Back in July, we introduced a temporary Brokers Fee and Sales Tax reduction across New Eden with the Grand Heist release, which was stated to last for three months. This period has now reached its end - but instead of merely returning to the market’s previous taxes, a modified tax structure will be coming your way soon.
In the Grand Heist release, the base Sales Tax and Brokers Fee in NPC stations were each cut in half, going from 5.0% to 2.5%. In place of the previous numbers, taxes will be changing to the following structure:
Base Unmodified Taxes:
Minimum Taxes (Modified by Skills, Standings, etc):
This change shifts a higher percentage of the tax division toward the sales tax instead of on the order placement, permanently reducing the cost-pressure associated with listing orders by moving the cost into the sales tax taken out upon purchase by another player.
In effect, trading at base tax values under the new structure will increase total taxes by 1% compared to pre-relief values – but if you operate with taxes reduced to their minimum, your total taxes will be decreased by 0.625% compared to pre-relief, on top of requiring less ISK to list your orders in the first place!
See you in space (or in station, for all you market moguls), and fly safe!
The Summon the Swarm update is now live in EVE Online, providing daring pilots with a new opportunity to earn exciting rewards!
This update introduces a new deployable structure, the CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon - or CRAB. This new deployable is authorized for use in Low and Null security space to research local Rogue Drone activities.
To begin its broadcast and analysis cycles, it must be powered up through the use of a capital or supercapital class vessel. Once initialized, it will attract hostile Rogue Drone threats that must be destroyed in order to complete the analysis cycle.
Successful completion will reward pilots with new mutaplasmid technology for mutating drones, as well as both bounties and research data to be handed in for additional ISK.
Thanks to extensive player testing on the Singularity test server, a number of improvements have been made that significantly enhance the experience of the new update:
Fighter targeting AI has been refined, allowing more ship types to complete the sites.
Deployables have been further restricted, to prevent interference with nearby Player Owned Structures or Citadels.
Bounty rewards have been more than doubled in the live release!
Infested Ogres have been modified to no longer pause the site.
Ready for a new challenge? Form your fleet, acquire a Rogue Analysis Beacon, and prepare to summon the swarm!
CONCORD Preliminary Field Research Report
Over the course of many repeated deployments of the CRAB, it was observed that active scanning for Rogue Drone activities failed. Analysis of test data indicates signal interference rapidly reaches a saturation point within the local system rendering further operation ineffective. Restrictions and information systems have been integrated into CRAB deployable structures, providing researchers with the current state of local system signal interference levels. This information will also be updated into Neocom firmware used by capsuleers going forward.
CRAB deployment and activation requires the involvement of capsuleers, due to a specific design requirement for using the secure FTL communications equipment available within hydrostatic capsules. However, capsules only have a limited reserve of Complex Encryption Qubits (CEQs) available for use to securely establish the link with the CRAB, and bridge to CONCORD FTL networks, during the broadcast cycle. This will impose limitations on use, as repeated linking to a CRAB by the same capsuleer will eventually deplete their reserve of CEQs. The CEQ reserves available for secure linking will regenerate over time as the capsule systems generate new encryption keys.
During the course of our CRAB testing and analysis, DED fleets engaged a number of extremely dangerous modified Rogue Drones. It has been found that these newly-detected Rogue Drones have been mutated by the use of new Rogue Drone technology. Our fleets have made note of several new mutaplasmids retrieved by the CRAB from the remains of the Rogue Drone threats encountered, all with radically different characteristics from the mutaplasmids retrieved from Triglavian technology caches. This finding urgently demands further study. Due to the extreme threat from these entities, we have assigned bounties on every discovered new Rogue Drone variation so far.
On completion of the broadcast and analysis cycle, the CRAB will relay its findings. The operating capsuleer may retrieve any resources recovered by the CRAB. CONCORD has now set up purchase orders for Rogue Drone Infestation Data collected during the operation of the CRAB, incentivizing capsuleers to sell their observation data for our research team to study further.
