With the recent addition of Sansha 'incursions' to EVE Online, activity in certain sectors of the game has increased dramatically. As a result, devs have been tracking issues reported by players and have deployed a patch to address several important concerns.

• Based on your feedback, we’ve cut the system control regain in half. That means Sanshas will regain control much slower than before. This is a first tweak of this value, and we’ll be monitoring the Incursions over the weekend to see if this was too much/too little.
• The journal, specifically the global report, was not updating properly. We’ve put in a fix that should make it update accurately.
• One of the things we found out initially was that sites were being kept “alive” for a long time after they were completed. The number of players in each system meant that you’d always have traffic going into sites, which means they didn’t de-spawn. Hopefully we’ve dealt with that problem by removing the beacon from overview when a site is completed. This should decrease the traffic going into completed sites. This, combined with optimization of the sites should mean the re-spawning of content is quicker and more graceful.

In addition, developers have started a feedback thread with several targeted questions with regard to future tweaks and improvements to incursion play.

Read more here.

Incursion, the EVE Online expansion, recently launched in its full glory with the final content deployment. The Sansha and some major game play improvements have finally arrived. Our sister site, MMORPG.com, has an interview conducted by Garrett Fuller. He recently had the opportunity to chat with several members of the CCP team to talk all things Incursion. Check it out and then leave us your thoughts in the comments below.

For Incursion, what was the biggest challenge for the design team?

CCP Soundwave: Rewards. Definitely rewards. Designing open world PVE across different security bands and rulesets is incredibly difficult. Imagine one of those boxes you had as a kid; It has x number of holes in different shapes, and x number of shapes that fit those holes. Designing the reward system for Incursions was pretty much like having to fit a square through all the different holes. On the positive side, it gave us a unique opportunity to experiment with a reward system that no one else has tried before. A close second was designing PVE content on a massive scale compared to anything we’ve done before. A lot of firsts for the design team in this expansion!

Read more of Garrett Fuller's EVE Online: Incursion Interview.

The latest EVE Online blog post by CCP Stillman discusses team efforts to keep user data safe and the underlying HTTP protocol used by the API feature. As a result of new and aggressive hacker attempts, the team is changing the protocol from HTTP to HTTPS to ensure that user data remains secure.

If you're anything like me, you religiously check the status of your character training and market orders on your smartphone. It's the greatest invention ever, especially if you can't log into EVE Online or EVE Gate. It's also nice to be able to pull out your smartphone at Fanfest and show off your nice skills and large wallet.

As we've added more information to the API, there's more incentive to try and acquire these keys by nefarious people. Due to the underlying use of HTTP when querying the API, it's possible to sniff the data stream of an API user and acquire their API key if they're using an unsecure Internet connection. This is not a good idea. And we don't want it to be that way. So we went ahead and enabled HTTPS on our API servers, which makes too much sense.

Read more here.

EVE Online players now have the Sansha to deal with in game in addition to other players. Full scale incursions are on the rise throughout all systems. Capsuleers are being destroyed in droves as ships come to help stem the tide of the Sansha invasions.

I urge you to join EVE's 350,000 other pilots and check it out yourself with a review account or 14-day trial. You can find "incursed" systems in your star map if you are looking to jump right in.

And finally, if you haven't done so, I couldn't more strongly recommend logging in to EVE even if just to play with the newly released, industry leading character creator. Making a character in EVE is unmatched by any other character creation I've experienced in video games. The players "seem" to be liking it as well, as last Sunday we broke our Peak Concurrent User (PCU) record with 63, 170 pilots all in one un-instanced world space. Epic.

Check out a new EVE Online video on YouTube by clicking the image below.

Read more here.

The official EVE Online blog has been updated with new information (and flowcharts!) about how the team is working to improve player account security. The first post deals with 'phishing' scams and how the team has researched successful ways that other companies have dealt with the problem and how CCP plans to implement stricter security for its players.

It is important to note that phishing is not the only way your credentials or private information can be stolen. One example we've given a bit in the past is third-party applications such as bots. We spend some time reverse-engineering this code and there are very few cases where ANY "botting" application does NOT send information to the creator that you did not intend it to. There is also NO class of bot that does not violate the EULA and will not  get your account actioned against when we detect it. In one case that springs immediately to mind a freely distributed piece of code had a time-bomb in it where on a certain date and time it transferred the contents of the wallets of everyone using it to the creator. Another recent example had the bot sending all chat channels and communications to the creator. I cannot think of a single instance of bot creation where the creator built and maintained a botting program out of the kindness of their own heart. If you got it for free there's a catch and they're probably stealing from you. If you paid for it you're still just a cash register and they're probably stealing from you, regardless of if you paid for it with a credit card or through some obscure method of transferring ISK.

Read more of this very comprehensive post here.

CCP Games has acknowledged difficulties experienced by some EVE Online players when using the new portrait creator. As a result, the UI for the portrait creator has been updated to give more explanation on topics including which of the four portraits will be used in game and how to get back to the creation tool to alter the appearance of one's portrait.

A chance to recustomize

We understand that many players proceeded into game under the impression that they could come back and make adjustments later; whilst other players didn't end up with the portrait they believed they had chosen.

We want to ensure everyone has the portrait of their choice. So now that we have made the UI clearer we will give all characters who have already completed character customization a chance to recustomize. This will be a one-time recustomization to be used during the grace period.

Characters who had yet to complete customization for the first time will not need this recustomization as they will see the improved UI on their first run through the customization process.

Read more here.

CCP games flipped the switches yesterday and officially launched the final installment of the Incursion expansion for EVE Online. Incursion brings a host of new features and improvements to the game, not the least of which is the new character creation system.

Incursion 1.1 also brings a revision to the Planetary Interaction system, strengthening the gameplay of extracting planetary materials by adding depletion and upgradeability. In addition, Contracts system improvements will complement the dynamic player-run market of EVE, offering better filters and a more intuitive search system. EVE Voice Beta will allow players out of game to join in-game channels via www.evegate.com, permitting them to socialize or participate in fleet ops from the safety of any browser without the EVE Online client running. Furthermore, over forty storyline missions have been added to take players on exciting new adventures for fame, wealth and power.

Read more about Incursion here.

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.

The official blog at the EVE Online site has been updated with information about the next update scheduled to go live on January 18th. Devs will be lulling the server hamsters to sleep and probing them with alien instruments before restarting things again later in the day. With the update, the Sansha will arrive.

One important note: If, on the 18th of January, you find yourself flying around New Eden unable to see any Incursions on the starmap, there is a good reason for it. Rather than just haphazardly throwing the content onto TQ, we’ll be opening it in what we hope is a spectacular-but-oh-so-carefully-staged manner, which means you won’t see it right away. Don’t panic - the spiky space zombies are still coming, but they’d rather jump out of a cake in lingerie, swinging assault rifles by the light of fireworks while singing whatever song space zombies sing, than simply “be there” when the server starts.

Keep your eye open for events and just generally things being a little “out of place” following the Incursion deployment.

Read more here.