At the last EVE Online fanfest, it was announced that the Dominion expansion is slated for December 1st to coincide with Iceland's Sovereignty day. With less than a month to go until launch, there has been growing concern at the extreme lack of information on the new sovereignty mechanics at the expansion's core. There have been a few scheduled tests and several devblogs but few factual details on the mechanics we'll be using once the expansion goes live. I've even been on the test server and tried the new mechanics out but they're far from finished.

The worry was that if the specific details weren't revealed as soon as possible, it might end up being too late to make necessary changes based on player feedback. On Friday 6th, a devblog was finally released explaining the cost breakdowns in the new sovereignty system and what bonuses will be given for the various system upgrades. Rather than allaying people's fears, the devblog set the forums on fire. An intense debate has sprung up, with massive outcry from those that live in 0.0. Their concerns may well be warranted as the proposed mechanics don't quite match up with the original vision of the Dominion expansion that the EVE community has shown support for thus far.

Has Dominion veered off course and is time running out to get it back on track? In this opinion piece, I run down the new devblog and give an inside view into parts of the heated debate it sparked off.

Whether you love EVE Online or hate it, there's one thing people tend to agree on - it makes for some great screenshots. EVE has a history of players producing some amazing videos, screenshots, artwork and fiction. YouTube is filled with intense PvP action videos and over four hundred players write the stories of their travels on personal blogs. People have even created some incredible papercraft ship models. Because we all love eye candy, screenshots from EVE even make a regular appearance in Krystalle's daily MMO screenshot column "One Shots".

EVE's Official magazine EON runs a regular feature called "Postcards from the Edge" where players write in with a screenshot and a short story about it. As a tribute to EON, who I wrote for before coming to Massively, this week and next I present galleries full of postcards from my own travels in EVE. They're all high-resolution shots suitable to be used as widescreen backgrounds, feel free to save them out from your browser to get them at full resolution.

Some time ago, I looked at the different graphical updates EVE Online has received over the years and what was to come. The ship graphics were renovated years ago with the Trinity expansion and much of the rest of the game was left looking dated in comparison. The Apocrypha expansion picked up on the upgrades where Trinity left off, with re-developments of asteroid graphics and most of the game's special effects. Future updates were planned, with promises of bringing new life to planets and everything else that hasn't been improved. With the Dominion expansion on the horizon, it now seems that those promises are being fulfilled. We've seen new planet graphics and even shiny new starfields on the test server but are there other parts of the game that could benefit more from a graphical overhaul?

In this short opinion piece, I take a quick look at the graphical overhauls that are coming with the Dominion expansion and ask which other aspects of EVE's graphics are long overdue for an upgrade.

The term "corporation" in EVE Online is something of a misnomer. While a corp can be run as a full-on business entity, most are just like guilds or clans in other MMOs. It's a group of pilots that join together under one banner for mutual benefit, organised operations or even just to have some nice people to chat to while you mine. For those that can't find a good player-run corporation that's compatible with their aims and goals, there are a few options. One option is to stay in one of the many NPC-run corps but perhaps the most interesting choice is to start your own corp. With the upcoming 11% tax being applied to NPC corps, some of the people currently in those corps may even want to start their own one-man corps to evade the tax.

Running your own corporation provides you with additional tools like corporate hangers and the ability to set up starbases or declare war on other corps. It also opens the opportunity to recruit like-minded individuals and friends into your group so you can work together on anything from mining and mission-running to full-on PvP and piracy. EVE is one of those games that really starts to take off once you start working together with people. Starting your own corp can, however, be a daunting task that carries with it responsibilities and risks.

For all those that have ever wanted to run their own corporation, in this article I explain how to the process of starting a corp, recruiting and keeping the corp secure against threats. I also go into detail on some of the corp operations you can hope to enjoy with friends.

If you play EVE Online or follow its news, you've probably heard of the Council of Stellar Management (or CSM for short). They're a democratically elected group of players that volunteer a lot of free time to help the developers improve EVE. The CSM's job is outlined in the official summary document as "to represent society interests to CCP". They act as an intermediary between CCP's development team and the EVE players but what do they actually do and have they made a positive impact on the game? I initially researched the CSM one month after the institution's inception when it was much too early to tell. With three six-month terms completed and a fourth about to start, there's now enough information to take a real conclusive look at how well the system works.

