EVE Online News

Sociable Capsuleers, 

As vast and varied as the world of New Eden is, the EVE Online community is just as diverse. Between the EVE Forums, subreddits, Discord communities, podcasts, streams, and news sites, the amount of information to be navigated and consumed can be truly head-spinning. To celebrate the EVE community and help you find your way in this crazy, wild, wonderful world, we’re introducing a new bi-weekly piece: The Community Beat!

Our aim in these articles is to provide a foundation for all aspects of the community: in-game events, developer chats, player meets, CSM reports, and much more. With a landscape as diverse and turbulent as EVE’s has become over the last near-nineteen years, no version of the Community Beat will look identical. We’re very excited to share the wonderful stories of the EVE community, and look forward to chatting regularly.   

Welcome to the inaugural publication of the EVE Online Community Beat: sit back, relax, and enjoy some refreshing Quafe!




The CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon, coming soon to EVE, is a new kind of observatory structure, intended to draw enormous Rogue Drone attention toward itself and those near it, providing a new and revolutionary way to engage in exciting and profitable gameplay content in Low and Null Security space. This beacon requires a significant influx of power to spool up, however, and can consequently only be activated by specific kinds of capital ships.

Originally posted by Team

"We’ve had just over 4,700 CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacons deployed in the last week, and we’re really happy with the responses. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve made a few changes and we're still on the lookout for more. We're excited to see how you CRAB! - EVE Online Team

To learn more details about this swarm-attracting beacon, tune in to Pando & Mirandalorian’s Podcast this week, where CCP Rise will be coming on to discuss the feature in greater depth. Likewise, you can learn more about how to get a sneak peek at this feature on the Singularity Test Server here.




The Foundation Quadrant saw the four core nations of New Eden – the Gallente Federation, the Amarr Empire, the Minmatar Republic, and the Caldari State – celebrate what it means to be a member of their respective empires with various holidays.

Not to be outdone by the core Empires’ supporters, pilots aligned with the enigmatic Triglavian Collective have come together to celebrate the formation of the Domain of Pochven – the climax of the successful attainment of Final Liminality in 27 systems across Empire space – on a newly designated day of celebration on 13 October, dubbed Totality Day. Various player events - which are by no means limited to the RP community - will be taking place from 9 to 16 October, so join in the week-long celebration (aiming to be at least three times as energized as the Empires’ holidays) and embrace your inner triangle!

What was your favorite Empire celebration? Tweet using the #CommunityBeat hashtag with your favorite moment, and the Empires will send a SKIN code to their favorite responses.



EVE suffers no shortage of extremely talented content creators covering a wide array of gameplay styles. One of our most prominent streamers, Bjorn Bee, is enthusiastically dedicated to showing New Eden what it means to PvP both as a lone wolf, as well as in small-to-medium sized fleets. Whether you want to experience late-game content or learn more about PvP mechanics, Bjorn is a great resource – and if you're interested in participating in PvP fleets, Bjorn also has NPSI (Not Purple, Shoot It) roams where he takes viewers out in public fleets, open to many skill levels. Be warned, FC Bee is not afraid to take a fight, so this might be a one-way trip!



If PvP isn’t your forte, have no fear – Frost is here!  Frost Ees has a wonderfully informative YouTube channel covering player news in EVE Online, as well as the Alliance Spotlight series where she interviews various alliance leaders from across the cluster. Whether you’re looking to catch up on what EVE players have been up to, or simply want to stay up to date with their hijinks, Frost’s Weekly Updates will keep you abreast without bogging you down in lexicon. 





By no means do we only take notice of our Partners; EVE players across the world constantly surprise us with their talent. For SHIPTember (which we’re totally making a thing), Oleena Natiras of GoonWaffe has combined a love for both EVE and LEGO to tremendous effect, so be sure to check out their absolutely jaw-dropping LEGO rendition of the iconic Apocalypse battleship!



