We bring you news of something awesome, which as usual took its time to get to you. We can‘t help it. We get protective over incredible things and keep fiddling and adding substance until we are happy.

Officially Official

Finally we have an Official EVE wiki. One which can be viewed in game (read only). One with an up to date Item Database, yes, finally! One for you to grow and help us make the most incredible player resource in town. Official CCP pages are marked accordingly so you can be sure that the information is correct.  EVElopedia operates as a standard MediaWiki with a few additional tweaks to make it EVEtastic.

Everything in Moderation

We have decided to go with a full moderation initially and possibly bring it down a notch once we all get the feel for how it’s progressing. Our team YARR, a division of ISD, will handle moderation of the wiki as mentioned in CCP Fear‘s blog in July. They will be responsible for handling the site, and they will be making sure that all new articles and changes to existing ones are accurate and meet our standards. The rules are very similar to the TOS and EULA, and there are similar repercussions for misbehavior as those used on the EVE Online message boards.

You + Us = Wintastic

Over the next several months you will see more and more official EVE information fed into the EVElopedia. It will be ‘the place to be’ to get help and information but, as we all know, love is a two-way street. We have kicked off the wiki with over 6,000 pages, provided you with a sexytime EVE site and assigned a whole team of champions who will make sure no one does something silly like put BEWBS as a replacement for punctuation. Your part is to help us grow this into the most comprehensive information portal in the history of EVE Online.

Expert players can share their knowledge and help n00bs grow up to be big bad Corporation members. You can write up player events and even expand upon information on Items in the Items Database.

Go forth, explore, and grow the EVE universe. Your community awaits it.

wiki.eveonline.com

Every year the players ask “CCP, what are you giving us for Christmas?”

This year we are giving you the gift of the Christmas Performance Patch which contains a massive boost to both large fleet and small gang engagements as well as much improved game play for every player in New Eden. Focusing on improvements to the Need for Speed initative, this very special patch streamlines performance to significantly increase frames per second (fps) and makes improvements to the patching process to allow for a smoother patching performance in general.

Players who participated in the testing on Singularity have noticed much improved playability and performance. In one case, during a fleet fight test, 600 additional drones and fighters were added to the grid. In the vast majority of cases the players were not aware they had been added until they were told.

The deployment date for Quantum Rise 1.0.3 will be 10th December 2008 and Tranquility will be offline between 11.00 to 15.40 GMT. Patch Notes can be found Here.

A forum thread for discussion is available Here

The EVE Client - A Love Story

Greetings fellow New Eden denizens. I wanted to write a few words to recap some of the issues we have been having with client performance as of late and explain our ongoing strategy for addressing these problems.

The short version

With Quantum Rise, we kind of messed up the performance of the EVE client. It’s sad, but it’s true…

With Quantum Rise 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 we made it better again. With Quantum Rise 1.0.3, scheduled for this week, we are making it awesome.

The long version

Here is the actual client love story you were promised in the title. It follows the Hero’s Journey pretty well with our protagonist, Eva Litla, first receiving a great injustice at the hands of the antagonist (we will call him Mr. Bug). In the second act, Eva Litla starts realizing her potential and in the climatic end scene she comes back to slay Mr. Bug. Anyways, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it’s pretty cool.

Table of Contents

• Act 1 - Quantum Rise 1.0.0
• Act 2 - Quantum Rise 1.0.1
• Act 3 - Quantum Rise 1.0.2
• Act 4 - Quantum Rise 1.0.3
  • Overall graphics performance bottlenecks
  • Premium-specific graphics performance bottlenecks
  • UI performance bottlenecks
  • New user-settings to optimize performance
• Interlude - Fleet fight survival guide
• Sample chapter from the sequel
• Epilogue

Act 1 - Quantum Rise 1.0.0

Over the past year or so we have been aggressively improving our server performance on multiple fronts. We have added great new hardware, we have migrated to 64-bits, we have introduced StacklessIO and made a great number of performance tweaks on the server and database, large and small.

The general feeling is that the server cluster has never been as healthy as it is right now and that feeling is backed up by data: Jita lag is a thing of the past, mission hubs are generally relaxed and couple of weeks ago we saw a 1,000 person fleet fight take place on Tranquility, which is something we have dreamt of for a long time. In that fight there was considerable lag, but the performance of the node degraded gracefully and we had consistent quality of service. Big pat on the back for us then.

