Bam-zine

Stop Dreaming and Do It!

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. 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

EVE Buddy Program

Get your friends into EVE online and inside their very own shiny new starship by inviting them to EVE with the Buddy Program. All buddies will receive a 21-day trial find out all that New Eden has to offer! See the Buddy Program wiki page for more information and how you can get 30 days free game time.

If your friends are still having trouble deciding if EVE is for them have them watch “The Butterfly Effect.”

Call for Candidates – the fourth Council of Stellar Management

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, 1^st. Opening for candidacy runs for the fourth CSM.

October, 15^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.

Second Open Cruisers Tournament

The EVE-RU.com community is doing the all-EVE Second open cruiser class T1 tournament. On October 3 players will be competing for over 8 billion ISK in prizes. Check out this link for more information.

CODENAME "COSMOS" – Release Plan and Feature Outline

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. 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.

Alliance Tournament VII draws to a close.

Alliance Tournament VII has now drawn to a close and we would like to congratulate Pandemic Legion on a fantastic defence of their title. We hope you all enjoyed the new HD format and the final results can be found here. Our YouTube page also features the matches for day five and day six for your enjoyment. Finally, we look forward to seeing you all once more when Alliance Tournament VIII rolls around!

System Requirements

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. 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

System Requirements

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. 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

Recent events with the ISD Volunteer Team

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

I Bring Gifts! (By Gifts I Mean Taxes, Sorry)

Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

As some of you have noticed, NPC corporations on Singularity are now being taxed at 11%. This corporation tax functions in the exact same way you know them from player corporations; a certain part of your hard earned income disappears and you probably never see it again. Now that I think about it, it functions a lot like taxes in real life do… oh well. The tax applies to mission rewards, bounties and the likes, so if you’re worried that your corporation will suddenly take a large chunk out of your wallet, don’t be; that is not how it works. If you are in Faction Warfare, you do not need to worry either, the militias will not be taxed. Service guarantees citizenship and all that, so keep on trucking.

So why this change?

• It seems like an unrealistic scenario that the empires in EVE provide infrastructure, security and a host of other financially demanding services at no cost. I sometimes read people complaining about how EVEs physics are unrealistic, but on the realism scale, that still pales compared to a government that refuses to tax its citizens.
• NPC corporations are meant to be temporary spaces where people can go about their daily activities while searching for a player corporation. Currently the level of comfort they provide, both in terms of war declaration immunity and 0% tax, give them an inherent advantage over player corporations which was never intended. Hopefully, this will let player corporations compete on equal footing with NPC corporations.
• We would prefer that players join player corporations, or other entities that shape the world of EVE at a higher degree than the NPC corporations do, due to their impersonal and somewhat isolated role. That said, this change is not implemented to “destroy” NPC corps, they should be considered a small motivation to join a player corporation, where you can develop and flourish as a player.

So why 11%?

• After researching average taxes on player corporations, this number seems the most fair, when it comes to maintaining the balance between giving player corporations a competitive edge, and still keeping NPCs habitable. The large majority of corporations in EVE have relatively low levels of tax, which should be reflected in the NPC corporation taxes.
• 11% is our starting estimate. If it turns out that this number is too low and the changes do not have the impact we hope, it can always be adjusted to a higher level. Right now though, we are hoping 11% will provide the balance we are looking for.

So you are in a NPC corporation, what now?

• This might be the perfect time to start looking around for a player corporation. There are several places to look, such as the recruitment forum on eve-online.com, in-game adverts or the recruitment channel.
• If you are in the habit of bossing people or pets around in real life, you may just want to start your own corporation. Corporations do not need a thousand members to be enjoyable, in fact, many people prefer smaller corporations to the bigger ones.
• Still want to stay in an NPC corporation? That’s absolutely fine too, but remember this: while you may escape death in EVE, taxes will still get you.

- CCP Soundwave