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Responsible Disclosure - Reporting Security Issues

Greetings Internet Space Citizens!

This is a topic that while near and dear to my heart, is something that's kind of languished for a while and I'm happy to begin talking about with youtoday here on the Internet.

Firstly, I want to spend some time on process and what goes into developing a web application at CCP. I'm not a web developer so I won't go into any detail regarding how we make decisions on technologies or anything, but I am The Security Guy so I do want to spend some time going over our process as it pertains to this area. In essence we follow a pretty well-established set of best practices. All code that is written is peer reviewed and subject to rounds of internal testing. Prior to publication of the code, a reputable third party performs a vulnerability analysis of the codebase that will be published. The results of this audit are actioned on prior to code publication. If this introduces delays, it introduces delays. The applications we develop are complex because of their levels of interactivity with so many other systems. Because of that, testing these applications can be challenging. The scope can never just be limited to testing a single web application because of the degrees of interactivity, which makes testing a much larger task than if the applications were self-contained. All of that being said, there are going to be situations where we simply miss something and that's where this blog comes in.

Dating back to the last release of the forums, I've been working through exactly how we can ensure that we're properly receiving and incentivizing security information from you, our players. This is a first iteration of a how-to which will be followed by a bit of information about how we'd like to see the program develop, and a request for some feedback from you because ultimately what we're trying to to is give you something to be proud of.

As it stands today there are a number of ways people attempt to submit security-related issues to us:

1. Filing a petition - This is inefficient as the person receiving the petition is not a security expert, may not understand the severity of the issue and it therefore may take more time to get to the right people. Security issues need to be addressed in minutes to hours, not days.
2. Filing a bug report - This suffers from a similar malady to the first. A lot of information comes into both of these systems and we wouldn't be doing anyone a service by spending our days weeding through bug reports.
3. Posting on the forums about it - This is also a bad idea. A really really bad idea as it is essentially an open disclosure, which leaves the system vulnerable to exploitation via the detailed method for the window it takes us to notice your post on the forums.
4. Posting on another forum - huh?

None of these above-mentioned avenues of communication are really effective at getting us the information we need in the time we need to be receiving it. What we'd like to rectify is twofold:

1. Providing you with a reliable and immediate avenue to report security issues so that they can get fixed immediately and investigated responsibly
2. Providing you with a template of information which would be helpful to us in actually tracking down the issue 

According to Wikipedia which is never wrong: Responsible disclosure is a computer security term describing a vulnerability disclosure model. It is like full disclosure, with the addition that all stakeholders agree to allow a period of time for the vulnerability to be patched before publishing the details. Developers of hardware and software often require time and resources to repair their mistakes. Hackers and computer security scientists have the opinion that it is their social responsibility to make the public aware of vulnerabilities with a high impact. Hiding these problems could cause a feeling of false security. To avoid this, the involved parties join forces and agree on a period of time for repairing the vulnerability and preventing any future damage. Depending on the potential impact of the vulnerability, this period may vary between a few weeks and several months. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_disclosure)

In essence what we're hoping to accomplish is that we can not only give you a venue to report information to us confidentially so that we can resolve the issue, but also to provide you with perks or incentives for doing so. We believe that if you're going to provide us with information that makes our product better, our customers safer and makes the Internet a better place then you should be rewarded for this. The problem with this is that incentives are not a one size fits all proposition but we'll get to that in a minute.

In the first pass we don't want to go crazy building systems or making crazy templates for submission. For the time being we think it is enough for us to say that when you send us information we need as much detail as possible. I can cite examples related to this forum:

• The Bad Example - User files a bug report that says, "You guys are idiots the whole thing is broken."
• The Good Example - User sends an email to security@ccpgames.com which reads "Dearest CCP Sreegs, I have come across a cross site scripting vulnerability in your forum. Here is some sample exploit code which I have used to prove my concept"

Believe it or not both of these examples actually happened. The difference is in how it gets handled. In the first scenario the report was erroneous and never got to anyone who could do anything about it. Were the user to continue messing around we would have only our logs to go by, which would show that the user was exploiting. Computers aren't very good at logging intent and believe it or not there are documented cases where people who are out to do bad things have lied about their intentions. If we're witnessing an exploit being taken advantage of in our logs then, from our perspective, an exploit is being taken advantage of and the consequences for such actions are not light.

