EVE Online News

Glorious Capsuleers,

EVE Online’s Foundation Quadrant has been eventful and full of excitement! As this second Quadrant of 2021 draws to a close, it’s the perfect opportunity to look back at the highlights and major updates introduced. Detailed below is a summary of this Quadrant’s in-game events, activities, community achievements, as well as gameplay & tech updates that are building the foundation of a thriving third decade for EVE.

[h2]In-Game Events and Celebrations[/h2]
The Foundation Quadrant saw EVE Online celebrate its 18th birthday in style with Capsuleer Day commemorating 18 years since the dawn of the Capsuleer Age. Celebrating the incredible togetherness and strength of EVE’s Capsuleer community, there were in-game activities and free gifts as pilots faced off against the Equilibrium of Mankind (EoM) terrorist group.

The great Empires of New Eden also hosted their own days of celebration, with Gallente Federation Day, Minmatar Liberation Day, Amarr Foundation Day and Caldari Union Day all featuring awesome in-game events and free gifts. Well done to all players that made awesome contributions to the propaganda contests and trivia quizzes that dovetailed with the Empire celebration days.

The Stargate Trailblazers event saw the Empires working to gather resources for the construction of new stargate routes around New Eden. Capsuleers picked sides and supported their faction at combat sites and resource harvesting sites. The event resulted in a new stargate being added to New Eden!

[h2]EVE Community Achievements & Activities[/h2]
The year-long player war in Nullsec which has featured some of the largest battles ever recorded in New Eden – and gaming history – ended during the Foundation Quadrant! Be sure to check out the latest episode of The Scope for all the details.

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Speaking of hard-fought battles, an astounding 51 teams duked it out for 16 spots in this November’s Alliance Tournament XVII, which was announced in the Foundation Quadrant. Those teams are now training hard in anticipation of the main event in November.

It wasn’t all bloodshed, though, as members of the EVE community submitted numerous videos of their defining Capsuleer moments for EVE’s 18th birthday. Don’t miss the player celebration video commemorating those moments!

[h2]Major Updates - A Foundation for the Future![/h2]
The Foundation Quadrant saw a number of big updates made to gameplay in EVE, as well as a number of balance changes and new features introduced.

The Hunter’s Boon update, inspired by player feedback, featured changes such as the introduction of mobile covert cyno beacons, buffs to the Pacifier and Enforcer, and Tech 3 cruiser skill loss removal. Mobile observatories granted pilots a long-awaited defense against cloaking-based incursions into Lowsec and Nullsec, and the Enter the Portal update brought powerful buffs to the Black Ops class of Tech II battleships, plus the slick new Conduit Jump feature.

Long-anticipated ESS keys arrived as part of the Grand Heist update, allowing Capsuleers to raid and liberate riches from Nullsec reserve banks using keys obtained from Lowsec signatures, with almost a trillion ISK already stolen by the wiliest Capsuleers! Furthermore, the Great Escape update brought gameplay depth and subtlety to the use of nullification and warp core stabilizers, ensuring they serve a more meaningful role across EVE and its community.

The Foundation Quadrant didn’t just feature gameplay and balance updates, though, as continued investment in technology keeps EVE Online on track to successfully navigate its third decade and thrive. A huge visual update – Bring Out EVE’s Colors – affected every activity in space and every visual interaction, as well as all ships, citadels, planetary bodies, and more. A new 3D version of your ship’s AI “Aura” and vast visual improvements to the interior of the Jita 4-4 trade hub were also significant updates to iconic elements of New Eden. New landmarks were introduced around the cluster to commemorate significant historical events and provided more places of interest to visit for explorers, including a monument to the enormous and record-shattering titan fight in the system of M2-XFE.

Another public playtest of the native Mac version of EVE Online also took place in the Foundation Quadrant, delivering further progress on the path to welcoming even more new players to New Eden.

The EVE Academy website launched in Q2, as well, with the aim of enhancing the new player experience. EVE Academy provides a wealth of information designed to help new players decide who they want to be in New Eden. There are links to four career paths - Explorer, Industrialist, Enforcer or Soldier of Fortune – where you get skill plans, beginner ship fitting examples, and curated links to resources created by the EVE Online community, videos and much more.