Not so fast. After the release of the Quantum Rise expansion on 11 November (which by the way included several fantastic server and database optimizations) the client seemed to have been left out in the cold.

We received numerous complaints from our players that client performance had generally become worse than before. The problem was that we did not manage to reproduce the same results in-house and it had completely slipped though our net before release. There seemed to be few bits and bobs left over, but it’s always the same when you try a bit of do-it-yourself, isn’t it?

We finally tracked down some of the problems a few days after the Quantum Rise release. A number of the newer under-the-hood features in the Trinity graphics engine were causing issues under high-stress situations and our resource handling had become worse than before. This was something that was especially apparent on single-core machines and when running multiple clients.

In hindsight, we should have caught this, but we didn’t. Needless to say the week after Quantum Rise wasn’t exactly our proudest moment. Although we had improved server and database performance in Quantum Rise, due to the client issues the perception was that overall performance had degraded. And perception is reality, doubly so in virtual worlds.

Act 2 - Quantum Rise 1.0.1

Okay, now for the good news. Once we had an internally reproduced the performance issues we immediately put some very smart people into action working on these problems.

It turned out we had extensive issues with memory and state leaks but the largest problem stemmed from the use of a specific resource lock which went out-of-process. This did not show up on multi-core tests and really just manifested itself under certain conditions such as when running two clients on a single-core machine or when the computer was under extreme load.

So, on Saturday 22 November, 11 days after we deployed the Quantum Rise expansion we shipped Quantum Rise 1.0.1, which was a client-only patch which addressed the critical performance issues from Quantum Rise 1.0.0.

We are very happy with that patch and especially that we managed to get it out the door before that weekend’s pew pew (1337 speak for shooting each other with big guns). It took an enormous effort on the part of the development teams involved and some pretty long hours but luckily we had plenty of candy so it wasn’t that bad.

Act 3 - Quantum Rise 1.0.2

We put a lot of work into the Quantum Rise 1.0.1 patch, with people pulling in evenings, nights and weekends to fix things. Our teams generated a whole lot of performance and usability fixes that needed more testing than we could manage for the Saturday patch. It was decided not to jeopardize that delivery but rather put out another full server and client patch a few days later with all those non-critical fixes.

Quantum Rise 1.0.2 was released on 27 November and contained a large number of smaller changes to address lingering issues, a lot of them having to do with usability. With the release of Quantum Rise 1.0.2 we believe that we completely made up for the client-side sins of the initial Quantum Rise release.

Act 4 - Quantum Rise 1.0.3

Despite the performance being back up to pre-Quantum Rise levels (right?), we are not quite done yet.

This week we will release Quantum Rise 1.0.3, which is jam packed with performance improvements. We have spent a lot of time profiling the client and identifying bottlenecks. Most of the client performance enhancements we are making in Quantum Rise 1.0.3 are to address older issues and should make the client much more snappier than you have seen it before.

We are primarily looking at client lockups which occur here and there when there is a lot going on at the same time. Software locking up while it is thinking about things is really something out of 1997 and we will be working hard on continuing to address this in future patches as well. This is quite specific and not something people generally encounter during their normal play time. However, the great thing is that by looking at these specific scenarios we are really getting a glimpse into the overall performance of the client. We really have to stress the client to its breaking point and beyond to pick up things that, when added up, can lead to an overall degraded performance.

A number of fleet fights have been conducted on our testing servers where our players basically showed us how they play the game and allow us to gather information on specific usage profiles. We used this information to construct new ways to benchmark the client under the unique stresses of fleet fights. That is the work that has lead us to Quantum Rise 1.0.3. Despite the fact that fleet fights and high-stress engagement scenarios form the basis of our performance attack plan, we do expect to see some major client performance gains under a lot of different scenarios.

I cannot stress enough how important these fleet tests and player reports are. It has been amazing to see our player base jump into the fray to help us make the client better. It’s truly a testament to how strong the EVE Community is.

Anyways, back to the story. In particular, we are attacking client performance on these fronts:

• Overall graphics performance bottlenecks.
• Premium-specific graphics performance bottlenecks.
• UI performance bottlenecks.
• Identifying and implementing user-settings to optimize performance.