In the second example the user was rewarded. What we'd like to do is extend that concept.I'll go ahead and get to that now.

In essence, what we'd like to achieve is to provide you with an incentive to be a good Internet citizen. Though we have given people rewards in the past they have been on a case by case basis. The main thing holding it up really is figuring out what would be of interest to you. Is it your name in lights? (This can look good on a resume.) Is it some free game time? Is it some other kind of incentive? This is the type of information I'd like to gather from you so that we can tailor the program to be the most effective.

Basically you provide us with security-related information in confidentiality. If you'd like your name in lights we'd like to recognize that. We also want to ensure that if you prefer to remain anonymous that can be facilitated as well. We have some ideas, but we're going to be basing the final solution on your input from this blog.

One thing of note in the program is that not every report will be worthy of reward. In order to receive recognition or incentivization you will need to provide us with something of value. Nobody really cares that Soundwave possesses the largest anime collection in Iceland. That won't help us at all; however, learning that he is studying Japanese so that he can further immerse himself in the true anime experience adds some value. To use a more relevant example, an exploit condition in our software that we can replicate and fix is of immense value. The more information you can provide the more relevant it is. Simply saying "something is broken" isn't always helpful, but saying "something's broken and here's how I broke it" is what we're looking for.

The best way to do this is to send a detailed email to security@ccpgames.com. No other method of contact will ensure that your issue gets attention from the team that can fix the issue. While we haven't yet formalized the program, I have made it a personal mission in the cases that the information is of high value that the person gets rewarded. I'm looking forward to your feedback on this and after you've had some time to weigh in we'll get the ball rolling and present The Full Monty.

News from the fontlines

Ola!

I'm CCP Punkturis of Team BFF and I'm here to talk about font changes. Yup you heard me F O N T changes!

I know you have all had problems with differentiating between I1, O0, 5S, 6G&, 8B  and I don't blame you:

So let me present Eve Sans Neue, where you can see the difference between letters:

We’re still tuning this, don’t worry if some screenshots look a bit wonky right now. The font is, for example, sitting a bit too high at the moment so it seems like there’s not enough space above it at times, but that will be fixed.  

All about it
Eve Sans Neue is a refinement of the original Eve Sans font. The design was revised, it was technically updated and readability has been improved. Among other updates, it now contains native Cyrillic characters, different fonts for different size groups, and a rounder form that improves legibility.

To get the new font to render the best we could we had to update our version of FreeType. While we were at it, we decided to change our approach of using FreeType slightly and move more of the work into C++, rather than Python. This results in a significant speed boost in text rendering, meaning we spend less time opening up new windows in EVE. We've also changed how we handle characters that don't exist in our font. We used to search through your Windows Fonts folder for some preferred fallback fonts, then failing that, searching for the font with the most characters in it. Now we've simply licensed the Arial Unicode font and provide that with the EVE client, using it to render any characters not available in the EVE font.

Label styles
We didn’t have much consistency in the way we displayed labels. So to make the look of EVE more consistent we created just a few label styles and applied those to the existing labels. That means some of the text will be smaller than it was before, and some will be larger. This also means that maintaining the labels and making style changes in the future will be a walk in the park.

"I DON'T TYPE IN CAPS CAUSE I'M MAD I TYPE IN CAPS BECAUSE I'M LAZY!!!" - Kanye West
EVE was full of uppercase labels. I kind of felt sometimes like the client was screaming at me; anyone else feel the same? So we removed a lot of the uppercasing. It's our opinion that the text is more readable now.

A good example of this is the esc menu. Here's how it was before:

And here's how it is now:

I know this is quite a lot of change in something that many of you spend a lot of time staring at so it's probably going to take some time getting used to. Some people at the office thought it was a bit wonky at first but quickly started to like it.

