Thursday 26th September 2013 is the day that CCP will publicly announce details of the next EVE Online expansion. This will be live streamed on the CCP Twitch channel from 20.00 UTC, hosted by the excellent CCP Guard alongside the EVE Development team.
While you can watch this alone, discuss it on the forums, or even brave the stream chat channel, I invite you to join me on the RvB Ganked Mumble on the day to talk about the expansion & its features as they are announced by CCP. I shall be online from 19.00 UTC for those interested in watching the announcement with me. Additionally for those unable to use a mic, please join the RvB Ganked channel ingame to discuss the expansion at the same time.
I am hoping any available members of the CSM will be there as well.
The holiday season is nearly upon us, which means plenty of beer and plenty of time for spaceships, which when combined result in hilarious explosions, and there is no better way to partake of these two wonderful gifts than an RVB Ganked roam. Or several in a row!
21st January 2012 – Ganked 13: Quack, Quack, Quack. Drakeswarm (and other assorted missile boats).
I will send round individual mails to the ingame mailing list “RVB Ganked” about these, as well as make posts for each on the RVB forums, and a post in the Ganked thread over on Failheap, as well as keep the RVB Ganked in-game channel updated. So guys, keep your eyes peeled, stock up on the beer and isk (isk=ships=explosions) and we will have a bloody good holiday!!!
As part of their refocusing on the “Flying In Space” aspects of EVE Online, CCP have undertaken a beautification of the nebulae found in EVE. They are now more breathtaking than ever. More importantly they closer you get to the regions that contain or are surrounded by these, the more imposing they are, until you are enveloped by them yourself. Quite stunning really.
Credit to sarmatiko on youtube for the video.
Below I have images taken by myself while playing around on the test server (click for images):
After 450+ Jumps, 8hrs roaming around EVE on SISI, I feel that is enough. I have seen and flown thru many of the new nebulae and the following regions:
Syndicate, Placid, Cloud Ring, Fountain, Delve, Querious, Period Basis, Paragon Soul, Esoteria, Feythabolis, Omist, Tenerifis, Immensea, Catch, Khanid, Tash-Murkon, Domain, The Citdael, The Forge, Lonetrek, Vale of the Silent, Tribute, Branch, Tenal, Venal, Fade, Pure Blind, Black Rise, Great Wildlands, Metropolis, Cache, Geminate, Kalevala Expanse, Perrigen Falls, Outer Passage, The Spire, Essence, Everyshore, Genesis.
Although many, many more remain to be discovered, however I shall keep those for when these wonderful additions go live on TQ, and endeavour to take Ganked to visit them all!
Over the years that I played EVE I have seen CCP achieve some brilliant things with this game, making it really enjoyable to play. However some 18 months ago, if not earlier than that, they seemed to start down a road that took them away from their core product, and what it is really about for the majority of EVE’s subscribers, towards a vision they had of an EVE that encompassed so much more than “mere spaceships”. In doing so they began alienating the “spaceship” fans, all – in my opinion – to grab a share of the generic MMO market by offering such things as full body avatars, and things related to these as found in those generic MMOs. I lost a large amount of the faith I had in CCP, so much so that i sold off characters from my stable and let other accounts go inactive, bringing myself down to 1 active account.
A result of this, over the 18months or so that they were obviously focusing away from EVE, was a substantial drop in subscriptions, a major drop in PCU numbers and even more anger on various forums than normal, quite a feat considering how vitriolic eve related forums usually are. Player dissatisfaction really came to a head with the Incarna expansion in the summer of this year, which saw the first iteration of full body avatars added to the EVE experience, along side a VERY controversial micro (I know!) transaction store. There was much rage, and the largest sub and PCU drops to date.
This seemed to wake CCP up, and slowly, very slowly over the summer they began to make noises about refocusing on their core product, their golden goose, EVE. This culminated in a number of things:
CCP making some staff redundant, and moving focus away from 3 products to 2;
A winter expansion, that promises a large amount of changes and fixes to the core product;
New ships, specifically chosen from some contests last year. The info on these is to be released weekly over the coming weeks. The first is the Tornado.
All in all, this turnabout is very welcome to me personally, as a 5+ year veteran of EVE, and as someone who has followed the game much longer than that, it saddened me to see the product go ignored/have half done content thrown at it, like it did. I cannot say CCP has restored all the faith I had in them, but they are doing a good job of it. I am sure that with enough time, and the items listed above are a good beginning, that they will reclaim the faith of many more people, and I hope that this is only the earliest days of a glorious resurgence of EVE.