CrazyKinux's Musings

Coriolis: The Great Dark session zero - The exploration begins

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:23:00 +0000

Last Thursday evening, while the Habs plowed through the Carolina Hurricanes, my roleplaying buddies and I were rolling up our characters for a first run within Coriolis: The Great Dark.

I picked a Roughneck, with Machine Tender as her specialty and Mechanics as her innate talent.

Your archetype already tells you what kind of story you came to play. A Roughneck says: "I want to be the one with grease under my nails when the lights flicker, the one who notices the hum in the bulkhead before anyone else does."

Not the diplomat or scholar. Not the mystic or poet. The hands.

What is Coriolis: The Great Dark?

Coriolis: The Great Dark is Free League Publishing's sci-fi roleplaying game, built on the Year Zero Engine. It picks up the Third Horizon setting and pushes deeper — into uncharted space, dead civilizations, and the strange things still waiting in the dark between stars.

Players take the role of Explorers: salvagers, scholars, mystics, and roughnecks crewing fragile ships on the edge of known space. The play loop leans toward investigation, exploration, and atmosphere — closer to Alien, Dune, and The Expanse than to a tactical shooter.

Combat is fast and lethal. Faith and technology share the same table. And the universe, more often than not, is watching you back.

A quick bit of context before I go further.

Our group spent a few months playing Fallout, and though I loved the atmosphere, the wasteland and the group of characters we had, we seemed to be fighting the system to play the game, or were often times bogged down by the game mechanics.
Combat sometimes slowed to a crawl, we were managing systems more than surviving the wasteland. More rolls, than roleplay. For me, that's the moment a game starts losing me.
So we simply pulled the plug. No drama. Just time to move on.
And I'd already been waiting a few years for the alternative.

Coriolis: The Great Dark

Though I didn't back Free League Publishing's Kickstarter for The Great Dark, the theme and lore definitely caught my attention. Explorers, not soldiers. Ancient ruins, not simply rooms to clean out. A universe that quietly stares back, and sometimes bites back hard.

If I had to pitch it in one sentence: Alien meets Dune meets The Expanse, with a salvage job that might wake something older than civilization.

Combat exists. Combat is also fast, dangerous, and costly. Treat every problem like a gunfight and the setting answers with disaster.

That's the game I wanted to be in. Tension over tactics. Investigation over inventory. Mystery over churn butchery.

Meet Safiya al-Khatib

Roughneck. Machine Tender. Mechanics.

Her stare is ice.

One side of her face carries a tribal tattoo that reads lived-in rather than decorative.

Her armor is scratched industrial plate, utility straps, grease-stained tubing, retro-futurist edges worn smooth by use. Resilience. Exhaustion. Competence. And something quietly violent underneath.

She joined the Explorers Guild for one reason: Greatships. The mile-long behemoths that crawl between the stars. She wants to be inside one — to hear how something that big actually holds together.

That's her hook.

The rest of her arc, we'll find out soon enough.

The crew

Around the table: Shadi, Vynx, Alex, with Alamo running the show. The same crew I've been playing D&D with these past few for years, and recently Fallout. We have a Scholar. We have an Esoteric. Shadi hasn't rolled yet as I write this post. The pleasant surprise wasn't a single "aha" moment — it was the texture of the character creation process itself.

The professions feel genuinely distinct from each other, or from anything we've played before. The background system gives you story hooks you didn't know you wanted. And once you've rolled, you can still bend the arc. Nothing is locked. The character grows as the campaign progresses.

Running it on Foundry

This was my first time on Foundry (as well as Coriolis). The first thirty minutes were the usual scramble — where's the sheet, how do I roll this, why is that window floating there. But Alamo was there to guide us through.

The themed look matches the tone. Drag-and-drop just works. Rolling is two clicks and a result.

Next session is this Thursday evening. Then June 6th, in person — dice on the table, snacks in arm's reach, the way RPGs were truly intended to be played.

What comes next

Picking the Roughneck wasn't an accident.

I'm here for the ancient machines, the fragile crews, and the things that hum in the dark before the lights go out.

I'm looking forward to sharing how this story unfolds!

The Safe Spot — Episode 8: "Our EVE Fanfest 2026 reaction"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:18:36 +0000

This one's our reaction episode to EVE Fanfest 2026, which wrapped up the day before we recorded. Rixx and I sat down Sunday evening to talk through everything — the Polaris Award he picked up while not even being in Iceland, the Cradle of War reveal, the Google DeepMind sit-down, where Vanguard and Frontier are headed, and a pile of asides along the way.

It's a long one, but a good one.

Pour something cold (or hot, in Rixx's case) and dig in.😂

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Welcome back to the Safe Spot — Rixx and I open the episode, flag that this is our Fanfest 2026 reaction show, and joke about needing a drinking game for every time someone says "Fenris Creations" instead of CCP, or was it the other way around. Sorry, I've been drinking way to early tonight!
Rixx's Polaris Award and the lead-up — The big news: Rixx took home a Polaris Award for lifetime contribution to EVE, and we dig into the strange road to get there — his original confusion about being left off the Creator Awards shortlist back in March, the passionate blog post I wrote at the time, the cryptic DM from FC Convict the day before Fanfest hinting he should "definitely" tune in Saturday at 19:00, and a full day of wallowing in his own anxieties before the ceremony — t'amber also winning a Polaris, deservedly, for everything he's done with the ship-scanning designer platform that helped Rixx with his fan art way back in 2014–2015 — and a shout-out to the literal hundreds of people who reached out through Bluesky, Discord, Facebook, and everywhere else with congratulations and stories.
How far back we go — A quick walk down memory lane: a screenshot contest Rixx ran where I won using shots from sneaking inside a POS shield to photograph an Avatar Titan, plus his old Battle Clinic win with a carved pumpkin that said "Rixx is in local." Probably 2008 or 2009. We've been at this a while.
Fanfest then vs. Fanfest now — My first Fanfest was 2008 at a much smaller venue (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, EVE Fanfest Memorabilia Giveaway, EVE Fanfest 2008 Blues) before Eve Vanguard or Frontier or any of it existed, so coming back this year (watching from home) the production quality felt like a different league entirely — Rixx, who's been going every year since 2014, walks me through what you actually miss on the stream: the hallway conversations, the hugs, putting faces to names, the bumping-into-people-you-haven't-seen-in-years stuff that's the real heart of Fanfest — which is also why I just bought my ticket for 2027.
Hosts and vibe of the stream — Quick appreciation for the between-session hosts (Yrsta, Lauru, Toxic, Oz, and the rest), how well FC Convict held the Creator Awards together, and how some of the old geeky charm — the friendly heckling, devs snapping back at players, players hassling devs — is still very much intact under all the polish.
Cradle of War and factional warfare — Rixx is genuinely pumped for this one. We get into the new Military Campaigns, the four empires getting more dynamic personalities, new hubs, and the new Navy Destroyers and Plexes (interceptor-only, solo-only, battlecruiser-only) — what it might mean for Stay Frosty and low-sec PvP — and the broader question of whether this finally hits the right balance between hand-holding newbros and pushing them out the door into the real game.
The newbro story — A classic EVE-in-a-nutshell: a Stay Frosty pilot tries to gank a month-old miner in a Pioneer, the miner escapes, they chat, and the Stay Frosty pilot gives him 60 million ISK out of the kindness of his heart to buy a special mining ship. Within an hour, a different Stay Frosty pilot blows him up in it. The miner has of course promised revenge. He'll never come back. They never do.
The Art Department and citadels — Why I'm so glued to the art team's work — the visuals are what pulled me into EVE in the first place — and Rixx tipping me off that the gorgeous docking animation I'd been geeking out about is on the player-built citadels, not the new air stations. There's a public Keepstar in Amamake (Minmatar lowsec) if you want to see it yourself, and Rixx predicting (correctly, again) that the first question at the Q&A would be about ship customization.
EVE Vanguard — It's finally starting to feel like a real game. We get into how Fenris seems to have learned the lesson from Dust 514: don't try to force the two games to mesh, just let them share the universe — different audiences, same New Eden — and that Operation Avalon, the first alpha playtest, runs July 7–20 on Steam or via the Eve launcher. I'll be checking it out. And you should definitely watch the Operation Avalon Details Reveal, with FC Collins & FC Rattati, freshly back from Fanfest.
The "514" mystery solved on air — Neither of us could remember what Dust 514 actually stood for. Google AI saved us mid-podcast: it's a nod to the Shanghai devs, an auspicious date, and a play on the Mandarin phrase "I don't want to die" — a reference to capsuleer immortality.
EVE Frontier — Rixx is out: it's just too much like EVE for him, and if he's going to play a sandbox space game he'd rather just be playing EVE. I'm still scratching my head on it too — the survivalist vibe gives me a claustrophobic feeling every time I log in, and I came back to EVE for the community, not to be alone in the dark. We do appreciate the premise (thousands of years post-New Eden, our stuff as ancient ruins) and the open-source modding angle, even if neither of us is a modder — and we raise the obvious question of what happens when someone mods Frontier in a way that ruins your experience and you don't even know they did it.
The Google DeepMind sit-down — Hilmar's fireside chat with Adrian Bolton was — by design — kind of boring, and that's exactly what should have eased everyone's nerves: this is strictly a research collaboration, with maybe something useful three-to-five years out — Hilmar's track record of attaching EVE to big partners (Sony for VR back in the day, now Google) is a real strength — and what excites me is the possibility of AI eventually putting some real intelligence into NPCs that currently just run pre-programmed scripts. Also: the right answer to "what if the AI learned to win EVE?" is that you can't win EVE.
What we're still waiting to sink our teeth into — Cautiously optimistic across the board, especially on Exordium and the new empire systems with titles, achievements, and the empire-progress hub. The expansion doesn't drop until June 9th, this is the first of a three-arc Theatres of War saga, and a lot of it is trust-us-it'll-work until we can actually play it. One interesting wrinkle: new players may not have to pick a race right away anymore. I wish I'd had that option — I rolled Caldari at random.
Wrap-up and the closing song — Two thumbs up from a freshly minted Polaris Award winner, see you in Iceland next year — and Rixx teases the outro track, which he pivoted at the last minute to something factional-warfare-themed in honor of this episode.