Try it out and post!
Since there are endless things you guys do in EVE and we have probably not covered all of the use cases, we want to ask you to try it out on Singularity (real soon) and then report all issues in this thread.

Let us know if you find text that doesn't fit in windows, let us know if you notice that the wrong font is being used. Let us know if you see anything you don't like! Try typing in the chat and see if the correct font is being used (especially you guys who type in "weird" languages - I'm Icelandic and I consider Icelandic not weird).

Note that this is still work in progress!

We will be monitoring this thread and we'll try to get to things as quickly as possible.

I really hope this change is going to make life easier and EVE more readable for you all,

Thank you for listening!

Fixing some things and moving forward

Hey there.

 I‘d like to announce a few fixes that are being worked on that we‘re planning to release shortly

First off, ship spinning. The ability to see your current ship within the station hangar. This was removed when we released Captain‘s Quarters, as we felt the perspective from your own bridge overlooking the ship was enough. As it turns out, it didn‘t allow you to look at the ship from all angles, it requires far more GPU and CPU power than simply rendering a ship and a hangar and, importantly, we didn‘t retain UI functionality such as drag-dropping a ship onto your hangar to activate it or double-clicking on the ship to open its cargo. We know that it‘s annoying as hell logging into a station on a craptop trying to sort out some market orders and feel it slowly roasting your lap while it renders your pencil skirt-wearing Caldari commander lady. We are addressing this now.  The original UI functionality is scheduled to be retained. Rather than a checkbox in the escape menu, you will simply be able to board and unboard your ship, toggling between Captain‘s Quarters and Ship Spinning mode. Your client will remember your last choice, so if you left your station while boarded, you will be boarded the next time you find yourself in a station and vice versa. Expect it on the test server soon™.

Second, while introducing the new turret graphics, we decided to experiment with using rendered views of each turret to replace the icons that you see in the fitting screen, HUD, market and on active targets. It turned out that the new turret models, while heavily detailed and cool, didn‘t lend themselves well to being drawn in an area just a few pixels wide and tall. Usability suffered. It was hard to distinguish between turret types. As a result, we will be reverting the change so that turret icons use the original custom drawn icons, rather than 3d renders of the turrets themselves. You will still be able to get the 3d preview of the turret, to celebrate their uberness while reading their stats.

Third, we‘ve made a number of improvements on the skin shader and on shading within the Captain‘s Quarters in general.:

• Fixed the incorrect specular behavior
• Fixed shader texture gamma issues
• Implemented a new specular glossiness model
• The specular reflection is tinted by the color of the light
• Added diffuse and specular fresnel
• Added specular light from indirect light (spherical harmonics)
• Calibrated the BRDF presets to the ones in character creator

Click image to enlarge.

Basically it will look better and less harsh in conditions where there is much contrast, such as the Minmatar captain‘s quarters.

Oh, and we have a new cyno effect. It is scheduled to be out on within a week, in WIP state, without sound. We‘re looking forward to getting your feedback on it. We‘re hoping that you‘ll be spending liquid ozone like there‘s no tomorrow for the pure joy of seeing and hearing that effect.

All in all, we‘re moving forward. It‘s too soon to make announcements about what expansions and features we are developing, that will be announced in due time.

Thanks for reading!

Torfi Frans

Fanfest 2012 Announced!

EVE Online Fanfest 2012: March 22-24

The Eighth Party at the Top of the World... now in a new location!

It is time to start marking your calendars for the 2012 Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland, held for the first time in the brand new Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre; an amazing new home for Fanfest that welcomes us with open arms.

I guess it is also time for me to reintroduce myself to all of you since my debut in Fanfest 2009 (actually I was the event manager for Fanfest '07 and Fanfest '08 as a contractor). I am CCP Tyr, your personal Fanfest guy. My goal is to bring you exponentially better Fanfests, and I think I have managed to do just that. But with the explosive growth of Fanfest the last couple of years, and especially the Party at the Top of the World, I have decided to refocus the event on you, the attendees. More EVE stuff, exclusive Fanfest attendee treatment at the party, improved Pub Crawls, DUST 514 goodies and more.