Decisive Battleship Blast in the Proving Grounds
Unflinching Capsuleers, A new, one-day event is coming to the Abyssal Proving Grounds, inviting you to pilot the mightiest frontline ships of the core nations of New Eden in one-on-one combat, unleashing punishing force on your opponent as you battle for victory!
This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 16 October, and runs for exactly 24 hours.
The ruleset is as follows:
Only the Apocalypse, Armageddon, Abaddon, Raven, Rokh, Scorpion, Dominix, Megathron, Hyperion, Tempest, Typhoon, Maelstorm, and Praxis may enter
Pilots receive 100m ISK payout per match
Only one local repair module allowed per ship
No Sensor Dampeners or Shield Boost Amplifiers allowed
No passive shield tank modules (power relays, flux coild, purger rigs) allowed
Modules and drones are restricted to meta level 5
Pirate implants are restricted
Board your battleships, ready your weapons, and snag your Proving Ground filaments – available in Abyssal Deadspace caches, in Triglavian wrecks in Pochven, or on the ingame market – and launch into a momentous battle , hitting your foes with everything you’ve got as you plow your way to the top of the Proving Ground Leaderboard, demonstrating immovable strength & spirit and earning rewards!
Fashionable Capsuleers, After an intense round of judging, following a great number of fantastic submissions from across the world for the GM Week Cosplay Contest, we’re proud to announce the winners of this stylish competition!
1st Place: Carol Hernandez
In truest EVE Online fashion, Carol Hernandez shows off a phenomenal spacefaring getup, evocative of one of New Eden’s most sustaining profession – complete with ship spinning!
2nd Place: Araknos BloodFeather
As the Domain of Pochven reaches its first anniversary, Araknos BloodFeather has outfitted himself in a beautiful custom Trigalvian survival suit - the prideful garb of Kybernauts everywhere!
3rd Place: Sven Saltzburg
The Amarr maintain the oldest and most well-established of New Eden’s spacefaring navies – and Sven Saltzburg shows his loyalty to the Empire with a snazzy officers’ uniform!
4th Place: Lucas Amarlio
The Sisters of EVE are best known as a humanitarian organization, but their interests extend to far deeper and more dangerous fronts – Lucas Amarlio shows off his custom-made combat armor in the classic red-and-white colors of the SoE!
Congratulations to all entrants, and thanks to all for their fantastic submissions! In addition to these winners, look forward to the winners of the community vote as well, which you can find and participate in here on the EVE Forums. Thanks to all who entered, and congratulations to the winners! We look forward to seeing all of your fantastic cosplays in person at future EVE meetups someday soon(tm).
See you in space, and fly safe!
Best SKINs of 2021
If you’re missing some of this year’s best SKINs, a new bundle of the very best is now available to buy from the EVE Store! As well as the brand-new Thanatos Green Demons SKIN, the Best SKINs of 2021 bundle is packed with this year’s cosmetic highlights.
Bundle contents
Head to the EVE Store now to add this stunning cosmetic collection to your personal fleet.
EVE Online is now fully native on Mac, with a brand-new client bringing improved graphics and visual effects, reduced RAM and power usage, full support for macOS keyboards & mice, and more!
As the ongoing Gateway Quadrant continues to see a great influx of new players, there’s no better time to dive into New Eden. Immerse yourself in a full realization of the vast and limitless world of EVE Online, and experience the game on Mac as never before.
To commemorate this release, you can look forward to new daily login rewards stocked with Quafe Zero Green Apple, a sparkling new product line from the beloved Quafe brand. These rewards will provide pilots with party packs of the premier Capsuleer performance drink of New Eden, as well as various celebratory SKINs until 11:00 UTC on 19 October!
Mac users’ feedback during the client’s time on the Singularity test server has provided vital assistance – thank you all for helping to make this a reality! Any general feedback you might have is welcome, and you can find a specific thread to post it to on the EVE Forums.
