The CCP EVE Online developer blog has been updated with a new post titled "Agents Made Easy". Agent changes are already deployed and Singularity and are scheduled to debut on Tranquility very soon. The post gives a lot of information about forthcoming changes.

Now, all agents in the game will have an effective quality of both -20 and +20: That is, in terms of calculating access to an agent based on your standings with his or her corporation, the system will assume that all agents are quality -20, making them (in some cases, considerably) easier to access; and at the same time, every agent will pay out rewards as if he or she had a quality of +20, meaning all agents of the same level within the same system security level (e.g., 0.6) will pay out the same amount for similar missions - and in most cases, they will pay out somewhat more than they used to.

Read more on the EVE Online dev blog.

CCP and the EVE Online team have announced a new feature to be added to the ongoing Buddy Program. When players invite their friends, they will be able to choose whether to gift that new subscriber with thirty days of game time or PLEX.

We are interested in finding out if there is an unmet desire for PLEX instead of game time. We'd also like to see if this gets more players using the Buddy Program, thus increasing the numbers of new players that join already knowing someone in game. This is an experiment. We will be monitoring this change closely, and we are prepared to adjust or abort the program if we find it isn't yielding desirable results.

We've also added a few more features based on feedback from the program and its users.

• The cap on invites has been raised from three (3) per month to ten (10) per month.
• Buddy invitations will remain valid and will no longer expire after a set period of time.

Read more on the EVE Online developer blog.

The CCP developer blog has been updated with a new anniversary post. Players will be happy to help CCP celebrate eight happy years of EVE Online by raising a bottle of Quafe Zero, a new beverage designed to boost Speed and Scan Resolution 5% for one hour with no side effects. Each player is being gifted a 6-pack of Quafe Zero.

How do you get your six pack? Easy! Starting May 6 at 00:00 UTC and ending May 31 at 00:00 UTC, you can get your six pack of Quafe Zero by following these simple steps:

• Log into the EVE Online client.
• At the character selection screen there will be a Redeem Items button in the lower right corner. Select the character you wish to receive the Quafe Zero and press the Redeem Items button.

Read more on the EVE Online dev blog.

EVE Online players are being given the opportunity to donate PLEX to assist victims of last week's horrific tornadoes and violent storms in the southeastern part of the United States. Players can contract their PLEX to the "CCP PLEX for Good" character, being sure the character is in the "C C P" corporation and that the name is spelled correctly to avoid scams.

The week of April 25 saw an unprecedented number of violent storms and tornadoes in the southern-midwestern and eastern United States. Over 330 people have reportedly died in the affected areas, with Alabama being the worst hit, with 249 fatalities being reported.

Beginning May 3, 2011 and ending at 23:59 UTC on May 16, 2011, CCP will be accepting PLEX donations for PLEX for Good: Storm Relief. Each donation will be converted into cash currency and donated to the Red Cross.

Read more on the CCP EVE Online blog.

The latest EVE Online developer blog is a lesson about the new CCP forums; what they are, how they can be exploited and how those exploits are being fixed. With the recent difficulties with the new forum system, it's a good read for those who like to 'peek under the hood'.

So, we are both evaluating what went wrong while working to get the forums back in shape and properly scrutinized. There will be more details on that forthcoming but there will not be any time pressure to release it before it is ready. We will do another public test phase to get your feedback and there will be more details on that soon. The goal is to fix the flaws, make some improvements based on your feedback and release the new forums when they are truly ready.

Read more on the EVE Online dev blog.

The EVE Online devs are at it again with a new post about Team Gridlock's aggressive war on server lag. This time, Team Gridlock discusses degradation and how acknowledging the issues facing players with regard to lag actually helps them work to defeat the evil lag beast.

Gridlock has been spending a lot of our time to date reducing load via optimization.  We can go further on this path - and very likely will - but we're at a point where a lot of the easy wins are behind us.  Going multi-threaded falls into the increasing capacity category - it increases how much load can be processed per second, but never as much as most people think.  We'll get there some day 'cause, well, we'll have to, but for today it's way more work for the benefit we'd see from it to be worth attacking. 

Throttling load is a much more compelling proposition at this point, now that we've cleared out a pile of easy optimizations.  A few different proposals on what we could do here have been put forward.  The one most people jump to first is to have Destiny, our physics simulation, update at a lower resolution than once per second as we get overloaded.  That would help lower the load of doing the actual simulation, but it turns out that only accounts for 5-10% of the load, so it wouldn't buy us much.

Read the full (and fairly technical) post on the EVE Online dev blog.