And please, by all means, if you think there is something I can do to improve your Fanfest experience, drop me a line and give me your valuable feedback – fanfestsupport@eveonline.com.

Back to the important stuff, Fanfest 2012!

Fanfest brings together players in a massive celebration of EVE Online. Travelers from all around the world gather in one of the most beautiful and unique locations the planet has to offer. Allies and rivals alike set aside their in-game differences to share drinks with one another and forge new friendships. CCP developers mingle with the community, always up for  "talking shop" and getting to know the fans.

Iceland is one of  the world’s must-see vacation destinations, and if you haven’t been to one of our previous Fanfests, we encourage you to come.The many wonders of Iceland await your arrival. The Sisters of EVE Program will give your friend or partner a chance to visit Iceland along with you: Details regarding the program coming soon.

Get ready for another crazy weekend of:

• Pub Crawling and hanging out with the developers
• Round Tables
• Presentations with new EVE Video Premieres
• PVP tournaments
• The Party at the Top of the World!
• Poker Tournament
• Battle of the Bands
• Silent Auction
• Live Agents
• Chessboxing?.....I guess not, but you can just imagine what those crazy devs are planning this time.
• And much more!

Further details, including flights and accommodation and Fanfest 2012 Access Pass availability, will be announced later, as the event draws closer. Stay tuned for further updates.

* Please note that you have to be 18 years or older to enter the Fanfest area.

CSM Special Summit - meeting minutes are out

Several well-known things lead to a special CSM summit being held in Iceland the 30th of June – 1st of July on very short notice. This summit consisted of three main topics: the latest expansion, EVE Online: Incarna and the introduction of Captain’s Quarters; the debut of the Noble Exchange; and CCP’s plans for the sale of virtual goods in EVE.

At the end of the summit, a summary of the conclusions was published when it concluded, and as with all CSM summits so far the minutes were to follow soon after. Obviously that was not the case this time. As with all sensitive matters that have to be agreed upon by many people, it takes time to create a document that everyone can accept. It is important to keep in mind that CSM meeting minutes are not released unless both CCP and the CSM give their approval. This is a mandate that I have set as the CSM Project Manager and I stand by it even if it means delays like this one. 

Both parties had strong opinion regarding the content, presentation and tone of the minutes and so a considerable amount of time and effort was spent in reaching a compromise. These things might sound trivial and many people might call it a battle of semantics, but the content of these minutes are far from trivial. They are very important to both participants in the summit and everyone wanted them to properly reflect the tone from the meetings.

The minutes have now been accepted by both parties and can be viewed here: CSM Special Summit minutes.

CCP Xhagen
CSM Project Manager

CAKs and Contracts in the API

For a while now we've had the latest API updates running on a SISI setup on apitest.eveonline.com as well as the new key management web on supporttest.eveonline.com. Most of you API-savvy programmers probably know how the new toys work to every last detail, but I'm still going to spell them out just to make sure everything is clear.

Customizable API Keys

You've been asking for this one for a while now and here it is. The new API key system offers a variety of new features that we hope will fill both third-party developers' and third-party application users' hearts with light, joy and furry little animals.

• Up to 10 API keys per account
• Customizable access to the API + Templates
• Optional expiry date
• Access to character- and corporation information separated
• Single-character or account-wide keys

The concept of customizing your API keys is all about being able to control what information can be accessed in the API with a particular API key, and for how long. Say you want to give the director of your corporation access to your wallet info but only for today, you can create a key that only unlocks that information and expires tomorrow. When you quit your corporation you can cut off any access to your API information your former boss may have had without having to create a new key for your third-party apps.

You can also customize the key's access to API information based on characters. If you select one of your characters then the key will only apply to the selected one, if you don't the key will provide access to all your characters' info. If you have a character that's a CEO or a corporate director then you can create a corporation key which unlocks the character's corporation information.

By templates, we mean that third-party developers can provide users with links to the API key creation form with a pre-defined access mask which describes what is needed for their application to work properly and the required API pages will be selected automatically on the form.