After installing the latest launcher version, the migration from the previous Wine client to the new Mac client will begin automatically, seamlessly ushering players on both Intel and M1 Mac machines into this new experience.
Welcome to a new era. See you in space, and fly safe!
You only have 24 hours to get 10% off the specialist Foreman, Destroyer, and Black Ops Packs in the EVE Store, as the offer ends at 11:00 UTC on 10 October! In addition, you have until 14 October to get your hands on the new Glass Semiotique monocle to customize your character, available now in EVE Online’s New Eden Store.
The Black Ops Pack includes 6 months of Omega, 2860 PLEX, half a million Skill Points, 6 months of Multiple character training, awesome Fireblade Guerilla SKINs, Expert Cerebral Accelerator and Blood Raider apparel.
The Foreman Pack brings great value to industry-minded Capsuleers. This awesome pack contains a wealth of PLEX, Omega time, Skill Points, 3 months of Multiple Character Training, Expert Cerebral Accelerator, magnificent Capsuleer Day XVIII SKINs for the Rorqual, Orca, and Porpoise, plus character apparel.
The Destroyer Pack offers PLEX, half a million Skill Points, boosters, a character implant and four stunning SKINs for destroyer class ships.
Don’t forget that the spectacular Glass Semiotique monocle is also still available in EVE Online’s New Eden Store, but only until 11:00 UTC on 14 October, so this is your only chance before it's gone forever! Wear this coveted cosmetic today and join the exclusive monocle owners club while you still can.
As vast and varied as the world of New Eden is, the EVE Online community is just as diverse. Between the EVE Forums, subreddits, Discord communities, podcasts, streams, and news sites, the amount of information to be navigated and consumed can be truly head-spinning. To celebrate the EVE community and help you find your way in this crazy, wild, wonderful world, we’re introducing a new bi-weekly piece: The Community Beat!
Our aim in these articles is to provide a foundation for all aspects of the community: in-game events, developer chats, player meets, CSM reports, and much more. With a landscape as diverse and turbulent as EVE’s has become over the last near-nineteen years, no version of the Community Beat will look identical. We’re very excited to share the wonderful stories of the EVE community, and look forward to chatting regularly.
Welcome to the inaugural publication of the EVE Online Community Beat: sit back, relax, and enjoy some refreshing Quafe!
Send in the CRABs!
The CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon, coming soon to EVE, is a new kind of observatory structure, intended to draw enormous Rogue Drone attention toward itself and those near it, providing a new and revolutionary way to engage in exciting and profitable gameplay content in Low and Null Security space. This beacon requires a significant influx of power to spool up, however, and can consequently only be activated by specific kinds of capital ships.
"We’ve had just over 4,700 CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacons deployed in the last week, and we’re really happy with the responses. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve made a few changes and we're still on the lookout for more. We're excited to see how you CRAB! - EVE Online Team
To learn more details about this swarm-attracting beacon, tune in to Pando & Mirandalorian’s Podcast this week, where CCP Rise will be coming on to discuss the feature in greater depth. Likewise, you can learn more about how to get a sneak peek at this feature on the Singularity Test Server here.
In-Game Event: Totality Day
The Foundation Quadrant saw the four core nations of New Eden – the Gallente Federation, the Amarr Empire, the Minmatar Republic, and the Caldari State – celebrate what it means to be a member of their respective empires with various holidays.
Not to be outdone by the core Empires’ supporters, pilots aligned with the enigmatic Triglavian Collective have come together to celebrate the formation of the Domain of Pochven – the climax of the successful attainment of Final Liminality in 27 systems across Empire space – on a newly designated day of celebration on 13 October, dubbed Totality Day. Various player events - which are by no means limited to the RP community - will be taking place from 9 to 16 October, so join in the week-long celebration (aiming to be at least three times as energized as the Empires’ holidays) and embrace your inner triangle!
