Hello and happy Valentines Day from Reykjavik! This is CCP Fozzie, one of your friendly neighborhood Game Designers, and I’m here to share with you all our plans for Ship and Module rebalancing in Retribution 1.1 scheduled for February 19th!

First let’s take a moment to look back at the road we’ve travelled together thus far.

Introduction

Are you new to EVE Online? Welcome to the world of Brave Newbies Inc. then, a group of people that is mainly also new to EVE Online. This group is organized in the typical EVE Online manner as corporation; a corporation which sprung into existence on January 31, 2013, just a few days ago before these lines were written.

Good news everyone! We here at Team Pony Express are continuing in our mission to revamp, rework and improve parts of the EVE Online client which haven't been touched in a while or just need some more attention.

As many of you will know, we completely rebuilt the Corporation Finder with our Winter 2012 expansion EVE Online: Retribution.

Time flies - it has almost been one year already since our first Dev Blog on the rebalancing initiative, and much has happened since then. The balancing team, extended with the addition of CCP Fozzie, the machine sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor, and soon to be joined by someone else you guys know about, has so far tackled tech 1 Frigates, Destroyers and Cruisers.

Hi!

Team Super Friends has been working on some Little Things for Retribution 1.1. We decided to focus a bit on making the war experience better since there were a few things we knew we could do better. Now lets get to it!

War Things

Group wars in the war history
The war history  in the info window for corporations and alliances was getting kind of crowded for active corporations/alliances.

Retribution brought 5 new ships, the Venture mining frigate and the 4 destroyers; Algos, Corax, Dragoon and Talwar.  From December 4 to the end of the year, 107,273 blueprints were sold for the new ships. The trade value was 848 billion ISK.

Hi I’m CCP Quant

In June 2012 I decided to take a break from banking (Quantitative Research) and joined Dr. Eyjó’s team, Research and Statistics, as a Data Analyst. I’m mainly responsible for predictive modeling, statistical research and general data analysis. 

This past weekend EVE Online saw two major player events, The Battle of Asakai and Red vs.

The Battle of Asakai, Poinen Must Burn and more…

I’m CCP Manifest, the Public Relations and Social Media Fleet Commander for EVE Online. I work closely with both development and the community team on messaging, gathering feedback and helping to magnify the accomplishments, dreams and actions of the EVE playerbase to the lamer places in life outside the boundaries of its virtual universe.

Pop-quiz: What do the Autopilot Route, Current System, Factional Warfare, Incursions, Agent Missions and Planetary Interaction have in common? I’m sure it’s possible to engineer various clever punch lines to that question, but the boring, logical answer is that they all fight to conquer the screen real estate next to the Neocom.

Ola chillbros and other bros!

As a part of trying to educate and make the devs at CCP even smarter, most of the EVE devs had a course in some basic (and not so basic) SQL by our own database gurus CCP Prism X and CCP Creber Cattus.

To put what we learned to good use, we then had a hack day.

Greetings most honorable space pilots!

As CCP Seagull recently announced, Retribution 1.1 will be shipping on 12th February. With this change, Team Five 0 is adding something that was much requested as part of the Crimewatch changes, but that didn't fit in to the original release plan: The ability for consenting players to flag themselves for legal combat against one-another without (legal) outside interference - AKA Dueling.

Background

Prior to the big Crimewatch revamp we introduced in Retribution, this was possible via a slightly awkward method of can-flipping: By 'stealing' one unit of ammo from someone's jet-can, you could flag yourself to that player, allowing them to legally attack you.

Fellow space pilots. 

Last December, the 12th to the 14th 2012, the CSM visited Iceland for a scheduled series of sessions with the EVE Online developers. For more than 8 hours a day, 3 days in a row, important space matters were discussed.

The topics covered during the summit are the following:

• EVE Online - The Next Decade
• CSM as Stakeholder
• CSM Whitepaper & Election Systems
• Null-sec: Part 1
• Null-sec: Part 2
• Ship Balancing
• Factional Warfare
• Bounty Hunting
• Mercenaries, Wars and Crimewatch
• EVE UI
• Live Events
• CREST
• Out of Client
• Player Experience
• ART
• EVE Economy
• EVE Marketing
• Customer Loyalty
• Community Website Exercise
• Marketing Feedback Session
• Prototype Feedback Session

Hi everyone, I'm CCP Seagull.

CCP Unifex has asked me to take on the role of Senior Producer of EVE Online Development, to lead work on the product vision and roadmap for EVE Online.

