You can click the link below for the full details, but for now lets look at the breakdown:

• Incarna: 9 teams, approximately 70 developers
• Dust 514/EVE link: 1 team, approximately 7 developers
• In-space features: 3 teams, approximately 22 developers
• EVE Gate: 1 team, approximately 10 developers
• Others: 4 teams, approximately 15 developers

Nine teams for Incarna, huh.  Admittedly it’s going to be a very tech-heavy expansion, involving folks from multiple disciplines to pull off, but for a lot of folks we’re talking about something that is utterly forgettable if all you want to do is undock and blow ships to pieces.

All is not lost, if you’re thinking this means all CCP is doing is tacking on frivolous features to EVE…

That does not mean that we won‘t make any improvements until then!  We haven‘t started planning the Spring 2011 or Winter 2011 expansions yet (not to that level of granularity) but we do realize the urgency of revisiting certain key game features. Rest assured, the CSM will play a large role in identifying those.

Please, also keep in mind that our developers are constantly fixing bugs – small ones, big ones, important ones and obvious ones. But also bugs you‘ve never experienced, never seen and never heard of. The EVE code base is as big as the universe itself and we‘re constantly engaged in cleanup and backend work that the players will never notice unless something goes horribly wrong.

I’m sure at least some of those people are also hard at work with new COSMOS constellation content, and bringing Faction Warfare across the finish line.

…right?

Sources:

• Iterative Development and What’s Happening in 2011

As players we’ve been treated to a brand spanking new server cluster. Thanks to the immense downtime associated with that, we’re also getting some free skillpoints.

In gratitude for your patience and after consulting the Council of Stellar Management, we will give an extra pool of skillpoints to all accounts (paying and trial) that were active at the beginning of this downtime, on one character per account. This skillpoint pool will be appropriately sized for the downtime time frame, universal across all accounts regardless of character attributes/implants and may be applied as each player wants.

It’s not like you’re suddenly going to be able to insta-train to Titan 5 with this but it’s definitely better than nothing. Congratulations are in order to CCP for getting the cluster business sorted too, that’s definitely more than a cut-and-paste job.

But wait… there’s more! Apparently feeling bad about the loss of so many ships in the tournament, a magic wand is being waved in order to give us all a brand new ship, the Primae. Quoth CCP Zinfandel:

The Primae is a repurposed ORE design intended to ease the task of extracting resources from planetbound environments. Initially devised as a deep space salvage vessel for large-scale ore retrieval from destroyed ORE fleets in pirate-occupied areas, its previous incarnation was made all but obsolete by the arrival of capsuleers on the interstellar scene. Realizing that the ship could, with a few minor modifications, be made into an efficient resource harvesting aid, ORE wasted no time in revamping the design.

You’re probably wondering how and when you can get your hands on this wondrous machine of planetary … something.

Beginning June 29, 2010, you will find the ability to redeem it on your account login screen. You can then assign it to a particular character and a friendly ORE agent will deliver it to your hangar bay. You will be able to redeem the Primae once per active (not trial) account and will no longer be available after downtime on Tuesday, July 13th 2010, so make sure you log in to receive yours.

It may not be as pretty as the Hyperion but hey, it’s a free shippy ship!

Sources:

• News: Welcome Back to Tranquility
• Dev Blog: ORE Primae Ship Nearing Distribution

The upcoming Tyrannis expansion was nearly upon us, when CCP announced their decision to delay its release.

We regret to inform you that deployment of our upcoming expansion Tyrannis has been pushed back by one week to May 26th, and that market seeding of Planetary Command Centers is pushed back to June 8th.

In our regression testing, we have identified scalability issues with the Planetary Interaction feature, which led to code refactoring that then needed further testing before being launched to Tranquility. Planetary Interaction is a unique feature in the sense that it is available to almost all players in the game providing opportunity for manufacturing for the masses, so ensuring that it runs smoothly on our cluster is of great importance to all.

Long story short, something’s broken. And, in a move that is so totally unlike developers of games the world over, CCP has chosen to fix it first before releasing it upon the unsuspecting masses.

The coolest aspect of this is that they’re doing a partial deploy, in a way. Giving people a chance to get their brain wrapped around the concepts here is a good thing, because it’s not a feature that I would personally recommend people just run headlong into, lest they end up wasting quantities of ISK needlessly. Consider playing around on the test server first.

One of the worst aspects so far of what I’ve seen is the whole concept of knowing what the hell to do with the stuff afterwards. Previously, I’ve made note that all I could find as an end product is nanite paste, but in fact the high end outputs of the processes here will end up as inputs to manufacturing sovereignty gear. The pain in the ass here is that in order to find that out, you have to dig into the blueprints section of the market.

Ok ok, so that’s not too bad, but think of this from a different perspective. You’re a person just starting out with your planetary endeavors, and you can see all the things you’ll be producing and how they tie into other planetary productions. Beyond that, you get no direct information. Why not show a subgrouping of products the stuff can be used in that is outside of  planet production, like oh I don’t know, sovereignty gear?

At any rate, fear not, for you will have some additional stuff to play with on the 26th.

EVE Gate will also be released on May 26th, with its web access to EVE Mail, Calendar and revamped contacts, both in-game and on the web.

