War in Fountain: 

This influence map image was provided as part of of press information pack put together by CCP for E3.

It shows a simplified Influence map and a colored suggestion on how the the Alliance groups are aligned within Null Sec with respect the the fight for Fountain. 

The image was labelled - "Invasion of Fountain Player Influence Map"

It was put together by the authors of the well regards Influence Map of EVE , it does a reasonable job of summarizing the current situation with respect to Alliance grouping. Although, as we know in EVE thing can change VERY quickly.

What is interesting is that CCP decided to include this low resolution graphic among series of high resolution images showing the various features of the recent expansion Oydessy.

CCP, with good reason, appears keen to try and capture and put on show at E3, one of the MAJOR selling points of EVE - that is, the content and game play the players create within their sandbox!

Self destruct changes coming in Inferno 1.2 - No option but to stand and fight.

Miners rejoice... changes coming to a server near you

 nuadi takes a look are the changes to mining barges as they turn up on the EVE test server.

The new changes are on Sisi so I started experimenting with various fits. If you can't get onto the server and have a request just let me know. I'll try to field a fit if I have the skills.

Everyone’s favourite interface dev CCP Punkturis gives an update on changes to fittings management.

Hi,

I just wanted to write a short dev blog on the changes Team Super Friends (your best friends) have made to saved fittings. Mostly because it's my first day back after a really long summer vacation (and this day mostly gets wasted with reading e-mails, syncing branches, watching the Olympics and other stuff, but also because I thought you guys should know).

We've had some requests from CSM6 and CSM7 to make things nicer for those who have the great job in corporations/alliances to mass-fit ships. The changes we're making should benefit those people in particular but also everybody else.

FIRST THING!
The biggest annoyance appeared to be that rigs in saved fittings aren't fit. To solve that in such a way people don't accidentally fit expensive rigs they didn't want to fit we've added a question asking if you really want to do that. That question is suppressible so if you're confident you'll never make a boo-boo, you can just check that box and never see the question again.

We also decided that if there are already rigs fit on the ship, no rigs will be added or destroyed (you'll get a notification saying why your rigs weren't fit).

SECOND THING!
Giving newbies ships with ammo in their cargos can help everybody. The ship fitting person will be quicker while newbies can see how much ammo they should bring when doing something in their new ship. So we made it so charges in cargo get saved in the fitting, and fit when fitting from said saved fitting. This works for both cap boosters and all kinds of ammo.

There have been some requests on saving Liquid Ozone in cargo too, I'll see if I can do something about it – no promises.

THIRD THING!
If you had a saved fitting with some module or rig you don't have skills to fit, it would just fail silently and not fit anything. We fixed that, so now everything you have skills to fit, gets fit.

Oh! Here's a picture:

Hope these changes will make your lives in New Eden easier, party on!

My name is CCP Nullarbor from Team True Grit and I am here to introduce to you some new space friends: the mercenaries of DUST 514.

DUST 514 is the second major game in development in the EVE Universe, where the players are mercenaries fighting ground wars on the same planets that you have been flying past in EVE Online for almost 10 glorious years. You can read more about it at www.dust514.com.

On Thursday the 10th of January, following a slightly longer than usual scheduled downtime, we will be migrating over players currently participating in the DUST 514 closed beta from Singularity to Tranquility. This is a particularly special day here at CCP as this brings to life an ambitious and incredibly exciting vision of a single cross platform universe, the likes of which have never been undertaken before.

So as a capsuleer, what does this mean in practical terms?

Well, for starters, you will begin to see unfamiliar faces in local. They may look a little funny and talk about bizarre concepts such as tanks, grenades and “running around” but I promise they are as friendly as New Eden citizens can be and want to learn everything they can about this world you now both share.

DUST mercenaries can belong to existing EVE corporations if you’re willing to accept their applications. Similarly you will see corporations started by DUST mercenaries recruiting EVE pilots to join up with them. You can share corporation chat including voice chat and invite them into custom channels or private conversations.

Mail works in both directions and you can add each other into your contact lists so you don’t forget your new acquaintances.

