Another exciting and action-packed GM Week starts today! All week long, until 23:59 UTC on 24 September, jump online and join your fellow players and GMs for a multitude of fun events – both in and out of game – including streams, in-game content, contests, and more!
CONTESTS
We’ll be conducting all kinds of exciting contests throughout GM Week, spurring on fun activity and rewarding winners with great prizes!
Cosplay Contest
Entries for the EVE Cosplay Contest, announced several weeks ago, will be accepted all week until 23:59 UTC 24 September - and winners will be announced by 8 October, two weeks after the submission deadline. We’re looking forward to seeing the very best of the dazzling EVE style that players can create, and rewarding them with fabulous prizes, which you can read more about in the Cosplay Contest Announcement!
“Bad” Fan-Art Contest
Submit your best EVE-inspired memes, badly drawn art, propaganda, or anything else you can think of in this contest’s forum thread, where the winners will be chosen based on number of likes. Submissions must be in PDF, PNG, or JPEG format, with a max size of 1920x1080. The winning entries will be displayed as backgrounds in the meeting rooms at CCP’s HQ!
Limerick and Ice-Breaker Contest
Break out your wordsmithing skills! Players are invited to craft an EVE-related limerick or conversational ice-breaker, to be submitted via Twitter using the #gmweekwordsmith hashtag. Limericks should follow the traditional format – (see here)), and ice-breakers should be written as if you were sparking up a conversation with a Capsuleer, be it for business, friendship, desirable cooperation, or anything else.
Winners will be awarded 1000 PLEX and two SKINs as prizes, and runners-up will receive 500 PLEX and one SKIN. In addition, all winners will be given bundles of collectible items associated with GM Week! While this is indeed a contest of witty and comedic wordsmithing, we kindly ask that you please be mindful of the content of your entries – EVE is a PEGI12 game, after all, and social media platforms all have their own measurements of what crosses the line. With that said, have fun!
*All contests run from the beginning of GM week until 23:59 UTC on 24 September
IN-GAME EVENTS
During this year’s GM Week, we’ll be running all sorts of fun live events for players to participate in - including activities at specified times, as well as ones running week-long!
Whack-a-Bot - 20 September at 16:30 UTC
In this fan-favorite event, Capsuleers discovered using CONCORD-prohibited automated piloting technology will be dragged into Yulai, ship and all, where countless players will be sitting in wait to tear them apart!
GM and ISD Roam - 23 September at 18:00 UTC
Various GMs and ISDs will be taking to space with the fantastic BjornBee as their FC, with each pilot carrying small amounts of goodies - so keep an eye out and watch the chaos, or hunt the fleet down to instigate even more excitement!
Scavenger Hunt - Week-Long Event
Containers full of interesting loot and goodies - including specific SKINs and vanity items - will be spread around space during GM week, with hints as to their locations being dropped during streams and across various in-game chat channels!
Orbital Stash - Week-Long Event
Trivia-locked containers will be dropped in easy-to-find locations across space throughout the duration of GM week, named with riddles whose answers will open them. Prizes include more SKINs, vanity items, and even PLEX!
STREAM EVENTS
Live Steam Reviews – 22 September at 14:00 UTC
Join CCP Paragon and CCP Goat for a fun, live answering session for EVE Steam reviews, assisted by Twitch chat!
Magic School Bus Stream – 21 September at 16:00 UTCDrop in for a relaxed stream with various GMs as they pop between career agent systems to talk to new players and give them ships and advice, while other GMs answer questions onstream and on a special GM discord server!
Appearances on Streams
GMs will also be hopping onto various streams hosted by EVE partners during the week, so keep an eye out and tune in to watch live!
In addition to these events, the Emergency Response Squad SKINS for logi cruisers are returning to the NES during GM week, with new availability for each Empire’s logi frigate.
We’re looking forward to another exciting GM week this year, and can’t wait to see the fun, excitement, and chaos you’ll all bring.
Return to your foundations in a new Abyssal Proving Grounds event, where four pilots dive into thunderdome combat against one another aboard one of the four Empires’ Corvettes! Board one of these humble and capable vessels for free at any station or citadel, and go all-out as you fight your way to the top!