Join me as I examine the creation of the CSM, how it works and what it's actually achieved since its inception.

Of all the EVE Online stories I've heard over the years, none have impressed and inspired me as much as those detailing a well-planned corporate heist. These aren't your run-of-the-mill contract scammers or corp hanger thieves. A professional corporate spy can earn the deepest levels of trust, destroy a corporation from the inside out, rob its members of their most prized possessions and then disappear without a trace. They're the people that pull the strings of war in the background, pitting alliances against each other to meet their own ends. The Guiding Hand Social Club's famous 2005 heist remains to this day possibly the single most impressive story in EVE history and serves as a benchmark of value and style for a heist that has seldom since been matched.

When I'm not busy writing about EVE or running sleeper anomalies with my buddies, I find myself delving more and more into the dark side of EVE. From wormhole piracy and courier contract theft to full-blown corporate infiltration, this year has bestowed on me a great deal of experience in the dirty underworld of EVE. In this article, I explain how to infiltrate a corp successfully and capitalise on the opportunities it throws at you.

A lot of MMOs rarely (if ever) revisit old gameplay mechanics or areas, focusing instead on new expansions. EVE Online is different in that the developers go back and re-visit old aspects of gameplay rather than just focusing on new mechanics and content. Even Blizzard have seen the wisdom in redevelopment of old content, and in their next planned World of Warcraft expansion "Cataclysm", the entire game world is being given a revamp to bring everything up to their most recent development standards.

CCP Games have been using this development strategy for years and coupled with player-based development in the community, EVE Online is truly a game that evolves over time. Player-managed political states shift allegiances, entire empires can rise, span the galaxy and fall within a year and the emergent gameplay that typifies EVE's sandbox style is constantly being expanding on by players. The game we know now is very different to the one we had a year ago and if recent devblogs are any indication, EVE is about to undergo a major evolutionary leap. The entire sovereignty system and the state of capital warfare is about to undergo a complete revamp.

In this article, I take a more in-depth look ahead at the changes that are coming to 0.0, capital ships and the sovereignty system and how I think they could turn out, given my experiences in EVE.

If you've been following the latest official Alliance Tournament in EVE Online, you've probably been glued to the match videos being posted on Youtube. Every year as I watch the matches, I find myself wishing I'd entered even though my rag-tag group of pilots would probably get knocked out in the qualifying rounds. What you might not know is that the official Alliance Tournament wasn't the first PvP tournament on the block and it's certainly not the only one running. Players have been taking advantage of EVE's open-ended sandbox design to set up their own competitions and arenas for years. They routinely organise successful lotteries, industrial ship destruction derbies, space races, full on PvP tournaments and even poker championships by themselves. Some, such as the BIG lottery, have become long-standing and respected institutions. Organisers of these types of event also have the option of taking a percentage cut for themselves, which can build up to a huge amount of ISK for all the organisation effort they put in.

Have you ever wanted to set up your own PvP tournament complete with prizes and your own unique set of rules? Whether you want to start a new popular competition tradition in EVE or just want to make some ISK off the entry fees, events organising is certainly one of EVE's most rewarding freeform professions. In this article, I dish out some handy information on how to organise and set up a trustworthy tournament without putting any of your own ISK on the line.

With EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion came an entire new class of ship. Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers represent a new wave of technology in EVE. Rather than being simply improved versions of the existing Tech 2 ships, Strategic Cruisers are modular ships reverse engineered from ancient Sleeper and Talocan components. They allow players to design their own ship from a base hull and a set of five subsystems. Each subsystem has four options, with a fifth possibly in the works. Original designs called for the ship to improve as it was used, but this was replaced with a set of rank 1 skills and you lose a level of one of them if your ship is destroyed. A fully fit Tech 3 ship originally would have cost you upwards of two billion isk but prices have since dropped to around the 600 million mark and they're still falling. As these ships have become more affordable, I've had a chance to see some of them in action and see first hand what they can do.

Join me in this visual gallery article where I dish out some information on Strategic Cruisers and then examine a few of the different ways these ships can be fit to fulfill different roles. If you have a particularly inventive setup, feel free to post it as a comment.