You may remember CCP karkur talking last year about some changes to the UI in anticipation of this event. I will leave that link here incase you missed it:

Look Who's Talking

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy

Besides just chatting about the weather or sharing battle stories, we are also introducing the first component of higher level gameplay as part of Faction Warfare. DUST mercenaries can accept contracts offered by the NPC Faction Warfare miltias and fight to attack or defend them in the form of corporation battles. These come with the risk of losing a collateral payment of ISK, but a victory will secure a district on one of the many temperate planets in Faction Warfare space. The more districts a militia has control over the fewer victory points will be required for EVE Faction Warfare pilots to take ownership of the system.

That is, provided you can convince the mercenaries to fight for your side.

CCP Fozzie has some more details about the specifics of this here:

FW: I-hub and system upgrades

The tools of war

We are also enabling the ultimate in cross game escapades, Orbital Bombardment, with the first flavor being the Tactical Strike. You may have also noticed some new ammo blueprints on the market (Tactical EMP S, Tactical Laser S, Tactical Hybrid S). Well, now you can load up these special long range, high precision munitions into suitable small turret weapons and rain fire from the skies. This will be available to Faction Warfare battles in low security space and we’ll leave it up to you to arrange the details of this with your new fleet-footed buddies. As one might assume, more guns are just better, so I recommend the destroyer hull as the best compromise between damage, mobility and cost for this particular task.

We are working on a FAQ to answer all your questions about orbital bombardment complete with pictures. We will post details of that later this week.

Worlds collide

For now we are remaining in closed beta from the DUST side of things but short of anything catastrophic occurring as we head towards open beta (knock on wood) this will be the last reset for DUST characters. So enjoy those skill points mercenaries, you earned them.

Just the beginning

This is a massive technical and game design endeavour and so the overlap in gameplay is intentionally contained for now. It is of course very important that we do not upset the serious business of internet spaceships.

In particular the economic balance between a 10-year-old space simulation and a brand new free to play MMOFPS is an obvious concern. So, for this first release, any ISK transfer between EVE and DUST characters will be blocked. This will then be replaced by a taxable transfer mechanism with the intention of easing the currency control to 0% and removing it entirely once we are happy the economies have reached an equilibrium.

We are already hard at work on the next expansion where you will see things like player owned districts, tighter economic integration and more incentives for EVE characters and corporations to take part in the politics, logistics and outcomes of DUST 514 battles. The design teams will be working with the CSM this year to make sure these plans sit well with capsuleers and mercenaries alike.

We absolutely cannot wait to get this journey started with you and it all kicks off this Thursday.

For now fly safe and good hunting. o7

CCP Sharq explains the new Radial Menu that is scheduled to make an appearance in the coming Oydessy expansion.

Hello pilots.

My name is CCP Sharq and I‘m a UI designer for EVE Online. I‘m a part of Team Pony Express, that focuses on User Experience for EVE Online.

When looking at and playing EVE one day, looking for what to tackle next for our team, we noticed that the left mouse button is more or less underutilized when interacting with the client. Primary interaction pattern with objects in EVE are through a cascaded contextual menu that is better known to you the players as the “Right Click Menu“. That menu has been bloated with options and submenus upon submenus for the last 10 years and is often hard to find what you’re looking for and navigate to it without doing a lot of reading. The Contextual menu for a ship in your hangar lists out 20 options or more in some cases!

Found this in the backyard…               

When researching alternatives to Right Click as a primary interaction, we remembered the Radial Menu that’s available when flying around in space. That control was implemented a long time ago and hasn’t received any love since then so it was time for giving it a second chance. In fact the radial menu UI pattern is going through a bit of a renaissance these days due to touch screen interfaces and it is becoming the weapon of choice for many UI developers both for touch and mouse input interfaces. This fitted perfectly to the plan; We had found our silver bullet.

Prototype, best type

The development of the radial menu was done using rapid prototyping, working closely with UI programmer CCP Karkur. We made a crude radial menu, just to get the look and feel right and then we put it through numerous iterations, mercilessly throwing out ideas that didn’t feel right, and trying out all sorts of different things to tackle the issues we encountered (and sometimes to create new ones). We went through this process without creating any client-quality code so as to keep progress fast. Later we User-tested a more complete version of the menu internally and also at EVE Fanfest, from that process we steadily ironed out kinks and optimized the experience.

How it works

To call up the radial menu you need to hold down the left mouse button on an item for a moment like on the original Action Menu. That works on brackets in space, the overview and on your Targets.

Different from the old radial menu, there is no need to hit the little button to trigger options, with the menu open the screen is divided into segments allowing for quicker interactions using gestures. Your commands can now be made quicker than through the old radial menu or the Right Click menu.