The EVE Gate service is pretty cool actually, and I’ll be doing a writeup on winterblink.com about it soon. I can’t wait to see how that service grows in the future, but having access to evemail outside of EVE has been one of my wish list items for a while now.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Tyrannis Release Delayed

Landmark Dot Thingies

One upon a time you used to be able to go around through EVE and find these interesting places talked about in the backstory of the game. Apparently giving us these funky new planets has robbed us of this content. Thanks to CCP Bettik, this content will be coming back to the game in a new and improved fashion.

The aforementioned objects would have to be moved over to the dungeon system. The alternative would be to deprive EVE of content, thus making the vastness of space therein somewhat more vacuous than it currently is. We broke the project down into how many dungeons needed to be created and turned into static dungeons. After much figuring and calculating, we decided to turn those 2,238 objects into basic dungeons – remember, they were not part of our dungeon system before – that we could then populate out into the game ad infinitum.

Now this is actually kind of cool, especially for those who like the back story to EVE. Mind you, I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head that noticed these things were missing, but I think most of that is due to the fact the content itself used to be basically static stuff with little interaction.

One other interesting tidbit comes with the addendum to the blog by CCP Tallest.

In some regions, we had to make new landmarks entirely. Most of these sites were tied to the empire factions in some way, so they wouldn’t make sense for, say, the Rogue Drone regions. Since all of the other regions were getting new content, though, we didn’t want to leave the rogue drones out. So we simply created a few new ones for those regions.

So areas that never had them now have them, and the end result is that the content can be expanded along with the story. Right, and I imagine a lot of people are still shrugging about the whole endeavor. I don’t blame you, this probably won’t add massive game-changing differences to the game, but integrating the story to the game in an interactive and expanding way sounds like it’s full of potential.

I just hope it doesn’t end up going the same way the COSMOS constellation effort went.

Sources:

• Those That Came Before Us: Tyrannis Landmark Updates

In a new dev blog, CCP Lemur breaks the bad news: the age of the “deep safe” will soon be passing. For those who don’t know, so called deep safes are … oh hell, lets just play the lazy card and quote:

First, a quick terminology primer, to make sure we’re all on the same page. “Safe spots” are bookmarks made in space, at any point that you can’t normally warp to directly. Ships at these locations can usually only be found via scanning (or infiltrating an enemy fleet, of course), hence the “safe” label. “Deep” safes refer to safe spots made outside the usual boundaries of the system – usually made a while ago by various techniques which have since been removed from the game, they can be up to thousands of AU from the nearest planet.

Now that’s not to say these are super easy to make, it does take some time and a pinch of know-how, but it is entirely possible to make some extremely safe safespots in EVE. You could go try this right now if you like, but it’s not going to get you very far because…

We’re defining a “deep safe” for these purposes as any bookmark which is more than 10AU further from the local star than the furthest-out celestial object (planets or stargates).

• You will no longer be able to create bookmarks outside this range
• You will no longer be able to issue a “warp to” command to any location outside this range
• You will no longer be able to open a cynosural field at any location outside this range

That’s right. Convenient though they were, we will no longer be able to create them. Nor will you be able to make more once May 18th hits, as CCP will be removing existing safe spot bookmarks entirely. For giggles maybe they should just move them all to within the system’s stars, but that’s just me.

Read more about this in the linky below.

*off-topic mode engaged*

Holy crap hi! Lets do this with a haiku!

work got quite busy / podcasts and comics coming / ‘puter upgrade soon

More details (very) soon, my lovelies.

*off-topic mode disengaged*

Sources:

Beginning January 29th, 2010 and ending February 15th, 2010, CCP will accept PLEX donations from players and convert them to a cash donation for the Red Cross efforts in Haiti. 100% of the proceeds will be given to this important charity as a representative gift from EVE’s player community.

That’s right, the greater EVE community can now convert their hard earned ISK into cash donations that will go to help out the people of Haiti.  Let me repeat: you can go out and mine a bunch of Veldspar, refine it and sell the trit on the market, and use that ISK to heal/feed/clothe someone in dire need.

There is no better game out there, and in a way there’s no better reason out there to play it right now.  Give what you can.

CCP…  wow.  Kudos.  Big time kudos.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Plex Aid for Haiti

The Zephyr is a unique starship design, relying almost entirely on solar winds for sublight propulsion. Super-light sails allow it to ride the torrents of photons streaming through space, and its barebones construction gives it a tiny sensor footprint and almost negligible mass.

She’s definitely pretty, but can she cook?

It has it‘s own special probe launcher (for wormholes) and Sleeper NPC‘s won‘t shoot it in the same way that all NPCs won‘t shoot pods.

Hellooooooo wormhole exploration ship. Not bad, not bad at all. If you’re curious where the name came from, Wiki tells us the following:

Zephyrus, or just Zephyr (Greek: Ζέφυρος, Zéphuros), in Latin Favonius, is the Greek god of the west wind. The gentlest of the winds, Zephyrus is known as the fructifying wind, the messenger of spring. It was thought that Zephyrus lived in a cave in Thrace. Zephyrus was reported as having several wives in different stories.

Nice double entendre, CCP.

Click through below for all the other sordid details of this new awesomeness, as well as how you’ll be able to get your hands on your new ship.

Sources:

• Holiday Gift for All Capsuleers – The Zephyr
• Zephyrus (Wikipedia)