What was your favorite Empire celebration? Tweet using the #CommunityBeat hashtag with your favorite moment, and the Empires will send a SKIN code to their favorite responses.
Partner Spotlight
EVE suffers no shortage of extremely talented content creators covering a wide array of gameplay styles. One of our most prominent streamers, Bjorn Bee, is enthusiastically dedicated to showing New Eden what it means to PvP both as a lone wolf, as well as in small-to-medium sized fleets. Whether you want to experience late-game content or learn more about PvP mechanics, Bjorn is a great resource – and if you're interested in participating in PvP fleets, Bjorn also has NPSI (Not Purple, Shoot It) roams where he takes viewers out in public fleets, open to many skill levels. Be warned, FC Bee is not afraid to take a fight, so this might be a one-way trip!
If PvP isn’t your forte, have no fear – Frost is here! Frost Ees has a wonderfully informative YouTube channel covering player news in EVE Online, as well as the Alliance Spotlight series where she interviews various alliance leaders from across the cluster. Whether you’re looking to catch up on what EVE players have been up to, or simply want to stay up to date with their hijinks, Frost’s Weekly Updates will keep you abreast without bogging you down in lexicon.
Community Corner
By no means do we only take notice of our Partners; EVE players across the world constantly surprise us with their talent. For SHIPTember (which we’re totally making a thing), Oleena Natiras of GoonWaffe has combined a love for both EVE and LEGO to tremendous effect, so be sure to check out their absolutely jaw-dropping LEGO rendition of the iconic Apocalypse battleship!
Thanks for sharing, Oleena – we’re positively gold with envy!
Fleet up! - EVE Vegas & London
Being able to unwind and put a face to the voices you’ve heard on Teamspeak, Mumble, and Discord is a truly special experience, so for those wanting to experience the splendor of an in-person player gathering, some very storied venues will at long last resume and continue their traditions in the coming weeks! We’ve had the pleasure of going to meetups far and wide, and each one is spectacular and memorable in their own way.
Returning to its roots as a player-run meetup, EVE Vegas will host the annual meetup from 22 October to 24 October. With almost 400 confirmed guests from across New Eden, it once again proves to be a consistently popular venue year after year.
On the other side of the Atlantic, EVE London returns after a 21-month break at a brand-new venue on 6 November. What started as a corp meetup at a pub many moons ago has evolved over the years into an institution all its own. Pop in to hobnob with fellow Capsuleers for, amongst many other things, the Alliance Tournament XVII Viewing Party! If this will be your first time attending EVE London, a bit of advice: go easy on the POS Fuel (you’ll thank us later).
In conjunction with these events, we’re happy to announce that the FriendShip has finally been cleared to undock; CCP will be sending a few developers to support both events, as well as various other player events through the year. We are overjoyed to be able to once again meet with you, kick back, and hear all the wonderful stories that always come out of these events!
Celebrate Pochven’s formation on Totality Day
Kybernauts of the Ancient Domains,
On 13 October 2020, the Invasion campaign of the Triglavian Collective reached its zenith with the formation of the Domain of Pochven and the permanent anchoring of the Triglavians in New Eden, following the realization of Totality through the hard-earned attainment of Final Liminality in 27 star systems across New Eden.
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This year, on the eve of the anniversary of the re-anchoring of Triglavian civilization in New Eden, we’re preparing to celebrate these world-changing events – made possible by the assistance rendered by Kybernauts across New Eden who aligned themselves with the Triglavian cause – with a small environment effect across Pochven from 8 to 19 October, bringing all pilots a 2.0 AU/sec warp speed increase in this already turbulent domain, as well as a collection of new landmark sites related to the Invasion arc and its outcome:
Perun Clade’s Liminal Proving Grounds, Veles Clade’s Automata Semiosis Sobornost, and Svarog Clade’s Skarkon Orbital Shipyards will be found throughout the Krais of the Clades across Pochven, and the EDENCOM Memorial to Triglavian Invasions, dedicated to all those lost during the tumultuous year and a half of conflict, will be established in Yulai.
