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Source: www.themis-group.com

Contest: IGG Year End Giveaway, Win an iPod or In-Game Prizes!

IGG and WarCry bring you a chance to win an iPod Shuffle or in-game prizes for Tales of Pirates, Myth War or Voyage Century.

There are three tiers of Tales of Pirates prize packs: Five people will receive a “Chest of Enigma” valued at $50 each, 10 people a “Chest of Demonic World” valued at $30 each and 100 people a “Novice Package”, valued at $9 each. From Myth War we have five “Constellation Packs”, which are valued at $100 each. Finally, from Voyage Century there is are 10 limited edition “Christmas Packs” valued at $46 each. Winners can redeem any of these prizes in-game.

Click below to enter.

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Source: www.warcry.com

The first Quarterly Economic Newsletter of 2010

It is finally here – the first Quarterly Economic Newsletter of 2010

In this QEN the key demographic statistics are reviewed along with other standard sections, such as the price level chapter, which focuses on overall price changes for the four key price indices.

A special section is also devoted to statistics on Wormhole space and Tech III. On March 2010 there was one year since the launch of Apocrypha and hence we had a full year worth of data on w-space and Tech III. I am certain that EVE pilots will find a lot of interesting trends and statistics, such as the fact that more than 4000 Strategic cruisers have been killed during this time or that in Q1 of 2010 there are more than 40 thousand wormhole jumps per day.

We are already working on the next QEN which will have some preliminary data from Planetary Interactions – exciting times ahead.

Fly safe!

Dr. EyjoG and the QEN team

Source: www.eveonline.com

Countdown to Dominion
Tomorrow, December 1 marks the launch of Dominion. Currently the game servers (and official website) are down for the count to bring this latest…
Source: evevault.ign.com

CSM 5 Election Results Are Out
The elections for the 5th Council of Stellar Management have ended and the results are out. Nine delegates, headed by a woman, Carole…
Source: evevault.ign.com

Happy New Year!
I hope everyone had a fantastic New Year celebration! To kick off the new year I’ve made a quick little calendar for you. Enjoy and watch for a…
Source: evevault.ign.com

Buying ISK for real money is not allowed!
Buying ISK for real money is a EULA violation and a punishable offence. The ISK being sold usually comes from hacked accounts, exploits and macroing. The ISK sellers have many tricks up their sleeves, such as rigging their websites to place key-loggers on their customers’ computers in order to later hack into their accounts and remove the ISK they just sold, and any other items of value belonging to the players, their corporation or even alliance. This is NOT fiction or exaggeration – this is an actual and very recent case.

Do not support this sort of thing by buying ISK!
Source: www.eveonline.com

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Source: www.eveonline.com

NPC sell orders for starbase structures have been temporarily disabled

During downtime on Saturday, May 29, all NPC sell orders for starbase structures, sovereignty structures and station components were temporarily disabled. These orders will be restored temporarily on Wednesday, June 2 until Planetary Interaction is fully operational.

Source: www.eveonline.com

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Source: www.eveonline.com

The Great Planetary Land Rush – June 8th

A vast wealth lies undeveloped on the planets beneath you, shaded by your mighty ships. We trust that you and your fellow pilots have been purchasing necessary scientific and planetary management skills and training them in preparation for the June 8th lifting of the ban on capsuleer involvement in planetary affairs. At that time, the various command centers (temperate, gas, etc) will be seeded to the market and the great land rush will commence as opportunistic pilots race to develop the most profitable planets and begin to reap the benefits of the production chains. Now is the best time to start planning for June 8th.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Alliance Tournament 8 – Better Than Ever

Alliance Tournament 8 starts this weekend and this year you can tune in to all the matches! How? CCP Stevie SG’s newest dev blog has all the details, including prize information and a picture of the beautiful ship winners will receive. You can read her new blog here.

Source: www.eveonline.com

, when IT forces attempted to destroy the tower sheltering a number of PL titans and supercarriers. Pandemic Legion fielded an estimated 20 heavy interdictors over the course of the fight, managing to destroy 4 IT supercarriers along with a number of carriers, dreadnoughts and support ships for 16 reported losses, mostly heavy interdictors.

The war continues daily between NC forces and SC forces, however Pandemic Legion have ensured they are doing their bit as they give IT some problems to deal with in Delve.

For this article the Interstellar Correspondents attempted to contact IT alliance for their side of the story through Michelle Jarre, but no response has yet been received.

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

Source: www.eveonline.com

The Day the Items Disappeared

Sometimes things have a way of working out drastically different than you had planned. More specifically: sometimes all it takes is one line of code for things to go very wrong. Last Friday was a case in point.