Where to find us!

If you enjoyed this episode, you can catch The Safe Spot wherever you get your podcasts — find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Past episodes and full show notes are up on the blog at crazykinux.ca. And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Fly safe. o7

Speedlinking New Eden & more - The May 17th, 2026 edition

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:57:59 +0000

Back in the heydays of this EVE blog, I used to do this thing called the "Speedlinking New Eden", which was a weekly wrap-up of EVE Online news, and then some. So with the excitement around the Fenris Creations rebrand, the Google DeepMind announcement and EVE Fanfest 2026 wrapping up, I thought I'd rekindle this initiative.

Fanfest week. Three days of keynotes, reveals, and blood donations (yes, literally). Fenris Creations came out swinging with a three-expansion arc, a new extraction shooter playtest, a survival sandbox reset, and enough coverage to keep you scrolling for a week.

Let's go.

EVE Fanfest 2026

EVE Fanfest 2026 is Live Now! | EVE Online — The full livestream schedule for May 15-16 at Harpa. Friday highlights: Opening Ceremony, Oz on what makes EVE markets move, Paul M. Sutter's "How to Die in Space" keynote, The Infinite Game with FC Hellmar and DeepMind's Adrian Bolton (with opening remarks by the President of Iceland, Halla Tómasdóttir), Dr. Beth Healey on surviving hostile environments, and the EVE Fanfest Keynote at 16:30 UTC. Saturday: EVE Vanguard Keynote, the Capsuleer Edda deep dive, Evolving Empires panel, EVE's Art Team on New Eden in high fidelity, EVE Frontier Keynote, the Cradle of War expansion deep dive, Closing Ceremony, and the Creator Awards.
EVE Fanfest Wrapped | EVE Online — The official wrap-up. Cradle of War announced for June 9. Capsuleer Edda moves forward with capsuleers donating blood for the ink. Alliance Tournament XXIII confirmed, sponsored by the Amarr Empire. Fanfest 2027 dates announced: May 13-15. Early-bird tickets already on sale.
EVE Keynote | EVE Fanfest 2026 | YouTube — The full keynote recording, kicked off by FC Orca. Cradle of War, Capsuleer Edda, Google DeepMind partnership, and more.

EVE Online: Cradle of War expansion (June 9)

Cradle of War Expansion Launches 9 June | EVE Online — The official announcement. Military Campaigns, 8 new ships (4 Tech II Command Carriers, 4 Navy Destroyers), the first non-PvP starter region in EVE's history, titles and achievements, new Epic Arc missions (Caldari Prime Breakout, Liberation of Intaki, and more). First chapter of the three-expansion Theatres of War saga.
EVE Fanfest 2026: EVE Online's Cradle of War expansion sets the universe on fire June 9th | Massively Overpowered — Brendan Drain's on-the-ground coverage. Biggest cheer from the crowd was for Command Carriers. Notes that EVE is "finally getting achievements and titles" after 23 years. Disclosure: Fenris paid for travel.
EVE Fanfest 2026: EVE Online's Cradle of War Expansion Brings Military Campaigns, New Player Starter System, And More | MMORPG.com — Joseph Bradford's deep dive. Good context on the Jita handover to CONCORD and how it sets up Cradle of War's narrative.
Prepare for EVE Online's Next Expansion, Cradle of War | CGMagazine — Overview with Bergur Finnbogason quote: "Military campaigns connect player actions into persistent, multi-front wars."
EVE Online Cradle of War Expansion announced for June 2026 | Shacknews
The Most Interesting Game Out There Just Got Easier To Start Playing | GameSpot — A Fanfest-on-the-ground feature piece about EVE's new player experience, the Cradle of War starter region, and the community's warmth. Mentions a 70-year-old CSM elected member.

EVE Vanguard: Operation Avalon (July 7-20)

Fenris Creations Unveils EVE Vanguard's Alpha Playtest: Operation Avalon, Launching July 7, 2026 on Steam | Fenris Creations — Official press release. Rebuilt combat, expanded enemies, new modular weapons, deeper risk-and-extraction loop. Always-on Alpha release via the EVE Launcher coming November 2026.
EVE Fanfest 2026: EVE Vanguard opens Steam signups for Operation Avalon alpha test | Massively Overpowered — Signups now open on Steam. Notes that Vanguard is "officially leaving pre-alpha" and embracing its extraction shooter roots.
EVE Vanguard Alpha Playtest Operation Avalon announced for July 2026 | Shacknews
EVE Vanguard Is Getting A Brand-New Overhaul Update & Alpha Playtest Window | CGMagazine
EVE Vanguard Alpha Playtest: Operation Avalon Comes To Steam In July | Worthplaying
Operation Avalon | Alpha Playtest Trailer | YouTube — Official trailer from Fenris Creations.

EVE Frontier: Cycle 6 - Sanctuary (June 25)

EVE Frontier Enters Cycle 6: Sanctuary on June 25 | Fenris Creations — Full server wipe. Modular ships, Dormant Gates, environmental hazards (thermal, electromagnetic), new Feral enemies, Leeches that harvest your resources and evolve into Wreck Stalker mini-bosses. Manual firing and skill shots.
EVE Frontier's Cycle 6 Announced, Brings Full Server Wipe To Founder's Access | MMORPG.com — David Bowman: "This is our most impactful update yet."
EVE Frontier Cycle 6: Sanctuary announced for late June 2026 | Shacknews
EVE Frontier's Cycle 6 "Pushes Deeper Into The Unknown" On June 25 | CGMagazine

Fenris Creations / business news

Pearl Abyss Q1 2026: Black Desert and Crimson Desert push Pearl Abyss to huge revenues – without CCP Games | Massively Overpowered — Bree Royce on the first PA earnings without CCP. Crimson Desert and Black Desert carrying the load.
Fenris Creations announces updates for Eve Online, Eve Frontier, and Eve Vanguard | GamesBeat — Comprehensive roundup of all three product announcements from Fanfest.
EVE FanFest 2026 Reveals Multiple New Additions Across The Board | Bleeding Cool — Good summary of every major announcement across all three EVE titles.

Other EVE Online news (May 11-17)

Claim Capsuleer Day's Biggest Rewards | EVE Online — May 11 was the last day to start logging in and still claim the big 325K SP haul. Capital support sites live in lowsec.
Capsuleer Day XXIII PLEX and SKINs Offers | EVE Online — May 15 and 17 store offers for Capsuleer Day. Stock up on PLEX and look your best.
Patch Notes (updated 2026-05-13) | EVE Online — Mid-May patch notes.