Overall graphics performance bottlenecks

When VTuning the client we noticed that under certain conditions the code was spending an abnormal amount of time in RtlReAllocateHeap (see Kernel32.HeapReAlloc, which is forwarded to NTDLL.RtlReAllocateHeap). This did not happen immediately, but rather after a while under specific load, and only on Windows XP. On Windows Vista we got completely different behavior with consistent memory allocation every time.

What this means in the real world is that after a certain amount of time loading resources, the memory started to become fragmented, which lead to degraded performance when copying resources in memory. We do a lot of copying resources in memory, from putting a new ship on the screen to loading up a menu, so after a while that process became slower and slower. This resulted in across-the-board performance drops after playing for a while with a specific playing style. This did not affect all players on Windows XP and not all hardware seemed to be affected equally which is why it was pretty hard to find. Also, this did not happen on Windows Vista.

After some investigation we found that the regular process heap on Windows XP was not optimal for our resource loading needs. We needed to replace it with a specialized Low Fragmentation Heap. This change made the time spent in loading resources much more consistent. Also, the resource object heap is now separate from the other process heaps which allows the memory manager to better manage the blocks for its needs.

The performance on Windows Vista in this regard is still considerably better than on Windows XP but the performance on Windows XP should now be better and much more uniform than before.

In unearthing this our teams also discovered several other things that could be tweaked and resource and memory leaks that we could plug, resulting in a much better handling of resources.

Premium-specific graphics performance bottlenecks

When the Premium edition of EVE was introduced in the Trinity expansion (not to be confused with the Trinity graphics engine mentioned above (don’t ask…)) the logic for loading up turrets was different between Classic and Premium. In the Classic edition turrets are always loaded up lazily. However, the belief was (and was backed up by metrics) that the performance of the Premium edition was so awesome that it wasn’t necessary to have this lazy turret loading in place. Rather the turret models and locators were loaded up and initialized as soon as the parent model (ship) came into the scene and there was no way for the player to turn them off.

We have now found that our original assumptions and performance tests were faulty and under real-life situations (i.e., space game) the cost of real-time loading is too high. The framerate suffers from too many turrets and loading up a heavy scene with a lot of turrets (e.g., warping into a fleet fight) is much more expensive.

So, we are replicating the lazy turret loading from Classic into Premium. This means that turrets will now only be shown for ships that satisfy one of the two following conditions:

• You are doing ‘look at’ on the ship.
• The ship is shooting its turrets and Turret Effects are enabled (default).

What this means is that ships will not show their turret models until the point when they are fired. If you disable Turret Effects through the settings menu (the escape menu) then you will generally only see turrets on your own ship.

If you really want to see the turrets of a ship you just right-click and pick ‘look at’. The turrets will be loaded until the ship leaves the scene.

UI performance bottlenecks

We are doing some fantastic (and well overdue) performance tweaks to the UI. For the Quantum Rise 1.0.3 patch the most noticable part is the way containers (such as windows and buttons) are rendered. Fewer draw calls are being made and performance is very noticeably increased when you have a lot of windows open, especially on lower-end computers or computers under heavy load.

Drawing and loading brackets has been greatly optimized. Loading of brackets can be up to an order of magnitude faster than it was previously. This is especially relevant when you are loading up a great number of brackets.

We are continuing this work throughout the rest of the year and will probably put in more fixes for UI performance after the New Year or in the next expansion.

New user-settings to optimize performance

From the fleet testing, we have been doing with our wonderful players on the test servers, several bottlenecks have been identified that can’t really be fixed as such, but are things that cause issues in high-load situations. Keep in mind that if you are a high-sec carebear (like me) these new options will probably make no difference to your client performance. However, if you are pew-pewing with a thousand people you will want to keep reading.

We have added the following options to the settings menu:

• Disable drone models.
  • This will cause your client not to render any drone models, improving performance on Classic and Premium significantly if you have a scene with many drones.
• Disable Explosion Effects.
  • Explosion Effects can drain your system and cause stuttering if there are a lot of them on the screen at the same time.
• Disable Tactical Messages.
  • You can now shut off messages about warp scrambling, self destruct, etc. This does not make a big impact on performance but every little bit helps.
• Disable camera shake.
  • We put this in because of numerous requests but it has not been shown that this has an impact on performance.

In addition we now have an easy way to quickly disable all brackets in the same manner as ’show all brackets’ worked before.

