In case you missed it, that past weekend was the finals for the EVE Online Alliance Tournament VI. Congratulations to Pandemic Legion, you fought an awesome fight in the final, well worth watching. You can check out all the matches at the CCPGames channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/CCPGames). I do recommend watching the matches as there were quite a few epic moments, including the “Hero Tanking Tempest” and the ultimate “bait Curse” in the semi-finals. (Please do note that the semi-finals and finals are not up on YouTube as of the writing of this post but they will be uploaded as soon as they can finished getting them encoded.)
This year’s Alliance Tournament saw over 12,000 people watching the live broadcast on EVETV (http://www.eveonline.com/evetv) and a new PCU record during the Allance Tournament finals of over 51,000. This is a huge milestone for CCP. I personally logged onto EVE on Sunday, which I normally do not do to help the number grow. I had my trader alt online in Jita and I have to tell you, Stackless I/O and hardware buffing for that node has helped considerable as it was rather responsive with close to 1200 people in system. If they could only bring resources like that dynamically to fights on the fly, lag would no longer be an issue. No, I am not going to get onto my “lag soapbox” again, it’s not worth going on and on about a problem that they have not fixed, but I do know they are actively trying to work on the issue.
Expansion Time!!!
It’s that time of year again, the spring expansion is coming. Apocrypha goes live on March 10th, the retail box goes on sale wordlwide on March 12th. Today was the first day that the March expansion, Apocrypha, was live on the test server. There are a number of changes that have been made to the game, such as the addition of wormholes, changes to the scanning game mechanic as well as a few items that I will have to look at as I am intrigued by what they say, such as the 250KM drone control range and the fitting screen UI changes. You can find all the notes for what is on the test server on the in testing link on the EVE website (http://myeve.eve-online.com/updates/intesting.asp)
Linux users will not be very pleased as CCP is discontinuing support for these operating systems directly from CCP as they will no longer be producing the EVE Online game client for those operating systems, however CCP states that they will be partnering with Cide and Cedega for those emulators to run EVE Online. For the whole story, read the dev blog at http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=625. I can understand Linux as market share is still very low albeit Linux is a far better and stable operating system than Windows. Granted, in tough economic times, you focus your business so that it can produce the best results, but supporting multiple operating systems would the the ‘Holy Grail’ for an MMO as it’s a rarely touched market for the hard core gamer. Emulator options may be feasible, but they are usually problematic for those less technical computer users.
Last but not least…
I want to shamelessly plug a new EVE website out there, The EVE Online Portal (http://www.evebloggers.com). This site is not meant to replace any of the fine websites out there, it’s simply a ‘newspaper’ like page that puts a large amount of information in a single place. From here you can see the current blogging stream from the EVE Blog Pack, links to current EVE Blog articles as well as current links to stories about EVE on EVE-Mag, EVE Network News and Massively. There are also links to CCP’s RSS feeds and all the active EVE Online podcasts. It’s not an RSS reader in a web page, it’s just a clean, simply laid out website for you to get your daily EVE information fix. It’s a must have for your bookmarks folder or you start page for your web browser. Be sure to stop by, you won’t regret it!!
See you out there!!!!!..
Tags: Alliance Tournament, CCP, Dev Blog, Expansions, Hero Tanking
