The downtime this Tuesday, 6 May, will be extended by one hour and last from 11.00 to 13.00 GMT. During this time we will apply server-side changes to Tranquility.

This also sets a new record, I don’t believe we’ve ever announced two different extended downtimes this close to each other.

These are exciting times, not only for EVE but for the future of virtual worlds in general as the first democratic elections began today for the Council of Stellar Management. EVE Online subscribers may vote for their representatives who will then represent them as council members interacting directly with CCP. Visit our election page to cast your vote now or at any time during the two week voting period. Elections will end the 19th of May.

The downtime this Wednesday, 7 May, will be extended by one hour and last from 11.00 to 13.00 GMT. During this time we will make some load balancer changes to Tranquility.

While we do not expect any problems we recommend that you set a bit of a longer skill training just-in-case™.

This Tuesday, 29 April, we’re going to test the new networking layer which we plan to deploy on Tranquility very soon. The test will help us make sure the networking layer is stable in itself and stable enough to deploy to Tranquility. All you have to do to help us with this test is to log in to Singularity at 18.30 GMT and remain logged in until 21.00 GMT, for this test to be successful we require approximately 150 to 200 of you to help us. Information about the Singularity test server and how to connect to it can be found in this link collection thread. During the test we will use the channel “sisitest” to give you information and updates on the testing, so please make sure you join it.

Another big step has been taken to introduce a democratic structure to EVE, our applicants for Council of Stellar Management (CSM) has now become candidates. Xhagen, the developer in charge of this, has written a nice Dev Blog where he presents some statistics on the applications and the dates for the election.

Please join us in this forum thread to discuss the CSM and your candidates.

These are interesting times we live in. Setting up a democratic structure in EVE has not been the easiest process we have undertaken, but we truly feel it is well worth the effort because of the interest you have shown in the project.

Now, this blog is to tell you a thing or two about the statistics of the applications received and the approved applicants, now lovingly referred to as candidates.*

But on to the statistics.

• We received 97 applications.
• We accepted 64.
• We rejected 33.

  Rejection reasons:

  • A scan of the passport was not supplied and either a personal photo was supplied instead, an expired passport or another type of identification that was not a passport.
  • EULA violation by the applicants.
  • Two applicants requested to be withdrawn and thus they count as being rejected.
  • Two applications were sent in by CCP for testing purposes when the service was reported as being down and they are included in these counts.
  • One applicant managed to apply twice due to some technical glitch we were unable to reproduce, one of those applications was rejected.

  This brings down the actually rejected applications to 28.

• 3 females applied and 61 males, making the female applicants 4,687% of the total pool. This corresponds very neatly with the overall player ratio, where the female population is 4,46% of the whole (according to user account information).
• 51,5% of the accepted applicants have more than one account, making the ratio more than double of what goes for the entire EVE player base.

The list of applicants will be published soon and will be viewable from this section.

We wish everybody the best of luck in the upcoming elections which will be open between the 5th of May and 19th of May 2008.

* I would like to refer to them as being between a rock (players) and a hard place (CCP), or the other way around.

This is not going to be a “here are your new features, go forth and pontificate” blog, so if you’re just after hard details, you may be disappointed, sorry. Instead, I’m going to take the opportunity to just talk about some things that may or may not be interesting to some of you.

The first and most important thing I wanted to talk about is the weather (can you tell that I’m British?). We had several inches of snow on Sunday, IN APRIL!?! Clearly this is ridiculous – I’m thinking about starting an online petition, but I’m not sure who to send it to. This kind of thing shouldn’t be allowed though, and I feel it’s time someone made a stand for sensible weather, particularly with the First Day of Summer (hah!) coming up next week or so.

Moving away from the weather a bit, this week I have been mostly working on (CENSORED), which we’re not talking about quite yet – expect to hear more in the next couple of weeks though. I can however talk about some of the stuff I’ve been up to, in a non-specific way.

For example, this morning we were running another small playtest of some of the new systems with the help of the GMs. This is turning out to be very productive – we’ve found some things that need tweaking, and there were explosions, so everyone’s happy. Last week I spent a fair amount of time getting to grips with the procedures needed for adding new stations and stuff, which it turns out involves an awful lot of staring-at-the-map and jumping-around-looking-at-stuff. It’s less fun than you’d think, to be honest.

What else? I’ve been working with our Mercury volunteers on and off, reading over news submissions and talking in IRC and generally making sure that everything is heading in the right direction for (CENSORED). Oh, and translating for Ginger when he’s having one of his ‘moments’.