The management web for API keys has been moved to the EVE Support website. The old one will, however, remain open and you can still create and use the old keys in the API for a while. We don't have an exact date for cutting them off; we want to give developers plenty of time to make the switch and make users aware of the changes, but we are measuring this in weeks and considering something in the order of 4-8 weeks. We'll keep an eye on the key usage though and let you know well before we flip the switch.

To use the new keys in the API you can throw out the old userID and apiKey URL parameters and use keyID and vCode instead. You can find the keyID in the first column (called ID) on the API key management website, vCode stands for Verification Code and is displayed in the same table for each key.

Technical information in CCP Stillman's dev blog from the testing period of the new keys still stands. You can find some examples of how to use the keys in the API and how to create the template/predefined links there.

Contracts

Here's another popular request from the API community. I posted a dev blog a while ago which explains the strategy we were going with at the time. To make a long story short, we decided to stick with that strategy.

We created three new pages to display contract information. Well, three pairs of pages since you can fetch character and corporation contracts.

/char/Contracts.xml.aspx: Lists contracts issued within the last month as well as all contracts marked as outstanding or in-progress. A single contract can be retreived using the contractID parameter. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• contractID
• issuerID: The character who issued the contract.
• issuerCorpID: The corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• assigneeID: The character or corporation who was assigned to the contract, 0 if none.
• acceptorID: The character who has accepted the contract, 0 if none.
• startStationID
• endStationID
• type: Can be "ItemExchange", "Auction", "Loan" or "Courier".
• status: Can be "Outstanding", "InProgress", "CompletedByIssuer", "CompletedByContractor", "Completed", "Cancelled", "Rejected", "Failed", "Deleted" or "Reversed".
• title: The player-made description. Odd naming, we know.
• forCorp: 1 if the contract was issued on behalf of the issuer's corporation, 0 otherwise.
• availability: Can be "Public" or "Private". The availability can also be set to "My Corporation", in that case the availability here is "Private" and the assigneeID is the corporation of which the issuer was a member of when the contract was issued.
• dateIssued
• dateExpired
• dateAccepted: Empty if the contract hasn't been accepted.
• numDays: Days to complete the contract.
• dateCompleted: Empty if the contract hasn't been completed.
• price
• reward
• collateral
• buyout
• volume

/char/ContractItems.xml.aspx: Lists items that a specified contract contains, use the contractID parameter to specify the contract. Note that items for courier contracts are not displayed. Each item in the list has the following attributes:

• recordID: A unique key.
• typeID: The type of the item.
• quantity: The actual quantity.
• rawQuantity: This attribute will only show up if the quantity is a negative number in the DB. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 indicates that the item is a singleton (non-stackable). If the item happens to be a Blueprint, -1 is an Original and -2 is a Blueprint Copy.
• singleton: 1 if this is a singleton item, 0 if not.
• included: 1 if the contract issuer has submitted this item with the contract, 0 if the isser is asking for this item in the contract.

/char/ContractBids.xml.aspx: Lists the latest bids that have been made to any recent auctions. The first request lists all bids made to last months auctions but subsequent requests will only display bids that have been made since that last request. The item attributes are pretty straight forward:

• bidID: A unique key.
• contractID
• bidderID
• dateBid
• amount

These pages are accessible with character keys. The /corp folder has identical pages accessible with corporation keys. The data retrieval differs slightly but the datasets returned by the API are same as in the /char folder.

Random stuff

• Items in the AssetList (and ContractItems) now include a rawQuantity attribute if the quantity in the DB is negative. Negative quantities are in fact codes, -1 indicates that the item is a singleton (non-stackable). If the item happens to be a Blueprint, -1 is an Original and -2 is a Blueprint Copy. For further information about negative quantities see this devblog.
• MarketOrders.xml.aspx will now return all active orders plus all orders issued in the last 7 days. An optional "orderID" parameter can be provided to fetch any order belonging to your character/corporation.
• CharacterInfo.xml.aspx now includes employment history.
• WalletJournal.xml.aspx should no longer cause a Scotty when rowCount is high.

