With the upcoming Dominion expansion and all the discussion/rage concerning proposed changes, changes on changes and various confusing information that has been put forth, I thought I’d create something helpful.

So, enjoy all the wonderful posts our beloved community has written.  As more posts are made, I’ll add them to this shared items page!

Dominion blog posts:  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F03749674846786948488%2Flabel%2FDominion

Now, there have been some complaints that posts to various discussion threads concerning Dominion are missing from the EVE forums.  CCP is being accused of censorship.

People, remember this.  The forums are CCP’s property, they will moderate as they see fit and yes, there will be mistakes made by forums moderators.  Fear not, Chribba the All Powerful EVE Online God has a wonderful resource to combat this problem.  Head over to EVE-Search.com and you can read all the forum posts as they were originally posted.  You can’t respond to a post here, only read them.  So, head over there to read and post your responses on the EVE forums if you feel the need.

Here is the link to the EVE Information Portal section on the EVE-Search website:  http://eve-search.com/forum/3512.

So, enjoy your reading assignments, there is a lot to read!!!

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So, here’s my new forums avatar for the U’K forums:

and my new signature I’ll be using on forums in general:

I am by no means a master of graphics design, I leave that to my wife, but I do like to tinker.  The new avatar is okay, just has the U’K fist on the top left corner.  It’s not very visible as the color in the graphics don’t make it pop like it does on the forums sig.  I do admit, my forums sig is a bit bland.  I’ll have to come up with something nicer.  Perhaps a bit with the new planets graphics in it.

And the big news today.  There is a new dev blog titles Storming the Gates.  This dev blog discusses the upcoming sovereignty changes and there is of course a forums discussion thread.   The good news, the forums thread has not evolved into a ‘threadnaught’ as of yet.  The combat mechanics on how you take over a system that has sov are a bit clearer now and honestly, it should be a lot of fun.  I have been updating the SOV shared item page as well, so you can get all the latest from the EVE Blogging community on these upcoming changes.

• EVE Online Dev Blog on Sov combat, Storming the Gates, http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=709
• Forums Discussion on the Dev Blog, http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1212636
• EVE Blogging Community posts on SOV, http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user%2F03749674846786948488%2Flabel%2FSOV

See you out there!!

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http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp?patchlogID=187

Things that caught my eye:

• The agility and the scan resolution of some ship classes has been adjusted to allow them to have a better chance of locking ships of their own size before they got to warp. Full details are available here. This means that a cruiser will have a better chance of locking and warp scrambling another cruiser, this was something that was broker when Aprocphya was initially deployed.
• If a ship cloaks, all active modules that modify attributes, such as ECM, will stop immediately and the icons showing the effect will disappear. No more using the Cloak/Align exploit, finally.
• Cloaking a Falcon while there is a jamming cycle in progress and the jammer has been deactivated will now result in an immediate break of the jam cycle on the targeted ship. To clarify: if you start a 20 second jamming cycle on a ship, then deactivate the jamming module and cloak, the jam cycle on the target will immediately cease. No more using the uncloak – jam – cloak exploit, finally.
• Corporation directors will no longer be spammed multiple times for the same starbase event.  They will receive one mail only. But I love receiving automated in game email spam, makes my mailbox look like Jita local ** smirk **.
• Grouped laser turrets will now allow a single crystal to be changed out once it has become completely damaged. For example, if you have aa Apocalypse with grouped pulse lasers using Tech II Scorch crystals, with varying degrees of damage you can reload used crystals without breaking the weapon group. This issue annoyed me to no end, thank you CCP for fixing this one!!!

So, there you have some of the items in the patch.  Do follow the link at the top of this post to the full patch notes and remember to set a long skill training or put skills into your training queue!!

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=626

I have read this twice and I am reading it again.  I will hit the highlights here, but I do recommend you read this as there is a lot of information.  In a nutshell, they estimate that the value of the total produced materials from this exploit to be a grand total of 6.7 trillion isk.

Our logs also show that there were only three corporations that had 88% of the 6.7 trillion ISK profit from the exploit.  These corporations were obviously setup specifically to harness this bug and when discovered were in the process of expanding their operations.  More on their activities follows in the chapter below from the Law and Order team but we will focus on the impact on several different items.