[h2]Quadrant 3 Incoming[/h2]
The third Quadrant of 2021 is not far away, and it will act as a gateway for EVE Online and its Capsuleers towards more major updates, events, and a new era in New Eden! Keep your eyes peeled and stay tuned for more announcements coming very soon.

Launch EVE Now

To our cherished players,

Today, 10 September, is World Suicide Prevention Day - and we at CCP would like to raise awareness of this vitally important and very delicate subject.

Anyone can find themselves in difficult times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 700,000 people die due to suicide each year – and it is the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 15 and 34.

In light of the still very strange and constantly changing state of the world and our lives in the past couple of years, and the difficulties we all face in uncertainty, loneliness, and grief, it is more important than ever for you to be able to know that you are not alone.

If you are ever struggling with suicidal thoughts, feel overwhelmed by life, or even just need someone to talk to, you can be connected with a professional and share what’s on your mind in a single call: specialized suicide hotlines operate 24/7 worldwide, and are always prepared and ready to help.

On our end here at CCP, reports of intentions of self-harm are treated with the highest urgency, and we have procedures in place to ensure as immediate a response as possible, including contact with any available local assistance.

And on the side of the EVE community, the Broadcast 4 Reps movement maintains a safe and sympathetic space where anyone can reach out to speak to other space friends in times of need, operating a dedicated public discord server, and providing links to various other valuable resources on their website.

This year, we would like to recognize and thank the core team of B4R for their efforts and invaluable assistance to those in need, including Tovanis, Jezaja, Erika Mizune, Diana Valenti, Fyt 284, Daark (Nyx Palaiologos), and Thoroughbreed, and would like to give an honorable mention to Laura Karpinski. CCP will be issuing special in-game medals in gratitude to active B4R members in the near future.

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We would also like to give thanks to Sixth Empire, founded by Max Singularity and Feiryred, for developing a community of friendship and care for their fellow EVE Online players. Sixth Empire’s core motto is “Answer All Calls”, and the group emphatically supports the B4R movement - raising awareness and spreading motivational posts across EVE groups on various social networks.

Fly safe, and fly together: through any difficulties you may face, there are always those who want to and can provide help. No matter what happens, we want you to know that you are never alone!

BROADCAST 4 REPS

Tireless Capsuleers,

No Downtime starts today!

As you may have seen in the recent development blog, No Downtime starts today after 11:00 UTC. That means, if everything goes to plan, that on 9 September EVE Online will be entering uncharted territory yet again past the 24 hour mark.

The ultimate goal is for EVE to have no downtimes at all. The first step has been to shorten downtime, which is quickly approaching its asymptotic value of around 3 minutes. Then, the goal is to have fewer and fewer downtimes, eventually eliminating it altogether. This is a long-term goal and all of EVE’s technological advances are aimed towards that.

Just like last time, your help is required to flag everything that seems suspect or weird, letting us know how the game performs for you when you do the things you normally do.

There are a number of reasons why running another one of these experiments is beneficial:

• Improvements which have been made since the last experiment can be validated
• Things that may have regressed will be flagged
• Memory usage will be observed
• Verification that anything new is not making any downtime assumptions

Ultimately, an experiment such as this is dedicated to the Capsuleers of New Eden who hail from countries such as New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and Australia. As EVE Online has entered and launched in Korea and Japan over the past year, the activity in this timezone has increased, and not disturbing players during their peak hours is important.

For those that remember the video from 2019’s No Downtime, a whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt. Find out more about how that is possible in the No Downtime Vol 2 video.

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PLAY EVE AND ENTER THE UNKNOWN

Every day I think about downtime, wait for it to pass, and record the result.

The last time I wrote this (did you read that dev blog? It's really good, I promise), Tranquility's auto-reboot on weekends was approximately 4 minutes and 20-40 seconds, just enough for a quick cup of tea. Today's auto-reboot, a year and a half later, was 3 minutes and 34 seconds - just enough for a quicker cup of tea (I measured it while writing this dev blog). Given the improvements we have made since 2019, an auto reboot downtime of 3 minutes and 30-40 seconds is pretty normal these days.

I could focus on this improvement of 50-60 seconds, a 22.5% improvement between 3 Dec 2019 and 3 July 2021, and predict the end of downtime on 19 December 2026 with this super-scientific graph, but the reality is more complicated than that.