This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 17 September, and runs until 11:00 on 21 September.
The ruleset for the event is as follows: - Only the Impairor, Ibis, Velator, and Reaper may enter - Modules and drones are restricted to meta level 4 - Pirate implants are not allowed
Prepare for combat on equal footing, gaining invaluable combat experience aboard ships you can easily afford to lose while utilizing any combat tactics you can think of: keep an eye on your orbit, get a handle on different types of weapons and EWAR, predict your opponents’ own moves, or even take a crack at manual piloting for fine-tuned movement!
We're looking forward to an accessible and exciting event, bringing in Capsuleers of any age and experience level to rage against one another in the Proving Grounds. Board your Corvette, kit it out with any modules you can imagine, and grab your filaments – found in Abyssal Deadspace, in Triglavian wrecks in Pochven, or on the ingame market – as you demonstrate your mastery of every Capsuleer’s first class of ship and ascend the Proving Grounds leaderboard, achieving glory and earning special rewards!
The Economic Report for the month of August 2021 is now available for your viewing pleasure!
You can download all of the raw data used in this report here. As always, each image can be enlarged by clicking on it.
Gateway – New Quadrant Starts Today
Ambitious Capsuleers,
EVE Online’s third Quadrant of 2021 – Gateway – launches today! The Gateway Quadrant kicks off with an updated and improved new player experience to train freshly cloned Capsuleers, great opportunities for established corporations and alliances to recruit and train those Capsuleers, the introduction of brand-new Skill Plans to streamline Capsuleer advancement, and much more. There’s never been a better time to start, continue, or return to playing EVE!
Since 2020, EVE Online releases have been divided into four Quadrants each year, packed with exciting events, game features, login campaigns, balance updates, visual updates, technological advancements, competitions, Abyssal Proving Grounds, and more. Each Quadrant has a unique theme focused on a specific aspect of EVE Online, which guides the type of content you can expect to see. Quadrants are not limited to delivering content within a set theme only, but most will be connected to it to provide a holistic experience for Capsuleers in New Eden. The content itself is delivered in smaller increments throughout the Quadrant’s duration instead of a single big patch, giving you something interesting to do on every space adventure! Be sure to check out this Foundation Quadrant wrap-up for the highlights from Q2.
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Gateway
The Gateway Quadrant will open the door to the EVE universe for many new Capsuleers and provide new pathways for them to connect with their dreams and ambitions in New Eden. It will also provide established player corporations and alliances new avenues in which to direct the training and advancement of fresh recruits, of which there will be many!
Gateway will be a shorter Quadrant than normal, and will also act as a stepping stone to EVE Online’s fourth Quadrant of 2021 – which starts in November - where a new era will dawn across New Eden, signaling updates for resource scarcity. Corporations and alliances would do well to use Gateway as an opportunity to recruit new Capsuleers wisely and begin training them up for the next Quadrant, where they will be able to ready their ships and materials for the new beginning!
Welcoming New Pilots
A brand-new, story-driven Capsuleer training experience for rookie pilots is now live in EVE Online, after having received a very warm welcome and valuable feedback from the veteran community during its time on the Singularity test server! Incoming players can now arrive in New Eden and get their initial Capsuleer training from the Association for Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) in this major update to EVE’s new player experience. It is the first step towards an improved introduction to New Eden for all Capsuleers, and one that will engage players to keep them in the game longer.
Crafting this narrative-driven content called for quite a bit of innovation when it came to tooling, resulting in more immersive experiences and faster iteration capabilities, more dynamic visuals and improved UI highlighting. This will benefit both current and future content capabilities so that players can continue to experience cinematic, immersive, and engaging gameplay in EVE Online. This is the first step in improving the gateway to New Eden for fresh pilots, and will continue to be updated.
To give new pilots a further boost, the Starter Training Boost Bundle is now available in the EVE Store at 15% off, giving rookie Capsuleers 500,000 Skill Points and a Prototype Cerebral Accelerator to advance their skill training options! It’s worth noting that more established Capsuleers in corporations looking to train fresh pilots can contract their Prototype Cerebral Accelerator to new recruits.