Credits

I think it's only fair to mention that CCP Prism X and CCP Stillman did the bulk of the work on the customizable API keys. All I did was marvel at this godly construct and build a couple of minor additions to it.

So. Thanks for reading, I know it was boring and dry as usual and for that I'm not sorry. I'll see you guys on the forums.

CCP Elerhino

<- addthis_pub = 'ccpgames'; // -->

Price Indices - July 2011

The four price indices of New Eden have been calculated for July 2011.  For more detail on the indices, please refer to the price level chapter of the QEN.

The Mineral Price Index seem to be stabilizing after a sharp fall in the last two months, but individual minerals are still fluctuating a bit.

The 2.4% fall in the Primary Producer Price Index is mainly driven by a  13% fall in the price of Technetium.  Technetium prices had been rising steadily since Tech II blueprint requirements were changed in the Dominion expansion.  In June, this trend started to reverse, with Technetium prices falling by 4.5%, and in July, the price dropped by 13%.  This comes at a time when the Northern Coalition, known as a major producer of Technetium, lost a lot of ground.  Technetium moons changing hands may hamper moon mining operations for a short while, which would reduce supply.  This should raise the price instead of reducing it.  However, supply of Technetium does not seem to have been affected noticeably.  Trade volume of Technetium was at normal levels in June and July, rising a bit from May.  Produced mass of Tech II ships also remained fairly stable.

The price of PLEX falls by 5% from June to July.  The average price in July is on par with that of April.  Speculative trading in PLEX, following a dev blog on virtual goods, seems to have created a modest spike in prices in May and June, which has now settled back at pre-blog levels.

The values for July are:

July 2011

1 Month Change

12 Month Change

Mineral Price Index

72.0

-0.2%

16.0%

Primary Producer Price Index

76.5

-2.4%

29.4%

Secondary Producer Price Index

110.8

1.8%

11.7%

Consumer Price Index

64.2

-2.9%

7.7%

The graph shows the development of the indices since October 2003.

Full series of the four main price indices in Excel format

Full series of the four main price indices in CSV format

The August indices are expected to be published around the middle of September.

Something wiki this way comes

What is EVE Online?  Bums, Education drop outs, Marketing, Scholars have argued this question for many years and come up with such answers as: “EVE is an MMORPG” (you can just taste the scholarship at work there) or “EVE is REAL” or “EVE is ruining my god damn life and my girlfriend is about to leave me but I got a sweet kill last night in my HAC."

In any case, EVE is this huge, hard-to-define entity that is pretty bloody cool, “somewhat” complex and so deep you can easily lose yourself within it.  Players like to write about EVE, whether it be a guide to the latest really complex lovingly crafted system, whose face their alliance just grinded into the dirt, or a guide to that mission or complex they just completed.

So some bright spark at CCP decided that it would be cool to have a central repository where people could put all of this stuff and others could easily locate it.  Someone said wiki’s were cool, so the EVElopedia was conceived and brought to life.  It had a bit of an unsteady birth; issues with moderation and various other things initially hampered its growth, but it has since steadily grown in popularity and use. 

So the EVElopedia is a wiki.   Put simply: it allows users to create simple Web pages on whatever they like and other users to search and locate that information.   For the EVElopedia, this means any and all information related to EVE.  For example: 

• How does Tech 2 production work?
• The timeline of the EVE Universe?
• What’s a good way to fit and fly an Incursus?
• What were the major battles alliances fought in 2009?
• Who are the CSM and what do they do?

It’s a bit ugly though.  It’s also still in beta.  It also has some lingering annoyances.  So we decided it was high time we kicked it up the arse so we have the release version coming out very soon™.   Unfortunately for me and wanting to show off in this blog, we mainly fixed a ton of boring behind-the-scenes work that was getting in the way of us progressing the EVElopedia along with the players like we wanted to.  But here’s what we did change that you will notice:

Into new sexy...

We had a system where you would edit a page and then it would go into an internal queue where our volunteers would check the edits and then approve the changes made to a page.  While our vols did a great job, it really wasn’t the best idea.  So we tried a few things and decided to go with the best suggestion: remove it.  So we removed it. 