If you disable all of these options then EVE won’t look as nice but it might make the difference between life and death in fleet fights.

We have put a lot of effort into Quantum Rise 1.0.3 in a short amount of time. Given some of the low-level changes we are making there is the possibility of some issues cropping up, but we felt that people would much rather have this amazing performance patch now and give us a bit of leeway to fix issues rather than waiting until after the New Year. Please continue working with us after this patch is released to get continued performance and usability benefits into the client.

Pretty graphs

A large portion of the Quantum Rise 1.0.3 development push revolved around getting better benchmarks and improving our metrics. To that end we have been measuring client performance in a wider range of circumstances than before. This has lead to the identification of a number of problems. Once the problems are identified, the fixes are more often than not relatively straightforward for the extremely smart people that work in that area of the code.

Here you can see some of the graphs that were generated to find ugly spots in the performance and to gauge it against the solution we came up with in each instance.

Figure 1: Extreme example of launching drones comparing Empyrean Age vs. Quantum Rise 1.0.3 and showing the predictable results of disabling models.

Figure 2: Same example as in Figure 1 when completely zoomed out when models are LOD-ed out. We no longer get a performance drop with increased items if they are not being rendered.

Figure 3: Before the client froze for 60 seconds on our test machine when toggling on all brackets for 2000 ships. Now that time is down to 12 seconds.

Figure 4: Because we are no longer applying turrets until just-in-time we see a big change in the loading time and frame rate when warping to turret ships.

Figure 5: The same example as in Figure 4 when zoomed out. There is only a minor client hiccup when compared to Emperyan Age.

Figure 6: Here we see the effects of the resource load optimizations and Low Fragmentation Heap on the Classic client.

Figure 7: The Low Fragmentation Heap has a better effect on the Premium client, but resource loading was already much better than in Classic.

Figure 8: Smartbombing a great number of NPCs at the same time shows us how expensive the explosion effect is. Now it can be turned off.

It should be noted that all of these examples here are very extreme. They do not directly represent the playing experience. At best they show us an indication as to the problem areas we have been looking at. The before and after graphs will probably not correspond directly to anything you’ll experience.

That being said, the changes are awesome

Interlude - Fleet fight survival guide

With the changes that we are making in Quantum Rise 1.0.3 thousand person fleet fights should be much more enjoyable (at least to the winning side, there’s not much we can do for the other poor guys *giggle*… ehem, sorry).

Here is a list of things you should do in order to make sure that your framerate is sufficient to at least see when you are podded. It is important for you to configure the client before you enter the fight because some of these settings will only take effect when a new scene is loaded and if you have some of the heavier options enabled your client might not recover from the warp-in before you find yourself back at HQ with Aura’s friendly voice telling you about the latest advances in cloning technology.

If you are happy with your frame rate and loading times with any of these items toggled on then by all means continue to run your client that way. However, if the tradeoff is between performance and prettiness I’m sure you will choose performance. The list below is ordered by priority with the most important bits on top.

• Only show the exact brackets you are interested in (at the very least disable drone and wreck brackets).
• Disable drone models.
• Disable Turret Effects.
• Keep your camera zoomed out all way when warping in.
• Disable Explosion Effects.
• Disable Effects.
• Disable audio (this does not include EVE Voice, there should not be a performance impact there).
• Disable Damage Messages and Tactical Messages.
• Disable shadows and HDR.
• Consider using Windows Vista (people might hate it but it has considerably better native heap management).

You will note that this list doesn’t contain an item to ‘run in classic mode’. Pre-Quantum Rise 1.0.3 that would have been one of the things to do but the performance is very much comparable now and if you have modern hardware that can handle the Premium client well then normally there should really be no reason to switch to Classic for fleet fights. You might actually get better performance with the Premium client.

Sample chapter from the sequel

We will continue to work on client performance after Quantum Rise 1.0.3. We already have some great performance improvements in our pipeline that we simply cannot get into this patch because of time constraints. But worry ye not, there will be client patches after this one.

Some of the things we are looking at include:

Lazy Model Loading:
We intend to eliminate completely the client stutter that you get when warping into heavy scenes. That familiar feeling you get (much mitigated in Quantum Rise 1.0.3) when your client stops responding just before you see your little blinky pod thing will be gone. This will be an enormously important change for everybody, from the fleet fighters to the mission runners because every time you warp into a scene with multiple objects you will see a difference.

