EVE's newest Dev blog takes a look at the expansion that launched on June 10th.

And Factional Warfare is just the first of several ideas we have plans to implement that will allow players to immerse themselves fully in EVE. Our goal is to start from this initial point, and make regular, steady forward progress in bringing the player storylines and the CCP storylines closer together.

The challenge we face is that EVE has already evolved a very vibrant and crucially important self-directed story based around Alliances and their battles in 0.0 space. We see that experience as the ultimate expression of the sandbox ideals of EVE. Eventually, we hope all players will become involved in Alliance activities, once they become experienced pilots and wise to the ways of EVE. Our challenge is to continue to support that advanced level of play while creating a consistent, directed, immersive storyline system in Empire space. We have to carefully navigate the integration of our story threads with the adventures arising naturally out of the decisions of hundreds of thousands of players. We want to tell stories with the EVE community, not to the EVE community.

Someone that understands that players are the story.  Not only do we want to take part in it, we want to create, change, and truly be, that story!  Read the rest on the official Eve site!

EVE is back in full swing, and factional warfare is going on!

EVE Online: Empyrean Age has been successfully deployed on Tranquility and we're now open for business! We invite you to explore the new region "Black Rise" or try the new feature Factional Warfare, to fight for glory and fame in the service of your faction. For a more comprehensive list of what has been added and fixed, please check the patch notes. We'd also appreciate to hear your feedback which can be posted in this forum thread.

If you encounter any issues or bugs, please post them here. Keep in mind that posting issues in that thread does not replace submitting a bug report.

We'll see you on Tranquility!

EVE Online is preparing to patch to their newest expansion Empyrean Age! They're warning that downtime may take as long as 24 hours!

Deployment of the free summer expansion, EVE Online: Empyrean Age, will begin at 02:00 GMT on 10 June. We anticipate the extended downtime for the deployment may take up to 24 hours. We recommend starship pilots prepare for the impending war by setting a long-training skill.

So if you have a chance before the downtime begins at 02:00 GMT on June 10th set a nice long skill! We'll see you in factional warefare pilots!

With the coming of Factional Warfare in the newest expansion Empyrean Age, comes testing before it launches on Tranquility!

Greetings again from the QA team! Since we got such good feedback and information last time, we're going to be running another series of playtests for Factional Warfare. Next week, June 4 to 6 (Wed, Thurs, Fri) from 11:00 to 14:00 EVE time (GMT) each day we're going to be convening on our test server, Singularity, again for the playtesting and we would really love to see as many folks show up as possible.

As work on the summer expansion nears completion we are putting our first release candidate up on Singularity this coming week, just like before the playtesting will be focusing on all the mechanisms involved in Factional Warfare, the main feature of the expansion. We will be applying a new mirror to Sisi just before this series of play tests begins.

 

EVE Online has a white paper regarding their Council of Stellar Management.

Ever since our CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, announced the re-emergence of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) last spring we have been working feverishly at trying to make it bigger and better than the earlier version. When it was implemented last time players could volunteer for the CSM and they were then handpicked by us.

What we wish to do is to take this to a new level and let you the players elect representatives to the CSM. The CSM will then act as an official conduit for your comments and requests, as a community, enhancing greatly your ability to express your concerns and prioritize the matters you believe are most important at the time. The white paper presented here is by no means a finished paper, changes and updates will be made to it when more feedback gets in. We have already changed our ideas on some key fronts based on the feedback we got at Fanfest this year, the biggest change being that this is no longer considered an implementation of ‘Democracy’, as that word has so many and different meanings to different people that it would be the cause of a lot of misunderstandings.

You can check out the paper and then tell us what you think!