EVE blogsphere & community

Friday EVE Online Bullet Points on Thursday for EVE Fanfest | The Ancient Gaming Noob — Wilhelm's Fanfest preview. Highlights the Crucible-era gameplay stations nostalgia trap, the $80K EVE Frontier hackathon prizes ("a blockchain boondoggle"), the dead CCP Twitch channel that doesn't redirect to Fenris, and PLEX For Good going permanent.
EVE Online Is Shifting Fast — Here’s Everything You Missed - Kekbur
Flying Solo In EVE: Prelude To Fanfest 2026 | The Nosy Gamer — Weekly ACU numbers at 26,000, session-by-session preview of what to watch at Fanfest, and thoughts on the rebrand timing.
Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath and the Event So Far | The Ancient Gaming Noob — Hands-on impressions of the Warpath event. Comparisons to the Gallente Presidential Election event. CCP learned lessons and upped the difficulty.
From CCP to Fenris Creations: EVE Online enters the Age of AI | CrazyKinux's Musings — Deep dive into the rebrand, the DeepMind partnership, and what it all means. Covers the Fenris name's connection to CCP's 1997 origins as Loki Multimedia, breaks down what DeepMind might actually do with EVE's 23 years of behavioral data, and flags the risks of AI messing with the game's core systems. "I know how to be excited and skeptical at the same time. I've had practice."
What DeepMind's partnership could actually mean for EVE's future | CrazyKinux's Musings — Follow-up post digging deeper into the DeepMind angle.
Fanfest 2026 Stream Review from Home - Greybill reviews the EVE Fanfest 2026 streaming experience, the news, the content, and his thoughts.
EVE Creator Awards - Rixx Javix reflects on his winning the Polaris Award, and the journey that got him there.

Ping me with links that I've missed, and I'll make sure to add them to this Speedlink, and track them in the future!

Fly safe!

What DeepMind's partnership could actually mean for EVE's future

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:26:54 +0000

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google DeepMind and Fenris Creations partnership and came away cautiously excited. So I took Friday off from work to make sure I could watch the LIVE broadcast from the Harpa Concert Hall. Then earlier today, Hilmar and DeepMind's Adrian Bolton took the Fanfest stage for 'The Infinite Game' session, and I walked away with considerably less.

The above video was added on Fenris Creations channel on May 25th, 2026. I thought I'd add it here for full context.

Like a lot of those who listened in, I came away fairly empty-handed from that conversation. Not disappointed, but very much hungry for more. As in a lot more. Yes, yes, there was lots of framing, lots of "excitement" about the partnership's potential, about AI lifting the popularity of games like Chess and Go, but very little about what it actually means for the game we play.

So I thought I could give it a try myself and dive into how I'm hoping DeepMind's research could realistically be applied and leveraged in EVE. Basically trying to add the substance that was missing from their talk. Trying to imagine what that near future could be.

I'm probably going to be way off mark, then again maybe not. We'll see.

But I thought I could give it a try.

Here goes nothing...

What's ahead in this post:

NPCs that actually adapt to how you fly — not harder stats, different behaviour
An AI-powered NPE in Exordium that keeps rookies alive past the two-hour quit window and hands them off to real player run corporations
Dynamic universe events that respond to what players are doing, not what a designer scripted
Behind-the-scenes economic modeling that could make balance patches less painful
The stuff I think people are overhyping — and why TiDi probably isn't going anywhere

It's a long read, but if you care about where New Eden is headed, you'll want to stick around.
So grab a coffee, tea or a cold one, and let's dive in.

Let's fast-forward five years.

It's May 2031.

DeepMind has had half a decade of research access to an offline copy of New Eden. Fenris has been bridging the gap between lab results and Tranquility.

Here's what I think is plausible, what I think is hopeful but unlikely, and what's probably just wishful thinking.

The most likely transformation: NPCs that actually think

This is easily the lowest-of-hanging fruit and the highest-impact change in my humble opinion.

Currently, EVE NPCs — mission agents, belt pirates, even Drifters and Triglavians — follow scripted behaviour trees. They aggro based on rules, orbit at fixed ranges, and use abilities on timers. Old and experienced players read them like an open book. You learn the pattern once, then you optimize around it forever. PvE in EVE has always been something you solve and then farm, not something that challenges you on the hundredth run.

Five years of DeepMind learning EVE PvE combat and mining missions could produce NPC opponents that actually adapt. Not "harder stats on the same script" but genuinely different behaviours. Agents that remember and adapt to the way you complete missions dynamically. Rats that recognize when you're kiting them and change approach. Mission NPCs that focus fire intelligently, call for reinforcements based on what you're flying, and retreat when they're losing. AI NPCs adapting to player behaviours, making sure the game experience is always pushing you outside your comfort.

This would be transformative for PvE, which has not been EVE's strongest content pillar, and the first impressions newbies get of the game. Suddenly ratting isn't just an ISK faucet you optimize and forget. It becomes an evolving challenge. The meta shifts not just because of patch notes, but because the NPCs got smarter.

The Exordium connection

Next is where it gets interesting for the current trajectory. Fenris announced Exordium back in mid-April as the new player experience region. If they're applying DeepMind's learnings to Tranquility by 2031, Exordium could be the first testing ground.

Before you shout back in horror, here me out!

Imagine an NPE where AI-driven mentor agents actually respond to how a new player behaves — not a scripted tutorial that marches you through the same steps regardless, but a system that recognizes "this player is exploring the market mechanics" versus "this player wants to shoot things" and dynamically adjusts what content it pushes your way. That's directly in DeepMind's stated research area of continual learning and long-term planning.

The numbers on why this matters are brutal. At EVE North in 2019 (Toronto, Canada), Fenris (CCP Burger, or should I say FC Burger) shared data showing that nearly 90% of new players who sign up for EVE quit within the first seven days. A 2016 Fanfest keynote was even grimmer: over 1.5 million new players signed up in a single year, and the overwhelming majority permanently quit after just two hours. Executive producer Andie Nordgren's reaction to that stat was two words: "It's super depressing." EVE has never had a problem attracting new players. It has a catastrophic problem keeping them.

An AI system that meets new capsuleers where they are on their journey of learning to play EVE — rather than where a designer assumed they'd be, could be the single biggest retention improvement in the game's history. And Exordium, as a dedicated region for new players, is the obvious place to deploy it without risking the "main" sandbox. Or at the very least to test it.

Now, I'm not naive about how the community may/will react to this.

We've already seen the tension play out. When Fenris launched Aura Guidance earlier this year — an AI chatbot trained on 5.8 million Rookie Help messages — the reaction was exactly the split you'd expect. The studio went out of its way to stress in a devblog that the system "does not give fleet advice, market strategies, or detailed fitting optimization" and "does not replace the depth of knowledge you get from experienced players, mentors, or specialized communities." Fenris was practically tripping over itself to reassure veterans that this wasn't the beginning of the end.

And the community's concern wasn't irrational. As many players pointed out, if newbies stop talking to humans because the bot is "good enough," EVE loses its most powerful retention tool: its community. That organic moment where a veteran drops a million ISK on a confused rookie in Rookie Help chat — that's the hook. That's what makes people stay. Replace it with a chatbot and you've optimized away the very thing that makes EVE special.

The data backs this up. At a 2019 presentation, CCP Hilmar identified what he called "the magic moment" — when a new player loses their ship for the first time, that's when they decide to stay or quit. And the single strongest predictor of which way they go? Whether they belong to a social group in the game. Not better tutorials. Not smoother UI. People.

So the goal of an AI-driven mentor system in Exordium shouldn't be to teach new players EVE. It should be to keep them in the game long enough — past those lethal first two hours, past that first ship loss — to figure out what kind of capsuleer they're becoming, and then hand them off to the real players and corporations that match their interests.

That's the job. Not companion. Not teacher. Matchmaker.

Here's what that could look like. The AI reads that you're gravitating toward exploration and connects you with Signal Cartel, or similar a corporation. It notices you keep picking fights (and loosing them) and nudges you toward a PvP corp, maybe one engaged in Factional Warfare. It sees you spending all your time on the market and introduces you to a trading community. The handoff from artificial guide to human community becomes the graduation moment — the point where EVE stops being a tutorial and starts being EVE.

That model respects the social contract in a way that a permanent AI companion never could. The AI doesn't replace the player-driven experience; it gets new players to the door of one.