The dedicated community that has coalesced around the Triglavian Collective, having assisted in the Invasions throughout Invasion Chapter 3, is organizing a slew of events during the week of October 9 to 16 – including PVP fleet roams, a furious free-for-all, a gathering to share war stories from the Invasion, and various parades, and more!
You can read all about the upcoming events in this post on the in-character section of the EVE forums.
During this time, we’ll also be launching a special one-day Proving Ground event on 9 October, pitting two three-man teams against each other in furious combat, commanding the deadly 9 Tactical Troika Classification cladeship of Svarog Clade’s Kikimora subclade in a heated contest!
As the Domain of Pochven enters its second year, the Porevitium Transmuters anchored at each sun maintain their operations; the mighty Xordazh World Arks roam the stars of the Clades, and the gargantuan Vyraj Anchorages thrum unceasingly with immense and unknowable purpose at the core of each Krai.
Stabilization of the Ancient Domains continues – and while the fiercely independent Clades of the Triglavian Collective may dissent on many matters, they maintain a necessary cooperation for the greater good of their people, and continue their efforts to guide the peoples of New Eden toward their ideal alignment in the Flow of Vyraj.
And as the Triglav mingle with those who remain inhabiting the worlds of Pochven, rumors of nonaggressive contact with the Empires mount, and the stoic forces of the Vigilant Tyrannos continue their ruthless trespass into the domain of those who call them “Ancient Enemy”.
Only time will tell what the future may hold for both the Triglavian Collective and the nations of the cluster they have returned to; but no matter what may come to pass, the attainment of Totality, the struggles on both sides of the preceding conflict, and the formation of Pochven – made possible by every Kybernaut who heeded the Convocation's call through Zorya Triglav – will never be forgotten.
Have a happy Totality Day, and see you in space!
Introducing Quasar
Tuesday, 14 September 2021, is a significant flash point which represents the end of an era and the access to powerful opportunities for EVE Online. Lost in the bright lights of the new NPE and tucked under the pixels of Skill Plans reverberates a fundamental change in how EVE Online moves into the future.
The last time the networking layer was fundamentally changed was in 2011 with the introduction of CCP’s IOCP implementation, “CarbonIO”, which eventually became the foundation of the infamous time dilation. Originating as some scribbles under the heading “Project Sanguine”, reasoning began about the problem space in which CarbonIO lived. Every optimization in EVE comes down to careful negotiation with Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Simply, Python can only do one thing at a time. EVE’s adoption of Stackless Python, implementation of IOCP through StacklessIO then CarbonIO, and cooperative design around time dilation is all to maintain the favorite illusion: New Eden breathes. What if the GIL didn’t have to be courted for every idea that arose? How can the hardware industry’s explosion in core counts over individual processor clock speed be taken advantage of?
There have been many experiments in this regard which are tangential to Project Sanguine, with the most public one being EVE: Aether Wars. The goal there wasn’t to fundamentally change the communication model of EVE Online, but instead change the simulation model. In contrast, Project Sanguine targeted the boring bits which represent EVE’s dense feature set. Simulating nearly 9,000 players in the same space could be faster if New Eden didn’t have to worry about everything else on its to-do list. So Project Sanguine landed on two goals: dodge the GIL and clear the table for moar lasers.
The first form of Project Sanguine emerged with ESI and the first iteration of EVE Portal in late 2016. Through these projects, a new paradigm was established within the server architecture of EVE Online: a message bus. From this new escape hatch, the bottlenecks associated with the GIL were rediscovered, but with a clearer picture of their expensive manifestations: message routing, serialization, and transmission. If one ship fires one laser in the middle of 1000 ships, that’s 1000 messages which need to be sent immediately all over the globe. The simulation must address that message to 1000 destinations as a copy (message routing), convert that data to a wire format (serialization), and then send the data over the wire (transmission). In most cases, CarbonIO has been addressing each of those issues, but within the custody of the GIL. CarbonIO has served EVE Online well for quite some time, but much has changed on the turbulent seas of the internets since 2011.
