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Source: www.eveonline.com

First Day of Alliance Tournament VIII Finals Comes to a Close

First day of the Finals has concluded. Tomorrow will be the last day of the tournament, and the champions will be named.

Many of the experienced tournament participants are still alive and matches are expected to heat up as they lay it all on the line for the win.

For more information about today’s matches including full reports, stats, pictures, and high definition catch up videos, please visit:

at.eve-ic.net

Are you affected by the events in this article? Do you have information regarding another event in New Eden? If so, please contact us with any information that you may have.

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Source: www.eveonline.com

Alliance Tournament 8 Prizes Awarded

G-G78S, Curse – After some protests over delays, the prizes for Alliance Tournament 8 winner Pandemic Legion and runners up HYDRA RELOADED, Darkside and WE FORM VOLTRON have been awarded.

Pandemic Legion [-10] team member Fintroll commented on the prize award delays stating “This is the third year running that Pandemic Legion has won the Alliance Tournament. In the previous years we have had much worse trouble receiving our prizes; including a time we placed but did not win I believe the wait times we endured were 6 months, 4 months, and 3 months respectively. I’m not sure why it’s such a struggle every year to get us our prizes. [The Tournament organization] has to be aware that someone is going to win every time and is going to be anxious to get a hold of their rewards. Every other tournament in the known universe, awards are ready to be handed out before the tournament ends, and given out immediately after.”

Pandemic Legion received 50 Adrestia Heavy Assault Cruiser ships, a Gold Medal for each participant and 50 Billion ISK for their victory. Fintroll added that he believes these ships “will have great value in Alliance Tournament IX, which of course we are going to win.” Regarding current plans, the alliance is now reportedly “breezing our way through the Southeast nullsec regions, burning and pillaging as we go. After our successful contract in Delve, Pandemic Legion has entered the mercenary business. While we lack anything resembling morals or mercy, for a modest fee we could be your friends.”

Second place HYDRA RELOADED [HYDRA] received 50 Utu Assault Frigates, a Silver Medal for each participant and 25 Billion ISK. Team member Suitonia explained that “the prizes were delayed by about 3 weeks, [leading to protests] in Jita and making some noise… the fact that it took a public outcry of that magnitude is a pretty sad state of affairs.” Team Captain Count MonteCarlo added “it was frustrating to say the least, if only Claw kept to his own standard after the Tournament was over… I don’t want to whine too much because Claw did a great job overall. I have to apologize to the public that was a victim to our [protests].”

HYDRA gave an Utu frigate to “all to the people who were most active in the Tournament team… a lesser prize money to those who contributed but not as much [and] plan to sell the remaining Utus slowly, so we can profit from them as much as possible.” Pilots awarded with one of the rare Utu frigates were: fmercury, raimo, knife, ched, endless subversion, rhak amharr, xxangelxx, leeloo manaquin, antoine lefevre, morel nova, hei’di, Gobbins, barek ironfist, CYVOK, Awox, suitonia and thrashpower.

HYDRA divulged that their alliance also used the rare ships to “open an Utu Bond secured by Chribba which allowed us to get some quick ISK at our disposal while we sell some of them” and also pointed out that “one of the Utus is a lottery prize.” Count MonteCarlo stated that “we’re planning on keeping some for the next Tournament and also some for general [combat], the thing can point at 75km which is insane for a frigate.”

After the Tournament, HYDRA’s Johan Moisander explained that “Leadership [decided] that growing and conquering some space might be a fun and new experience for us, as we have mostly been a roaming alliance up to this point… and as such we have decided to mimic [the original] Hydra’s recruitment policy, namely accepting anyone who applies.” Count MonteCarlo added “we’re mass recruiting because we want to invade Providence with Curatores Veritatis Alliance [CVA]. When CVA owned Providence, Providence was unlike any other region, CVA had a reason to defend their space, and they did, they did it all the time, there was ALLWAYS a fight to be had, no matter who their enemy was, they would bring it, but the new residents are nothing like CVA… I want CVA to take Providence back, [New Eden] is not as much fun without it.”