And it solves the real problem, which was never "EVE lacks content for new players" but "new players can't find the people who would make them stay."

Dynamic universe events that aren't scripted

Fenris has tried this before with live events and invasion arcs, but they've always been hand-authored with predetermined outcomes or branching paths. Someone at the studio decides "Triglavians invade these systems on this date," and players react to the script.

An AI system trained on EVE's emergent behavior could generate events that respond to what players are actually doing. Not "invasion begins on patch day" but "an AI-driven faction notices a power vacuum in a region where a major alliance just collapsed and moves to exploit it." Content that emerges from the game state rather than being imposed on it.

This is plausible but harder than it sounds. And maybe a tad riskier.

The risk is that AI-generated content feels generic or random rather than meaningful. EVE players care deeply about narrative coherence and political context — they want to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Fenris would need to maintain storytelling quality on top of the AI's strategic logic, which is still something humans do better. But the combination — human narrative designers working with AI-driven strategic behavior — could produce something neither could achieve alone.

The invisible revolution: economic modeling

This one is less visible to players but potentially huge.

EVE's economy is notoriously hard to balance. Fenris has economists on staff, but the interactions are so complex that interventions often produce unintended consequences. Nerf a blueprint and three markets you didn't think about crash. Introduce a new resource sink and inflation shifts in ways nobody predicted.

An AI system that has spent five years modeling EVE's economic flows could give Fenris vastly better predictive tools — "if you nerf this blueprint, here's the cascading effect on 47 related markets over the next six months." That doesn't change what players see directly, but it means fewer economy-breaking patches, more confident design decisions, and a healthier game overall.

Players won't notice this one. They'll just notice that balance changes feel less jarring and the economy feels more stable. Which, ironically, might be the most valuable outcome of the entire partnership.

What I'm skeptical about

I don't think Fenris puts DeepMind-trained combat agents into nullsec or lowsec as hostile entities that fight players with player-level tactics. The political backlash would be enormous — "Fenris is using Google's AI to kill our fleets" — and it undermines the core social contract that EVE is a player-driven universe. If it happens at all, it stays contained in PvE content.

I'm also skeptical about any fundamental server architecture changes coming from this partnership. TiDi will probably still exist in 2031. DeepMind is a research lab focused on intelligence, not infrastructure engineering. The server improvements will come from Fenris's own engineering team making incremental progress, not from AI breakthroughs.

And I'd temper expectations about the pace. Five years sounds like a long time, but going from "research paper" to "stable live game system used by tens of thousands of players" is a brutal pipeline. The first two to three years are probably mostly research with small controlled experiments. Meaningful Tranquility integration likely starts showing up around year three or four, with big visible features closer to year five.

If you're expecting revolutionary changes at Fanfest 2027, you're probably a year or two early. Maybe even longer.

The shift nobody's talking about

The most profound change might not be any single feature.

It might be that EVE becomes an MMO where the universe genuinely feels alive — where the space between player interactions isn't dead but populated by systems that learn, adapt, and create pressure.

Not AI that replaces players. AI that fills gaps between them.

That's the version of this partnership that makes EVE not just a better game but a different kind of game, one small AI-optimized mechanic at a time. Whether Fenris can deliver it in five years is the open question. But the pieces are there — the research partner, the financial independence, the revenue momentum, and a game world complex enough to actually stress-test whatever DeepMind builds or learns from the game.

For the first time in a while, I'm looking at EVE's future and seeing something different from what we've seen the last 25 years or so.

That alone is worth paying attention to.

Fly safe. o7

Source articles on new players retention

EVE Online Developers Discuss Ways To Stop New Players From Leaving The Game - Kotaku
EVE Online has no problem getting new players, but retaining them is a hell of an issue - Destructoid
Aura Guidance - Fenris Creations DevBlog
High Sec and New Player Experience Are Tied - Make a change CCP - EVE Online Forums
EVE Fanfest 2015: Using Science to Help Newbros - YouTube
EVE Down Under 2019 - Beyond The Friendship Machine, by Hilmar "CCP Hellmar" Pétursson

From CCP to Fenris Creations: EVE Online enters the Age of AI

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:26:00 +0000

What a time to be an EVE player!

When the news dropped Wednesday last week, I wanted to sit down and start writing immediately. CCP Games rebranding as Fenris Creations. Entering a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Damn!! But the hot take is rarely the right take. So I shut up, read everything I could find, and gave myself a few days to let it settle.

It's been nearly a week since the news dropped, and this is where I'm at three days before Fanfest starts: I'm excited. And I'm eager to learn more when DeepMind founder Adrian Bolton takes the stage alongside Hilmar at Fanfest later this week, even though I won't be there in person.

I've also been following EVE's development since the late nineties, which means I know how to be excited and skeptical at the same time. I've had practice.

So buckle up folks, cause Kansas is going bye-bye, as this is going to be a "DeepDive" into the biggest EVE news in years. Pun very much intended!

So what actually happened?

Three things, announced simultaneously, which is probably why the coverage has been a mess of conflicting headlines.

First, and this is the part most outlets led with, CCP Games is no more. The studio rebranded as Fenris Creations. The name is a callback to CCP's first published game in 1997, which is a nice bit of continuity.

Second, the management buyout from Pearl Abyss is complete. We've known this was in motion since April 30th. Hilmar and the team own the company again. Birgir Már Ragnarsson, CCP co-founder, takes the Board Chair. After eight years under Pearl Abyss, the studio is Icelandic-owned and independent. That matters more than people realize.

Third, and this is the part I keep coming back to, Google DeepMind has taken a minority stake and entered a research partnership with the newly independent studio.

Most of the press treated the rebrand as the headline. Don't be fooled. The rebrand branding, important yes, but something bigger is brewing: the DeepMind deal is the story.

Why pick our game?

Hilmar told Engadget: "We jokingly say that the final boss for AI in games would obviously be EVE Online."

I know how that sounds. Every studio thinks their game is special. But sit with this for a second, because the people at DeepMind aren't idiots, and they specifically picked EVE Online, with its unique single shard gameplay environment, for specific reasons.

DeepMind has spent fifteen years burning through game environments. Atari. Go. StarCraft II. 3D open worlds. They've beaten all of them. AlphaStar was impressive, but its longest StarCraft match lasted about thirty minutes. EVE wars unfold over months. Sovereignty campaigns require logistics and patience that operate on timescales AI has never had to deal with.

And that's just the easy part.

Your reputation in 2026 was earned in 2014. Alliances remember betrayals from a decade ago. There's no session reset. No clean slate. Memory isn't a feature of New Eden, it's the foundation the whole thing sits on. AlphaGo never had to lie convincingly. In EVE, the metagame is reading other humans: their bluffs, their grudges, their tolerance for risk. Diplomacy and espionage aren't edge cases. They're the game.

ISK persists. Lose a Titan, it's gone forever. Tens of thousands of pilots with conflicting goals, all operating simultaneously. Two to three hundred thousand monthly active players generating 23 years of behavioral history.

That's not a benchmark. That's a civilization.

Adrian Bolton said it himself: EVE "requires skills that AI has not yet fully mastered," specifically long-term planning and continual learning. Alexandre Moufarek, a Director at Google DeepMind, called it "a one-of-a-kind simulation for testing general-purpose artificial intelligence."

We've been saying for years that EVE is unlike anything else in gaming. Now the people who built AlphaGo are saying it too.

Okay but what does this mean for the game?

This is the part I care about most, and it's the part with the least detail so far.

The partnership will run on an offline version of EVE, hosted on a local server, firewalled from Tranquility. Our live game isn't the lab. That's the line Hilmar is drawing, and for now, it holds.

The press release promises "new gameplay experiences" and "insights" flowing back to EVE Online from the research. That's deliberately vague. Nobody, not Hilmar, not DeepMind, is committing to specifics yet. Bolton on the Fanfest stage later this week is where we'll find out if this is a real roadmap or a mood board.

I'll be honest, I'm a tad concerned about how DeepMind's involvement might eventually affect the game itself. Smarter mission agents that adapt to how you fly? Pirate NPC factions that actually learn from player behavior and respond accordingly? Absolutely. That's the kind of thing that could make PvE in New Eden feel alive in ways it never has. But too much messing around with the inner workings of the game, the economy, the market, the core mechanics that players have spent decades learning and mastering? Hard pass.

