Russian and Japanese localizations of EVE Online are currently on the Singularity test server, and CCP Caedmon has asked players in a dev blog to help point out anything that may have been lost in translation.

According to Caedmon, the team has been localizing more than 700,000 words for the Russian client, where most console games gave about 100,000. In addition, a lot of the EVE code was written with English in mind, so it doesn't translate easily to Russian. This is why Caedmon has asked players to log on to Singularity and report and bugs they find for both the the Russian and Japanese localizations.

Also, just to make it clear, Caedmon emphasized that machine translation was not used in either instance. So you don't have to worry about seeing "All your base are belong to us" popping up in any version of EVE Online.

As we reported in February, a recent developer's blog outlined the New Player Experience changes that will come along with Apocrypha, the 10th EVE Online expansion. Well, a new dev blog entry posted by CCP Flatboy today goes one step further to explain how the reduction of starting skillpoints for new character will affect gameplay.

According to Flatboy, characters will now train skills faster: "In Apocrypha, new characters train at double speed until they reach 1.6 Million SkillPoints. That is all. These values were chosen so that an Apocrypha character catches up with a current character in about 6 weeks after which they will be equal in power."

So what's the purpose of all this? Flatboy says in the blog entry that the team wants new players to better understand their skills. Users will earn new skills as they play and will hopefully learn to understand how they truly work through experimentation. You can read the full blog entry after the jump.

The EVE Online: Apocrypha features page went live today in preparation for the free expansion's launch on March 10. You can view screenshots, wallpapers and a teaser trailer, as well as read interviews and check out the full list of features coming in this massive update.

Here's just some of the features you can look forward to seeing in Apocrypha: exploration through wormholes; The Sleepers, a new NPC race; Tech 3 strategic cruisers; the addition of the New Player Experience with improved tutorials; Epic Mission Arcs; updated visual effects; a Premium Mac client; the addition of a skills queue; a redesigned ship formatting screen; an improved audio engine; and localization for the Russian client.

Considering the expansion coincides with the release of the game's first retail box, it looks like CCP is pulling out all the stops with Apocrypha. You can read a press release with the full list of features after the jump.

Work on EVE Online has always been a community effort, and CCP is currently calling on players for help fighting lag and becoming a Bug Hunter.

The EVE team has been investigating lag in faction warfare in the server side for some time, and now they need your help looking at the client side of things. "The more people that help us with this, the faster and more accurately we can solve this issue. What makes it even better is that it is easy and fun to help out. This is what we need from you: We need you to run the logserver (easy), and participate in as many Faction Warfare battles as possible (fun)." You can find out all about participating here.

If hunting for bugs is more your thing, you can apply to become a Bug Hunter if you're 18 or older. "We are looking for those with a technical inquisitive mind. If you yearn to understand the game mechanics from beginning to end then you are the type of person we want." All sorts of information on the position can be found here.

The Apocrypha expansion will bring with it all sorts of additions to EVE Online, but one that will affect both new and old players alike are the New Player Experience changes. CCP Fear has written a dev blog outlining what we can expect to see with the NPE, and their goal is to "ease players into the game and not intimidate them with a hundred choices in the first minute."

The biggest change you will probably notice is character creation. For the past few years, the process of creating your character has been a multi-step process with a lot of choices. Choices that were intimidating, to say the least, for anyone who had never played EVE before. ... For Apocrypha, we simplified this process. We eliminated choices that had no effect on you whatsoever and moved these choices to a more appropriate time where you could make an informed decision. You are in charge of your destiny.

There will also be changes to skills, attributes and careers in the NPE update. You can read all about them in the dev blog, which can be found after the jump.

The newest EVE Chronicle, "The Great Harvest," has been posted on the game's official Web site. It is the fourth installment of the "End of the World" series.

While the drones swarmed the ever-hopeful Sisters of EVE ship, Antar, captain of the Blood Raiders crew assigned to shadow the Sisters, enjoyed watching the drones tear her apart. That is, until he learned the true nature of his assignment: secure the abaddon. Would he and his crew meet the same fate as the Sisters?

If you'd like to catch up on past Chronicles, which examine the various aspects of life in New Eden, you can read them all here.

CCP Mindstar has written an informative blog outlining some of the hardware upgrades that CCP will be implementing behind the scenes to make sure EVE Online runs smoothly for both the launch of both the retail box and the Apocrypha expansion on March 10. To make a long story short, the team bought a 2TB RamSan 500 to join the two existing RamSan 400 powering the EVE database cluster.

Having much faster storage means that we will see a number of improvements in the future:

• Shorter daily downtimes
• Shorter expansion deployments
• Maintaining virtually nonexistent database lag

Files (1.1 terabytes of them) will be copied and pasted to the RamSan 500 during a six-hour downtime on Wednesday beginning at 6 a.m. GMT. For much more information on this and other hardware changes, check out the blog here or below.

In case you missed the finale of the Alliance Tournament VI on Feb. 5 and 6, all of the videos from the competition are now available for your viewing pleasure on CCP'S YouTube channel. You can watch the Day 5 videos here and the Day 6 videos here. Also, a detailed synopsis of the final battle can be found in this thread on the tournament forums:

Pandemic Legion (-10.0) is crowned victorious after beating R.U.R. (RUR) in grand final match that represented just how strongly fought the tournament has been.

Perhaps the best part is that CCP has provided the videos on the YouTube channel in HD quality, so you can really see every explosion as it was meant to be seen. And you can always go back and watch all of the videos from the first four days, as well.

In January, EVE Online broke its its record for peak concurrent users when 45,186 pilots logged in at the same time. Well, thanks to last weekend's PvP tournament finale, that record has been crushed once again as the 50,000 mark was shattered.

Due in large to the Alliance Tournament VI finale this weekend, the PCU (Peak Concurrent User) record was broken the third time this year with 51,675 pilots logging in to the single-shard world that is EVE Online.

The numbers just keep growing for the 5-year-old game. We'll have to wait and see if the release of the retail box and Apocrypha expansion on March 10 will lead to any more record-breaking numbers this year.

CCP Eris Discordia has announced in a dev blog today that they're developing a skills queue so you'll have the opportunity to advance your character while you're offline. According to the dev, the system does not contain the risk of players queueing forever and being inactive in the game.

The skill training system we came up with allows you to queue skills that will start training in the next 24 hours. You can enter in up to 50 skills in a queue, as long as they all start training within 24 hours. This leaves room to start a skill that will take 6 hours, followed with one that takes 12 to complete. With only 18 hours of training prepared, the queue still has room to start another skill.

 If you train a skill the old fashioned way (by activating a skill as you do now without the queue window) it will still be listed in the queue as the top skill; the skill you are training now. If you don´t add a follow-up skill then you´d have to come back when that skill is finished. You can still start training skills from your normal character sheet without entering the queue.

You can read the full blog entry here. CCP Eris Discordia has also asked for feedback on how you manage skills.