Commenting on next year’s Tournament, Suitonia added “This was the first Tournament for many members; hopefully with the experience we will be able to beat the elite undisputed champions, Pandemic Legion next year.” Intigo concluded by adding “Shout out to [Count MonteCarlo] & Gobbins for an amazing work on bringing us so far. Considering what a bunch of idiots they had to work with it’s a wonder we got second!” Admiral Goberius’s Utu will add to his prize ship collection that includes a Mimir from his Alliance Tournament VII participation on Pandemic Legion’s winning team.

Third place Darkside alliance won a Bronze Medal for each participant and 25 Billion ISK while WE FORM VOLTRON in fourth place was awarded 10 Billion ISK.

Count MonteCarlo expressed his views on next year’s Tournament by stating that his team “has been relaxing and just doing casual [combat]. For next year, we hope to win, we will practice more, we will theory craft more, we will spend as much ISK as PL did (this year we only spent 5b on the Tournament, PL easily 10x that, maybe even 20x), we will have more specialized [pilots] and next year we’ll be better at dealing with [espionage] and hopefully have a lot more setups to use, I’m a lot more confident in winning next year than I did this year, but for me, winning 50 Utus is good enough… PL deserved to win this year, the amount of effort and ISK they put into this is unreal, I’m sure next year they’ll put even more into it… PL got to the finals and didn’t win on their first attempt, same with us, next year we will win.”

On Alliance Tournament IX and the hopes and expectations of this year’s runner up teams, three times Tournament winner Pandemic Legion member Fintroll stated: “I can hear you knocking but you can’t come in.”

GalNet References

Alliance Tournament VIII

Are you affected by the events in this article? Do you have information regarding another event in New Eden? If so, please contact us with any information that you may have.

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Source: www.eveonline.com

EVE Online Tyrannis 1.0.2 has been deployed

EVE Online Tyrannis 1.0.2 has been deployed successfully and Tranquility is now accepting connections. You can review the list of new features and fixes by at our patch notes page. Forum threads are available in the EVE Information Portal for players to list feedback and alert us to any issues that they may experience. A guide on how to use the free skill points can be found here.

Source: www.eveonline.com

TQ Level Up

What makes up the live EVE Cluster and how it’s all done is something of a mystery to many who have speculated what it’s made of and how it’s all connected together.

As you may know the Tranquility (TQ) cluster will be down for maintenance on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 from 0900 to 1500 UTC.

With a migration and a bit of a redesign on the way I thought it was about time to deliver the facts on what it is and will be.

Step one: A cozy new home

TQ has morphed and adjusted over the years as much as EVE Online has. It’s gotten to the point were a couple of cabinets simply don’t handle it anymore. So, this first step is to move TQ to a bigger place. We’ll still be in the same datacenter and connecting to you from multiple networks to ensure the best performance, but this time with a lot more space and power and room to grow.

The new space is a whopping 79kW of power across 12 cabinets. With the larger space and added power, we can now aggregate TQ, Singularity, and the ancillary EVE Services (web, forums, account management, etc.) into a single location in the datacenter. This will provide better network connectivity, fewer intermediary devices and increased capacity.

As with any dense computer solution like our blade servers, heat is always a major concern. Sure, we get great management tools and reduced physical space requirements, but we still have to cool the servers. To do this we’ve moved from an ambient cooled system (basically the open room temperature is managed but not funneled direct to server intakes) to a completely self-contained, closed aisle cooling system. Cold air from the center of the aisle is force-fed into the cabinets reducing the loss or wasted cool air significantly and helping to focus cold air where it’s needed most. This takes the industry standard “hot aisle/cold aisle” designs a step further without having to do anything crazy like running servers under nitrogen pools (although that is pretty cool).

Step two: Networking to 9000

Most of the traffic on the network in TQ is happening between the servers on the internal network. While the routers we use are quite powerful (Cisco 7600’s with the RSP720 route processors), our internal switching needed a kick in the pants. With the move we are going to be adding about 800% capacity to our side to side network along with some really nice Cisco Distributed Forwarding Cards (DFC3) to the network blades themselves to help reduce the latency and reduce burden on the supervisor cards that run the switches.

Step three: Pics or it didn’t happen

We are going to continue the information sharing about the infrastructure that makes EVE work on the next installment. Although not everyone gets excited about cabinets and a datacenter, there are a few that do. I personally keep them posted on my wall at home. This is meant to be the first of many installments as we continue to improve the infastructure that EVE runs on.