For the first time ever, EVE Online players will have the opportunity to walk around their ships with the release of the Capatain's Quarters onto the Duality test server this weekend. Acknowledging that the Captain's Quarters aren't in the final stage of development, devs felt it important to let players check it out in preparation for the first iteration of Incarna.

• Minmatar Captains Quarters, new tutorials, and new crash-course on Duality beginning on  Thursday, April 21,  in the Emrayur system
• This build is not fully stable or complete, you have been warned!
• Captain's Quarters are "work-in-progress", but contains interfaces for:
  • Planetary Interaction
  • Corporation management/recruitment
  • Character re-customization
  • Ship fitting

New things, coming soon to a test-server near you

So when, and where can you check this out for yourself? We will be putting all the new goodness, in all of its "work in progress" glory up onto Duality from Thursday, April 21 through Monday, April 25. The new Captain's Quarters currently replaces the old hangar/station environment, so you will find yourself there instead, upon docking. Currently you will only see the Minmatar version of the basic Captain's Quarters, but we will eventually have a spankin' new basic Captain's Quarters for each race before we're done. In addition to the new digs, you will also encounter our new crash-course designed to help teach new players the basics of EVE Online in a more intuitive and user-friendly way than what you would currently find on Tranquility.

Read more on the CCP EVE Online developer blog.

Older players will remember Arnar as CCP Zulupark, that horrible guy who nerfed their carriers back in 2007. Alternatively, you may remember a fantastic forum thread from 2008 in which he personally answered countless player questions on game design and balance issues. Since becoming senior producer on EVE, Arnar has been a strong advocate of this kind of heavy communication with players. Through devblogs, interviews and interactions with the Council of Stellar Management, he's helped to fill the information vacuum players have become accustomed to.

Check out the full interview about EVE Online here.

CCP Sreegs has posted a new blog about the recent security issues with the EVE Online forums. In it, Sreegs details the exploits, what has and is shut down, what fans should be concerned about and more. It's a good read and, in typical CCP fashion, reveals the plan to fix it ASAP.

We do not see any evidence of anyone being able to access your personal information or credit cards, which are actually stored in a secure environment which isn't in the communication path for the forums in any way. In essence, the vulnerabilities were limited to people's ability to escalate their privileges on the forum itself and nowhere else. Even were someone able to have injected script the method by which your information would have been at risk would have been in the form of malware, session theft or keylogging of your local machine rather than some window into our secure environment. That being said, it's always a best practice to keep your computers safe from malware and your passwords changed on a regular basis and now's as good a time as any to scan that PC and change your password.

Read more here.

The sixth Council of Stellar Management has officially been 'sworn in' to represent the wishes of the player base in EVE Online. To start its tenure, the current CSM has penned a letter outlining what it believes is an effective communication strategy.

What the CSM can do is demonstrate to CCP that we are a valuable interlocutor with useful ideas; that listening to the CSM (and through the CSM, to you), is good for the game and good for business.

We intend to highlight certain issues of interest to the playerbase and campaign for their adoption. Because CSM6 is united as a body, rather than a cacophony of individuals, we have the capability to bring our narrative to the forefront in the media, on the forums, and within the game.

Already, change has been implemented in the CSM: we are all together in a Skype channel 24/7, which has allowed a rapid consensus around certain shared truths to be formed. That might sound trivial, but regular real-time communication outside the context of formal meetings and forum posts allows us to understand one another more effectively and become better advocates.

Read more here.

It seems as though the new forums over at EVE are causing some more headaches for the CCP team, of course, it's nice to know that that security risk is out of the way.

It has been an interesting weekend so far. Our shiny new forums haven’t worked quite as expected and they have been going up and down a few times. We have opened up our trusted old forums for your posting pleasure and we will be keeping the new forums down until they can be sorted out. There will be more information on this on Monday. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and we thank you for your patience and understanding.

Visit the Official Site here.

A new DevBlog coming from CCP about an incident with their forums yesterday and today reassures players that, despite some security issues that came with their new forums, they've been addressed and players can rest assured "that none of their personal details, login credentials or billing information were compromised". Check it out.

we disabled the new forums temporarily while we investigated and addressed the situation. We can assure players that none of their personal details, login credentials or billing information were compromised as that information is maintained on a separate encrypted server.

We have since identified and fixed these security issues, and have patched and tested the software. We believe that we have resolved the security issue successfully. We will continue to investigate the cause of these problems, and hope to have more information available to you soon.