Thanks for sharing, Oleena – we’re positively gold with envy!




Being able to unwind and put a face to the voices you’ve heard on Teamspeak, Mumble, and Discord is a truly special experience, so for those wanting to experience the splendor of an in-person player gathering, some very storied venues will at long last resume and continue their traditions in the coming weeks! We’ve had the pleasure of going to meetups far and wide, and each one is spectacular and memorable in their own way.

Returning to its roots as a player-run meetup, EVE Vegas will host the annual meetup from 22 October to 24 October. With almost 400 confirmed guests from across New Eden, it once again proves to be a consistently popular venue year after year.

On the other side of the Atlantic, EVE London returns after a 21-month break at a brand-new venue on 6 November. What started as a corp meetup at a pub many moons ago has evolved over the years into an institution all its own. Pop in to hobnob with fellow Capsuleers for, amongst many other things, the Alliance Tournament XVII Viewing Party! If this will be your first time attending EVE London, a bit of advice: go easy on the POS Fuel (you’ll thank us later).

In conjunction with these events, we’re happy to announce that the FriendShip has finally been cleared to undock; CCP will be sending a few developers to support both events, as well as various other player events through the year. We are overjoyed to be able to once again meet with you, kick back, and hear all the wonderful stories that always come out of these events!

Kybernauts of the Ancient Domains,

On 13 October 2020, the Invasion campaign of the Triglavian Collective reached its zenith with the formation of the Domain of Pochven and the permanent anchoring of the Triglavians in New Eden, following the realization of Totality through the hard-earned attainment of Final Liminality in 27 star systems across New Eden.

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This year, on the eve of the anniversary of the re-anchoring of Triglavian civilization in New Eden, we’re preparing to celebrate these world-changing events – made possible by the assistance rendered by Kybernauts across New Eden who aligned themselves with the Triglavian cause – with a small environment effect across Pochven from 8 to 19 October, bringing all pilots a 2.0 AU/sec warp speed increase in this already turbulent domain, as well as a collection of new landmark sites related to the Invasion arc and its outcome:

Perun Clade’s Liminal Proving Grounds, Veles Clade’s Automata Semiosis Sobornost, and Svarog Clade’s Skarkon Orbital Shipyards will be found throughout the Krais of the Clades across Pochven, and the EDENCOM Memorial to Triglavian Invasions, dedicated to all those lost during the tumultuous year and a half of conflict, will be established in Yulai.

The dedicated community that has coalesced around the Triglavian Collective, having assisted in the Invasions throughout Invasion Chapter 3, is organizing a slew of events during the week of October 9 to 16 – including PVP fleet roams, a furious free-for-all, a gathering to share war stories from the Invasion, and various parades, and more!

You can read all about the upcoming events in this post on the in-character section of the EVE forums.

During this time, we’ll also be launching a special one-day Proving Ground event on 9 October, pitting two three-man teams against each other in furious combat, commanding the deadly 9 Tactical Troika Classification cladeship of Svarog Clade’s Kikimora subclade in a heated contest!

As the Domain of Pochven enters its second year, the Porevitium Transmuters anchored at each sun maintain their operations; the mighty Xordazh World Arks roam the stars of the Clades, and the gargantuan Vyraj Anchorages thrum unceasingly with immense and unknowable purpose at the core of each Krai.

Stabilization of the Ancient Domains continues – and while the fiercely independent Clades of the Triglavian Collective may dissent on many matters, they maintain a necessary cooperation for the greater good of their people, and continue their efforts to guide the peoples of New Eden toward their ideal alignment in the Flow of Vyraj.

And as the Triglav mingle with those who remain inhabiting the worlds of Pochven, rumors of nonaggressive contact with the Empires mount, and the stoic forces of the Vigilant Tyrannos continue their ruthless trespass into the domain of those who call them “Ancient Enemy”.