In a typical MMO, players will have one main character that they dedicate most of their time and effort to. They may also have alternate characters on the same account that they use to try out different classes or starting areas. EVE Online is different in that it's not really feasible to play multiple characters on the same account. While each EVE account has three character slots, only one can be actively training skills at one time. Taking a break to train up another character means losing training time on your main one. And since any character can learn any skill, it's often better to just train those skills on your main character rather than making a dedicated alt for it. Many players suggest getting a second account but is that really necessary? And what do you do with those two extra character shots on your account?

In this article, I look at some nifty things you can do with your main account's two extra character slots without paying for a second account.

A few weeks ago, we here at Massively were speculating on what the big announcement CCP Games were planning was. After they filed a trademark on a logo for something called "DUST 514", we could only guess that it was the promised EVE Online themed first person shooter. In an email with one of my regular column readers before the announcement, I suggested off-hand that it would be awesome if it were a new EVE FPS that linked in with 0.0 sovereignty. I didn't seriously think that's what they had planned. In fact, I only suggested it as a sort of idealised wish -- a hint at what heights I thought EVE could reach a decade from now.

When the announcement finally went out and I was right, my jaw hit the floor. Reception of the news has virtually polarised the EVE community, with only a small few viewing the idea with a calm, cautious optimism. Most seem either in firm support of the idea or dead set against it, with many arguments erupting around the claim that Dust will let console gamers decide the fate of EVE alliances. And yet despite all the talk of DUST 514 since the announcement, few people have speculated on what the game-play might actually be like and how it might integrate with EVE Online.

In this wish-filled article, I lay out the facts we know so far about DUST 514 and then go on to speculate on what the game-play might be like.

If it seems like I've gone wormhole crazy lately, that's because I have. The wormholes that arrived with the Apocrypha expansion have infiltrated and enriched many different aspects of EVE Online, from exploration and corporate goals to small gang PvP and piracy. In previous articles, I looked at preparing for an expedition, untangled the mystery of the Sleepers and told the story of a tense week for Total Comfort alliance in the Sleeper's den. After a week spent hunting wormhole-dwellers for fun and profit, this week's EVE Evolved is dedicated to the fine art of being an interstellar cut-throat as I delve into the world of wormhole piracy.

Wormhole piracy is one of the few professions where small gang warfare is most prevalent. While many pirates have already begun including wormhole systems in their roaming gangs, our corporation (and I'm sure others) have come across a much more effective method. By setting up your own pirate staging base inside a wormhole system, your corp can use its regular outgoing wormholes to wreak havoc in systems all across EVE. Using this method, it's possible to spring attacks on people without anyone even seeing you coming. Whether you're planning surprise attacks on 0.0 systems or hunting in the 2500 new unknown sleeper systems, wouldn't you like to run your own pirate way-station?

Read on for an informative guide on using wormholes to wreak havoc around EVE and make a profit in the process.

Back in 2004, a friend introduced me to a relatively new space MMO called EVE Online, where the markets were run by the players and there were undiscovered frontiers to chart. A short time after, I became obsessed with pre-calculating everything in the game. I thought that if the game server can calculate everything we do, I must be able to replicate the process and come up with some interesting results. I wasn't alone, many other pilots had previously created simple spreadsheets and web-databases of EVE's items. Rather than the game's developers hoarding the information required for such an undertaking, they took an unusual stance and released large portions of their main database for player-study. Websites began popping up listing information from the data dumps and it wasn't long before the first pioneering apps came about in the form of handy spreadsheets and interactive web-pages, my own fairly popular tanking spreadsheet among them.

In this article, I look at how player-developed apps came about in EVE and give details on my top five EVE apps. Once you've tried these programs, you won't know how you lived without them.

It's said that sandbox MMO EVE Online doesn't really begin to shine until you join a good player-run corporation. There's only so much a lone pilot can accomplish and a lot of the game's most rewarding experiences are based around groups and collaboration. Wormhole expeditions, PvP, territorial wars, politics and much of EVE's other emergent gameplay routes rely heavily on forming groups and friendships in-game. In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find an MMO which doesn't have its game experience improved by group activities and forming friendships. But just as choosing the right corporation for your play style can make the game a lot better, choosing the wrong one or not joining one at all can ruin a new player's experience of the game.

Over the past few weeks, I've had several emails from readers looking for advice on how to find a good corporation. In this article aimed at new and prospective EVE players, I introduce a simple five-step approach for finding that perfect corporation who can turn playing EVE from a potentially boring experience into a very rewarding one.
(UPDATE: I had accidentally disabled comments, comments are now enabled on page 2)