules
Technical Rules
Copyright issues repeated
This comes up every time so this will be the final ruling and comment regarding copyright issues:
All audio must be from EVEOnline the game, this includes music and sound effects. The only exception is recording your own voice. All Video must be in-game or of your own creation completely.
Resources
As mentioned above, you can use any of EVE's music and sound effects as well as any music by RealX.
Submissions will not be accepted after 4 February 2009. To enter your submission, mail your advertisment link to evetv@ccpgames.com. Do not attach a file to your email.
More information regarding this can be found in the following thread.
Good luck to everyone!
The Sixth Alliance Tournament is fast approaching, and signups for this popular tournament will begin on Friday, 19th December at 11:00 GMT. You can find the sign-up page here.
This year's tournament is not just limited to Alliances; Faction Militias has been invited to participate as well. You can learn more about the signup process for Alliances and Faction Militias here.
We also recently announced our new team of Expert commentators who will join us in Iceland for the tournament in early February. For more information, see CCP Charlie's thread here.
CCP Claw and the team have been hard at work finalizing the rules, and we are pleased to announce that the final set of match rules are now available in the Official Rules Thread. These changes include a small re-balance in the points cost of Heavy Assault Cruisers and Battlecruisers.
Finally, we have laid out the prizes that will be going to the winning teams. See CCP Mindstar's post for details.
The dates of the tournament are as follows:
Merry Christmas from the Alliance Tournament team!
Have you checked out our YouTube channel lately? Military experts are calling it the place to go for all your EVE Online video needs. Not only will you find our trailers, but all of our videos from Fanfest, and, by popular demand, all of the internal videos you simply won't find on Eve-Online.com!
You can check out our channel at http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames. And don't forget to subscribe! You won't want to miss checking out new videos we publish on YouTube, including exclusive material you'll only be able to find there.
EVE Online: Quantum Rise 1.0.4 has been deployed on Tranquility today, Tuesday 16 December, in order to address performance issues regarding memory leaks that were affecting some of our players. Our team will continue to monitor Tranquility until we’re fully satisfied that the issues have been solved. Patch notes are available for review and we would encourage anyone who is still experiencing any game play issues to submit a bug report and we will investigate the matter as soon as possible.
A thread is available here for feedback and issues.
EVE Online: Quantum Rise 1.0.4 will be deployed on Tuesday, 16th December. No additional downtime is required for this deployment.
This patch focuses exclusively on updates to our Need for Speed initiative with several fixes being deployed to address problems with memory leaks.
Patch Notes are available; updates to the notes may be added should any further items be cleared through the Quality Assurance process. These updates will be highlighted with green text.
Patch discussion may be found in this forum thread.
Since the announcement of the recently discovered POS exploit last week, many EVE players have had a number of questions and concerns regarding it. This weekend we held a meeting with the Council of Stellar Management regarding the exploit, and answered a number of questions both they and you had regarding it.
The meeting was informative on both sides, and the meeting minutes are now available for your perusal.
Please feel free to discuss the meeting minutes here.
Update: The meeting minutes are now available for download. You may find them here.
CCP and Xfire are proud to announce our grand holiday spectacular EVE ‘til EVE! We have a ton of wonderful prizes that you can win, but you must read on to learn how you can fill your stocking with EVE Online goodies.
If you don't have an existing Xfire account, you must first create a new account (it's free!) and download the Xfire client. To participate, you must then join the Official Xfire EVE Online Guild.
Now, I know what you're thinking: you are already in a corp and you don't want to quit it just for some silly contest. Don't worry! This is simply your entry form into the contest and it does not affect you in-game. The only way you can enter this contest is by joining the guild; this is how we know if you qualify for our great prizes.
But before we tell you what you can win, you should know what you have to do in order to qualify. It's simple: play EVE Online while the Xfire client is running. If you play for 2 or more hours between 15 December and 31 December you have a chance to win one of the following prizes:
One (1) Grand Prize Winner: 40+ Hours
- 1 EVE model ship of choice!
- 1 Year EVE Online Subscription
- 1 Year Subscription: EON Magazine
- EVE Strategic Maps book
- EVE Online T-shirt
Three (3) Gold Prizes: 25+ Hours
- 1 Year EVE Online Subscription
- 1 Year Subscription: EON Magazine
- EVE Online T-shirt
Five (5) Silver Prizes: 10+ Hours
- 6 Months EVE Online Subscription
- 6 Months Subscription: EON Magazine
Ten (10) Bronze Prizes: 2+ Hours
- 3 Months EVE Online Subscription
Play to win. It's that simple. So sign up for EVE ‘til EVE today!
A patch to the Cider engine for the Mac client was launched today. This patch will fix the issue with keyboard input reported by players in recent weeks and as such we highly recommend all Mac client users install this patch when prompted to do so. This patch will update your Cider engine to version 2037, and you will not be prompted to update if you are already running version 2037. More information and discussion of this patch can be found in this forum thread. Windows and Linux clients are not affected by this patch.
On December 7th 2008, a date which will live in infamy, a petition from a concerned player alerted us to a serious problem with Starbase reactors. The petition had been filed five days earlier, a far longer waiting time than we can accept with our current queue status and we have now taken measures to fix that. We immediately started investigating the issue and found that there was indeed a problem and that it was being exploited to gain unfair advantages.
We discovered seven corporations with multiple Starbases set up for the express purpose of exploiting the issue. Three of those corporations were members of two alliances. We took immediate action against the offenders and banned over 70 accounts and destroyed all the Starbases run by the corporations in question. All the offending corporations are now effectively inactive as a result of our actions.
The corporations were producing high end materials for T2 production. Working with the Research & Statistics team we have established that the effects on the markets have been considerable and far reaching. The effects of our actions against the exploiters will also be felt on the market as the production of the materials has been cut substantially. However, supply should increase again once players have mastered the alchemy process.
We are still conducting operations to deal with this matter and we will keep you posted on the progress and results as things develop.
Update: This matter will be brought up at a CSM and CCP meeting this upcoming weekend.
Update: (12/19/2008)
Here is an update on the investigation into the Starbase reactor exploit that we are currently conducting:
1. CCP has confirmed that this bug has been exploitable since February 2007. Changes to the Starbases code from launch until February 2007 are minimal and very unlikely to have caused the bug. So at this point we are working on the assumption that this bug has been exploitable since the release of player owned structures on November 24th, 2004. We will therefore focus solely on looking at Starbases data in order to determine who has been using this exploit, and for how long.
2. CCP has been able to restore older databases that show us that the bug has been exploited since at least January this year, but at a lower scale than in the last few months. The players involved then were the same ones that we found and banned recently. We are now working on restoring data from 2006 which will take us several days. It is uncertain if we will be able to have answers on that before holiday vacations.
3. CCP has been able to access data from our old petition system. We have been unable to confirm that a petition was filed in 2004, 2005 or 2006 pointing out this bug with Starbases. We urge anyone with information on who and when a petition on this issue was filed to contact us directly through the petition system under the Exploit Category. Alternatively, an email sent to community@eve-online.com with details on the matter would be much appreciated.
4. The full investigation will take several weeks. CCP will be in direct contact with the CSM to discuss this issue and we will provide information to the community as it becomes available.
5. We have done a thorough investigation on our staff members and CSM members and found no links to this exploit.
6. Our actions so far have included the eradication of 178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors running in the bugged state. We have also banned all those we have found directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to conclude.
We will continue to work hard to understand the overall impact of this exploit and how widespread it was. We ask for your patience until more information becomes available.
Please discuss this news in this forum thread.