More resource performance improvements:
There is plenty of work to be done in resource loading. We will continue to improve the process and streamline common operations.

Simulation performance improvements:
We have found some performance bottlenecks in the physics simulation engine that runs the world update loop. These are mostly relevant to the client that runs its own simulation loop and will have a performance benefit in scenes with a lot of objects in close proximity of each other.

More UI performance fixes:
A lot of work is continuing to be done on the UI framework to improve performance of windows and brackets. We will see considerable improvements to UI performance in the near future.

Epilogue

This has been an awesome time for us here with putting in great fixes and working closely with the community to identify problem areas with client performance. We hope that we will continue to deploy performance patches when they are needed. The teams here have done an amazing job in getting these fixes out quickly and the wonderful EVE Online community has been extremely patient and helpful during this period.

In conclusion, without wanting to sound immodest I must say that with Quantum Rise 1.0.3 the EVE Online client will be by far the best performing piece of software ever constructed in the entire history of mankind

The End.

Jon Bjarnason
Technical Director
EVE Online, CCP Games

For Quantum Rise I wrote ten new tracks to accompany the 57 that are already in the game. Since this is an addition to a proven design, the main inspiration for them was the previous tracks, and the inspiration for those was always the artwork and the feel of EVE. Special mad props go to Ásgeir Jón Ásgeirsson former concept artist and now Art Director for EVE and the former Art Director Reynir Harðarson. These new tracks are however different from the others for mainly two reasons:

Firstly, all the old tracks were written almost completely on hardware machines, Korg Triton, Novation Nova, Roland JP8080 and a few other synths, recorded with Digidesign Pro Tools adding a pointless DAC>ADC conversion since all my synths are/were digital with analog outputs. The tracks added post launch up until now were made with both my hardware synths as well as a softsynth suite called Reason from Propellerhead Software. These ten new tracks were written entirely using Reason, and mixed in Pro Tools. Back when I had samplers and external synths I would have to remember to save to ZIP drives on all my synths/samplers but now I only need to hit CTRL-S. This means that I haven’t lost a days work, which used to happen occasionally with the power going out, or me forgetting to save everything on each machine, and so on. Now I have a CTRL-S reflex, one program to rule them all. (actually I use two of them, Reason and ProToolsHD)

The second thing that was different with these tracks is that in the mixing process I mixed both stereo and 5.1 surround at the same time. 5.1 you might ask, Eve music isn’t in 5.1 why would I mix these new tracks in 5.1. Well, as of now all the music in the jukebox in EVE has been mixed in 5.1 and will soon be available as a premium music download just like with the premium graphics pack.

This has been a great experience, adding a whole new dimension (pun intended) to the mixes, bringing out elements hidden within the tracks. I fully used the 5.1 format, using all the channels and even added additional bass material where needed for the sub channel. I have my 5.1 setup according to the Dolby specification where the the sub is mixed +6.0db over the other five channels. Most of the tracks were left unchanged, but I must admit that I did add some elements to some songs. I tried to make use of the panning as a compositional element, making swells and sweeps come up from behind and sweep past the listener. I’m also a big fan of using long reverbs and delays, both of which sound so much better in 5.0 (I don’t use reverbs or delays on the sub channel)

But we must look to the future. What does the future hold for music in EVE? I guess that many would like to maintain the status quo, but what doesn’t grow must wither and die. We have begun to think about what the future holds for the music in EVE. The technology now allows us to do so much more than the simple jukebox we did back in 2003. Not many people know this, but since launch all the music in the jukebox is played by a sequencer and the tracks are always crossfaded on n*8th bar which makes it possible to overlay other musical elements on top of the underlying tracks so it makes sense from a musical perspective. That was possible then, but much greater things are possible now: a totally adaptive soundtrack made up of musical elements which would weave up an interesting sound universe, changing to what is happening around you.

We are also working on a overhaul of all the sound in EVE as it has gotten less love than it perhaps should have in the last 5 years. We are working with a whole new technology now which gives us much more creative freedom.  Stay tuned for a special blog for the sound overhaul in the weeks to come.

The Sixth Alliance Tournament is finally on its way!

…and we’re looking once again to recruit from the player base a team of experts/commentators to appear on the Eve TV broadcast.