Dear EVE Players,

What a year 2012 has been for EVE Online. With Crucible 1.1 coming out at the end of January, through an amazing Fanfest in March, the Inferno release in June and then the great success of Retribution in December, we have had a year where we have gone back to the core of EVE Online and done the right thing.

Citizens of New Eden

My name is CCP Nullarbor from Team True Grit and I am here to introduce to you some new space friends: the mercenaries of DUST 514.

DUST 514 is the second major game in development in the EVE Universe, where the players are mercenaries fighting ground wars on the same planets that you have been flying past in EVE Online for almost 10 glorious years.

Introduction

From massive fleet battles with thousands of pilots to duels between two brave spaceship captains – the EVE Online Universe has it all! Further information about these events, with all the excitement, drama, and triumph or crushing losses, is provided by the EVE community on public killboards.

Killboards can help data-mining and might expose behavioral patterns of pilots; they also can give an easy overview of important events and provide a list of top pilots or entities.

Expansions spur trading, both prior to realease and after.  The effect of the preparation for Retribution can best be seen in the Mineral Price Index, which rose by 8% from October to November.  A rise was to be expected, as Retribution brought new Tech I ships and major changes to many of the already existing Tech I ships.

Nocxium, Isogen and Zydrine prices contributed most to the rise in the MPI.  The prices of these three minerals rose by 17%, 20% and 26% respectively.  The price of Morphite rose by 33% in the period, even though it is not used in the production of the new or modified ships.  On the other hand, the prices of Tritanium, Pyerite and Mexallon were very lightly affected.  Only Isogen and Morphite show a notable increase in traded volume between months.  The increase is 17% for Isogen and 20% for Nocxium.  Traded volume of other minerals remains stable or even falls, as is the case for Zydrine and Megacyte.

The following graph shows how Retribution affected the manufacturing of frigates, destroyers and cruisers.

There may have been less hoarding of minerals than one might have expected prior to this expansion.  There was, however, some discussion among traders about the announced changes to NPC supplied containers, which are now made by players.  There was the possibility that the new player-made containers would be recyclable, making it possible for industrialists to gain vast quantities of minerals from local NPC supply, thus saving on transportation hassle.  Given enough material requirements, the recycled materials might even have become much cheaper than market prices.  Pilots may remember a similar incident from the introduction of Planetary Interaction.

The following graph shows the trade in containers.

The data shows some large but isolated spikes in container sales but not an all out frenzy.  Total container sales in October and November were only 86% above the total sales value for August and September.  It‘s heartwarming to see that the majority of players did not risk their money on CCP repeating the mistake from the introduction of Planetary Interaction.  However, there were a few that did.  The biggest single buyer of containers in the period from the dev blog announcement to deployment bought containers for 28 billion ISK.  There‘s a good chance there‘s a station out there somewhere where you can get a good price on containers on the secondary market.

The index values for November are:

Changes in the Mineral Price Index have already been covered.  The Primary Producer Price Index showed a 1.7% deflation, driven by datacores supplied from Factional Warfare, while the Secondary Producer Price Index  saw 0.6% deflation, with hardly any changes of note.  The Consumer Price Index displayed 0.7% inflation, with most categories changing very little.  Most of the inflation is caused by an 11% rise in implant prices, which has to do with loyalty points being a bit harder to come by in Factional Warfare.

All in all, this was fairly quiet month on the markets, except for the mineral market.  The figures for December will obviously be less stable and the effect of the rising mineral prices and increased activity should become clearly visible as inflation in consumer prices.

For more detail on the indices, please refer to the Market Indices page on Evelopedia.

Full series of the four main price indices in Excel format.

Full series of the four main price indices in CSV format.

At Fanfest this year, we introduced new technology in our cluster called CREST, that allows us to connect new applications to the EVE cluster in a much more interactive way than the current EVE API. We also announced that we would introduce a Developer License for 3rd party developers for those who want to use CREST in their applications, so that creating apps around EVE would be governed by its own license, not just by the player EULA.

Hey all,

There's a major back story update ready for your perusal - a seriously major, extensive, positively luxuriant update - so I wanted to drop you a quick note about how we've been fleshing out the lore and where we're taking it.

After the advent of the Fiction Portal's launch on the EVElopedia, we haven't been content to sit on our laurels and marvel at the 1,000+ articles already on there.

...then this is for you! Christmas, CCP, You, and Our Thanks!

Pilots of New Eden,

It is that time of year again. The time of year when you curl up in front of the fire with a hot cup of coco... HAHAHA who am I kidding. It's that time of year when you all log into EVE to get away from your family so that you can actually enjoy your holidays!

To help support you all through this difficult time of year we have a set of gifts for you.