Fanfest, the annual EVE celebration in the land of fire and ice, continues to be to be awesome. April 22 is the second day of Fanfest and this time we had a lot of in-depth discussions, new details, roundtables, presentations and community interaction!
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Videos
EVE: Citadel expansion trailer
EVE: Citadel feature tour
Upcoming Industrial Arrays
EVE: Valkyrie VR Gameplay Trailer – Carrier Assault
Between Fanfests – Development review
CCP stronger than ever
CCP is stronger than ever before! Financially strong, but also investing into the future with large expansions and continued releases, VR products, and new hardware for servers. This is really the right stuff to make EVE Forever!
EVE is still breaking records
Even in the 13th year of EVE Online you continue to break records! We saw the most nullsec PVP kills ever in the history of EVE on April 13. The most NPC bounties ever have been collected on March 19. And the most ISK was traded on February 8. Yes, all in this year. You have been more active than ever before!
Capsuleer Day on May 6
EVE Online turns 13 on May 6! With a stronger CCP than ever before, with a super vibrant EVE Universe, we are celebrating this day and henceforth it shall be known as “Capsuleer Day”! The Upwell Consortium will lead the celebrations which will take a whole weekend. Expect new Capsule SKINs!
Additional Citadel gameplay
This Summer we will bring Contracts to Citadels! We are also planning to add more modules for Citadels such as a tractor beam to pull in ships or a ship repulsor that pushes ships away from a certain epicenter. We will also bring Industrial Arrays to be prime locations for manufacturing and research. Later on, in the Winter, we will see Drilling Platforms which are unified locations for harvesting moon materials, reactions, reprocessing and mining support.
Rorqual upgrades
The Rorqual, the capital industrial ship, is going to be revamped with a new medium-range mining foreman bonus, a defensive superweapon making the whole mining fleet briefly invulnerable, and a new mining superdrone.
Pirate Capitals and Supercapitals
The pirate factions have been watching Capsuleers since a while and now they are upgrading their fleets with capitals and supercapitals. The pirate factions are also working on a second set of implants including shield buffer and armor repair amount effects.
Fleet Boosts Rework
The current system of Fleet Boosts (affecting PVP) will be made more accessible, easier to understand, and changed to level the playing field a little. This will be done by tying the boosts to the activation of a Boosting Module, and a balance of the Buff amounts associated with these boosting modules. This is planned for this Summer.
Data with CCP Quant
CCP Quant once again brings us super interesting data from the EVE universe. This time it is all about ISK! The total value of all items on active player accounts in the EVE Universe is 3,070 Trillion ISK and the total ISK on all active player accounts is 978 Trillion. Of course we saw a lot more, from the assets in wormholes sorted by class, money in market hubs, production (the average profit is around 15%) and more.
The 11th CSM
CSM 10 was a bit of a bumpy journey, but we have taken steps to bring the process around and the CSM to a better place overall. After all, only if you never do anything you won’t encounter rough times. But since we believe in the value of the CSM, we now are in the place to announce the new candidates of CSM 11:
– Steve Ronuken, Fuzzwork Enterprises
– Sullen Decimus, The Bastion
– The Judge, Circle of Two
– Fafer, Northern Coalition
– NoobMan, Hard Knocks
– Jin’taan, CVA
– Kyle Aparthos, The Division
– Innominate, Goonswarm Federation
– Bobmon, Pandemic Legion
– Nashh Kadavr, Pandemic Legion
– MrHyde113, Pandemic Legion
– Aryth, Goonswarm Federation
– Xenuria, Goonswarm Federation
– Gorski Car, Pandemic Legion
Congratulations!
New book in 2017: Frigates of EVE Online
A beautifully designed book about the frigates of EVE Online will be published by Dark Horse. This book contains stunningly many details, even down to the exhaust pipes, and contains incredibly rich technical detail and background information. But those things take time, and therefore the book is scheduled to be released in Summer 2017 (not 2016).