EVE works because its systems are legible. Players can study them, "exploit" them, literally build empires on top of them. The moment those systems start shifting under our feet because an AI decided they should, the trust breaks.

But here's the other question I keep asking, and I haven't seen a satisfying answer anywhere: what about our data?

The offline-server framing protects gameplay integrity. Great. But it doesn't tell us whether historical player data, chat logs, market transactions, behavioral records, 23 years of decisions made by hundreds of thousands of capsuleers, gets fed into DeepMind's models. Explosion.com flagged this concern. Nobody else in the mainstream coverage touched it. Hilmar's community letter, which is otherwise thoughtful and clearly written by someone who cares how this news is received, does not address it.

That's a gap. And it deserves a direct answer before Fanfest is over.

The numbers (because someone needs to keep score)

Pearl Abyss bought CCP in 2018 for $225M cash plus up to $200M in performance earn-outs that never triggered. The buyout price was $120M, roughly $100M cash plus about $20M in EVE Frontier token acquisition rights. The "$425M loss" figure floating around Reddit is wrong. Actual loss to Pearl Abyss is closer to $80M, and they accepted it because Crimson Desert money makes the write-down survivable.

The Google piece? Hilmar told Bloomberg the investment was "in the millions." So "small" stake. Not an acquisition. Basically, this is Icelandic ownership with a Google research contract attached.

A studio doing $70M+ in 2025 revenue, profitable at the EVE Online level, with a 20-year persistent IP, sold for 1.7x revenue. Well below comparable studios. The new ownership group got a favorable deal. Good for them!

What does worry me: Fenris is now running four concurrent products. EVE Online. EVE Vanguard. EVE Frontier, online space survival with a blockchain layer. And EVE Galaxy Conquest, a mobile 4X that Hilmar's letter quietly added to the portfolio. One cash cow, two unproven betas, and a mobile entrant. That's a lot of products for a small-ish independent studio.

Engadget called Frontier "likely-doomed." First piece of mainstream press to say that out loud.

The things you're already thinking

We're probably all thinking some version of these:

"AI in my EVE?" Yeah. I hear you. The offline-server framing limits exposure for now. But for now is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, and we all know it.

"This is just another Hilmar hype cycle." Fair. I respect the man's ambition, but his track record cuts both ways and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Apocrypha and Citadel on one side. Incarna, monocle-gate, Project Nova, and Project Legion on the other. Independence removes the parent-company cushion that absorbed past failures. The highs are high. The lows cost people their jobs.

"Google bought EVE." They didn't. Minority stake, small dollars. Hilmar and the management team own this thing. But I get why the headline makes people nervous.

"Just a press release stunt." A founding DeepMind team member on the Fanfest stage and a real check with real dollars argue otherwise. This is funded research with named contacts, not a logo on a slide. More to come soon...

The bigger picture

Here's what I keep coming back to.

Game studios as AI research infrastructure is a genuinely new thing.

Big-tech investment in gaming has historically been about distribution platforms, Stadia is dead, Luna is dying. This is different. Google isn't trying to own a games platform. They're treating EVE as a research environment. If it works, watch for similar deals between AI labs and studios running deep persistent worlds. EVE might be first. It won't be last.

And one thing worth noting that the recent mainstream coverage mostly missed: CCP already shipped AI features in EVE this year, an assistance tool trained on 5.8 million Rookie Help channel messages. The community accepted it without too much drama. DeepMind isn't AI's first arrival in New Eden.

It's just a hell of a lot more ambitious.

What I'm watching for

Three things, over the next 18 months.

EVE Online update cadence. If expansions and patches slow because attention shifts to DeepMind work, that's the bear case materializing. We'll notice. We always notice.

Visible results. Papers. Blog posts. Something in the client. Vague long-term R&D partnerships are how companies announce things and quietly let them die. Show us something.

EVE Vanguard's Steam Early Access. Slated for Q3 2026. Lands right when Fenris needs to prove the new structure can actually ship a product. If it underperforms, financial pressure on the new ownership group accelerates fast.

Before any of that though, there's Fanfest

Bolton takes the stage this Thursday. Hilmar beside him. Us in the room, or watching from home, refreshing feeds. A community that has heard bold promises before and has the memory to hold people accountable for every single one of them.

The company that started in 1997 by saying "death is a serious matter" is now asking whether intelligence itself is.

I can't wait to find out what they mean by that.

Fly safe folks.

References

The Safe Spot — Episode 7: "Pearl Abyss & Fanfest"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:30:00 +0000

Big news this episode — Pearl Abyss is selling CCP Games back to its own leadership team, and Rixx and I break down what that means for EVE Online, Frontier, and Vanguard.

We also look ahead to Fanfest 2026 (which neither of us is attending this year, don't judge), swap some FanFest war stories from years past, geek out over the EVE Faction Warfare Yearbook, touch on the brand-new Capsuleer Days event, and Rixx shares a couple of PvP encounters that remind us all why you check local and never fly what you can't afford to lose.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Pearl Abyss sells CCP Games back to its leadership — The big headline: Pearl Abyss acquired CCP in 2018 for around $425 million and has now sold it back to the management team led by Hilmar for roughly $125 million, just two weeks before Fanfest. We talk about what this means for the studio's independence, who might be providing financial backing, and why the timing feels very deliberate — with more details expected at Fanfest.
What happens to Frontier and Vanguard? — With CCP no longer under Pearl Abyss's umbrella, we wonder how the studio carries two major side projects alongside EVE Online. We dig into CCP's history of experimental development — from World of Darkness to VR — and whether that Icelandic instinct to explore always ends up feeding the core game. I share my early impressions of EVE Frontier after picking up a founder pack, and Rixx talks about being in the very first alpha test and how much the game has evolved — plus we float the theory that Frontier's Web3 and blockchain angle may actually be attracting serious outside investment, especially after a very successful recent hackathon with over 800 modders. Vanguard also gets a mention as the spiritual PC successor to Dust 514, minus the PlayStation exclusivity mistake.
Fanfest 2026 is two weeks away (and we're not going) — Neither Rixx nor I are attending this year. Rixx and his wife have been to eight Fanfests since 2015 and basically seen the entire island of Iceland, so it still feels like they just got back. I've been twice — 2008 and 2011 — and I'm targeting next year instead, possibly timed to CCP's 30th anniversary. We both agree that watching the stream will be interesting and that next year is the one to plan for.
Why every EVE player should attend a Fanfest or player event at least once — We swap stories about the magic of meeting corpmates and rivals in person. Rixx describes arriving in Reykjavik for the first time and being recognized on the street before breakfast, then falling into a table of 30 EVE players at the laundromat — selling posters, signing autographs, having dinner with CCP Seagull, the whole whirlwind. I recall meeting corpmates from the States for the first time at my 2008 Fanfest and covering the event for PC Gamer in 2011. We shout out EVE Vegas, EVE Toronto, EVE Amsterdam, and the small-scale meetups — Rixx hosted players at his home for five years, I organized pub meetups here in Montreal — and the point is the same: you share a universe, you share a single shard, and that instant common ground is unlike anything else in gaming.
The EVE Faction Warfare Yearbook by T Sky — I stumbled back into this 94-page document after my break and it's absolutely incredible. Published by T Sky (of EVE Frigates fame), it's packed with frigate stats, fits, killboard deep dives, and balance analysis going all the way back to 2013. We'll drop links in the show notes — if you're into faction warfare or frigate PvP, this is a treasure trove.
Capsuleer Days event and the Warpath — A new in-game event dropped literally the day we recorded, so neither of us has much detail yet. It's the annual Capsuleer Days celebration leading into Fanfest, with free skins, skill points, daily login rewards, and event sites scattered everywhere. Rixx warped into one, thought he was getting scrammed by rats, and bailed. We'll have more to chew on next episode once we've actually explored them.
PvP stories from lowsec — Rixx shares two encounters. First, he catches a month-old player mining in a Pioneer destroyer, takes it out, sends the guy a million ISK with an encouraging note — and then the pilot comes back in a Thorax and gets killed again, having apparently learned nothing about checking local for a -10 flashy red skull. Rixx even has to bump the guy's pod to get him to warp off. Second, there's the "most boring fight ever" short — a Hookbill with a target disruptor and long point kiting his Comet at 23km for nearly 10 minutes of slow, painful death at 120 DPS. The takeaway for both: sometimes you just take your lumps, and never fly what you can't afford to lose.
Next episode: post-Fanfest special — We're holding the next recording until after Fanfest wraps and dropping it the Tuesday after, so expect a full debrief on everything CCP announces. See you on the other side of Fanfest 2026.