That’s a lot of isk, but according to the numbers they show in this report, it represents .7 percent of all the value of materials produced in 2008.  Not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, however, being the materials are usually very rare, the actual impact to the economy was far greater.

So, how many people and POSes were involved?

At the time we discovered the exploit in early December, there were 232 reactors running in the bugged state.  Those were installed at 178 POS complexes owned by seven corporations.  The scale of the operations differed quite a bit, with one corporation running 81 bugged reactors and another with 3 reactors active.

The opening action on our part regarding the exploit included the total destruction of all the POS complexes involved. This entailed flying to each one and basically nuking everything in sight – a fireworks show of epic proportions but with no witnesses except the GMs in the demolition team.

Users directly involved in the exploit were permanently banned. Direct involvement meant that the character had a director role in the corporation using the exploit or was directly involved in servicing the POSes in exploited state.  Others that were found to be involved in moving the exploited goods and laundering the ISK also received bans for their part. A number of players who had benefitted directly from the exploit were also banned. The total number of accounts banned in relation to the exploit of POS reactors is 134.

So, we know the numbers of who was involved and to what extent.  What we will never know is exactly who was involved and for good reason.  CCP’s account privacy policy will not allow such information to be released, however, the EVE Online community has figured out pretty well who was involved.

So, the bigger question, how did this happen and what was the deal with the claims of petitions filed years earlier?  The report goes into detail, I will sum up:

• Yes, petitions were received in 2005 and 2007 .
• Both petitions were researched and according to logs and documentation available (they admit that logs and documentation was bad), the petitions were closed as isolated incidents.
• They did investigate all CCP staff and all members of the CSM, no one was linked to any of the xploiting corporations and/or characters.

The last petition was correctly filed into the exploit category but it was simply handled as an individual problem for the player reporting it. Thus it fell through the cracks and did not raise the flags it should have and no exploit investigation was launched.

CCP has done something that many other MMO’s do not do, they admitted that they made a mistake.  Ladies and Gentleman, I know that there will be many upon many posts on the EVE forums about this very line, but let’s “calm our passions” here.  We know they make mistakes, they are just as human as the rest of us.

The last section of this dev blog does go into their efforts to keep something like this from happening again.

So in the end…..

There will be exploits in the future and we will do our best to discover them in their early stages and minimize their effect on EVE with new and proactive procedures. We do hope that the EVE community will accept our way of handling these once they are found.  The procedures and rules used against those using these exploits will also be reviewed on a regular basis. We have already had discussions with the CSM on fines and other tools to punish those that directly, or indirectly, reap the benefits from illegal activity within EVE. No final decisions have been made yet, but now is your chance to contact your CSM representatives and let your voice be heard.

Again, don’t take my post here as the complete story, you should all take the time to read the dev blog for yourself.  It’s a long read as I said, but do take the time, it will help answer many of the questions we all have concerning this issue.

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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!!!!!..

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The latesst dev blog has  me doing the Snoopy Dance.  Skill training queues!!!!

Read about it!!!  http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=621

The whole process could be a bit complicated.  You can only queue up skills that would start training in the next 24 hours.  I will use the following example.  I have a skill that will take 15 minutes to train to level 1, 1 1/2 hours to level 2.  I will add that skill to the queue to train to level 1, then level 2.  I will then add another skill that will take 18 hours to train and a finally skill that will take 6 days to train.  As long as all the skills I want to train will be able to start training in the next 24 hours, I can add them to the queue.

Many of you may ask, well, how does this help me?  For a newer player who has a lot of short time skills to train, this will allow them to set a queue up that will fire through all those 15 minute, 1 1/2 hour skill train times easily and not waste precious training time early on.  For those of us who are veteran players that run into the need to train a skill up to level 4, this will work well as we can set the queue for level 1 (say 45 minutes), level 2 (say 4 hours) and then level 3 (1 day, x hours).

The best way to use this tool would be to setup all those short skills that you have to train and make the last skill in the queue a long skill that will take the longest time to train.  When you can log on again, just adjust the queue again with those short skills in the beginning of the queue and put that long skill as the last skill to start training.  Just always remember to make sure that your last skill in the queue will start to training within that 24 hour queue window.