Skill Plans - Focus Your Advancement
The new Skill Plans feature is also now live in EVE Online, streamlining and simplifying your progression through EVE’s many skills and advancement avenues! This feature allows you to build a list of skills, without needing to buy and inject them first. A Skill Plan is an ordered list of skill levels with specific goals which you can create to follow and keep track of your training as you aim for your desired experiences and challenges in EVE.
Skill Plans also allow you to share lists of skills with each other via chat, EVE Mail, corp bulletin, etc, and interact with them, all inside the EVE Online client. You can set up to five milestones in a Skill Plan, indicating specific sub-goals within it, and a milestone will be completed as soon you train all the skills required for the item or skill in question. With the aim of developing and expanding the Skill Plans feature in the near future, work is already underway on Corporation Skill Plans.
With the feature having already been tested on the Singularity test server, it has been fantastic to see the EVE community discussing Skill Plans and embracing them, especially considering how central the skills system is to anyone’s gameplay in EVE. The benefits of streamlining this process and having experienced EVE players embrace it will have a great effect on all new Capsuleers that enter the game.
EVE in the Epic Store
Speaking of gateways, a new path into New Eden is opening on 23 September as EVE Online will be coming to the Epic Games Store! The Epic Store platform’s arrival will open up the gates of New Eden to players who will previously not have had any experience of EVE Online.
This platform will bring in waves of new Capsuleers, expanding the EVE community. These fresh pilots will play through the updated AIR new player experience, leaving them ripe for recruitment, training, and integration by established player corporations and alliances. There will be an in-game celebration with an event and rewards to mark the arrival of these new Capsuleers, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
On the Horizon
Going live with the Gateway Quadrant are a couple of changes to resource distribution. More ice has been brought back into New Eden with its availability having doubled, and the availability of Mercoxit has also increased. These changes signal the start of greater updates to the scarcity of resources in the universe, and you can expect them in the fourth Quadrant which kicks off in November 2021, running until the beginning of February 2022. That's not all! There are exciting additional gameplay updates being cooked up for launch during Gateway that will be geared towards veteran players. More details will follow on these updates soon.
Providing fresh access to EVE Online through new gateways will help grow the global Capsuleer community, and the new AIR Capsuleer training program will prepare them better than ever before for life in New Eden. The eventual resource distribution conclusion that Gateway will set EVE on course for, in addition to the waves of new pilots coming in with AIR’s new training, mean that established players will have plenty to sink their teeth into. All of this continues to set EVE Online up strongly for its third decade and beyond!
EVE Online’s Foundation Quadrant has been eventful and full of excitement! As this second Quadrant of 2021 draws to a close, it’s the perfect opportunity to look back at the highlights and major updates introduced. Detailed below is a summary of this Quadrant’s in-game events, activities, community achievements, as well as gameplay & tech updates that are building the foundation of a thriving third decade for EVE.
In-Game Events and Celebrations
The Foundation Quadrant saw EVE Online celebrate its 18th birthday in style with Capsuleer Day commemorating 18 years since the dawn of the Capsuleer Age. Celebrating the incredible togetherness and strength of EVE’s Capsuleer community, there were in-game activities and free gifts as pilots faced off against the Equilibrium of Mankind (EoM) terrorist group.
The great Empires of New Eden also hosted their own days of celebration, with Gallente Federation Day, Minmatar Liberation Day, Amarr Foundation Day and Caldari Union Day all featuring awesome in-game events and free gifts. Well done to all players that made awesome contributions to the propaganda contests and trivia quizzes that dovetailed with the Empire celebration days.
The Stargate Trailblazers event saw the Empires working to gather resources for the construction of new stargate routes around New Eden. Capsuleers picked sides and supported their faction at combat sites and resource harvesting sites. The event resulted in a new stargate being added to New Eden!
EVE Community Achievements & Activities
The year-long player war in Nullsec which has featured some of the largest battles ever recorded in New Eden – and gaming history – ended during the Foundation Quadrant! Be sure to check out the latest episode of The Scope for all the details.
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Speaking of hard-fought battles, an astounding 51 teams duked it out for 16 spots in this November’s Alliance Tournament XVII, which was announced in the Foundation Quadrant. Those teams are now training hard in anticipation of the main event in November.