Only time will tell what the future may hold for both the Triglavian Collective and the nations of the cluster they have returned to; but no matter what may come to pass, the attainment of Totality, the struggles on both sides of the preceding conflict, and the formation of Pochven – made possible by every Kybernaut who heeded the Convocation's call through Zorya Triglav – will never be forgotten.


Have a happy Totality Day, and see you in space!

Tuesday, 14 September 2021, is a significant flash point which represents the end of an era and the access to powerful opportunities for EVE Online. Lost in the bright lights of the new NPE and tucked under the pixels of Skill Plans reverberates a fundamental change in how EVE Online moves into the future.

The last time the networking layer was fundamentally changed was in 2011 with the introduction of CCP’s IOCP implementation, “CarbonIO”, which eventually became the foundation of the infamous time dilation. Originating as some scribbles under the heading “Project Sanguine”, reasoning began about the problem space in which CarbonIO lived. Every optimization in EVE comes down to careful negotiation with Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Simply, Python can only do one thing at a time. EVE’s adoption of Stackless Python, implementation of IOCP through StacklessIO then CarbonIO, and cooperative design around time dilation is all to maintain the favorite illusion: New Eden breathes. What if the GIL didn’t have to be courted for every idea that arose? How can the hardware industry’s explosion in core counts over individual processor clock speed be taken advantage of?

There have been many experiments in this regard which are tangential to Project Sanguine, with the most public one being EVE: Aether Wars. The goal there wasn’t to fundamentally change the communication model of EVE Online, but instead change the simulation model. In contrast, Project Sanguine targeted the boring bits which represent EVE’s dense feature set. Simulating nearly 9,000 players in the same space could be faster if New Eden didn’t have to worry about everything else on its to-do list. So Project Sanguine landed on two goals: dodge the GIL and clear the table for moar lasers.

The first form of Project Sanguine emerged with ESI and the first iteration of EVE Portal in late 2016. Through these projects, a new paradigm was established within the server architecture of EVE Online: a message bus. From this new escape hatch, the bottlenecks associated with the GIL were rediscovered, but with a clearer picture of their expensive manifestations: message routing, serialization, and transmission. If one ship fires one laser in the middle of 1000 ships, that’s 1000 messages which need to be sent immediately all over the globe. The simulation must address that message to 1000 destinations as a copy (message routing), convert that data to a wire format (serialization), and then send the data over the wire (transmission). In most cases, CarbonIO has been addressing each of those issues, but within the custody of the GIL. CarbonIO has served EVE Online well for quite some time, but much has changed on the turbulent seas of the internets since 2011.

After seeing the patterns evolve in this new ecosystem, it became clear that a more standardized protocol was needed if this paradigm were ever to be exploited. With the integration of gRPC it became possible to combine the message routing capabilities of the message bus with the lighting fast serialization of protocol buffers (gRPC’s message standard). It is still necessary to schedule data with the GIL for transmission, but this is now buffered at a higher level on a separate thread. This means all transmission, serialization, and message routing happens outside the GIL except the memory copy that has to happen in-between. It cannot get much faster than that.

moar lasers

A firehose was now attached to New Eden, but where does it all go? When the building of ESI began, so did the adoption of more cloud native technologies such as Kubernetes, and as the need for simple concurrency primitives to digest this information started to be seen, a greater move into Go was made. With these technologies accumulating into an ecosystem of their own, work started on building out features to take advantage of the new ability to work with New Eden with modern standards. You’ve seen many of them.




The first was the Activity Tracker. It attaches itself to the firehose and monitors New Eden’s respiration to keep track of all your exploits. There’s also a variation of that with Opportunities which attempts to predict the trajectory of a Capsuleer and highlight more interesting parts of New Eden. The message bus has also been used to power the Abyssal Proving Grounds leaderboards. A massive amount of work has gone into providing the development teams with an ecosystem to harness the power of a messaging architecture with these features. However, each of these features represents a gap in capabilities: the desktop client.