You’ll be flown out to Reykjavik Iceland to join the team here at the CCP headquarters to help us run the show during the live broadcast of the final weekend. Flights (from all Icelandair destinations) and accommodation are supplied by us. All you need is a little spending money and several layers of coats!

So you’re interested? Next step is to check this short list and make sure you match what we’re looking for!

• Can you come out and play? Selected experts will need to hold a valid passport (proof will be required at a later stage) and be available to fly to Iceland for the tournament dates: Feb 5th - Feb 9th inclusive, as well as available to commentate live from their home on the non video broadcast qualifiers on the 24^th, 25^th, as well as the  31^st of January and the 1st of February.

• A sense of humour is a must: Experts will need to be sharp-witted, knowledgeable, presentable and comfortable with talking on camera and into a microphone. To greater the chances of getting through, we highly recommend submitting any pre-made or purpose built video you have of yourself (or a link to a YouTube clip) as part of your application.

• You need to know your PvP: We don’t despise industrialists, mission-runners and miners but as this is a PvP tournament, you need to be well versed.

If you are interested in taking part, please email us at evetv@ccpgames.com by downtime on the 7^th of December with the following information. Those lucky enough to be selected for the second round of eliminations must be available to attend voice chat interviews on the 14^th of December. The chosen experts will be announced by the 19^th of December.

• Character and Real name.
• Date of birth.
• Nationality and current country of residence.
• Tell us about yourself, both in game and out. Remember what your applying for and sell yourself to that effect.
• Confirm you are available on February 5,6,7,8 and 9th. If you need to book time off work / school please don’t do it until we accept you but please check that it is possible, if there is any doubt here please let us know.
• Remember your applying to be on TV! Include any multimedia you think shows you off (audio, video clips)!

Remember applications close on the 7th of December! So get mailing!

For some time now, we have been monitoring requests sent via stuck petition to GM’s for notifications of incoming fleet battles. Where possible, we have been placing these systems on high powered blades to ensure you get the best server performance possible in your fleet fight.

To reduce load on the GM’s and to get these requests where they need to go as quickly as possible, we now have a system for you to notify our virtual world operations team of these fights directly.

If you are planning to have a large fleet engagement, please tell us using the following form: http://myeve.eve-online.com/fleetfightnotification.asp

Rules

• Abuse of this system will NOT be tolerated.
• All notifications are linked to your user account and we will not put up with any shenanigans.
• Only corporation directors are able to send notifications.
• Please notify us only if you expect the operation to exceed 300 pilots in the engagement (ie. 150 vs 150).
• Notifications must be at least 24h in advance, as we re-map these systems during downtime.
• These notifications go to Virtual World Operations (the Tranquility admin team), Internal Affairs and Lead Game Masters.

Feel free to discuss this here.

Our recently announced, revamped Buddy Program has proven to be so popular that we have decided to extend the program through the Christmas season. From now until 5 January 2009 you can invite your friends to EVE Online for a special 21-day trial. If they become subscribers, you will get 30 days of game time added to your account.

The invite form and detailed information can be found on the Buddy Program page in Account Management.

» Each Active Subscription Account (trial accounts do not qualify for this promotion) can send Buddy Program invitation emails through the Buddy Program page.

» Only accounts created through this emailed invite are valid for this offer. Be sure your friends use the invite to create their account in order for you to earn your game time when they subscribe to EVE Online.

» Eligible subscription activations can be funded by any payment method except EVE Time Codes.

» Trial accounts must subscribe within two weeks following the trial expiration to qualify for the promotion.

» Please note that once your friend purchases an EVE Online subscription, your 30 free days may take up to 24 hours to be applied.

» Buddies must activate their 21-day trial no later than January 5th.

» Buddies must purchase a subscription to EVE online within 7 days of their trial expiring, in order for your free 30 days to be awarded.

Don’t wait! Get a buddy to sign up today!

The Sixth Alliance Tournament has been announced! We’re returning with a full cast of commentators, experts, explosions and it will be broadcasted live! Read more in CCP Mindstar’s dev blog, and head on over to discuss it in the EVE Alliance Tournament Discussions forum.

News on the next QEN and a new Econ Devblog

Unfortunately we were not able to finalize the 2nd quarter, 2008 Quarterly Economic Journal before Thanksgiving despite our best efforts in mining through hundreeds of gigabytes of mission data.  So instead of giving you a QEN with thin discussion on missions and their statistics we decided to work a little further on getting a better dataset and delay the publishing by another week.