Another neat thing I found this week – we have an automatic name generator built into our authoring tools. Not sure who’s responsible for it, but it’s handy – you just pick a faction and it’ll throw out fifty character or system/constellation names. Occasionally tools like this just pop out of the woodwork; the rest of the time huge Excel files do the job well enough, particularly when they’re nice and colorfulÂ…

That’s it for now, anyway!

No NPC sell orders for shuttles and trit prices

In the latest patch a major change to the economic system of EVE was introduced when NPC sales orders for shuttles were withdrawn. Previously shuttles where available in every station at a fixed price of 9000 ISK per unit, this allowed pilots to purchase shuttles at a low price and great convenience. There was a side effect to this though – an artificial price cap of 3.6 ISK per unit of tritanium. To read more about that please see this Dev Blog.

It is true that the convenience factor is important. It was debated internally if the benefit of removing the price cap outweighs the loss in convenience. In the end the opinion that current options of travelling in the capsule, warp to zero and free rookie ships minimizes the loss of convenience and hence the benefits of removing the price cap clearly outweighed the loss in the convenience factor.

The benefit from removing this price cap is that the price of tritanium will be more in line with the underlying demand for tritanium at any given time. This makes the mining industry more profitable in the long run and will balance the benefits between mining and other professions in EVE.

I also have full faith in that EVE industrialists and traders will supply shuttles where there is a demand, but of course at a reasonable price for convenience. There is no reason why NPCs should be subsidizing cheap travel in EVE at the cost of the mining profession. Another benefit is a new opportunity for industrialists to produce and sell shuttles of course.

This change is also along the lines of our general philosophy of the design of markets in EVE, that all items should be player produced and based on the incentive to make a profit from providing the item to other players.

Speculators will try to cash in on the short term shortage of shuttles by buying up the current stock and reselling it at a very high price (this happened within hours of patch deployment), that will in turn make it more profitable to industrialists to start producing shuttles and selling them at a good profit. At the same time competition among industrialists will drive prices down, the market should therefore stabilize within a relatively short period of time.

Tritanium is the building block of everything in EVE and hence we expect that in the short run this will create some turmoil on all markets, especially the mineral market and the market for Tech I items. Again, speculators will affect the market for tritanium, most likely by hording trit in the hope that now that the price cap has been lifted the price of tritanium will increase (note: just lifted, not completely removed). This has already happened, prices for tritanium started to increase almost immediately, but have since declined a little from the highs last night (see this thread for good discussion on tritanium prices after the patch). But again, the beautiful workings of the invisible hand will help us (thank you Adam Smith) due to the greed we have for ISK. With higher tritanium prices, mining of veldspar will become very profitable, and since it is readily available in safe areas, needing only low cost equipment to mine, we should see the veldspar flowing very soon and tritanium prices stabilize, but at what level? At this point your guess is just as good as mine.

No time to write more at this point – must go and mine some veldspar.

Tranquility will undergo an extended downtime on Tuesday, 15 April. The start time is 1100 GMT and the length of the downtime is expected to be five hours. During this time, a patch will be applied to Trinity consisting of fixes and improvements.

Patch Notes are now available. Updates to the notes may be added over the weekend as more items are cleared through the Quality Assurance process. These updates will be highlighted with green text. Patch discussion may be found in this forum thread.

Training a long learning duration skill ending after the scheduled return to service is recommended.

Please note that we have added two hours to the downtime for deploying this patch, Tranquility is expected to be up at 1600 GMT and not 1400 GMT as originally reported.

We are aware that an individual claims to have access to the source code of the EVE client, but this access is not a security risk to CCP or our customers in any way. The Python scripting language that is used by the client can be easily decompiled to generate readable code, and we have designed our server-side systems with that understanding. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that the code was leaked by an employee and our internal investigations confirm that.

Access to the source code for the EVE client exposes no security vulnerabilities, has no privacy protection issues, and poses no threat to our customers billing information. The server-side interface used by the client is carefully protected to ensure that no abusive or unwanted information is transmitted to or from the EVE system.

Nothing the EVE client can do can affect the game state, a manipulated EVE client cannot affect the server, no advantageous or disadvantageous information can be transmitted to other EVE users by altering the EVE client. The EVE client is signed with a security certificate registered to CCP. Hashes are available on our web site for those who wish to ensure the integrity of EVE client download files they may have received from a source other than direct download from CCP’s web site.

Finally, there have been no mass bannings, as reported in some news articles, though we do remove all message board posts regarding violations of our EULA and Terms of Service as per standard policy and procedures. We consider any alterations of the client software, including decompilation, or discussions thereof, to represent such a violation.