Where to find us!

Fly safe. o7

The Safe Spot — Episode 6: "Exordium | Training wheels don't teach you how to crash"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:05:00 +0000

In episode 6, Rixx and I dig into the biggest EVE Online announcement in a while — CCP's Exordium, a 53-system PvP-free region for new players. We've got strong opinions, open questions, a healthy dose of skepticism, and a quick recap of the latest Frigate Free-For-All. I was also fresh off a trip to France and still a bit jetlagged, so bear with me.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Intro and the France trip — I'm back from a week in France with my partner, still jetlagged, and Rixx wastes no time steering us toward the big news that dropped while I was away.
CCP announces Exordium — CCP revealed a massive 53-system PvP-free starter region called Exordium, designed to give new players a safe space to learn the game. Rixx has been advocating for something like this for years — he called his version "Sanctuary" — and digs into the lore setup, the central hub system called Manifest, the four empire-linked clusters, and the two-way bridge through Uli. We also talk about whether third-party groups like Mike's Magic School Bus and EVE Rookies will be allowed in, how safety settings will work (green only, no player combat), and the general structure of what CCP is building.
Where's the data? — I push back on the announcement because CCP didn't share the research behind the decision. We revisit the old "friendship machine" narrative — that players who get blown up early actually retain better — and wonder what changed. The 8% retention stat comes up, and we both agree we'd love to see actual numbers explaining why this approach was chosen over alternatives.
The culture shock problem — This is the big one. We both worry that Exordium creates a false first impression of EVE — a safe, cushiony, Care Bear paradise — and that players who spend weeks or months there will be completely unprepared for the real game. I compare it to learning English in a sheltered learning center versus being dropped into a real classroom, and Rixx frames it as the antithesis of what EVE actually is. We talk about autopilot habits, the thrill of risk, and whether you can really teach EVE without the danger.
Graduation mechanics and kicking players out — Rixx raises a critical question: what's the mechanic for moving players out of Exordium? If there's no timer, no graduation path, no incentive structure, people will just stay forever. I float the idea of rewarding players who leave sooner with better loot or bonuses, and Rixx riffs on a hilarious graduation ceremony concept — 500 ships outside Manifest, fireworks, a speech from the Amarr Empress, and a diploma in your cargo hold before you get booted.
Exploits, farming, and EVE players being EVE players — We both acknowledge that EVE's player base will find every loophole. Rixx recalls the old can-flipping trick in starter systems where vets would bait rookies into taking from a jettisoned container to trigger aggression rights — a perfect example of the kind of creative exploitation CCP needs to anticipate.
EVE isn't really a game — Rixx makes the case that EVE's retention problem isn't about PvP danger but about the fact that EVE is a sandbox, not a traditional game. Nobody holds your hand. Nobody tells you what to do next. That's what loses people — not getting ganked. We talk about friendship as the real driver of long-term retention, the emotional pull of not wanting to let your corpmates down, and how none of that can be replicated in a sterile safe zone.
The branding and marketing problem — Rixx shares a story about his barber — a gamer who'd never heard of EVE Online — and we talk about how the game has a visibility problem, especially in North America. More players might help, but only if people know the game exists in the first place.
Rixx's prediction for Exordium's future — Rixx lays out the classic CCP development cycle: big launch, exploit discovered, mad scramble to patch, six months of neglect, then either a revamp or total abandonment. He compares it to Pochven and wormholes as cautionary tales. We agree that success would show up as a steady climb in server numbers — from the current ~26K toward 35–40K — but neither of us is holding our breath.
The friendship-first alternative — I pitch an idea: instead of a safe zone, why not build better matchmaking into the onboarding experience? Let new players flag their interests — hauling, PvP, mining, wormholes — and make it easier for corporations to recruit them directly. Lower the threshold for human connection instead of removing the risk. Rixx agrees the friendship angle is the real retention lever.
Frigate Free-For-All recap — Rixx gives a quick rundown of the latest Frigate Free-For-All in Amamake. It was a deliberately smaller event this year due to ship supply concerns, but it went smoothly — great feedback in local, no major drama, no TiDi. It did overlap with Anger Games again (a player-run 7v7 tournament), which Rixx plans to avoid next year. We also talk about how past Free-For-Alls have been the gateway moment for players who'd never tried PvP before.
Pirate etiquette and helping rookies — Rixx shares a story about engaging a player in an Algos while flying a Vigil Fleet Issue. The player begged in local, and since you can't tell a real rookie from an alt anymore (show info age means nothing when you can inject skill points), Rixx gave him 10 million ISK, left his loot, and spent time explaining what went wrong. He does this three or four times a week — and I argue those encounters are exactly the kind of experience that makes players fall in love with EVE.
Wrap-up and what's next — I mention the New Eden Banter #2 is running a bit late thanks to the France trip but will be up soon, with the next topic announced in May and posts going live on the 15th. Rixx plugs the YouTube channel, and we sign off with the usual "fly safe."

Where to find us!

Fly safe. o7

New Eden Banter #2: You're the Executive Producer of EVE Online

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:04:00 +0000

Welcome to the second installment of the New Eden Banter (NEB), the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux (that's me!). The NEB involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a couple of weeks to post articles pertaining to the said topic.

The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the New Eden Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com.

Check for other New Eden Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month's topic: CCP just handed you the keys to EVE Online. You're the new Executive Producer — full authority over development, technology, marketing, monetization, and community. The only mandate: make EVE thrive. What's your vision? What do you prioritize, what do you cut, and what sacred cow do you slaughter first?

You are the Executive Producer — but first, understand what you're running

So I've got the keys. Congratulations to me, I guess. 😬

Before I start tearing things down or pouring developers into some crazy pet projects, I need to stop and think about what I've actually inherited.

Because EVE Online isn't a game in the way most MMOs are games. It's a tangle of overlapping systems — mechanical, social, economic, political, temporal — that hold each other up in ways that aren't always obvious. Pull the wrong thread and something three rooms over collapses. Push the wrong lever and a dozen emergent behaviors vanish overnight.

I've been back long enough to know I don't know enough to pick a priority yet. But I've been back long enough to see the shape of the thing. So instead of writing a manifesto, I'm going to map out what I think any incoming EP — me or anyone else — needs to understand before they touch anything.

The spheres of influence that make EVE, EVE

1. Sandbox vs. theme park

EVE is a sandbox in a genre dominated by theme parks. There are no quests funneling you down a golden path, no level cap to chase, no developer-scripted hero's journey waiting for you at character creation. The world doesn't care if you log in. You choose what matters, and you live with the consequences of that choice. This is the foundation of everything else — and it's also why EVE is hard to market to people raised on WoW-shaped MMOs, who often show up expecting to be told what to do and bounce off when no one tells them.

2. Science fiction, not fantasy

The setting isn't just decoration. Space strips away entire content categories that fantasy MMOs have to hand-build — no towns to populate with NPCs, no voice-acted questgivers, no dungeons with bespoke encounters. The universe is procedurally coherent in a way that lets a small studio punch far above its weight. It also attracts a different kind of player — the kind who reads patch notes, runs spreadsheets, and argues about capital ship doctrine for fun. Change the setting and you change the audience.

3. Player-driven economy

Almost everything in New Eden is made, moved, traded, and destroyed by players. Industrialists, haulers, traders, market manipulators, and scammers are all playing legitimate, deep versions of the game that have nothing to do with combat. Break this layer and you don't just hurt industrialists — you break a huge chunk of the player base's reason for logging in. The economy is also the substrate for warfare. Every fleet battle is, underneath, an economic event.

4. Multiple games in one

Two players with ten years each can have played completely different games. Null-sec warlord, high-sec mission runner, wormhole explorer, faction warfare pilot, market trader, industrialist, scammer, spy, logistics pilot, content creator. They share a universe, not a gameplay loop. This means the EP has to balance systems that don't even overlap for most players — and has to resist the temptation to "fix" one playstyle in ways that quietly break three others.

5. You are your ship

Identity in EVE is weirdly distributed. You're not really your character — you're the ship you're flying today, the fit you chose, the role you took in fleet. Every hull plays like a different game, with its own fitting constraints, tactical rhythms, and skill prerequisites. This is a complexity multiplier that shapes fitting theory, skill training, ship progression, and even how players talk about themselves ("I'm a Caracal pilot" means something very specific). Mess with this and you mess with how players relate to the game itself.

