CCP Alice has penned the latest EVE Online developer blog on the official site to introduce players to the new and improved EVE forum. The forum has been moved into the EVE Gate system and includes several important new features. In fact, CCP Alice likens it to the image below.

The new front page is streamlined to get players where they need to go, whether it's a topic-specific forum or to a chat channel.

Read the full post here.

A new EVE Online developer blog has cropped up on the official site. The post details the enhancements coming to character portraits as the Incursion expansion goes live. Once the character portrait generator is released, players will have the opportunity to recreate their avatar. Check out the differences!

Going this route also allows us to render all the portraits in high resolution using extremely high quality textures, something that normal desktop computers do not handle well. As we expect very high number of characters to be created in the initial days after launch, we might decide to use lower quality textures for the portraits while getting over the initial tsunami of characters, but then redo them in higher quality in the days thereafter. This also means that when creating a new character on a low end machine it will appear to others as rendered with high quality textures, and might therefore look a bit different than when initially created.

Read the full blog post here.

EVE Online's official developer blog has been updated with an extensive post about the upcates to the Contracts system in the game. Developers indicate that the new system will seamlessly integrate with the updated Neocom and will be in beta testing for the next several months to iron out the kinks.

The new Contract search feature is Experimental, which means that it will be in a Beta phase for a few months while we iron out the kinks and make sure it performs well enough. That means that you can continue to use the old contracts search and you can provide us with feedback through the forum thread associated with this blog. Then, a few patches later, we will tear off the Experimental band-aid and let the feature out into the wild. In its experimental state the feature should be completely usable though, and you should feel free to use it as much as you want to when it hits Tranquility.

The new Contracts search and the new Neocom are the first features to get this new 'experimental' treatment. This new way of pushing out features is something we are trying out as a thinner way to deploy things that we want to try out a bit before making the leap to the mainstream. Hopefully this goes over well with the players and gives us good feedback on continued development of the features.

Read the full and details-packed blog here.

CCP Optimal has posted a new dev blog on the official EVE Online site that gives readers a blast from the past and a look to the future with specific regard to the NeoCom. The team, he says, wants to make NeoCom customizable and utilitarian for players. Devs seem to have come up with an elegant solution.

Customizability

The customization of the old NeoCom was very limited to say the least, but no more. You‘ll now be able to decide exactly what buttons are displayed in the NeoCom and reorganizing the buttons is as easy as dragging them around. Removing a button from the NeoCom is a right-click affair and re-claiming that same button is as easy as dragging it from the EVE menu into the NeoCom bar.  It is even possible to create groups into which buttons, and other groups, can be dragged.

Read more here.

A new EVE Online blog has popped up on the official site giving a few details about the campaign to stop and eliminate 'real money transaction' bots. The 'raging' RMT campaign has been ongoing for the past year with good results. The dev post goes on to talk about how the team is also concerned about bots that are still present which may or may not ever sell goods for real world cash.

We appreciate the reports you guys keep sending us about suspected bots and so on and would like to use this opportunity to thank you for that and encourage you to keep those reports coming. Also, use of the "Report ISK spammer" feature has been very helpful in the battle against RMT - also something we'd like to commend you guys for.

We have by no means stamped out the whole of RMT in EVE Online. This is an ongoing struggle and the results depend on what we do - but they are also dictated by the conduct of you, the players.

ISK is sold because people buy it. Players do business with the RMT element and that is why accounts are hacked, asteroid belts are sucked up by bots and it is why we find ourselves in our current situation.

Read the full blog post here.

CCP Games has revealed images and details for the 2010 Holiday Ship. Called the the Concord Echelon, the new ship will roll out to all players on December 14th. The ship's description also comes with full instructions how to redeem and claim their ships.

Constructed in secrecy, the Echelon is a minor masterpiece of engineering, integrating otherwise incomprehensible Sansha technology into a frigate-class capsuleers vessel. The advanced cryptographic processors on board provide superior hacking capabilities for use on most known password-secured devices. However, the true beauty of the Echelon is in the adaptive synchronization of capsuleers and Sansha codebreaking components, creating a system predicted to give capsuleers an edge over even the strongest of the Nation's encryption locks.

Read more here.

The EVE Online team has posted a brand new blog about one of the most anticipated features coming with the Incursion expansion: Character Creation. CCP Ph00ze goes into great detail about the process developers went through to make the huge improvements in the models for Incursion. There's a lot of great information to read so be sure to swing by and check it out!

We figured that with the attention our character creation system has been getting lately, that it was time to write a devblog about it. There´s lots to cover, so let´s get to it!

The Carbon Character System was made to enable us to create characters for several projects, including Eve. It started off as a design document containing various wishlist features, ranging in complexity from the simple to the impossible. I believe most of the items on the list ended up being possible, with the possible exception of essentially being able to perform a striptease with arbitrary clothing. Hmm, do they even do that in CGI movies these days? Do I really want to know?

Read more here.

EVE Online developers and CCP Games have announced the release of the first portion of the latest expansion, Incursion. The Incursion expansion will be released in major patches for the next several months. Today's 1.0.0 patch includes 80 new storyline missions and the Noctis salvaging ship and the rebalancing of rockets and Tech 2 ammo. The update also includes improvements to EVE’s user interface.

Incursion 1.0.1 will be available on December 14th and will couple the removal of learning skills with another holiday gift for EVE players.

Incursion 1.0.2 will be available mid-January and includes the stunningly realistic character creator based on CCP’s avatar technology, a precursor to next year’s “Incarna” release. The web-based social networking platform for EVE players, EVEGate, will see a large upgrade with integrated forums. The Planetary Interaction feature will also see significant improvements based on player input. The following week, a vengeance-fueled Sansha’s Nation will invade the EVE universe, causing chaos as pilots join together in twenty to forty person fleets to beat back the new “Revenant” supercarriers, their fierce fighter bombers and the fleets at their command. Victors against these “incursions” will reap tremendous rewards for their bravery.

Check out the full list of changes in the v1.0.0 patch here and the official Incursion site.

In response to input from the Council of Stellar Management and from players, the EVE Online team has decided to scrap the plans to allow players 'neural remapping' (redistribution of attributes) that would have come in the first large patch in preparation for the Incursion expansion. The remapping option was going to be a way to bring a virtual goods 'store' online and to introduce other goods into the game. By eliminating the remapping, devs have gone on to explain how bringing virtual items into EVE will work.

It‘s clear that it‘s the will of the community to keep virtual goods sales outside the spectrum of what we classify as the "merit economy". That refers to skills gained over time or items that have a gameplay impact. So after discussions, designs, brainstorming and all sorts of processes we‘ve come up with a strategy that we‘ve already polished with the help of the CSM and would now want to present to the larger community.

Virtual goods sales in EVE Online will evolve through sales of vanity items, first in Incarna but later in-space features. The scope will be (and there‘s no design be done around this, we‘re just talking strategy now) that anything that doesn‘t affect gameplay directly can be, potentially, sold for PLEX or other means. Ideas that have come up include Incarna clothing and furniture, logos on spaceships and swapping out portraits. This is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it a commitment that said items will be available for sale, I mention these as an example for what type of items we‘re thinking about.

Read the full developer blog here.