We still have a very few pages that we will simply just lock. 99.9% of the pages on the EVElopedia you can edit at will.  I know what some of you are thinking!  Don’t do it, we will ban you.  We will still be looking over all the submissions and anything that breaches the rules will get you spanked and possibly banned depending on how naughty you were.  The rules aren’t that complex, but basically boil down to “don’t be a wanker.”

So many potential bad jokes. Anyway, this took ages and is boring, but during the initial development cycle and birth of the EVElopedia we did some things right and some things not-so-right.  So we took a long look at it, chucked out a lot of stuff that was getting in the way of enabling players to contribute, and added a lot more support that allows us to easily add player requests, for example new extensions.   We put in support for localization (not everyone likes English, you know) and laid the groundwork for better links from in-game to EVElopedia.   EVElopedia is now much more closely aligned with its mediawiki core, which basically means we can move faster and operate better, allowing us to bring player requests and suggestions onboard to expand and improve EVElopedia.

We are implementing a portal system to make it easier to navigate around various subjects, something we were really lacking before.  Hunting for something specific is fine, but trying to find all the help you can on mining or PvP can be laborious.  We’ve started the portal system in this release and hopefully the some of you will come on board and help us expand it post release.

There are a lot of good EVE Online wikis already out there.  We want to work with these to both projects advantage.  To that end we are working in partnership with EVE University and EVE History wikis to port over some of their best articles onto the EVElopedia, which we will then link directly back to the original.  Also once we have implemented the in-game help links, your site's guide might be linked directly from the in-game window related to it.  Which is pretty cool, IMO.

I’m thinking most of you will just want somewhere you can go search for a guide on advanced mining techniques, how to be a space ninja, or who are the Goonswarm – I like you people.   A lot of you however will want to make new articles or update old ones – I hold you people close to my heart.  Some stalwart souls will even want to really get involved and help us develop and progress the EVElopedia – you are my special people.

If you want to help further, how do you do it?  We have a volunteer team (named YARR, much to their modest delight) who help us develop, support and moderate the EVElopedia.  These guys liaise with you and then talk to us about what you need and require and then we get that implemented (new extension, hate the font size, etc).  They happen to be recruiting!

If that’s not your cup of tea and you just want to see what people need help with or contribute to on-going projects then the Community Portal is the first stop shop as well as a hub for the community on the wiki.  We currently share a forum which our volunteer EVElopedia admins and CCP watch, and you can email YARR at evelopedia@isd.eve-online.com.

Or you can simply create a new article on your favorite subject.  However, please be sure that you search for the topic first, as chances are someone else has already made something and you can go and improve that instead.

So that’s whats going to happen; this is what we want to happen in the not so distant future...

The current, basic wiki editor is rather awful, and we’d like to get something WYSIWYG-like in place to allow more people to easily create and update articles.  This is sensible, we are sensible.

This was actually going to make it in for the summer, but my heart was broken and it got delayed.  Basically, we want to turn the help button you have on windows to directly go to an appropriate EVElopedia help article.  This seems sensible; our current help doesn’t.

We might already have this in place by release.  But we like more languages.  More languages are sensible.

We're hard at work on the first part of the Immersion Project, a central storehouse of all our lore so far. It's up to nearly a thousand articles, and it won't be long before we can let you guys get your first look at it.

--

So what does all this resolve into.  A leaner, easier to use, more pretty EVElopedia.  Its my fervent hope that the community will get even more involved with the EVElopedia and we will see all manner of beautiful and crazy articles appear.

Thanks,

Ginger.

Power to the people ......

Knowledge is power, and we want to give EVE Online pod pilots more power (as if they did not have enough already! ;-)  ). Ever since my first Fanfest, back in 2007, I have discussed with pod pilots the possibility of giving better access to the vast data that is available from EVE Online. The main obstacle so far has been making the data available on a consistent basis in a format that fits EVE players. I am pleased to inform you that we have made headway towards having a system in place that would allow us to give EVE players access to historical time series on items sold in the main EVE market hubs.