Designing the radial menu using only 8 slices is constraining, yet liberating. We went through numerous iterations on the layout schema and ended up with something we were happy with.

Primary actions are at the 12 o’clock position in the menu. Primary actions are actions we feel are most used or unique to a particular type of object. Some examples:

Jump for Star gates

Board for Ships (in space)

Dock for Stations

Open Cargo for Containers

You get the picture.

Targeting is always at the 6 o’clock position. That allows us to keep that consistent across the board. We tried having it as the primary actions for some things, like ships, and then it had to be elsewhere for items with other primary actions. It became messy pretty quick.

Show Info is always on the 9 o’clock position for a quick access to vital info.

Plus / More options are at 3 o’clock. There are options like Bookmark and Look at. We made a conscious decision on not going all in on migrating ALL THE OPTIONS into that submenu, some things are better left in right click menu.

Navigation options are placed on the 45 degree axis; Align, Warp To, Keep at Range and Orbit. The range of these options depends on the distance of the mouse pointer from the center of the menu. So all ranges can be set in a single motion, their placement is deliberate to minimize errors.

Radial menu beyond Odyssey

The idea is to implement the radial menu in more places if you guys like it and will use it. Examples: When using the inventory, interacting with your ship in the hangar even for options on your weapons in the ship HUD.

We have also been playing around with a different radial menu to use for navigating celestials within your current system instead of the deep, deep right-click in space menu. Let’s see if we get around doing that.

Just go to Singularity and test the radial menu out!

… And one more thing, Fly safe!

CCP Sharq

It has been quite a while since our last update on this topic, mainly due to summer vacations then inertia time to get back into shape, but we are now back alive and kicking.

There are many excellent points expressed on this post that I will first address. Once that is done, we will then move on intended improvements we want to bring to the table for winter. There has been plenty of internal discussions, brainstormings about them, and after receiving feedback from the CSM we are ready to unveil changes for public review.


THREAD FEEDBACK:

Q: ONE OF THE REASONS FOR LOW-SECURITY SPACE BEING CRAP REMAINS THAT HIGH-SECURITY STATIONS ARE TOO GOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE, DO YOU HAVE PLANS TO ADJUST THIS?

A: Indeed we do. This topic brought quite an internal discussion, and while this most likely won't be part of a Factional Warfare iteration, we do want to have a look at reducing high-security stations effectiveness to make other areas of space more interesting. Some examples could be reducing refining rates, increasing ISK payment to install jobs. Nothing is set in stone as this is not planned for the immediate future however. Another good idea we noticed here was to tie high-security tax with the war performance of its related Factional Warfare Militia. So if, by example, the Caldari Militia are losing the war in Factional Warfare, all taxes in Caldari State high-security space could go up to support the war effort.

Q: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT TYING FACTIONAL WARFARE AGENTS TO SYSTEM UPGRADE LEVEL?

A: Yes, quite a bit as this is an interesting point. However we decided to keep agents out of the upgrade loop for now, as this would create quite some issues if you have missions accepted / in progress when a system level changes. Dynamic agent seeding also is another problem we need to tackle before we can go on such route.

Q: WHAT'S THE POINT OF UPGRADING A FACTIONAL WARFARE SYSTEM WITHOUT A STATION?

A: At the moment, not much indeed, which is a failure from the previous design that needs to be solved in the next iteration.

Q: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT ADDING JUMP BRIDGES AS PART OF SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: A bit, but we dismissed the idea. That is because we don't like instant travel as it lessens risk as a whole. If anything we should strive towards reducing instant travel, not the opposite.

Q: HOW ABOUT LINKING NPC STRENGTH TO SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: That's also something we internally debated. We first wanted to scale NPC response depending on system upgrade level, but after some more discussion we removed the idea out of our plans. The main reason is that we want Factional Warfare to mainly be a PvP activity, where PvE supports player engagements without overriding them. NPC scaling for complexes / general protection brings us dangerously close to the point we are trying to avoid. The design mechanics should encourage players to defend their own space themselves instead of relying on NPCs to do so.

Q: MAYBE WE SHOULD TIE SHIP INSURANCE COSTS TO SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: That also was quickly considered and dismissed, mainly because there is a high chance it will be exploited to death. If anything the great summer 2012 LP farming taught us to be extremely cautious with this kind of things as our player base are a bit like Velociraptors in that Jurassic Park movie: they will find devious way to eat our designs alive from the side. Clever girl.