The 7-hour outage on Tranquility we experienced on Friday, May 7, 2010 is the longest unscheduled downtime EVE has had in over two years. My purpose for writing this blog is to explain as best I can what happened, what we have already done to try to set things right and what lessons we have learned.

During EVE’s daily runs we execute various maintenance jobs that ensure the health of the database. One of these maintenance tasks is recycling itemIDs. Almost every object in EVE has an ID, from a humble lump of Veldspar to characters, skills, space stations and celestial objects. When items get deleted or destroyed they are moved to a specific location in the database that we refer to as the junkyard. This location grows huge over time as the wheels of the EVE universe keep spinning. To keep things running smoothly there needs to be a way to recycle itemIDs from the junkyard and make them available for in game use. Which is where the junkyard cleanup scripts come into play. There are a few of those, each responsible for “cleaning” a specific part of the junkyard and reinserting previously used itemIDs into the overall pool of available itemIDs. Usually this happens behind the curtains without anyone noticing except the system admins responsible for watching over the EVE universe.

What happened on Friday was that a part of the junkyard was being cleaned that hadn’t been cleaned online before so a new modified script was required. The script was prepared and went through the customary rounds of code reviews and testing on Singularity before being deployed on the Tranquility database.

What all the scrutiny and testing of this script had failed to take into consideration was the huge difference in transaction volume on Tranquility vs. Singularity. During normal operation the Tranquility database can see anywhere from 3-5,000 transactions per second. Only part of the transactions between the EVE clients and application servers actually end up going directly to the database because of caching and batching of transactions, so the actual number of transactions in EVE is somewhat higher. But I digress. Long story short, the flaw in the script went unnoticed on Singularity because the error had only a miniscule chance of occurring there.

So what the script did was actually to make itemIDs from the Junkyard available for use and then continually overwrite them as if they were available. This created a lot of problems in game. Overall, up to 0.0071% of all itemIDs were affected, which is up to 114,000 itemIDs; for a game that revolves around persistent items, that is a very serious thing.

Petitions soon started piling in reporting a multitude of strange problems and the logs started filling up with errors and exceptions. This ultimately resulted in a decision to close down the game in order to prevent further data corruption while we were analyzing the problem. About 75 minutes after downtime, TQ was closed down and some of CCP’s best and brightest minds started analyzing the problem.

It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on but in order to fix it we had a dilemma and the dreaded word “rollback” started creeping into the conversation. We quickly decided that a rollback was not a feasible option: firstly, because rollbacks are well, very nasty things in general (we have only once done a rollback in the 7 years EVE has been in operation and that was back in 2003) and secondly because of the time it would take. We were simply faced with the option of either having EVE offline for an extended period of time or attempting to retrace and repair the damage and get TQ back up and running as soon as possible.

We opted to repair the damage, bring Tranquility back up and resolve incoming petitions as quickly as possible for those things that could not be undone. Over the past few days we have been working tirelessly on answering petitions and will continue to do so until we have solved every last one of these cases. To help speed up response times on petitions our software engineers worked all of Saturday to create specialized tools for customer service to review and deal with petitions related to this unusual error and made this suite of tools available to customer support. If those of you that read this are still having problems then I would like to ask you to please submit a petition through the EVE client or through the web interface.

Mistakes can and will inevitably happen. There will always be Murphy. In this case all prudent precaution was taken in terms of code review and testing. The main lesson learned last Friday, however, is that we need to step up our game in terms of speedy restoration of backups and options for recovery.

We need to be able to recover and restore the EVE database in a much quicker manner than we are currently able to do now. We have been planning to change that for a while now and those plans are being set into motion. This will allow us to recover from even a complete database failure within a very short period of time. We will also be making a thorough risk assessment for Tranquility to identify operational risk and categorize it according to priority. We will use it to focus our work in reducing risk and improving long term stability.

So, what a day. May we wait another two years or more for another day like this one and when it comes we aim to be readier than ever.

Yours truly,

Red Button

Source: www.eveonline.com

Preliminary Council of Stellar Management Voting Results

A record number of capsuleers cast their votes for the Fifth Council of Stellar Management, and CCP Diagoras shares some detailed information on the votes cast in this forum thread.

Source: www.eveonline.com

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Source: www.eveonline.com

Tyrannis Sale at EVE Online Store

The EVE Online store will be running a Tyrannis Sale from May 18 – June 1.

