CCP Purple Tentacle has posted a new blog on the official EVE Online site. EVE devs will be releasing Incursion later today and with it's arrival, the old portraits that represented players will be removed from the game. Players will need to create new avatars. But players become attached to portraits and Purple Tentacle has them covered: A new database of all the old character portraits has been created that players can access to revisit old faces!

As most of you already know, on Tuesday we are releasing Incursion, which comes with a brand new avatar creation system. All the old portraits will be removed from the game and you will have to create new portraits for all your characters. I have spent considerable time playing with the new avatar creator and it is absolutely awesome. It is superior to the old one in every aspect, and no matter how many portraits I create with it, I just cannot get bored of it. However, no matter how cool it is, I figured that it would still feel like a loss to see my old face, the one I was tied to for many years, being flushed down the drain just like that. These old faces served their purpose. They represented us for over seven years, and they deserve to survive somewhere. So, back in December I requested a dedicated box and set it up to start crawling through all your seven million characters, rendering their portraits one by one and saving them in a nice and homey database. The box was rendering nonstop throughout Christmas and New Year's Eve and, despite being hit by a major disaster and having to restart the whole process at half time, it managed to finish on time.

Purple Tentacle has step-by-step instructions on how to access the old portrait server so be sure to head here to read up on it.