Q: HAVE THERE BEEN ANY PLANS TO FACILITATE TRACKING OF LP GAINS?

A: Yes, quite a bit, but they require quite some UI overhaul to properly display, store, track LP progression as a whole. Some ideas are tied to better notifications as a whole, or having a LP history just like it's done in the wallet.

Q: HOW ABOUT AFFECTING POCOS IN SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: If possible, why not. That's something we briefly talked about, but I can raise the issue for more discussion.

Q: WHY NOT HAVING SEPARATE DONATION BRANCHES WITH DIFFERENT EFFECTS IN THE I-HUB?

A: That's a good question. Our first design for the system upgrade included different upgrade branches; for example, one was focused on industry, the other on warfare. But the main problem here, is that on the contrary to null-security territorial warfare, there is no supreme authority coordinating FW player effort into a specific upgrade path or another. Because the donation system is totally free and open to large pool of players with vastly different interests, having separate paths would cause quite some problems. What would happen to LP stored in branch A if branch B was upgraded first? How to tell whose donated LP is more important? It's not to say this is impossible to resolve, it just was too much of a complex problem to look at for a first summer release.

Q: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT ADDING/REMOVING LP STORE DEPENDING ON SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: Indeed we have. The main issue with that option is that the LP store is a terrible, confusing, horrible [Censored by the EVE Moderation Team] pile of [Censored by the EVE Moderation Team] dog [Censored by the EVE Moderation Team]. Here, I said it. The code is obsolete and it needs a serious back-end as well as external UI overhaul before we can touch it in such an advanced fashion. For example, clicking the same datacore offer 1000 times because there is no multi-buy option is to put it mildly, annoying. And yes, we know you, you and you over there have been doing it for hours, we have logs.

Q: LET'S GET BETTER NOTIFICATION/INTEL TOOLS WITH SYSTEM UPGRADES MR. HOLMES!

A: Interesting argument Dr. Watson. More water Sir? We definitely agree having better notification tools should be part of the whole package, but it should maybe be independent of Factional Warfare and something you need in all cases. After all, Starbase, corporation, war declaration notifications also need love too, let's not be selfish here. Such revamp is in the pipeline, even not for immediate release. Better intel tools for system upgrades however is definitely something we are thinking about.

Q: COULD WE HAVE I-HUBS GIVE GANG BONUSES?

A: With all due respect, no thanks. Gang links are too much effective already, especially regarding off-grid boosting and while there are evil plans to fix that, let's not magnify the issue please.

Q: HOW ABOUT HAVING PIRATE NPCS IN BELTS PROVIDE BETTER SECURITY STATUS INCREASES FROM SYSTEM UPGRADES?

A: While it sounds good on paper, we would recommend caution on that one. It's mainly because, at the moment, recovering security status is a long and annoying process that forces one to go into null-security space. While it seems frustrating, it also prevents player from recovering too quickly and thus being able to commit crimes with little to no consequence. Allowing players to recover security status from low-security space, and thus bypass the above process could thus be very dangerous. We are not closed to the idea, but we still need some serious convincing.

Q: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT ENCOURAGING BORDER FIGHTS BEFORE CLAIMING SOVEREIGNTY IN A CENTRAL SYSTEM?

A: Yes, we have quite a lot actually. It's a good idea, as it spreads fights along an outer rim of system while giving a geographical meaning to a war effort. However, implementation is very time and resource consuming, which is why we don't have it actually planned for winter.

WINTER ITERATIONS

After looking into current mechanics and feedback there are a certain number of points we want to change on the system upgrade and war zone control systems.

WAR ZONE CONTROL EFFECTS

Current warzone control design is flawed as it does not encourage players to hold space, only to upgrade I-hubs when they need to buy stuff from the LP store to get massive reductions. Ideally we would want players fighting and struggling to keep control over their space, that is why we propose the following.

We would remove LP store price reduction in the new system, and only modify LP gained. As such, tier1 WZ would reduce all LP gains by 50%, tier2 would keep them on the same field as of now, tier3 would give a 100% LP gain bonus, tier4 150% and tier5 200% LP gain bonus. This would encourage factions to actually keep and maintain space to have the LP bonus rather than just push once in a while.