This is not the skill training queue that we all wanted, but it’s a start and to be honest, I think that once this goes live, people will understand how it works and will find ways to use it effectively.

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Well, CCP has done it, Snowballs MMVIII (Snowballs 2008 edition).  WOO HOO!!!!!

We all had something sitting in our hangers this morning after downtime.  You received 300 snowballs and a snowball launcher.  If you are stuck at work, be sure to take a look at the pictures below.  To be honest, I remember the reasons why we didn’t get these for the past few years.  Hopefully no one will fall prey to Concord when they return fire with regular weapons!!  UPDATE, seems that will NOT be the case, very good thinking (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=951782&page=4#118)

Have fun with the snowballs, they won’t last long!!!  They should all be melting by January 6th or at least, that’s what I am thinking, read http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=2632&tid=1 for more information!

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I have read the minutes and as you can all guess, the EVE forums are already filling with the “total whitewash” and “nothing new, coverup” posts.  Honestly, there is really nothing new here save the re-afirmation that CCP is still looking into the issue.  CCP does admit that they have some issues, that to identify some of the older data, it will take time.  To think that they could review everything in less than a week is absurd.  This issue will not be resolved quickly, it will take at least a few weeks.  I would expect that we will not really have anything truly useful until the end of January.

As for the veracity of the claims of the abuse going on for 4 years, I had this thought.  Remember the changes to ghost training?  CCP admitted that it had been going on for a long time, but one of the reasons for the change was the sudden increase in abusing the exploit.  I truly believe that is the case here.  The POS exploit existed for a long time and there was an increase in activity according to the CSM notes.  So, they took action when it became widespread and truly noticeable.  As to exactly when this exploit came into existence, well, without a complete review of all data it will take some time.

Until then, I urge everyone to, as my CEO says, “Calm your passions.”  We will learn all that we need to learn about this exploit and exactly how far reaching the abuse truly reached.

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The latest dev blog (http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=612)  EVElopedia is becoming a reality (http://wiki.eveonline.com).  It’s starting out with the long awaited and updated Item Database.  Check it out!!!

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=603

Seems that is is not dead, he is very much alive.  Many new pieces of information in here.  It’s a huge post and worth reading every bit. It’s revealed about some of the intergration changes that are coming, more to be announced at fanfest.  Look for information about Eveolpedia, in game trading for GTC’s, etc..  He hints are fanfest having much more to reveal.

To make things even cooler now, the Quantum Rise features page is up on the EVE site (http://www.eve-online.com/features/QuantumRise).

What caught my eye was the hud changes.  Now, you will be able to move the combat hud to a different location on the screen!!  There is some info on the weapons grouping and many of the other new features, including a screenshot of the new stargate graphics.

Man, I can’t wait for this thing now!!!

UPDATE:  Seems I won’t have to wait long, it’s being deployed on November 11th!!!

AWESOME!!!!

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Thanx to CCP Charlie and his latest dev blog:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=602

EVE TV & Fanfest

Now, this is a story all about how…

So to start this off maybe a quick introduction is in order, I’m Charlie the newest face in the CCP Marketing team, working as a video producer and having the fantastic role of managing EVE TV’s events. While EVE TV may be changing a bit in the future, its ideals are still based on “something made by EVE players, for EVE players.” I can safely speak for myself and others who have moved from EVE TV to CCP that we’ll continue to put all our efforts, and our free time, into bringing you more events in the future.

Fanfest 2008

So next up on the EVE TV schedule is Fanfest 2008, held every year on top of the world in Reykjavik. The Fanfest is always a massive hit with those that can attend, meeting the developers of EVE, other players, their corp mates and getting the first viewing of what will be coming to EVE over the next year.

But understandably not everyone can make the trip to Iceland, which is where we step in. EVE TV this year will again be filming nonstop for all three days to bring you;

· Every main lecture – over 15 lectures covering every topic you could think of.

· Keynote speechs from Oveur and Hellmar.

· The Producer’s Panel Q&A.

· Roxor & The Party on Top of the World.

· The Fanfest PvP Tournament including “EVE TV Live on stage”.

· Many many interviews with players and CCP staff.