Exciting news indeed, and we can't wait to see what the human supercomputer that the EVE playerbase is will do with this data. However, before Team Sleeper Cell and the Research and Statistics unit can finalize this project we need your assistance to better understand which data format is best for the community. To do that, we will provide access to EVE market data from 2010 through May 2011. The data will show the average price for more than 6,000 items on the EVE market in the top five trade regions in EVE, along with other basic parameters, as can be seen in the table below. This data can differ from the in-game price history graph, since those graphs use either median price or average price, depending on the number of transactions available. In this case, we opted for calculating both the median and the average price for all items, so both time series are in the dataset. This is a one-time datadump for now, but in the future, the data would be provided on a regular basis. However, the catch is that the data will always be delayed; by how much will be determined at later stages in the development process, but until then, it would be great to hear from you guys what you think would be a reasonable delay: one month, two weeks, several days?

We're providing access to the market data in two different ways during our initial test run. Our intent is to only release it in one format in the future. As we want to know what is the most convenient for everyone to use, we're providing the data in both .csv and a MSSQL backup format. We will be using your feedback and statistics of which is most used to decide on how we will be going forward with delivering this data for you in the future. Please let us know your preferences for format in the comments thread of this blog.

The data is provided in the following format:

typeID

regionID

dateday

transactionCount

totalQuantity

totalValue

avgPrice

maxPrice

minPrice

medianPrice

27904

10000032

2011-04-25 00:00:00

1

1

123649.95

123649.95

123649.95

123649.95

123649.95

CSV: http://content.eveonline.com/data/marketData/MarketData.csv.zip
SQL: http://content.eveonline.com/data/marketData/MarketData.bak.zip

This is just a test run so that Team Sleeper Cell can continue their work on getting you this data on a consistent basis in convenient format.  But we would also like to hear your comments on the usability of this data; give us examples on how you would use it. If this turns out to be popular, it is my opinion that the more we can directly give to you, the better. 

More data, more knowledge, more power to the pod pilots of New Eden.

Many thanks go to team Sleeper Cell and Research and Statistics. Giving players some interesting data to work with is truly a team effort.  You will see several of us participating in the discussion on this topic, including CCP Stillman, CCP Elerhino, CCP Recurve, and yours truly.

Fly safe but remember to destroy stuff - it is good for the EVE economy!

Best

Dr.EyjoG

<- addthis_pub = 'ccpgames'; // -->

Summer and Incarna 1.1

It's a tradition: every time summer rolls around, Europeans take nice, long vacations. As an American, I tend to become overly amused by this; my Puritanical (pure tyrannical?) self cannot fathom the idea of taking three or four weeks off at a time, and secretly, I envy my co-workers, those lucky, loveable bastards!

Another tradition: during the summer months, EVE Online players become anxious for more news and information about their favorite game. Vacation time, for the average capsuleer, is EVE time. Capsuleers rarely take time off from flying around in space, pulling the latest, greatest, ever-larger scams, or engaging in massive fleet battles that make CCP Veritas salivate with glee.

But what is going on at CCP when so many are on holiday? Does everything stop while holidays and return trips home occur? Does further development for EVE take a back seat to tanning oil and proper English breakfasts? Not at all! Even though many of my co-workers are on holidays, work towards improving the game and fighting the war on lag continues.

Now that you are better familiar with how work progresses on EVE Online during the summer months, it's time to talk about EVE Online: Incarna, and its future. A number of players have been asking me, both on the forums and on Twitter when the remainder of the Captain's Quarters will be released. Since the release of Incarna, we have continued to iterate and improve the Minmatar CQ while pushing forward with the development of the remaining racial quarters, as well as working apace on establishments. Incarna 1.1 will see the results of our progress on improving the existing CQ, and later this year we plan on deploying the remaining racial quarters to Tranquility as well as the next Incarna feature, establishments.

Racial Captain's Quarters and Establishments... coming soon to a door near you!

We also currently plan on releasing Incarna 1.1 on August 30. Detailed information will be provided in our patch notes, which will be released before Incarna 1.1's deployment. We look forward to sharing our work with you and hearing your feedback!

- CCP Fallout