NEW SYSTEM COSTS
We are not particularly fond of how easy it is to upgrade a system currently. On top of that it is quite easy for attacking players to reduce upgrade level by attacking complexes in the same system due to how the bleed-out on the I-Hub works(this will be tackled further down below).

Part of the fix is to increase LP amounts required to upgrade a system to the new numbers mentioned below:

* Level1: 40,000
* Level2: 60,000
* Level3: 90,000
* Level4: 140,000
* Level5: 200,000
* Buffer: 300,000

NEW SYSTEM UPGRADES
As mentioned quite a few times, current system upgrades are a bit lame, as not really providing needed bonuses, especially in systems with no stations. Iteration would include:

Level1:
* +5 station manufacturing, copy, ME, PE, Invention slots
* 10% market tax reduction
* 10% repair cost reduction
* 5% manufacturing time reduction 

Level2:
* +10 station manufacturing, copy, ME, PE, Invention slots
* 20% market tax reduction
* 20% repair cost reduction
* 10% manufacturing time reduction 

Level3:
* +15 station manufacturing, copy, ME, PE, Invention slots
* 30% market tax reduction
* 30% repair cost reduction
* 15% manufacturing time reduction
* 10% reduction to starbase fuel cost 

Level4:
* +20 station manufacturing, copy, ME, PE, Invention slots
* 40% market tax reduction
* 40% repair cost reduction
* 20% manufacturing time reduction
* 10% reduction to starbase fuel cost

Level5:
* +25 station manufacturing, copy, ME, PE, Invention slots
* 50% market tax reduction
* 50% repair cost reduction
* 30% manufacturing time reduction
* 20% reduction to starbase fuel cost
* Able to anchor Cyno Jammer 

CYNO JAMMER
As you can see above, the Cyno Jammer is back with a vengeance. However we took into consideration the feedback we received during Fanfest and various community channels, and it would work as mentioned below.


* Bought from FW LP stores as 1 BPC (total cost including manufacturing materials estimated around 100-130m ISK)
* Has only 25% hitpoints of the null-security Cyno Jammer version (thus about 4 million HPs instead of 16)
* Cyno Jammer is launched from the ship cargohold and deployed into space, requires the "config starbase equipment" role (this technically restricts all NPC militia members to launch such a structure - you have to be in an enlisted player made corporation)
* Cyno Jammer requires a spool-up time (5 or 10 minutes)
* Cyno Jammer automatically turn online once spool-up timer has passed, causing its effects to be activated for the specified amount of time
* May only be anchored when proper system upgrade has been met
* Only one Cyno Jammer may be anchored per solar system
* Cyno Jammer needs to be launched near the system Infrastructure Hub (between 5 and 10km)

Working conditions:

* An anchored Cyno Jammer automatically turns online after the spool-up period and works for 1 hour
* Deployed Cyno Jammer is automatically unanchored and destroyed if the solar system upgrade level goes below minimum requirements while it is active
* Deployed Cyno Jammer automatically unanchors and self-destructs once their lifetime has expired
* Cyno Jammers are considered as militia objects and may be shot by the opposing factions without any consequence (neutrals can shoot them but have to take a security status hit)
* Has same effect than null-security version - prevents Cynosural Fields to be created in the solar system as long as it is active

LP DONATION MAINTENANCE FEE
The more system upgrades a faction has, the more donated LP is wasted to maintain current upgrades. Technically this would mean a faction with no upgrade would get a 0% fee while donating LP to the I-hub, while a faction reaching tier 5 war zone control would spend 70-75% of its LPs into the maintenance fee before they are counted for the upgrades themselves.

This mainly done to offset the massive LP gain bonus when reaching higher War Zone tiers, and also provide diminishing returns to factions owning vast amount of space.

GENERAL CAPTURE CHANGES

Last but not least, we have a certain number of smaller changes that have been suggested and requested for a while.


* Reduce I-hub LP bleed from attacked complexes: I-hub currently lose 50% of attacked complex LP amount, which makes it difficult to hold a system upgrades. We would like to reduce the bleed out to 10% to make it less easy to reduce it. Thus capturing a Major site would only remove 3,000 LPs from the I-hub instead of 15,000 as it is today.

* Defensive plexing gives LP: as title says, but with a twist. LP amount is based on contested system % to avoid farming. Thus, a system that is 50% contested would only give 50% of the total LP amount available. Maximum cap would be set to 75% to encourage players to still be in the offensive.