· Everything else we see until we run out of tape!

Once we have recovered from all of that every video will be made available for download within a week or two after the Fanfest.

Book an interview

Attending the Fanfest? Maybe you’re coming with your entire corp? Or maybe you run a big EVE service such as a fan site? Then the ever curious StevieSG and CCP Mindstar would love to schedule you for an interview while you’re visiting! We’ll be interviewing players and staff alike all through the Fanfest but we’d like to book big groups and special interest interviews in advance so we definitely get you on film. If you’re interested drop us an Email with some quick details on who you/your group are and we’ll send you more information. Stevie also recommends that corps bring their own t-shirts, flags and any other corp branded items (wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man?) to give your corp the full on screen impact you deserve!

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=598

rollin’ rollin’ rollin’

Much has changed in Eve since many of the hauler or mining class ships were introduced. With Quantum Rise we felt the time was right to review these ships and make changes where necessary to refocus their roles and ensure they can still perform in the age of New Eden’s Great War.  Of all the ships, we found the transport class to be the most lacking in distinct roles, so much of this blog will focus on the changes to those and then we will briefly list some of the other improvements to some other ships.

Blockade Runners

The Blockade Runners (Crane, Prorator, Prowler, Viator) are meant to be rather good at getting through gate camps and navigating through low and null sec space with more impunity than the other industrial ships.  Several changes such as the introduction of interdictors, heavy interdictors, and force and fleet recons have had an impact on their ability to run blockades with much success at all. As a result, we wanted to try and balance things to better focus them towards their role in light of many changes EVE has seen since they first were introduced.

To improve them we refocused on stealth rather than agility.  They will gain the ability to equip covert ops cloaking devices and therefore can warp whilst cloaked.  In lieu we removed the +2 warp strength and one or part of their active tanking bonuses which were not really being used anyway as much.  They will also gain the ability to utilize the black ops jump portals.

By switching to stealth and cloaking as their primary defense in navigating through space and getting through gate camps they gain a significant edge in being able to cloak and move away fast if within a bubble.  The ability is use the black ops jump portals is a fringe benefit allowing specialised operations where you would need cargo capacity moved around for a variety of reasons.

Deep Space Transports

The Deep Space Transports (Bustard, Impel, Mastodon, Occator) have good tanks and good cargo capacity but really no focused role beyond the good tank.  The most important part of moving your cargo around is arriving safely at the destination.  The DSTs have significant drawbacks as they are less prone to getting through the all critical gate camps like their Blockade Runner cousins. If warp scrambled, it was a matter of how long their tank might last in order to have a remote chance to survive the encounter.

To revamp their role we gave them the +2 warp strength of the Blockade Runners and also a bonus to the power needs of shield extenders (Bustard and Mastodon) or armor plates (Impel and Occator) to increase the ability to fit for a HP tank which is much more useful than their active tanks in many situations where you are receiving a large amount of damage over a short duration. In balancing this out, one of their active tanking bonuses was removed.

With these changes we hope that the extra warp strength and HP tank will greatly aid their use in all areas of space especially in empire where they have less to worry about with no bubbled camps to have to run through and only the heavy interdictors as their nemesis.

Mackinaw, Procurer, Skiff and Rorqual

The mackinaw gets some love with an additional +10 cpu and +1000 cargo capacity to allow it to be more effective at ice mining.  It always under performs a little compared to the hulk and these changes should allow it to specialise at ice mining better.

The Procurer and Skiff both received minor boosts to their agility as we wanted the smallest barges to be at least agile if completely outclassed by their larger cousins in most scenarios and nudge them towards more of a ninja mining role a little.  It might also be good for you all to know the Skiff has always had a +2 warp strength bonus but this was never detailed in the description so we have updated the description to highlight this rather powerful bonus as a good selling point.

The Rorqual will be receiving a minor boost to its corporate hangar capacity.  This is done to allow the hangar to be used as a shared and secure container for mining ops and also increase its utility for carrying cargo around.

In Summary

These changes are not final and are subject to change following feedback here and from public testing on Singularity.  By no means are we finished and we will continue to look at the industrial line of ships in the future. We plan to focus on improvements to help them fulfil and expand their roles. Specialised cargoholds is one improvement we are looking at in detail for the future.  For now we very much want to hear your constructive views on these proposed changes.