At 03:30 UTC on April 9, we took the forums down again for a second time to apply a hotfix that would restore several moderator features. Unfortunately, this hotfix did not resolve the issues with moderator functionality, and as a result, we are keeping the forums down until the full team is available Saturday morning to resolve the issue.

Read the whole dev blog here.

A new blog post from CCP Elais has arrived on the official EVE Online site. The post first announced the opening of the new and improved EVE forums and then goes into some detail about the new features. The old forums will remain but fans will no longer be able to post on them.

The new forums are located at https://forums.eveonline.com and they are now fully integrated into EVE Gate. They will replace the old forum that was on eveonline.com, including the same functionality you previously enjoyed, along with cool new features such as:

• The ability to Like posts and see number of Likes per post
• The ability to add threads to a favorites list
• Simple and advanced searching options
• RSS feeds for threads and search criteria

Read more here.

MMORPG.com Quiz Master Drew Wood is back this week with a new test of your gray matter. This time, Drew focuses on the ever-popular EVE Online. Put on your thinking caps and get started, students. Then report your results in the comments.

Welcome once more, ladies and gentlemen, to the quiz! This week, I'm going to take a look at one of the longer running games on our game list (not the longest, by any means, but definately one of the elder statesmen of the MMO world), EVE Online.

Read more of Drew Wood's The Quiz: The EVE Online Edition.

EVE Online fans with a penchant for understanding all things economy in the game will want to check out the latest Quarterly Economic Report. The QEN features all the economic news up to and including the end of 2010.

This quarter was an unusual one for EVE Online for several different reasons. Starting at a slow pace, it quickly jumped into overdrive once the details of the Incursion expansion started to become clear. The introduction of a new salvage ship (the Noctis), removal of learning skills, and excitement about the final release of the Incursion feature in January all contributed to a very active Q4 of 2010. So active, in fact, that we saw the daily trade value record increasing twice in December, ending in an incredible 1.8 trillion ISK’s worth of trades in a 24-hour period, in more than 1.2 million individual trades – and this is only on the main EVE market, not taking into account contracts or direct trade between players.

Download or view the QED here.

PLEX for Good is an on-going charitable program initiated by the players of EVE Online. Past drives have assisted the victims of the Haiti earthquake and excessive flooding in Pakistan. To date, EVE Online players have donated over $108,000 USD (over 6100 PLEX) to those in need via this program, with almost $155,000 USD being donated by EVE Online players to charity since 2004.

Read more here.

User Interface

* The calculated security status of solar systems will now be displayed as negative where appropriate (See: Player Owned Structures, Outposts and Stations).

* 'Show Contracts' option is now available in the menu of non-NPC corporation info.

* Player portraits are visible in the following user interface windows in which players interact: Trade, Give Money, Chat Invite and Selected Object in space.

* The width of the 'runs' boxes in Science & Industry has been increased to account for the production of items in larger batches, such as ammo.

* Player-owned stations now appear like NPC stations in the UI with their location displayed as a prefix before the Station name.

Check out the whole (long) list here.

After spending last weekend at the EVE Online Fan Fest, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood came away with a lot of new information both about the game as it is now and what CCP plans for the future. In today's article, Jon takes a look at "A Future Vision" as presented by CCP during Fan Fest. See what Jon has to say about it and then leave a comment or two below.

With Incarna starting to roll out, I wonder if some folks aren’t going to see this video and look for the moon, when the short term reality is actually significantly less. Sure, walking through stations and getting involved in all kinds of political intrigue sounds completely awesome, and it’s something I’m looking forward to in the game, but that’s nowhere near where the developers are going to be when Incarna starts to roll out this summer.

Read more Of Jon Wood's EVE Online: A Future Vision - Commentary.

The CCP dev blog has been updated with news that mounts are coming to EVE Incarna. Along with this exciting news is the announcement that obedience training, mount control, animal husbandry, veterinarian and gene splicing will be added to the game in the near future. Oh, and free kittens for everyone.

Imagine this -- you spend a long day oppressing your fellow capsuleers in space, or you've just lost your third officer fit Bhaalgorn in another 15 versus 1 engagement. (You'll kill 'em all next time amirite?) Sometimes, it's just time to dock up, kick up your feet and relax. Sure, you'll be able to visit an Establishment in Incarna and drink away your sorrows with some spiked Quafe or consume a fistful of boosters just because you can. But what about those nights when you just want to chill in your Captain's Quarters?

We've already discussed the character re-customization, market ticker, and news feeds accessible within your Captain's Quarters. But what about companionship? Especially of the legal and not by-the-hour variety? That's where your mount comes in.

Read more here.