* Attacking complexes don't pay anything in vulnerable systems: currently it is possibly to still gain LPs and VPs in vulnerable systems, not only allowing you to farm the system instead of taking the I-hub, but also give you a huge VP buffer as they keep piling up indefinitely. Plan is to stop attackers from getting LPs and VPs when system is vulnerable - we would still leave a small VP buffer for attackers, but nothing bigger than 100-200 VPs.


That's pretty much for this thread, as mentioned above, we have more stuff coming, but that will concern NPCs and FW complexes, both of which are covered elsewhere in the Features & Ideas Discussion forum.

Can we have your stuff? (for a book*)

If you were watching the "CCP Presents" keynote at Fanfest this year you'll recall a slightly bulbous English fellow bumbling on about some book or other. Well that fellow was me, Richie Shoemaker (aka Zapatero, ex-EON), and the book I was bumbling on about was "Into The Second Decade*", one of many delights going into the Collector’s Edition box set that will hopefully be taking pride of place on your gaming shelf come October.

Just to recap, the book aims to tell the development history of the EVE universe; not just the making of EVE Online and DUST 514, but the influence of the players in shaping New Eden and the community that has served it. A significant part of the book we’re planning is a chapter, tentatively called "This Is New Eden", in which we hope to show just how vastly creative and important the New Eden player base is, so that when you flick through the glossy pages in 2023 as EVE enters its third decade, your brain will be awash with glorious memories that might otherwise have been lost (on account of the ravages of middle age).

You can contribute to this time capsule-publishing endeavour in one or both of two ways: by submitting words and/or sending in some lovely pictures.

The words are easy. We want to compile your predictions for the EVE universe during the second decade. You can second guess gameplay changes, lore developments, advances in technology that might impact the game or the community, and you can be a bleak or as upbeat as you see fit. Don’t go writing sweeping essays though, 30 words on a matter of your choosing will suffice.

As for the pictures, you may need to do a bit of digging around on an old hard drive or the internet, but here’s the kind of thing we’re after:

Pictures of important in-game events from the last 10 years, such as fleet fights, either as screenshots or grabbed from hi-res video footage.

Pictures from current and old websites and apps, such as skill trainers, killboards, ship-fits, blogs, etc.

Ads, motivational and propaganda posters and other bits of eye candy from ages past.

Pictures from tournaments and other in-game sporting events.

Fanfest photos from over the years

Photos from player or corp meets (inc. player weddings) you may have attended.

Anything else that doesn't quite fit into any of the above not-quite categories, such as EVE cakes, etc.

When you’ve assembled your words, pictures and/or links, simply email them to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before Saturday, 1st June. I will then sift through everything and pick out the best stuff for inclusion. Don’t worry about copyright and all that gubbins for the time being. I will ask permission from the necessary parties if and when necessary once all the required assets are assembled. So if you recall something from long ago that someone else who no longer plays EVE created, remind me about it and we’ll see what we can do about getting it in.

Alas we can't offer payment for your contributions, but you name will forever be noted in the annals of EVE history, likely on the same page as Brendan Drain (Massively), Alex Gianturco (The Mittani), Michael Lastucka (Warp Drive Active), Jim Rossignol (Rock Paper Shotgun), Bryan Ward (Eveoganda), Mat Westhorpe (Freebooted) and Robert Woodhead (CSM) - in other words some of the brightest and best commentators ever to devote themselves to understanding EVE. Exalted company, indeed. Oh, and some guy called Richie Shoemaker.

Thank you in advance for your contributions. I look forward to getting as many of your thoughts and memories into the book as possible so that the story of the EVE universe can be told in as full a way as possible.

- Richie "Zapatero" Shoemaker

Dear alt-loving capsuleers,

Many of us here have been playing EVE long before we started working at CCP. As such, a lot of ideas and improvements come from our own experience and (sometimes) frustrations with EVE. Alt accounts play a large role in EVE so training and keeping them shouldn't be a hassle. Take these two cases for example: 

Case 1: You have an alt and you just need a few days or weeks of training but you can't be bothered with logging into your main, pausing the skill training, logging out and then back in again to resume training on your alt. That or you simply don't want your +5 implanted, carefully EVEMon-planned main character to stop training. 