Ave – Chronotis

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=601

In a nutshell, CCP is trying to balance moon resources.  Instead of having to spend massive amounts of isk to get that much coveted refined resource from a dysprosium moon, you can take other resources and refine them into what you need.

So how will this work? We’ve created six new reactions which allow you to create key intermediate materials without relying on the rarest moon minerals. This isn’t, of course, an efficient process! Each rare mineral has been assigned a more common counterpart, which can be used in the place of the rare mineral in these new reactions at a ratio of 20:1, which roughly approximates the difference in moon count between the rare mineral and the common mineral in each case.

Read the entire article as there is a lot of information in here.

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Dev Blog on Weapon Grouping:  http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=596

Weapon Grouping is something that people have been asking for as long as I can remember.  In a nutshell, you will be able to stack turrets or launchers into a group to make manual reloading and/or changing ammo types faster.  No longer will you have to right click on each weapon and change the ammo type one weapon at a time.  You will simply be able to stack the weapons, then simply right click on 1 module icon and change the ammo type.  You will also be able to select that one module icon to activate all the weapons in the stack.

Alliance Logo Submissions:  http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=585

The long awaited changes to the Alliance logos has finally come to fruition.  I strongly suggest you read this post and get started on making your logo.  It’s not a huge dev blog, but it’s a huge thing that everyone has been waiting for.

The Orca:  http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=597

Again, another long awaited item, the Industrial Command Ship, the Orca.  It looks cool, has some very nice status and will making mining operations even more effective.  It provides a large carp bay, a corp hanger and a ship maintenance array within the ship itself.  Can you say mobile POS?  These things can be built in Empire Space.  As to whether or not his has jump capabilities, that is not listed in the dev blog.  It’s being called a sub-capital logistics ship.  Will this be able to use a stargate or will it have to use a jump drive.  We should learn this soon.

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That being said, I am going to venture forth, with my asbestos suit on, and chime in here.

I feel that Ghost Training is an exploit and I support CCP in removing that exploit from the game.

I don’t feel that CCP handled it well at all.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me support both statements with some dazzling language and thought.

I feel that Ghost Training is an exploit and I support CCP in removing that exploit from the game.

There is a great article on MMORPG on this issue, http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?feature=2349%2FGhost-Training-Interview&game=14&bhcp=1.  In a nutshell, It was not a bug, it was a game feature that was being abused.

So, the question remains, should ghost training be allowed.  Well the quote from the article sums it up.

“I truly hope that people still realize that we’re just gamers like them, trying to make a game and making a living off of it. It was not out of pure money, greed or lust that we did this. It was a balancing act and a fairness act toward us as a company moreso than the gamers, but I honestly can’t think of any other company that allows you to skill up your character when you’re not even paying for it.”

It takes money from the game, according to the article, 4 percent of all subscribers were using it at the time of the announcement.  Four percent may not sound like much, but it’s money that’s not coming in to maintain the servers, pay the devs, etc…  CCP strives to continually balance the game and I must applaud them for their efforts.  It’s not fair that some people were taking advantage of the situation and advancing their characters for free.

I don’t feel that CCP handled it well at all.

Want proof?  Look at the EVE Forums.  It just exploded with commentary (I am being kind here) on this change.  To quote from the MMORPG.COM article::

“We announced it as a bug, which it was to a lot of us old devs, but as it turned out, our website listed it as a feature because we had outsourced the writing of our career guide to someone who was not knowledgeable about the code itself, years ago back in 2004… It was like a virus waiting to get out and nobody had really given it much thought until it was pointed out when the whole debate started.”

Now, you have to ask, how could you have missed that one?  Put simply, they didn’t think to check.   Always do your research, even on your own product.   The worst thing you can do to a gaming community is lie, even though CCP’s explanations are sound, the appearance of dishonesty is something that many gamers will rage upon to no end.  I am more willing to believe that they screwed up rather than lie, however, the whole situation makes CCP look like they did lie and that is just horrible.

Normally, they announce a proposed change, put it on the test server and let people test it for them.  The Speed Balancing went on the test server and after much commentary, it was pulled, revamped and redeployed.