EVE Mobile app
An official and free app (iOS and Android) that is focused on keeping you in touch with EVE Online! It is scheduled for Summer 2016 (beta, the release is scheduled for Fall). This app lets you get all in-game notifications (you can control which you want in the feed, and which ones you want push notifications for). The app has also EVE mail and the EVE Calendar. This is a starting point!
EVE Gunjack
Launched in November alongside the first wave of VR platforms (GearVR), EVE Gunjack made it into the best selling game on GearVR, which made Gunjack the best selling VR game ever. 🙂 But really, it is a great game confirmed by the 4.5 star rating and over 3,000 reviews. Just recently Gunjack was also launched on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. There will be more from the VR team in Shanghai, but not quite ready yet.
EVE Valkyrie is starting great
EVE Valkyrie had a great start, we already see more than destroyed 200.000 in over 8.000 matches. We can also see a fantastic community forming, for example with Fansites and Flight Schools. But this is just the beginning!
EVE Valkyrie Release 1 and cross platform play
The next release (carrier assault mode, a new map, joystick configuration and more) is already in the works with release plan for June. Together with that we have an open and transparent roadmap. And we are working on full cross platform play where you can play EVE Valkyrie regardless if own a Oculus, Vive or PSVR
Project Arena
Previously shown at Fanfest 2015 and named Disc Arena, this has been evolved into a project now. This points into the direction of a true e-sport sport in VR and is a lot of fun.
Project Nova
Project Nova is a shooter set in New Eden on the PC working with the Unreal 4 Engine; we are planning for it to be free to play. “Project” Nova because we are here still in the early stages of development, we have not yet made the decision to go full production. Nonetheless we what to share our plans and would love to get feedback! Video capture by Dannie Fleetfoot.
Capital ship revamp
We saw an in-depth presentation of the Capital revamps coming with the Citadel expansion on April 27. Carriers will be offensive ships now based on fighter damage and lose the logistical role. The new Force Auxiliary ships are the new capital logistic ships. Fighter gameplay has been revolutionized, you have a launch deck and control squadrons of fighters; each of the squadron can have different effects for you to activate. Dreadnoughts are revamped so that they are turret based damage dealing beasts. Additionally we will see a bunch of new capital modules (such as capital shield hardener, capital afterburner and microwarpdrives and more). Additionally, (faction) capital weapons will be able to use Tech-2 ammunition.
New super weapons for Titans
With the Citadel release on April 27, Titans will get new superweapons which are mainly area of effect based weapons. The area there is not a static point in space though, but often a line. One weapon effect for example slashes across space and damages every ship that is between two points in space. Other weapons teleport ships that are in the affected area to a random spot in the solar system.
New capital NPCs
Mention briefly already in the keynote yesterday, we will see now Capital ship NPCs. These NPCs will appear in three versions (normal capital, commander capital, commander supercapital) in nullsec asteroid belts as well as in Sanctum and Haven anomalies. These NPCs will have bounties between 60 and 240 million ISK and drop new capital named module components and faction capital modules.
Warfare link changes – Summer and beyond
This Summer and beyond we will change Warfare Links so that they are actually fun and engaging to play (instead of just sitting around). We plan to introduce Area of Effect Links that are applied for a fixed duration. You do not need to be in a specific fleet position to make use of them.
Pirate faction capitals and supercapitals
We are planning to introduce rare, but powerful pirate capital and supercapital ships based on the various pirate factions. A first preview shows that they are indeed very powerful. Stay tuned for further information on this!
Rorqual changes – Summer and beyond
The Rorqual will be rebalanced later this year. It will receive AoE links, a defensive superweapon, and brand new, powerful excavator superdrones. Details and further information can be expected later this year.
Ship bumping – at maximum for 3 minutes
A small, but important change is coming. A ship will get into warp no later than 3 minutes after the warp was initiated, regardless of any bumping, as long as the warp engines aren’t disabled (warp scrambled, bubble etc.).
