For the past few months, an EVE player called Aries Acheron has been writing a bi-daily serial called Action! Suspense! Jita!. The premise, as it were, is the adventures of an up-and-coming pilot in the world of EVE, usually from a humorous viewpoint. Excerpt:

So I began the next phase of my plans to dominate all of this dreaded 0.0, and eventually march upon Jita. It would be a simple operation. We would merely transfer authority of the local POS Towers to my control, thus granting me sovereignty of the area. Then I would scrape off the flakey old stickers of the previous station owner and claim it as my own.

There's already a heap of material present on the site, divided between 34 "chapters". Ideal for those mining operations that just seem to drag on into eternity.

We have a new guide up, on par with last week's turret guide, but this time about the wonderful world of missiles! Everything you need to know before starting your career flinging guided packets of death towards complete strangers, right here. Excerpt:

The main purpose of the guided missile is to track and hit small, fast targets at ranges where the target cannot fire back. Because of their ability to damage a wider range of ship classes thanks to a lower explosion radius and greater velocity, guided missiles such as cruise missiles are often regarded as a "safer" option than the slower, more damaging torpedoes. However, guided missiles may often lack the punch to overcome the stronger tanks.

Be sure to swing by our guide section as well.

In July 2006, a newbie player named INNOMINATE NIGHTMARE [sic] started a thread on the official forums detailing his new experiment: go into lawless space with a new character, a million isk in the wallet and see what happens.

Almost six months, countless clones and ships, 2 billion ISK and a successful IPO later, INNOMINATE NIGHTMARE has undoubtedly declared his experiment a success and become somewhat of a cult celebrity in EVE in the meantime.

Excerpt:

Should I answer? Or should I ignore him? Would he make me walk the proverbial plank? I decided to be a brave n00b and to answer the call, despite the fact that he was a member of the "Cursed Killers"....

After saying "Hi", he informed me that he had read my bio and that he "wanted me". This led me to three possible conclusions:

1) He wanted me to join his corp.....
2) He wanted my body....
3) He wanted my dead body.....

Figuring that a random homosexual invitation was unlikely, this deep into 0.0 space (although I have seen posts on these forums by a member of the "Minmatar Homosexual Rights League" so anything is possible), I eliminated option #2 and pondered the other two for a while.

Frequently hilarious, punctuated with images and convo logs with prominent people in EVE and praised by developers and players alike, The 0.0 Experiment has proven to be a worthy read for anyone considering entry into 0.0, as well as those used to it's differing reality.

Amidst the glitz and vague delusions of grandeur comes a new devblog from E-ON Editor Zapatero. But don't take my word for it:

Back during the Fanfest, E-ON’s pint-sized publishing guru, Xicon, mentioned to me something about hosting some kind of E-ON-themed gathering in London, where the players of EVE would the be the stars, and where attendees could all bask in the glory of our collective achievement as members of a unique community. In short, he suggested that we (MMM Publishing, rather than CCP) host a real and very proper awards ceremony, one that required a swish venue, the services of some sort of catering company, loud music, alcoholic beverage consumption (in moderation, of course), trophies and - most importantly of all – some kind of voting/nomination wotsitmahdoodah doohickey. (Apologies, I have a hangover. Words are failing me.)

Red carpet extravaganza for EVE? Sounds like a plan.

There's a new chronicle out, a gritty affair on torture in the Minmatar Republic. Or, as the writer Abraxas tells it:

This long-awaited chronicle is called "Methods of Torture - The Minmatar". It's a far more serious piece than the Amarrian one was, and deals with the subject of torture from a slightly different angle than might be expected, particularly of the long-suffering Minmatars. It wasn't going to be posted until tomorrow, but apparently our hard-working Web Cell people never rest, so kudos to them.

As I mentioned in my post on the Amarrian story, these two, the Amarrian and the Minmatar pieces, are meant as counterpoints to one another. The next story will be published two weeks from now, come hell or high water, and will show how the Gallente approach torture. (Messily, it turns out.)

From CCP's Kieron:

Tranquility will undergo an extended downtime for database maintenance on Tuesday, 16 January. The extended downtime will occur from 1100 through 1500 GMT.

While the extended downtime is underway, we are asking for the community's assistance. As part of the ongoing effort to improve EVE's performance, we will be holding a stress test on Singularity and would like for as many members of the EVE community as possible to log into the test server. Once logged in, just play EVE as normal.

The test server will be running on the same version as Tranquility, so it will not be necessary to install a second client. We hope the server load during the stress test will help us troubleshoot some of the recent node issues.

It will not be necessary to set a long skill training for the extended downtime, but please ensure your skill training does not complete during the downtime.

Right, so we've got another guide up aimed at newer players in EVE, explaining all you need to know to start hurling deadly projectiles or laser beams at any opposition that might show up. Excerpt:

Turrets in EVE are mounted damage dealers that share several important characteristics. First of all, their projectiles are instant, and do not have to cross a distance to reach a target like missiles and drones. Their chances to hit are dictated by their respective tracking value, range and signature resolution. Also, like other modules in EVE, they take up Powergrid and CPU when fitting. Turrets fit into High Slots, and can only be put on ships with free "Turret Slots". For example, a ship with 5 high slots but only 3 turret slots can only ever fit three turrets at the same time.

Funtime. Enjoy!

Yes, it does look like they pretty much decided to release them all at the same time, as Oveur rolls in with his Devblog on the design direction of upcoming Revelations patches. Excerpt:

What's interesting to note from us these days is planning and scheduling for the upcoming year. We're pondering questions like "what should really be in Revelations chapter 2 and 3?", "how can warfare be warfare without warfare, and what is warfare without warfare?" and "who took my mountain dew?". All terribly important questions, mind you.

Maybe we'll be seeing something else to report than Devblogs soon. Maybe. Until then, they make for a good read at least.

Also, from CCP's Community Manager Kieron:

Some community members may have difficulties viewing the images linked in the blog. Unfortunately, this is a lingering issue remaining from last week's infrastructure improvements and will be resolved before the end of the week. In the interim, the images are available on EVE Files, here and here respectively.

CCP seem to be hitting their blogging stride with Tuxford's new devblog on rigs, boosters and the manufacturing thereof. There is also mentions of the content of the next Kali deployment, scheduled to deploy in a few months. Excerpt:

Aside from that, we've been talking about what we want to do for Kali 2 and trying to prioritize our ever-growing task list. As I think I have mentioned before, and as Nathan mentioned in his speech at the Fanfest, the focus for Kali 2 is going to be warfare. This involves getting capital ships into the fight, splitting up the blob, improving POS warfare and more. That doesn't mean that other issues and tweaks that need to be made will be overlooked. I'm not gonna tell you that everything is going to be "fixed." First off, not everybody agrees on what is broken, and secondly there's never enough time to do everything that we want to do.

Indeed, sir.

There's a new Devblog up on the official website, penned by QA Dept. Manager Ulfrr. It is, in a way, "a year in review" on QA for the Revelations patch, as well as detailing how things are changing in terms of bughunting in CCP. Excerpt:

When Revelations was first deployed, the server was consuming a lot of memory and we had a series of irregular CPU spikes we had not seen before. Proxies were maxing out and crashing, database load spikes were occurring, and jump queues kicked in unnecessarily. Then we had to reset the cluster-load balancer which caused unbalanced load for a couple of weeks causing more problems. The petition queue rose to a new high of 10,000 petitions.

It's an interesting read, if only for the sake of the rarity that detailed information on the inner workings of an MMO company is in the industry.