There is a (soft) lower bound of approximately 3 minutes given the three different activities during downtime - shutdown, database jobs, startup - which last approximately 1 minute each, unless fundamental changes are made, and the most fundamental one is still to not have any downtime at all. Downtime will not become much less than 160-200 seconds; instead there must first be fewer downtimes and then none at all. Nevertheless, I wanted to start this blog with a concrete example of improvements made in downtime reduction since last time. And now another no-downtime experiment is being planned for September 9.

The purpose of this second no-downtime experiment is at least four-fold:

• Verify the fixes made for the issues discovered in the previous experiment in the live production environment
• Verify that no other code/features have regressed since last time and in general look for further issues
• Observe memory usage
• Verify that our technology platform (which you will hear more about later) is not making any downtime assumptions

So what did we discover last time, I hear you ask?

First and foremost we discovered reliance on downtime as an event to mark the beginning of a daily cycle, and a reliance on a daily startup, such as structures not finishing 24+ hour timers and corporations not joining Faction Warfare. We fixed all those issues that we found, and those you reported to us. Now we want to verify them further (of course they have been tested but our test environments don't have Tranquility's scale) and look for more such issues.

We also observed time desynchronization (which we fixed), and significant memory usage (which we improved somewhat).

The time desynchronization was a known issue, but last time we were observing whether players noticed at the end of day #2. The target for time desynchronization is a maximum of ±0.5 seconds. But with newer hardware, we had been observing an end-of-run desynchronization of 2.25 seconds and - predictably - 4.5 seconds at the end of day #2 in the first no-downtime experiment in 2019.



Players started to notice once the desynchronization was above 3 seconds, mostly by noting what felt like module lag or delay when their client and the node hosting their solar system disagreed significantly about when modules were cycling. Time desynchronization is now normally within ±1/100 of a second, well within the maximum of ±0.5 seconds.

Tranquility has always been memory hungry. For better performance, then, we have always opted for pre-computing values & processing data and storing the results for later reference rather than re-computing those values again later. As an example, the Brain in a Box and Dogma Rewrite projects in 2015 were all about computing and storing skills and their effects (i.e., the characters' brains) and transferring the computed results between solar systems instead of re-computing the brains on each entry to a new solar system. We also never clean up any memory, as the cluster node memory is reset every day anyway, which is a reliance on a daily reboot (note: we of course don't clear our DB cache memory or our Redis cache memory, but the main simulation cache memory is cleared in the reboot in each downtime).

The most memory-hungry nodes in the Tranquility cluster, the Character Services nodes that store those brains I mentioned above (among other things), were at 75% memory pressure at the end of day #2 last time, which is just below our operating tolerance of 80%. We might be able to run Tranquility for 3 days (and perhaps 7 hours more) if we were to run the cluster to a "first-node-at 100% memory usage" state, given those 2019 numbers. In 2019, the day #1 memory pressure was at 55%, but these days it is around 35% and so we want to rebase our observations.

No-downtime is a long-term goal and all our technological advances aim towards that. We have been working for a few years now on a micro-service and message bus technology platform for EVE, and started using that platform for a number of features. We now want to observe how that ecosystem holds up with no downtime of the primary game cluster, making sure no assumptions have been made about a daily downtime.

See you on Thursday, 9 September, as the second No Downtime experiment commences. And, just like last time, there will be a video coming soon. A whole lotta effort and power is needed for such a heroic stunt.

Ambitious Capsuleers,

Join your trusted allies in heavy combat during a new, special Caldari Union Day Proving Grounds event, battling side-by-side aboard powerful battlecruisers as you prove the unbreakable strength of your bonds, evoking the unifying collective drive of the Caldari people!

This event begins at 11:00 UTC on 3 September, and runs until 11:00 UTC on 7 September.

The ruleset for the event is as follows:
- Participants receive 20m ISK each time they enter this Proving Ground event
- Only the Drake, Ferox, and Naga may enter
- Only one local repair module can be fitted per ship
- No shield boost amplifiers, rechargers, power relays, flux coils, or purger rigs allowed
- Sensor dampeners cannot be fitted
- Modules are restricted to meta level 5 and below
- No pirate implants allowed

Gather your friends, fit your battlecruisers, and grab your Proving Ground filaments (found in Abyssal Deadspace or on the ingame market) as you prepare for intense team combat, battling in tandem to climb the Proving Grounds leaderboard, achieving glory and earning special rewards!

PLAY EVE NOW