It wasn’t all bloodshed, though, as members of the EVE community submitted numerous videos of their defining Capsuleer moments for EVE’s 18th birthday. Don’t miss the player celebration video commemorating those moments!
Major Updates - A Foundation for the Future!
The Foundation Quadrant saw a number of big updates made to gameplay in EVE, as well as a number of balance changes and new features introduced.
The Hunter’s Boon update, inspired by player feedback, featured changes such as the introduction of mobile covert cyno beacons, buffs to the Pacifier and Enforcer, and Tech 3 cruiser skill loss removal. Mobile observatories granted pilots a long-awaited defense against cloaking-based incursions into Lowsec and Nullsec, and the Enter the Portal update brought powerful buffs to the Black Ops class of Tech II battleships, plus the slick new Conduit Jump feature.
Long-anticipated ESS keys arrived as part of the Grand Heist update, allowing Capsuleers to raid and liberate riches from Nullsec reserve banks using keys obtained from Lowsec signatures, with almost a trillion ISK already stolen by the wiliest Capsuleers! Furthermore, the Great Escape update brought gameplay depth and subtlety to the use of nullification and warp core stabilizers, ensuring they serve a more meaningful role across EVE and its community.
The Foundation Quadrant didn’t just feature gameplay and balance updates, though, as continued investment in technology keeps EVE Online on track to successfully navigate its third decade and thrive. A huge visual update – Bring Out EVE’s Colors – affected every activity in space and every visual interaction, as well as all ships, citadels, planetary bodies, and more. A new 3D version of your ship’s AI “Aura” and vast visual improvements to the interior of the Jita 4-4 trade hub were also significant updates to iconic elements of New Eden. New landmarks were introduced around the cluster to commemorate significant historical events and provided more places of interest to visit for explorers, including a monument to the enormous and record-shattering titan fight in the system of M2-XFE.
Another public playtest of the native Mac version of EVE Online also took place in the Foundation Quadrant, delivering further progress on the path to welcoming even more new players to New Eden.
The EVE Academy website launched in Q2, as well, with the aim of enhancing the new player experience. EVE Academy provides a wealth of information designed to help new players decide who they want to be in New Eden. There are links to four career paths - Explorer, Industrialist, Enforcer or Soldier of Fortune – where you get skill plans, beginner ship fitting examples, and curated links to resources created by the EVE Online community, videos and much more.
Quadrant 3 Incoming
The third Quadrant of 2021 is not far away, and it will act as a gateway for EVE Online and its Capsuleers towards more major updates, events, and a new era in New Eden! Keep your eyes peeled and stay tuned for more announcements coming very soon.
Today, 10 September, is World Suicide Prevention Day - and we at CCP would like to raise awareness of this vitally important and very delicate subject.
Anyone can find themselves in difficult times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 700,000 people die due to suicide each year – and it is the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 15 and 34.
In light of the still very strange and constantly changing state of the world and our lives in the past couple of years, and the difficulties we all face in uncertainty, loneliness, and grief, it is more important than ever for you to be able to know that you are not alone.
If you are ever struggling with suicidal thoughts, feel overwhelmed by life, or even just need someone to talk to, you can be connected with a professional and share what’s on your mind in a single call: specialized suicide hotlines operate 24/7 worldwide, and are always prepared and ready to help.
On our end here at CCP, reports of intentions of self-harm are treated with the highest urgency, and we have procedures in place to ensure as immediate a response as possible, including contact with any available local assistance.
And on the side of the EVE community, the Broadcast 4 Reps movement maintains a safe and sympathetic space where anyone can reach out to speak to other space friends in times of need, operating a dedicated public discord server, and providing links to various other valuable resources on their website.
This year, we would like to recognize and thank the core team of B4R for their efforts and invaluable assistance to those in need, including Tovanis, Jezaja, Erika Mizune, Diana Valenti, Fyt 284, Daark (Nyx Palaiologos), and Thoroughbreed, and would like to give an honorable mention to Laura Karpinski. CCP will be issuing special in-game medals in gratitude to active B4R members in the near future.
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We would also like to give thanks to Sixth Empire, founded by Max Singularity and Feiryred, for developing a community of friendship and care for their fellow EVE Online players. Sixth Empire’s core motto is “Answer All Calls”, and the group emphatically supports the B4R movement - raising awareness and spreading motivational posts across EVE groups on various social networks.