6. One universe, one server, one history

Tranquility is a single shard. What happens, happens to everyone. Forever. This is why EVE stories matter in a way that stories in other MMOs don't. B-R5RB wasn't a server event — it was the server event. The Great War, World War Bee, the Casino War, the death of any named character — these are shared history, not instanced content. Most MMOs fragment their players across realms to spread load. EVE doesn't. This is a defining technical, philosophical, and cultural choice, and it's almost impossible to walk back once made.

7. Time as a mechanic

Skills train in real time whether you're logged in or not. You can't grind past a timer, no matter how many hours you pour in. Combined with the rhythm of daily downtime, the length of fleet engagements, structure timers, and the in-universe YC calendar, EVE runs on its own clock. This filters the player base hard — patience isn't a nice-to-have, it's a prerequisite. It also means the game respects the lives of players who can't log in every night, which is part of why so many of us come back years later and pick up where we left off.

8. The social and political layer

Corps, alliances, coalitions. Diplomacy, espionage, propaganda, betrayal. Other MMOs treat guilds as a feature — a chat channel and a shared bank. EVE treats them as the game. Most of what makes EVE famous to people who don't play it — the heists, the wars, the billion-ISK scams, the spies who played long cons for years — happens at this layer. And most of it emerges from player behavior, not developer design. The EP's job isn't to write this content; it's to keep the soil fertile enough for it to grow.

9. Loss and consequence

Ships die permanently. Undocking is a decision. A single mistake can cost weeks of work, billions of ISK, or the trust of an entire alliance. This is the emotional engine under everything else in the game. It's why victories feel real and defeats sting. Soften it too much and EVE becomes just another MMO where nothing matters. Leave it too harsh and new players bounce before they ever understand what they've signed up for. The EP lives on this tightrope — and every balance decision, every insurance tweak, every new safety mechanic is a vote on where the line sits.

10. The meta-game outside the client

Discord servers, Pyfa, zKillboard, Dotlan, EVEMarketer, third-party tools, forum propaganda, killmail culture, fan fiction, podcasts, and blogs. EVE spills out of its own client more than almost any game in existence. Much of the actual play happens on voice comms and spreadsheets. The EP has a strategic question to answer: is this infrastructure to embrace and support, or leakage to contain and bring back inside the client? Neither answer is obviously correct, but picking one matters.

11. The developer-player relationship

CSM, Fanfest, dev blogs, direct community engagement, CCP devs who play the game and get podded in lowsec like anyone else. CCP is unusually close to its player base — for better and worse. It means feedback loops are tight, but it also means every patch is a political event. This isn't normal for MMO studios, most of whom treat players as consumers rather than collaborators. An EP has to decide whether to formalize this relationship, expand it, or pull back from it. And each choice reshapes what CCP is as a company.

The EP's real job

None of these spheres exist in isolation. Nerf industry and you affect war. Soften loss and you gut the economy. Fix onboarding badly and you alienate the veterans who are the content. Market the game to a wider audience and you have to ask whether the game can survive that audience actually showing up.

This is what makes EVE both impossible to kill and impossible to grow easily. It's a system in tension with itself, and the tension is the point.

So if I'm handed the keys tomorrow, my first act as EP isn't a roadmap. It's a whiteboard — and a long, uncomfortable conversation with the people who know where the wires go.

Then, and only then, do I touch anything.

The Safe Spot — Episode 5: "Bad Patch"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:48:00 +0000

In this episode, recorded back on March 24th, Rixx and I dive into what happens when CCP pulls the rug out from under your favorite ship mid-stride. Rixx has been on a PvP tear, stacking up fights and cracking the mystery of his disappearing video recordings, while I'm still reeling from the Catalyst major update that basically nerfed my entire gameplay loop.

We get into patch notes philosophy, Pochven lore, blockade runners, abyssal arenas, and why the best advice in EVE often comes from the guy who just blew you up.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Rixx's PvP recording breakthrough and the hidden video stash — Rixx has been on a hot streak of fights and finally solved the mystery of where his in-game recordings were disappearing to — buried 12 folders deep in a system library — unlocking a backlog of content and a new workflow for capturing fights as YouTube Shorts.
PvP Shorts as teaching tools and the "windows of engagement" — We talk about whether Rixx's fight Shorts could become mini-tutorials for new and returning players, the tension between content creation and protecting corpmates, and what Rixx calls "windows of engagement" — that moment you commit to a fight without knowing how it'll end.
The Catalyst major update and the SUIS nerf that wrecked my week — CCP's mid-expansion patch gutted my go-to ship — cargo hold slashed by a third, align time pushed above the critical 2-second threshold — and I talk about how I'm adapting instead of rage-quitting, including training into the Hecate as a replacement.
How EVE expansions, patches, and ship balancing actually work — Rixx breaks down the rhythm of EVE's development cycle — big expansions followed by tuning patches — and how CCP nerfs and buffs ships to keep the meta from calcifying around a single hull, with the Redeemer-to-Widow shift as a recent example.
Blockade runners and the ships you never think about — A spontaneous deep-dive into blockade runners like the Prorator — cloaky, fast transport ships perfect for hauling assets through dangerous space — which neither of us had planned to discuss, proving that even a 20-year vet can't keep every ship class in their head.
Pochven, Triglavians, and filaments into the unknown — Rixx walks me through the basics of Pochven — the Triglavian-controlled region with its own gate aesthetics, security tiers, and filament-based access — plus standing mechanics with both Triglavians and EDENCOM that can get you shot on gates if you're not careful.
Abyssal space, arena PvP, and the players who broke it — We explore abyssal filaments, the gorgeous instanced PvE missions they unlock, the trick of probing down abyssal traces to ambush returning players, and the now-removed arena PvP mode that got pulled after players min-maxed the matchmaking.
Why you should read patch notes before you undock — A practical tip for all players: check the patch notes in the launcher before logging in, because the ship you were planning to fly today might not work the way it did yesterday — as I learned the hard way with the SUIS nerf.
The mammoth, the autopilot, and the gentleman pirate — Rixx tells the story of catching an autopiloting Mammoth on a lowsec gate, getting called names in DMs, and then sending the player fitting guides and advice — because blowing someone up and helping them get better aren't mutually exclusive.
Learning from losses and the long road to getting good — We close out with the philosophy of sticking with it — from the pilot Rixx used to blow up regularly who's now one of the most respected PvPers in the area, to EVE University as a resource, to the simple truth that asking "what did I do wrong?" is the fastest way to improve.

(Back posted on May 4th)

Where to find us!

Fly safe. o7

What returning EVE Online players need to know before undocking

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:39:00 +0000

This guide is based on a video by AloneInFinland, an EVE Online player and fantastic content creator who covers gameplay, fitting advice, and the state of the game from a veteran's perspective. Full credit to him for the insights, warnings, and hard-won lessons that follow.

You can watch the original video on which this guide was built below. 👇

Overview

As I've mentioned before in recent posts, if you're coming back to EVE Online after a long break — whether that's five years or fifteen — there are a handful of changes that can ruin your day before you even realize what happened. In AloneInFinland's opinion, the biggest and most dangerous of these is the introduction of lawless systems in what used to be safe high-sec space. This guide walks you through what changed, how to protect yourself, and what else you should double-check before you undock that expensive ship.

What are lawless systems?

EVE Online introduced Pirate Insurgencies as part of the Havoc expansion in late 2023. Through a mechanic called Corruption, pirate-aligned players can degrade the security status of systems in Faction Warfare zones. When corruption reaches its maximum level (Stage 5), something dramatic happens:

A high-sec system becomes functionally low-sec. CONCORD will not respond to aggression against your ship (though they still respond to pod kills).
A low-sec system becomes functionally null-sec. Players can deploy warp disruption bubbles, use bomb launchers, and operate under full null-sec engagement rules.

These affected systems are labeled "LAWLESS" in the UI and marked with a small inverted triangle on your route planner. If you're not paying attention, you can warp straight into what looks like a routine high-sec gate and find yourself in a system where anything goes.

Step-by-step: How to stay safe

1. Reset your warning pop-ups

Open the Escape menu → Settings → Reset Settings. Scroll down to find all the warning dialogue options and reset them. This ensures you'll receive pop-up warnings when you're about to jump into a system with reduced security, including CONCORD advisories, Edencom/Triglavian warnings, and lawless system alerts.