Case 2: You need an alt, you create a new account, pay a signup fee, a month, two or three, then train the alt. After all requirements are met for the alt to do it's new job efficiently, you transfer it to your main account, i.e. consolidate, and pay a transfer fee. Sooner or later you're facing Case 1 because after all, your industry alt will need to invent new things, your market alt will need higher order capacity and your cyno alt could be turned into a covert cyno alt. Then later a covert recon cyno alt... then later, well you know where this is going.  

A simple solution to this is to offer users to enable secondary training slots on their accounts using PLEX. Changes made to subscriptions need to be taken seriously so we in Research and Statistics teamed up with Team Game of Drones to analyse the feasibility of such a solution and shipping it with Odyssey on June 4th.  The research on our part involved detailed scenario analysis of the effects on the in-game PLEX market, subscription changes due changing payment patterns, and needless to say, effects on our revenue. After we had conclusive results that this did not pose any serious operational risks to CCP or the EVE economy we finally ran the idea through the CSM and got really positive feedback from them. Team Game of Drones took the ball from there, did careful analysis on different scenarios, edge-cases and estimated the total implementation work needed to be done on their end. Soon after they were ready with an implementation, so this feature will ship with Odyssey! 

Now over to CCP Ytterbium of Team Game of Drones for details on the implementation itself. 

How to enable Dual Character in Training?

There are several ways to activate this feature. The first, and most obvious one is to right-click any PLEX you have in your account possession and select “Activate Dual Character Training”. Dual Character Training is account based, not bound to an individual character, so there is no harm enabling it from any character so long as you are sure this is the account you want to apply it for. Just remember time will count down as soon as it is enabled.

If you don’t have a PLEX as an item available in-game, another option is to go to the EVE Online “Account Management” website, log in and activate the service from there, with the same particularities as mentioned above.

Alternatively, attempting to start skill training on an account´s second character will cause a notification to appear. This message states if you wish to enable Dual Character Training by using a PLEX you already have, or by acquiring one from the EVE Market or account management.

How does Dual Character in Training actually work?

Activating Dual Character Training on your account allows two characters to be trained at the same time for 30 full days. However, an important point to note down remains the system doesn’t care which individual characters are trained, as long as the simultaneous limit is not reached.

For instance, you could have 3 characters named A, B and C on the same account; activating Dual Character Training allows any combination of A+B, A+C, B+C to be trained at the same time. This provides extra flexibility for the user wishing to train up several alternate characters.

Is Dual Character Training Time the same as my account main game time?

No, and this is a crucial detail to keep in mind. Buying 30 days of Dual Character Training will not extend your account expiration date at all – it will just enable this extra functionality during the specified period. If your account main game time expires while this new feature is running, Dual Character Training remaining time will be paused, so nothing will be lost until your account is re-activated again.

As an example, if you activated 30 days of Second Character Training while 13 days of regular account game time is left, you would have 17 days remaining of this feature paused when your account expires.

Which character training do we prioritize when Dual Character Training time expires?

By default, we always favor the most experienced character. That means in the event Dual Character Training time expires, the character with the least skill points available will be stopped. We advise you to plan accordingly.

Can Dual Character Training time be purchased several time at once and stack?

For being a new and somewhat experimental feature coming out for Odyssey, we did not wish to allow Dual Character Training time to stack up indefinitely for now. In practical term, that means that for the time being, it is not possible to renew Dual Character Training on an account until you have 7 or less days remaining for it. This may be changed in the future if and when we feel comfortable enough with this feature to allow full queuing.

For improved visibility, please note that activated and remaining Dual Character Training time may be seen at any time in the Account Management page.

With the deployment of Retribution 1.2.4 and the deployment of the new launcher, we received reports internally and externally that people were unable to connect to Tranquility thanks to some misconfigured servers. While this issue was not universally experienced and over 30,000 pilots were able to log in normally before we fixed the issue, we do feel this special case does require a special thank you (for your patience) from CCP. 

During tomorrow's downtime we will add 50.000 skillpoints (representing roughly a day’s worth of intense skill training) to the character with the highest number of skill points on each active account (the presumed main). Here’s a quick guide on how to apply those skillpoints. 

We're sorry for the inconvenience and we hope you can use these skill points on your adventures.

Your voices have been heard loud and clear and we've been busy taking notes so we'd like to ask you to help us move forward in this thread and keep the feedback focused and constructive. Thank you.