Until the release of Skill Plans, each feature has “smuggled” data into Tranquility through CarbonIO. This is no longer the case as skill plan operations are not only communicated through gRPC but never touch Tranquility, or its database.



Why is bypassing Tranquility and its database so important? To really understand that, one must talk about the failures. Part of the journey has led to many new techniques and tools in which to view New Eden. One concept is distributed tracing "Tracing") using a new favorite toy: Honeycomb.io. (More about that journey here.) Armed with all the new shiny toys, it was clear exactly what was happening with Skill Plans as it was released into the wild:



It could also be seen in general that the performance was ok with a lot of room for improvement:



Then the following morning a chaos monkey appeared and started to harass the hamsters:



Yeah, that’s 500k milliseconds, AKA 8 minutes and 20 seconds, to send a message. The details will require some Fanfest beer and a marker board. Here are the important parts of this fail state: Tranquility didn’t go down, thousands of players weren’t disconnected, and most players weren’t affected (you can see a majority of the messages are still packed in the very bottom of the graph). This is because we don’t communicate at all with Tranquility in the traditional sense. No CarbonIO to the traditional proxies which then go to the server node and then the database. Instead, Tranquility focuses on what’s more important, and the EVE desktop client is communicating via gRPC into the new ecosystem where the Skill Plan service lives with its own database.



As you might remember recently, a volcano was drained to test No Downtime for Tranquility. One of the most powerful characteristics of the new ecosystem: No Downtime. There wasn’t a need to restart Tranquility to rescue Skill Plans. There was no need to deploy a patch to the server or the desktop client.This is a peek into the journey of Project Sanguine becoming EVE’s new technology platform: Quasar. The feeling was that now was the right point in time to give it a name so it could be more easily comprehended and referenced, as well as give you more insight into what has been going on recently with EVE’s technological advancements and how they align with setting the game up for a thriving third decade. It’s also serendipitous that this quadrant name is Gateway as it heralds the direct usage of the gRPC gateways.

Also, space words man. They just sound good.

[h2]What’s next?[/h2]
Work continues on clearing the table by refurbishing many old services which provides two vectors of momentum: build up more foundational capabilities for Quasar in terms of manipulating more than just Skill Plans in the universe, and normalize ancient systems to pave the way for faster iteration.

What does that mean for the average Capsuleer? More opportunities to expose more powerful features across more mediums.

The idea of publishing simulation data through Quasar has also been toyed with…but that might take a minute.

EVE has launched a massive overhaul to the New Player Experience, an upgrade to the skill system, and updates to EVE’s new player resource, EVE Academy. You can also dive right in and get involved in the in-game celebrations, even as a brand-new player. Better still, join free now to receive generous daily gifts as you experience space like never before alongside thousands of other new players. Play free now!

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EVE Online is the largest space MMO there is, meshing elements of PvE, industry and exploration together with real political intrigue the gaming’s biggest PvP battles. New players can jump right in and get involved in countless activities as a free to play Alpha Clone, flying over 350 fully customizable ships.

[h3]Play EVE for free on Steam today and join the legendary community responsible for continually smashing gaming records over the past two decades. [/h3]

Maverick Capsuleers,

Rush into intense two-on-two combat in the Proving Grounds, flying in tandem alongside a partner in intense Interceptor combat against an opposing pair of victory-driven pilots in this new Abyssal Proving Ground event!

This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 1 October, and runs until 11:00 on 5 October.

The ruleset for the event is as follows:

• Malediction, Crusader, Crow, Raptor, Ares, Taranis, Stiletto and Claw may enter
  
• Modules and drones are limited to meta level 5
  
• No pirate implants allowed

Fit your ship, find a partner, and grab your filaments – available in Abyssal bioadaptive caches, in NPC wrecks in Pochven, and on the in-game market. Prepare for a battle for high-speed superiority as you and your teammate climb the Proving Ground leaderboards, striving for glory and earning special rewards!