However with new team members we are able to churn out recent data in much faster way than before and in an effort to satisfy your hunger for numbers we made a devblog on the new ORCA.  So with dedicated work from CCP_Recurve, CCP_Diagoras and CCP_Spectrum we were able to find some interesting facts about the Orca.

Please enjoy.

How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Carebearing

Quantum Rise introduced the Orca, a capital sized industrial command ship, which was covered in technical detail in Chronotis’ devblog of October 23, 2008.  The feedback to that devblog indicated considerable player interest in the ship, which, coupled with relatively low production cost, should translate into a large demand.  Therefore, we at the Research and Statistics deparment of CCP were very eager to see how its entry into the market would turn out.

The First Days of the Orca

The first Orca blueprint was sold on November 11 at 23:30 and within an hour 67 Orcas were in production.  Within 24 hours the number of Orcas being produced had risen to 478.  The first production job completed on November 15 at 17:07 while the first sale on the general market was on November 16 at 02:38.

From November 11 to November 23 a total of 1814 Orcas had entered production.  Of those, 1121 ships were completed which means that 693 ships were still in proudction at the end of November 23.  Over the same period, 548 Orcas were sold on the market.

It‘s interesting to see that during that period 2935 Orca blueprints were sold.  This suggests that at least a thousand Orca blueprints were put directly into research rather than production and the number may actually be closer to 2000 since many of the 1814 ships that entered production will be made from the same blueprints .  The producers that take the research route will, to some extent, miss out on the high prices experienced when ships first are introduced to the market.  Instead they gain the competitive advantage of lower costs compared to those that go straight into production with unresearched blueprints.

Like other capital ships, the Orca is made out of components.  Orca producers can either buy the ready made components from the market or produce them themselves.  The latter option requires the extra investment in the component blueprints.  The following graph shows the daily average price of Orcas and our estimated constuction cost.  The construction cost is shown both as the cost of buying the components and as the cost of buying the minerals needed for the components production.  We assumed a mineral efficiency of 20 on the component blueprints and no mineral efficiency on the Orcas.  The cost data does not include the fixed cost of buying the component blueprints or researching them.  Orca prices are world averages, while component and mineral prices are average prices in the Forge.

It‘s evident from the graph that it‘s far more expensive, in terms of variable costs, to make Orcas from purchased components rather than making them yourself.  Of course, this stands to reason since sellers of capital ship components will want a markup on their production cost.  Each Orca producer must then figure out if their expected volume of Orca production will warrant buying the component blueprints.  Most likely, the main function on the capital component market is to fill in any gaps in the component production of newer capital ship producers.

There has been some speculation about how often we‘ll see Orcas blown up, given their strength and expected focus on high-sec.  Well, the first numbers are in.  By the end of November 23 a total of 5 Orcas had been turned into short lived, but very pretty balls of flame.  The first kill was scored on November 18 at 20:41.  Of those 5 losses, 3 were in high-sec., 1 in low-sec. and 1 in 0.0. 

Comparison to Other Capital Ships

We decided to take a look at the number of Orca blueprints purchased in the first 13 days of its release compared to the number of blueprints of other classes of capital ship in their first 13 days. The numbers surprised us greatly:

As you can see, the Orca blueprint sales were a great deal higher - over ten times the number of Orca Blueprints were sold compared to freighters when they were released, with almost three trillion ISK being spent on Orca blueprints.

Summary

The Orca seems to be living up to the expectations in terms of popularity.  The main surprise for us was to see the large number of Orca blueprints sold.  This should lead to a massive supply of Orcas in the future, which in turn should lead to very heavy competition among producers.  It‘s therefore tempting to predict that the price of Orcas will fall rather sharply in the coming weeks and that profit margins will be low in the future.  As a consequence, we may see many Orca producers turning to the production of other capital ships that require similar components but may offer larger profit margins in the long run.

After working night and day, day and night, they’re finally done! CCP Charlie and the EVE TV crew have finished editing together 6 million astronomical units of footage from this year’s EVE Online Fanfest for you to enjoy. And enjoy you shall, as the results are nothing short of amazing.

You can view all of the videos on our Fanfest 2008 Video page, or check them out on our YouTube channel.