You have to ask the question, why did CCP make the changes to Ghost Training without first announcing that the change was coming like they always do for patches?

Again, look at the public outcry about the change.  There are many people who feel, myself included, that CCP knew this was going to be a rough issue to address from a publicity standpoint.  If they had announced the change, let people generate feedback and then go make the change anyway, they would be accused of simply ignoring the player base.  That was the way Sony Online Entertainment ran things when I played Star Wars Galaxies.  So, do you look like you are ignoring your players or do you play it as if it was a bug that needed immediate patching and deal with that PR damage.  You do the latter, as CCP did in this case.

Now, how could this drama fest been avoided?

Quality control on a product, including it’s documention, is vital.  This should have been done when the documentation was finished by their sub-contractor years ago.  If they had done this, they could have corrected for this long ago.  If they had, there would have been no valid public outcry as it would not have been sold as a feature.  Not having this as a feature makes it easier to claim it was a bug.

I suspect that if this feature had not been listed in the documentation, they could have simply fixed the bug and when the public outcry came out about Ghost Training was not working anymore, a simple forums post announcing that a bug had been found and fixed could have been released.  It would have been an easier issue to difuse and thus there would not be so much “commentary” concerning the exploit.

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=594

We also have a dev blog about the EVE Performance Group.  These folks work on the the Stackless IO project as well as EVE 64 and many of the upcoming enhancements that I have mentioned like the weapon linking.  The blog has some good information and gives you an idea of what they have been working on.  These kinds of update have been all to sparse over the past several months, it’s nice to see that they are becoming more active with the community again.  Anyway, the dev blog can be found here:

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=590

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EVE Online:  Quantum Rise (http://www.eve-online.com/pressreleases/default.asp?pressReleaseID=48).  There is some basic information on this page, more information is coming.  What we have to look forward to so far are some additional Trinity graphics updates, the weapon linking for reloading, improvements to the autopilot system and more yet to be revealed.

Tomorrow evening, there is a live dev blog to discuss certificates and medals which I suspect, will be part of the next expansion as well, it should be an interesting discussion (http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=2432&tid=1&sid=746968537).

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=896054&page=1#8

As it goes right now, if you want to change an ammo type, you have to right click on each weapon and select the ammo that you want to load.  This change, which I will caution is still in testing and needs work, will allow you to group together all your turrets into 1 slot for reloading.  So, if you are flying a Raven and you want to change from Mjornir torps to Javelin, you would right click on the 1 slot and it will change for all the launchers.  Turrets will work the same way now.

Apart from the obvious speed changes in being able to swap ammo types, this will also help to reduce lag in a fight.  Your client will be able to sent only 1 ammo type swap command in stead of 6 to 8.

This will be initially deployed on the test server and will allow you to group only turrets or launchers at the for now.

I do hope that testing goes well as this is a much needed feature.

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http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=591

Do read the dev blog as it’s an interesting concept.  In a nutshell, this does not change how you train skills, but may help to make it easier from inside the game.  They decided to add certificates to the game as a tool for new players.  Honestly, I think this is a wonderful idea and a cool concept.

The best way I can explain how this works is to use an example.  Let’s say that you want to use t2 small pulse lasers.  If you use evemon, you will see all the skills that you need.  If you check the item info on a t2 laser, you will see the tab for the skill requirements and whether or not you have those skills.

Certificates takes all that and puts it together.  When your skill training reaches a certain point, you receive a certificate that will tell you what you are certified to use in way of ships, modules or trade skills.

How could this be helpful?  For new players, it gives you a visual tool from within the game client to see how you are progressing.  What it also does is notify you of things that you are certified for that you may not realize.  Some additional modules may be open for your use that you have not even heard of yet. Ships will have a list of recommended certifications for you to have in order to fly the ship effectively.

You have the ability to lock down permissions on who see your certificates and this is a good thing.  Don’t want your enemies to see what you are capable of.  It does provide an interesting tool for you when you are trying to join a corp.  Seeing that you have basic and advanced armor tanking helps a director evaluate your character.

Certificates should be on Sisi by the time you read this.  If you can, give it a go and see what it’s like.  It should be part of the next Empyrean Age patch.

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