After seeing the patterns evolve in this new ecosystem, it became clear that a more standardized protocol was needed if this paradigm were ever to be exploited. With the integration of gRPC it became possible to combine the message routing capabilities of the message bus with the lighting fast serialization of protocol buffers (gRPC’s message standard). It is still necessary to schedule data with the GIL for transmission, but this is now buffered at a higher level on a separate thread. This means all transmission, serialization, and message routing happens outside the GIL except the memory copy that has to happen in-between. It cannot get much faster than that.
moar lasers
A firehose was now attached to New Eden, but where does it all go? When the building of ESI began, so did the adoption of more cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes, and as the need for simple concurrency primitives to digest this information started to be seen, a greater move into Go was made. With these technologies accumulating into an ecosystem of their own, work started on building out features to take advantage of the new ability to work with New Eden with modern standards. You’ve seen many of them.
The first was the Activity Tracker. It attaches itself to the firehose and monitors New Eden’s respiration to keep track of all your exploits. There’s also a variation of that with Opportunities which attempts to predict the trajectory of a Capsuleer and highlight more interesting parts of New Eden. The message bus has also been used to power the Abyssal Proving Grounds leaderboards. A massive amount of work has gone into providing the development teams with an ecosystem to harness the power of a messaging architecture with these features. However, each of these features represents a gap in capabilities: the desktop client.
Until the release of Skill Plans, each feature has “smuggled” data into Tranquility through CarbonIO. This is no longer the case as skill plan operations are not only communicated through gRPC but never touch Tranquility, or its database.
Why is bypassing Tranquility and its database so important? To really understand that, one must talk about the failures. Part of the journey has led to many new techniques and tools in which to view New Eden. One concept is distributed tracing "Tracing") using a new favorite toy: Honeycomb.io. (More about that journey here.) Armed with all the new shiny toys, it was clear exactly what was happening with Skill Plans as it was released into the wild:
It could also be seen in general that the performance was ok with a lot of room for improvement:
Then the following morning a chaos monkey appeared and started to harass the hamsters:
Yeah, that’s 500k milliseconds, AKA 8 minutes and 20 seconds, to send a message. The details will require some Fanfest beer and a marker board. Here are the important parts of this fail state: Tranquility didn’t go down, thousands of players weren’t disconnected, and most players weren’t affected (you can see a majority of the messages are still packed in the very bottom of the graph). This is because we don’t communicate at all with Tranquility in the traditional sense. No CarbonIO to the traditional proxies which then go to the server node and then the database. Instead, Tranquility focuses on what’s more important, and the EVE desktop client is communicating via gRPC into the new ecosystem where the Skill Plan service lives with its own database.
As you might remember recently, a volcano was drained to test No Downtime for Tranquility. One of the most powerful characteristics of the new ecosystem: No Downtime. There wasn’t a need to restart Tranquility to rescue Skill Plans. There was no need to deploy a patch to the server or the desktop client.This is a peek into the journey of Project Sanguine becoming EVE’s new technology platform: Quasar. The feeling was that now was the right point in time to give it a name so it could be more easily comprehended and referenced, as well as give you more insight into what has been going on recently with EVE’s technological advancements and how they align with setting the game up for a thriving third decade. It’s also serendipitous that this quadrant name is Gateway as it heralds the direct usage of the gRPC gateways.
Also, space words man. They just sound good.
What’s next?
Work continues on clearing the table by refurbishing many old services which provides two vectors of momentum: build up more foundational capabilities for Quasar in terms of manipulating more than just Skill Plans in the universe, and normalize ancient systems to pave the way for faster iteration.
What does that mean for the average Capsuleer? More opportunities to expose more powerful features across more mediums.
The idea of publishing simulation data through Quasar has also been toyed with…but that might take a minute.