Fly safe, and fly together: through any difficulties you may face, there are always those who want to and can provide help. No matter what happens, we want you to know that you are never alone!
As you may have seen in the recent development blog, No Downtime starts today after 11:00 UTC. That means, if everything goes to plan, that on 9 September EVE Online will be entering uncharted territory yet again past the 24 hour mark.
The ultimate goal is for EVE to have no downtimes at all. The first step has been to shorten downtime, which is quickly approaching its asymptotic value of around 3 minutes. Then, the goal is to have fewer and fewer downtimes, eventually eliminating it altogether. This is a long-term goal and all of EVE’s technological advances are aimed towards that.
Just like last time, your help is required to flag everything that seems suspect or weird, letting us know how the game performs for you when you do the things you normally do.
There are a number of reasons why running another one of these experiments is beneficial:
Ultimately, an experiment such as this is dedicated to the Capsuleers of New Eden who hail from countries such as New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Australia. As EVE Online has entered and launched in Korea and Japan over the past year, the activity in this timezone has increased, and not disturbing players during their peak hours is important.
For those that remember the video from 2019’s No Downtime, a whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt. Find out more about how that is possible in the No Downtime Vol 2 video.
Every day I think about downtime, wait for it to pass, and record the result.
The last time I wrote this (did you read that dev blog? It's really good, I promise), Tranquility's auto-reboot on weekends was approximately 4 minutes and 20-40 seconds, just enough for a quick cup of tea. Today's auto-reboot, a year and a half later, was 3 minutes and 34 seconds - just enough for a quicker cup of tea (I measured it while writing this dev blog). Given the improvements we have made since 2019, an auto reboot downtime of 3 minutes and 30-40 seconds is pretty normal these days.
I could focus on this improvement of 50-60 seconds, a 22.5% improvement between 3 Dec 2019 and 3 July 2021, and predict the end of downtime on 19 December 2026 with this super-scientific graph, but the reality is more complicated than that. There is a (soft) lower bound of approximately 3 minutes given the three different activities during downtime - shutdown, database jobs, startup - which last approximately 1 minute each, unless fundamental changes are made, and the most fundamental one is still to not have any downtime at all. Downtime will not become much less than 160-200 seconds; instead there must first be fewer downtimes and then none at all. Nevertheless, I wanted to start this blog with a concrete example of improvements made in downtime reduction since last time. And now another no-downtime experiment is being planned for September 9.
The purpose of this second no-downtime experiment is at least four-fold:
So what did we discover last time, I hear you ask?
First and foremost we discovered reliance on downtime as an event to mark the beginning of a daily cycle, and a reliance on a daily startup, such as structures not finishing 24+ hour timers and corporations not joining Faction Warfare. We fixed all those issues that we found, and those you reported to us. Now we want to verify them further (of course they have been tested but our test environments don't have Tranquility's scale) and look for more such issues.
We also observed time desynchronization (which we fixed), and significant memory usage (which we improved somewhat).
The time desynchronization was a known issue, but last time we were observing whether players noticed at the end of day #2. The target for time desynchronization is a maximum of ±0.5 seconds. But with newer hardware, we had been observing an end-of-run desynchronization of 2.25 seconds and - predictably - 4.5 seconds at the end of day #2 in the first no-downtime experiment in 2019.
Players started to notice once the desynchronization was above 3 seconds, mostly by noting what felt like module lag or delay when their client and the node hosting their solar system disagreed significantly about when modules were cycling. Time desynchronization is now normally within ±1/100 of a second, well within the maximum of ±0.5 seconds.
Tranquility has always been memory hungry. For better performance, then, we have always opted for pre-computing values & processing data and storing the results for later reference rather than re-computing those values again later. As an example, the Brain in a Box and Dogma Rewrite projects in 2015 were all about computing and storing skills and their effects (i.e., the characters' brains) and transferring the computed results between solar systems instead of re-computing the brains on each entry to a new solar system. We also never clean up any memory, as the cluster node memory is reset every day anyway, which is a reliance on a daily reboot (note: we of course don't clear our DB cache memory or our Redis cache memory, but the main simulation cache memory is cleared in the reboot in each downtime).