Sale items include:

• 15% off EVE Ships (was $124.99, now $106.24) COUPON CODE: ShipTyran15
• Buy an EVE Conquest Board Game and get an available tee shirt for free
• Twitter Coupon for 10% off shipping. Follow the EVE Online Store on Twitter by clicking here
• Facebook Coupon for 10% off order. For the Facebook coupon, visit the EVE Online Facebook page.
• MMM: All back issues, issues 1-18, of E-ON will be $7.00 + standard p+p COUPON CODE EONT50

DISCLAIMERS:

1. Customer must use the coupon codes in order to get the discount.
2. Facebook & MMM coupons cannot be combined with other coupons.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Responding to the number of SC carriers, Imperian had his cap fleet drop back from O-BY0Y to a nearby system, where they were able to gather reinforcements before jumping back in and engaging the SC forces.

“It was a turkey shoot since we had 10 titans on the field that doomsdayed their dreadnoughts left and right,” Imperian said.

The SC lost an estimated 39 dreadnoughts in the fighting and 11 interdictors as well as what is believed to be 9 towers in a number of systems. It is believed the NC lost 3 interdictors and 6 dreadnoughts.

The war continues between both coalitions with skirmishes daily. Imperian expects more from the SC as both sides give and take over the same space.

“At the moment, Pandemic Legion is attacking IT in their home region, Delve, so IT have to handle both fronts and can’t concentrate giving us fight around the clock.”

The war continues daily, but is at a stalemate as both coalitions continue to exchange systems while not yet committing forces to a concerted push.

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

Win PLEX with Planetary Interaction at New Eden Radio

New Eden Radio are currently hosting a screenshot competition with a twist for players to win PLEX as part of the launch for EVE Online: Tyrannis. This competition will be running from May 1 through to May 28, 2010. To be in with a chance of winning, simply visit their forums and read how you can participate.

Source: www.eveonline.com

Courier Missions Revamp

Hello players. I am CCP Tallest, and this is a dev blog.

TL;DR: We changed pickup locations, drop-off locations, and courier items in most of our basic courier missions. (Basic courier missions are the courier missions you get from a normal mission agent).

The Extended Explanation

For Tyrannis, we changed a bunch of basic courier missions, and I wanted to tell you why. The changes we put into place are based on two separate problems. I’ll tell you a little bit about each problem and what we did to fix it.

Problem 1: Planetary Interaction is using some of the same commodities as the courier missions currently in-game.

Why is this a problem?

Changes to commodity volumes affect the commodities in both systems (PI and missions).

Because Planetary Interaction is using some of the same commodities as courier missions, players could intentionally fail courier missions in order to get the commodities, thereby affecting the player market for those commodities.

The massive influx of commodities from Planetary Interaction would make it easy for players to stockpile those items in stations close to their courier agents, thereby making the missions nearly insta-completable.

What did we do to fix it?

We created courier mission versions of the PI commodities and used these new versions as courier mission items instead of using the Planetary Interaction commodities.

o Example: In our courier missions, “holoreels” are now “crates of holoreels,” and “datachip” is now “encoded datachip.”

PI commodities have also been removed from all encounter missions.

Problem 2: Courier missions were inconsistent between factions and levels.

While studying our mission metrics, we noticed that players were running a lot more Gallente/Minmatar courier missions than Amarr/Caldari courier missions (see chart below).

This chart shows the relationship between the numbers of completed level 2 courier missions for each faction block during Q4 2009.

When we looked at the missions more closely and compared them between faction blocks, we found some inconsistencies:

Gallente/Minmatar courier missions generally had shorter travel distances than Amarr/Caldari courier missions.

Gallente/Minmatar courier missions generally had (far) less cargo to haul than Amarr/Caldari courier missions.

We also noticed that the progression between levels was practically non-existent. This also required changing.

o Example: Several level 3 and level 4 courier missions could be run in shuttles, while some level 1 and level 2 missions required larger ships.

Why is this a problem?

Giving one faction a clear advantage over another faction is necessarily bad; players of all factions should have access to similar resources. Balanced missions among factions also help to spread out EVE’s population, which is good for the server and desirable for our population.

What did we do to fix it?

Instead of fixing this issue by patching a few holes, we decided instead to do a wholesale revision to all of the basic courier missions in EVE. We decided upon a minimum and maximum cargo size for each level, as well as a standardized travel distance per level.

Level 1 courier missions: Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation.

Level 2 courier missions: Cargo will fit into frigates, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.

Level 3 courier missions: Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be within your agent’s constellation and/or a neighboring constellation.

Level 4 courier missions: Cargo will fit into industrials, and the destination will be a neighboring constellation.

Thank you for your time. CCP Tallest.

Source: www.eveonline.com