Step four: But, how does this help me get my ship back?

The increase in Layer 2 switching capacity, reducing in latency through Distributed Forwarding, and the extra cold hamsters will have an impact on the ability to reduce overall latency in EVE. It is not a single solution, but a good foundation where core infrastructure can be eliminated as a possible concern.

The next tech installment will have more details on Remapping EVE, the next level of Fleet Fighting and better prediction of hot spots for dedicated nodes.

TQ Tech Details: (Not the whole system, just what runs TQ)

Servers
64 x IBM HS21
2x Dual Core 3.33GHz CPU’s
32GB of RAM Each
1×72GB HDD Each

2 x IBM X3850 M2’s
2x Six Core 2.66GHz
128GB of RAM
4 x 146GB HDD

Cores
- 280 total Cores
- ~1 THz

RAM
- 2.3TB of Total RAM

Storage
- 4.8TB of Local Storage
- 2TB of SSD SAN
- 256GB of RAM SAN

Network
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 4Gb/s Fiber Channel

So what will June 23 look like?

Here’s our current downtime schedule for when TQ will be offline:

0900: All EVE Services go offline. (Web, Forums, Test Servers, EVE Gate, TQ, basically everything hosted in London)

1200: EVE Online web, secure and Test Servers come back online. (all network services reestablished in London. Only TQ should still be down at this time)

1500: TQ back online

Source: www.eveonline.com

Are you affected by the events in this article? Do you have information regarding another event in New Eden? If so, please contact us with any information that you may have.

Want to become a news correspondent with IC? We are recruiting.

Source: www.eveonline.com

• The autopilot was mistakenly providing the shortest route to your destination even when you had the prefer safer option selected. We sent it back to flight school and the safer option is again working correctly.
• Some blueprint icons were being displayed incorrectly based on their type. This has been corrected.
• An error was being generated while trying to access items in a corp hanger while in space.
• You are now able to trash items normally that are located in a corporate hangar array at a POS.
• The Planetary Commodities cargo hold on the Primae could not be loaded with Water or Oxygen. It can now.
• An error was being generated while you tried to edit more than one contact at the same time. This now works as intended.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Mondes Persistants Burns for CCP Abraxas

Mondes Persistants has published an interview with Hjalti “Abraxas” Dan elsson, author of the new EVE Online novel The Burning Life and more Chronicles than there are stars in the universe. After you’re finished reading the interview, be sure to check out their contest (English version) for your chance to win the official EVE Online novels and more.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Tournament Experts Announced
With all the applications in, interviews conducted and time spent deliberating, the CCP staff has decided on the experts that will be announcing the…
Source: evevault.ign.com

It’s finally here, 64 of EVE Online’s best Alliance teams have spent endless amounts of time practicing, tons of ISK and two whole weekends battling it out to make it to this weekend’s Universe Cup: The EVE Alliance Tournament. The qualifiers kicked off to an incredible start; not only did we witness comedy setups, metagaming and some seriously talented FC’s we also reached a new milestone in EVE Online when 60,453 pilots logged in during the second day of matches shattering EVE’s PCU.

The finale will be broadcast LIVE via EVE TV on June 19 and 20 from 14:50 UTC. Throughout the weekend, you can join CCP Soundwave, special developer guests and a host of PvP experts in the studio, and watch the matches each day in glorious High Definition. You can Tune In Here to catch all the action!

Must view matches for Saturday include the #1 ranked Alliance Rote Kapelle fighting at 15:00 GMT, a rematch of last weekend’s slugfest between Circle of Two and Red Overlord at 16:20 and defending champions Pandemic Legion at 20:00. The elimination schedule is available here. Will they take it again this year? Tune in to find out…

The Studio Show

Not only will we be showing every match complete with commentary, post-match analysis and up-to-the-minute statistics provided by ISD, alongside our studio show we have flown five EVE Players to our studio in Reykjavik, Iceland, to commentate on the event. We will also have several of CCP’s key developers in studio to talk about their projects, including Lead Game Designer CCP Hammer and the Creative Director of EVE Online, CCP t0rfifrans. We will also be showing some exclusive featurettes including a sneak peak at CCP’s incredibly talented Video Production team.