Project Discovery has been extremely successful
Project Discovery, the Citizen Science in EVE, has been extremely successful. Alone in the first 24 hours, we saw more than 460,000 classifications with 14,500 images reaching consensus. The Top 3 of the first 24 hours:
+ Uriel Paradisi Anteovnuecci with 98.2% accuracy and 1704 classifications
+ Bergmann with 96.48% accuracy and 1,137 classifications
+ Sup Mate with 92.73% accuracy and 1,193 classifications
Since the start of Project Discovery the EVE players have almost 8 million classifications! That’s incredible, especially when you consider that the combined work consumed already 34.7 years (which is the equivalent of 163 working years).
The House Tash-Murkon won the Amarr Championship and Amarr Succession Trials
In an intense Amarr Championship Final at Fanfest 2016 between the two houses Tash-Murkon and Kor-Azor, we saw Tash-Murkon emerging as the winners of the Amarr Succession Trials. Her Royal Highness Catiz Tash-Murkon is more favored by progressives and outward-looking elements in the power structure of the Amarr Empire, and now that her house won the Succession Trials, she will be the new Empress of the Amarr Empire.
Future of CREST
CREST enables the third party development community to create wonderful tools and apps. With the Citadel expansion we will see a unified CREST for both public and auth access. Beyond that, the future is even brighter! Future endpoints, which are currently under consideration, include corporation and alliance contracts, corporation fittings and access to control groups, and maybe even mail.
EVE Vegas
EVE Vegas 2016 is going to have full CCP support and will be a fantastic gathering with parties, presentations, roundtables and developer news. The theme for EVE Vegas 2016 is “Trick or Trit” and will take place at Halloween from October 28-30. Tickets are on sale now at vegas.eveonline.com.
Permaband – Wrecking Machine
Permaband, in-house rock band for CCP Games, is back to the future with the official music video for the EVE Online: Citadel cinematic trailer. Bring on the Wrecking Machine!
Art of Citadels
The new Citadel structures are beautiful structures of epic proportions. Creating the visual aspects of them was quite a challenge, it was all done in a well documented and defined process. We have used instance geometry and modular geometry to create blockouts and visuals. Certain (visual) parts got broken down to create separate technical solutions. We have also spent good amount of time to have functional, yet beautiful visuals – think about supercapital docking and the docking areas. To bring life to the concepts, we added moving parts, spline traffic, lights and holograms.
Art and Graphics panel
The popular Art and Graphics panel gave a review of past 12 months which brought new ships, ship redesigns, ship skins, visual effects, avatar apparels, improvements of old “stuff” and more. With the EVE Citadel expansion we see a huge amount of new art: new force auxiliary capitals, different Citadels in three sizes, Citadels exploding in crazy balls of fire, and Citadel hangar interior. Additionally we will see new superweapons and Citadel weapon effects. For the next releases we already have assembly array blockouts as work in progress.
President of Iceland
The President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, was the honorary guest at Fanfest. In a passionate, humorous, yet also serious speech, the president reminded the EVE Community that EVE is not only a continuation of ancient storytelling and sagas deeply rooted in Iceland, but also that EVE inspires Iceland and the icelandic people. EVE gives confidence to continue the journey into modern times. The creativity of the EVE community and CCP has been inspiring! When the president left the stage, he received roaring applause!
Charity events
The charity events, silent auction and charity dinner, have been a great success. Together the community has raised USD 16.130, amazing! Thank you very much for those!
Project Discovery tournament
The first science eSports tournament was conducted at Fanfest 2016! Scientific brains fought against each other to get the best research results. A small, but fun event!
Cosplay competition
The Cosplay competition was won by Sancta Basilica in an Armor suit and a Nova knife, follow by Max Singularity as male Fedo, and Gromby Roffo as CONCORD guard. Those costumes and representations are awesome! Thank you for these inspirations and the work poured into the cosplay event!
Fanfest 2017
Fanfest 2017 will not only celebrate the EVE Universe and its awesome communities, but also the 20th anniversary of CCP! Fanfest 2017 will take place in Iceland from April 6-8. Reserve those dates!
