Tonight saw the much awaited return of the O7 Show, CCP’s very own in-house live stream show. Tonight’s show was mainly on point, featuring some great announcements that are sure to have capsules across New Eden celebrating throughout the night, with the only dull point being CCP Bettik’s shameful attempt to PVP in Jita. Upon showing us their new set, seen below, CCP dived right in with an announcement that is sure to make everyone happy.
The O7 Show’s New Set
Expansions:
CCP announced they will be revering back to their old method of releasing expansions, while also keeping their 6 week release schedule, in a devblog released after the O7 Show, CCP Seagul said:
Yes, I said expansion. We want to give you EVE Online expansions with a more epic feel to them again, but in a new form.
In the summer of 2014, we started delivering updates to EVE in a new way: instead of two expansions per year, we switched to a more rapid way of releasing features, doing about 10 releases per year.
Here’s what we’ve liked about releasing updates almost every month:
- Small and medium features get to you quicker
- We can give you stuff early and continuously develop features with more feedback from the whole community
- We can take on more ambitious projects because the timelines are more flexible
Here’s what we think hasn’t worked so great with this new release cadence:
- It encouraged us to take bigger changes that should really belong together and chop them up into multiple releases once each part was done – which has created a disjointed experience in some cases
- We put a lot of responsibility on you players to figure out what’s coming and when, and what the future of EVE is, instead of us packaging big changes together and telling you about them all at once
We have gotten a lot of feedback along these same lines from you players, so we are going to change to a hybrid release model that hopefully brings together the best of both worlds:
- We will continue to release features on a regular five-week schedule, especially things like quality of life changes, ship balance changes, visual upgrades, new ship skins, storyline developments, and other content. Some of these features will be surprisingly big and some relatively small but still important.
So for the most part, we’ll continue with the style of releases you have seen since Kronos in 2014. The next two are Vanguard and Parallax, bringing you things like multi-buy, new burner missions, alterations to the new sovereignty system, changes to jump fatigue, and a whole mess of graphical improvements.
But we will also bring back expansions. What’s then the difference between a release and an expansion in this hybrid form? First, an expansion will be a set of big, connected features that both make impactful change on EVE, and make a statement about what kind of game EVE is. Second, there won’t be a fixed number of them per year, but rather we will announce when we have one in the making and what the main features are. While we will have a timeframe in mind for the release of the expansion and tell you about it, the exact date won’t be pinned down until we are confident that the state of all the connected features are in a good place.
Alliance Tournament XIII
The second notable thing mentioned in the O7 Show was the confirmation that Camel Empire and Warlords of the Deep’s Alliance Tournament XIII prizes were frozen during the week, pending a full and thorough investigation by CCP into the allegations of collusion between both teams in this years Alliance Tournament. For those of you who missed the story this week, our report on the situation can be found here.
CCP also announced that they had produced a series of graphs, providing detailed insight into the Alliance Tournament, along with stating that over 1.2 Trillion ISK worth of ships were killed in this years tournament.
A Graph Showing The Most Popular Ships In Alliance Tournament XIII
Amarr Succession Trials
CCP also revcaled the format of the Amarr Succession Trials.For those of you unawares, the Empress Jamyl I was assassinated by the Drifter threat, and the Succession Trials the are Amarr Empire’s way of deciding the rightful mporo/Empress. The format will be a 4v4 format, consisting of the champion, and his 3 supporting team mates. If a candidate meets an as yet unspecified criteria, he will have to face off against other candidates who have been chosen as potential champions for the said house. Once each house has a decided champion, the champions will face against each other, with the last two champions being flown to FanFest 2016 for the final trial.
CCP also announced that Gold and Silver Magnates will be making a return to EVE, with the eventual winners team recieving a Gold Magnate each, and each of the losing chosen houses candidates team members receiving a Silver Magnate each.
CSM Members
We then saw CCP talk to three CSM Members. Cagali, Mike Azeria and Sion. We were assured that CCP and the CSM members are working cooperatively to solve current issues. Focus groups were also mentioned, a suggestion that I am sure will appeal to many veterans of EVE. The suggestion was that experienced members of EVE form focus groups under certain CSM members, to aid the CSM and CCP in solving relevant issues.
Also mentioned was the fact that at this weeks CSM summit in Iceland, was the fact that HighSec war declarations, the bounty system, and the criminal system may need changing and adjusting.
The final CSM update was a new webpage, where people can keep up to date with information from the CSM and also find contact details to get in contact with any member of the CSM.
Economics
We then had CCP Quant reveal that he had been busy developing software to compute in game economics into figures that could be easily read, and mentioned the possibility of monthly economic updates, including the ability to see trade between regions, where certain ships are built, and the amount of ISK traded per day against the ISK active in system, and other fun economic data.
Vanguard Update
We received news of the upcoming Vanguard update, including the ‘Buy Multiple’ feature, which allows a capsuleer to purchase multiple modules at once, and is currently available on the Singularity Server. For more information, see updates.eveonline.com.
EVE Politics
A O7 Show edition of Hendrick Tallardar‘s NullSec Recap.
EVE Hospital Drive
EVE-Online vs Boredom
Hello my name is Jonas aka C4w3 have been playing Eve since it began and have enjoyed every day of it.
I’m suffering from diabetes and chronic kidney failure which forces me to attend the hospital on a weekly basis. About a year ago the some of the young kids that spend extended periods at the hospital saw me playing Eve on my laptop and were intrigued by it.
So as time went on I introduced a few of them to EVE, just getting most of them the hang of it and didn’t think much of it.
And since my hospital schedule doesn’t sync up with them every time I found it awesome to see that one of the computers had an updated version of eve. After investigate the matter I found out that the kids I had introduced to Eve had now started to play with other kids while I was gone.
I posted a flyer saying “join in on the fun and beat the boredom hospitals takes on young and old” and we now have around 15-20 active kids playing EVE at the age between 14-20 in all branches including pvp, pve, mining, trade etc. I’m now starting to gather them all in one spot for some fun during the otherwise boring and painful weeks at the hospital, and this is where I could use some help from this amazing community.With the help of some amazing and generous capsuleers, my wife and I have been putting together gift packages which include 1 PLEX, 1 set of +3 implants and 100m ISK. With generous donations from Ziraili Onzo, we have also started a corp called “Care for kids” and an alliance. Maybe we will be able to carve out a small area of New Eden for them to call their home at some point.
Our goal: To provide a break and to drift away in our pixelspace game instead of feeling sad and being in pain.
What we need help with: Donations, ships, mods, and in general everything that makes their eve life a bit better due to limited gametime.
Donations and help ingame should be to M1sty.
Special mentions: RKK for supporting the idea, EVE-Bet for generous donations, Niraia EVE Online Hold’Em, JEFFRAIDER and Grendell last but not least Mom Bellicose.
Love Jonas AKA C4w3.
I wanted to write something to open this piece up, but I thought it would be best to allow the post to speak to itself. If this is something that you feel empathic towards, please show your support.
With EVE-NT Sold Out, Make Sure You Get Your EVE Vegas Tickets Now
Quafe Skins
Finally, CCP’s last announcement was the reveal of the Quafe Hyperion skin.