But wait, there’s more!

For the participants, a lot is at stake, with CCP giving away 50 unique ships to the first and second place teams, as well as 50 Billion ISK for the winners. Check out this dev blog for more information!

To celebrate the Alliance Tournament and for a limited time only CCP is also waiving the $5/5 Euro activation on new Buy EVE Now accounts (this does not apply to current trial accounts). You can get all the benefits of having a full EVE online account, such as all skills being available for training, whilst saving money to spend on snacks to eat during the finals broadcast. We will also be giving away two beautiful NVIDIA GTX 280 graphics cards to two lucky viewers who tune into the stream and a full set of EONS issues 1-20.

For those of you who can’t tune in…

The match replays will be available on CCP’s YouTube Channel within a couple of days of broadcast and you can see some of Winterblink’s incredible pictures of the events here.

For those who want to discuss the upcoming matches, head on over to our Alliance Tournament Discussion channel. You can also join us on Tournament Twitter and keep an eye on the Official EVE Online Facebook page. You can also join us in the #eve-online IRC channel on irc.coldfront.net. Check the Coldfront website for information on using IRC and how to use their built in chat interface.

Who will fight for the glory and honor of their Alliance, and take home the Golden Adrestias?

Find out, this weekend.

Images courtesy of Winterblink. For more amazing images, check out Winterblink’s Alliance Tournament 8 Flickr set!

Source: www.eveonline.com

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Source: www.eveonline.com

, and specifically the comment thread that followed) that are meant to both inform the playerbase as to how EVE CS operates and to shine a light on our continued and on-going efforts to provide the high quality of service our players both expect and richly deserve. Additionally, we‘re also in the process of revamping and improving many of our procedures and tools to ensure that we‘re squeezing as much juice out of them as possible.

One of the things we‘ve improved recently is the Customer Satisfaction rating system. This is the survey you receive after your petition has been closed and the resulting data that we gather from it. As we are the first contact that you usually have with CCP, it‘s extremely important to Customer Support that a functional mechanism exists that shows in transparent terms exactly where we can improve our services while also indicating trends that players are unhappy with in the overall gaming experience.

GMs file a large number of defects and a substantial percentage of wonky game functionality is discovered and pushed through the development pipelines by the Support department. We try to be constantly aware of our responsibility in this area. Although we usually know just from the petition text itself and subsequent dialogue with the player what‘s causing issues, the results of the survey often reinforce and further narrow down these trends. Used properly, this simple tool can be very powerful, allowing for a sharper focus on the relevant specifics.

Also, the CSM mentioned a degree of player disconnect with EVE Support. We were initially a bit surprised about this point, since our satisfaction rating from our customers was, and has always been, high. However, we value the representative voice of the CSM and trust their judgement and anechdotal evidence. The elegant redesign of the Satisfaction survey gives us a greater overview and a better way to shift our focus to these problem areas. Our intent is to continually improve…and we will.

Internally, this is a positive step as well. The old rating system allowed only a single score from a petition, meant to encompass the performance of the GM working on it, the resolution of the case at hand and the response times. This numbering system often misrepresented the competancy of individual GMs, especially in more “high stakes” categories such as reimbursement or account dispute cases. In those, the ratings are typically more loaded towards satisfaction (or disatisfaction) with the “resolution” as opposed to the behaviour and communication of the GM delivering the resolution when compared with, say, the Stuck category. The new layout splits the overall score into four components, being reply time, resolution of the petition, courtesy and professionalism of the GM and finally the overall mean score that emerges.

We are now in a much better position to accurately gauge and evaluate the metrics, derive more specific feedback from the data pool and take more targeted action than we‘ve ever been able to before. We‘re going to try and take advantage of the opportunity. That‘s where you come in.

Currently, about a third of our users fill out the survey. While that‘s statistically significant enough for meaningful data to emerge, we‘d still like to hear from more of you. Therefore, we would like to ask you, the EVE community, to fill out the survey when next your petition closes, essentially helping us help you. We‘re aiming to make 2010 our banner year, and we hope that you‘ll be right there with us.

All the best,

Lead GMs Ender and Fate.

Source: www.eveonline.com

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Source: eve.warcry.com