The most memory-hungry nodes in the Tranquility cluster, the Character Services nodes that store those brains I mentioned above (among other things), were at 75% memory pressure at the end of day #2 last time, which is just below our operating tolerance of 80%. We might be able to run Tranquility for 3 days (and perhaps 7 hours more) if we were to run the cluster to a "first-node-at 100% memory usage" state, given those 2019 numbers. In 2019, the day #1 memory pressure was at 55%, but these days it is around 35% and so we want to rebase our observations.
No-downtime is a long-term goal and all our technological advances aim towards that. We have been working for a few years now on a micro-service and message bus technology platform for EVE, and started using that platform for a number of features. We now want to observe how that ecosystem holds up with no downtime of the primary game cluster, making sure no assumptions have been made about a daily downtime.
See you on Thursday, 9 September, as the second No Downtime experiment commences. And, just like last time, there will be a video coming soon. A whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt.
Ruthless Team Battle in the Proving Grounds!
Ambitious Capsuleers,
Join your trusted allies in heavy combat during a new, special Caldari Union Day Proving Grounds event, battling side-by-side aboard powerful battlecruisers as you prove the unbreakable strength of your bonds, evoking the unifying collective drive of the Caldari people!
This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 3 September, and runs until 11:00 UTC on 7 September.
The ruleset for the event is as follows: - Participants receive 20m ISK each time they enter this Proving Ground event - Only the Drake, Ferox, and Naga may enter - Only one local repair module can be fitted per ship - No shield boost amplifiers, rechargers, power relays, flux coils, or purger rigs allowed - Sensor dampeners cannot be fitted - Modules are restricted to meta level 5 and below - No pirate implants allowed
Gather your friends, fit your battlecruisers, and grab your Proving Ground filaments (found in Abyssal Deadspace or on the ingame market) as you prepare for intense team combat, battling in tandem to climb the Proving Grounds leaderboard, achieving glory and earning special rewards!
As the Foundation quadrant draws to a close it's time for the Caldari to celebrate Union Day.
As with the other factions, the State seeks contributions of capsuleer propaganda that celebrate the unity and resilience of Caldari! To be in the running to win some cool prizes you must submit a piece of propaganda for review. Some of the topics it could address are:
celebrate the rich history of the Caldari people
denigrate the the enemies of the State - i.e. the Gallente, Minmatar, Guristas or Triglavians
highlight a famous location in the State
recognize a notable Caldari citizen and their accomplishments (this includes both player and non-player characters)
Or something else not listed here - as long as it's putting the Caldari in the spotlight we want to see it! You can find some examples of the excellent work produced by capsuleers for the previous Foundation quadrant contests in these threads 1|2|3 on the official forums.
PRIZES
Submissions will be pored over by a crack team of CCP developers with impeccable taste and the chosen winners will receive the following:
1st place
Your choice of any Caldari ship model (Condor, Naga or Scorpion) offered by our friends at Mixed Dimensions
A set of brand new apparel: the State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
Golem Octopus Orange Flight SKIN
2nd place
1100 PLEX
State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
Raven Octopus Orange Flight SKIN
3rd place
500 PLEX
State Commander's Dress Jacket and Pants (men's and women's)
Drake Octopus Orange Flight SKIN
All winners and any distinguished entries chosen as honorable mentions by the jury will also receive a medal from the Caldari State to display with pride on your character sheets.
HOW TO ENTER
In order for your work to be considered it must be submitted in this thread on the EVE Online forums.
The contest starts now and the cutoff for submissions is Monday 13 September at 11:00 UTC. Winners will be notified soon after!
Although no longer required for entry, please do continue to share your propaganda on EVE-related social media, such as Twitter with the #tweetfleet hashtag.
Livestream quiz
Also be sure to to tune in to CCP TV at 18:00 UTC on Monday 6 September for the final installment in our series of Foundation quadrant livestream trivia! There'll be 3 quizzes of 15 Caldari-flavoured questions with Omega, apparel, SKINs and medals up for grabs. Set a reminder and then tune in to test your Caldari knowledge for a shot at some prizes!