If you previously dismissed these warnings (or if they were dismissed on your account before you returned), you won't get any notification before jumping into danger.

2. Set your autopilot to prefer safer routes

Open your route settings and make sure "Prefer Safer" is selected. This tells the autopilot to route you through high-sec systems whenever possible. It won't guarantee you avoid lawless systems, but it reduces your exposure.

3. Check your route for lawless systems before departing

Before you undock in anything expensive, look at your planned route on the map. Lawless systems appear with a bright red highlight and a small inverted triangle (▼) icon. If you see one on your route, you need to deal with it before you fly.

4. Use the avoidance list to route around dangerous systems

Right-click on any lawless system in your route and add it to your avoidance list. The game will attempt to find an alternate route that bypasses it. Be aware that sometimes the detour is significantly longer, and in rare cases there may be no alternate route available depending on your origin and destination.
You can manage your full avoidance list through the route settings panel.

5. Never autopilot through unfamiliar space in an expensive ship

This was always true, but it's doubly important now. Autopilot lands you 15 km from the gate, leaving you slow-boating through open space — perfect gank bait. Manually warp gate-to-gate instead. If your route passes through a lawless system you can't avoid, dock up in the nearest station and wait for conditions to change, or switch to a cheaper ship.

6. Check your faction standings

Open your character sheet → Interactions → Standings and review your standings with all factions, including Edencom and the Triglavian Collective. If you have poor standings with either, you may face NPC hostility in systems you'd normally consider safe. This is especially important for returning players who may have accumulated standings changes they've forgotten about.

Other changes returning players should know

Module changes

Some modules that were previously passive are now active. Warp Core Stabilizers are the most notable example — they now require activation and have fitting cost implications. Check every module on your ship before you undock and make sure you understand how it works in the current patch.

Capital ship reclassification

If you had capital ship skills before you left, you may find new skills injected into your character. Carriers were split into separate classes, and the old carrier skills were redistributed. Check your skill queue and your available ships carefully — you may have access to hulls you didn't expect, or you may be missing qualifications for ships you used to fly.

Tech 3 subsystem changes

Tech 3 strategic cruisers now use four subsystem slots instead of five. If you had a T3 fit saved from the old system, it will need to be rebuilt from scratch. The subsystem options have been restructured, so your old fitting knowledge may not apply cleanly.

Fitting changes in general

Ship bonuses, slot layouts, and module stats have shifted across many hulls over the years. Don't assume any saved fitting still works. Import your fits into the in-game simulator and verify everything before you commit to a hull.

Tips and best practices

Lawless status is temporary. Systems move in and out of lawless status as insurgency corruption levels rise and fall. A system that's dangerous today may be safe tomorrow, and vice versa. Check before every trip.
Don't fly what you can't afford to lose. This rule never changes. If you're traveling through uncertain space, fly something disposable or at least something you won't rage-quit over losing.
PvP ships for PvP, PvE ships for PvE. If you're going to pass through a potentially hostile system, don't do it in a PvE-fit battleship worth billions. Switch to something fast, cheap, or both.
Read the route, not just the destination. It's easy to set a destination and start jumping. Take ten seconds to scan the route for warning indicators before you leave dock.
Don't bother reading ten years of patch notes. Nobody is going to do that, and nobody should have to. Focus on the changes that directly affect your gameplay — security mechanics, module changes, and ship rebalances — and learn the rest as you go.

Common mistakes

Assuming high-sec is always safe. This is the single biggest trap for returning players. Lawless systems can appear on major trade routes, and they look like normal high-sec until you check the indicators.
Ignoring warning pop-ups. If you see a warning you don't recognize, stop and read it. Don't click through out of habit.
Flying expensive ships through unverified routes. Always check your route before undocking anything shiny. A two-minute check can save you billions.
Forgetting to check standings. Edencom and Triglavian standings can make otherwise safe systems hostile. If you don't know where you stand, check before you travel.
Using old fits without verifying them. Module changes, slot layout changes, and subsystem restructuring mean your old fits may literally not work anymore. Always simulate first.

AloneInFinland's take: Why lawless systems are bad for the game

Beyond the practical advice, AloneInFinland has a strong opinion on this mechanic — and I think it's definitely worth hearing, because it reflects a sentiment shared by a lot of veteran and returning players, including yours truly.

His core argument is that lawless systems are a forced-PvP mechanic aimed at players who never signed up for PvP. CCP has acknowledged in their own Fanfest presentations that roughly 80% of EVE's player base is primarily PvE-focused — miners, mission runners, industrialists, haulers. The lawless system mechanic takes space those players relied on and turns it into a combat zone, with no opt-out other than docking up and logging off.

That's the engagement problem he keeps coming back to. When a player sets a route, sees a lawless system blocking it, and decides the detour is too long or simply impossible, the most common response isn't "time to fit for PvP." It's "guess I'm done for the day." For a game that depends on active player counts, mechanics that push people to log off rather than adapt are counterproductive.

He also points to the exodus that happened when the mechanic launched alongside the resource redistribution changes. Players lost stations and outposts to lawless flips. A significant chunk of the mining community left. CCP has since walked back some of the redistribution changes, and he acknowledges that EVE is generally moving in a positive direction — but he sees lawless systems as an unresolved wound that still needs attention. And I'd tend to agree with him.

His suggested compromise: if lawless systems stayed in backwater, off-the-beaten-path systems, that would be tolerable. The real pain point is when major trade routes get cut in half by a lawless flip, forcing players into impossible detours or outright blocking their session.

It's a perspective worth considering, especially if you're a returning player weighing whether the game is still worth your time. The mechanic is real, it affects daily gameplay, and it remains a source of friction for some of the player community.

Summary

If you've tuned in to The Safe Spot, you've heard Rixx and I mention this a number of times: the most important thing a returning player needs to understand is that high-sec is no longer unconditionally safe.

The Pirate Insurgency system introduced lawless states that can strip CONCORD protection from systems you've flown through safely for years. Reset your warnings, check your route for the lawless indicator, use the avoidance list, and never autopilot anything you care about.

Beyond that, double-check your modules, your standings, and your fits — the game has changed in ways both large and small, and a few minutes of preparation will save you a lot of grief.

Over to you

Here's my question to you: Should high-sec systems ever be allowed to go lawless on major trade routes?

AloneInFinland argues it's a net negative — that it doesn't convert PvE players into PvP players, it just converts active players into logged-off players.

But there's a counter-argument that New Eden was never supposed to feel completely safe, and that dynamic security is exactly the kind of chaos that makes EVE worth playing.

I'd have to agree with AloneInFinland on that one. Though, it'd be interesting to see how many high-sec systems have become Lawless.

So where do you land?

Did lawless systems push you away from the game, pull you deeper into it, or are you just finding out about this right now and reconsidering that resubscription?

Drop a comment and let me know which side the fence you've planted your flag.

Backrooms: This is the horror that gets under my skin

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:34:00 +0000

I first came across the concept of Backrooms back in 2022. Unless mistaken, I think that's where I first read about it anyways. It was a PC Gamer article "Noclipping is no joke: the strange world of The Backrooms explained" article which introduced me to "The Backrooms" — a concept that had started as a single creepy image posted anonymously on 4chan back in 2019. Just a photo of a yellowed, fluorescent-lit room that felt deeply, inexplicably wrong. No people. No context. Just endless, empty office space that seemed to go on forever.

The description that came with it didn't help remove the confusion: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in The Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms."

WTF? 😦

The article went on to explain the origins of The Backrooms and mentioned Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels), a 16 year old Youtuber that had taken that single creepy image and turned it into something extraordinary. Using Blender and After Effects — tools he'd taught himself — uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube on January 7, 2022. Minutes and minutes of found-footage horror set inside those endless yellow corridors. No budget. No film school. Just a teenager with a laptop and a gift for dread.

I went down the rabbit hole that evening. Watched the videos. Then went to Wikipedia to make sense of it all.

Then completely forgot all about it.

Fast forward to March 31, 2026. A24 drops the official trailer for Backrooms — a feature film directed by Kane Parsons himself, now 20 years old and the youngest filmmaker ever to collaborate with the studio. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, produced by James Wan. It hits theaters on May 29th.

I watched the trailer. Then I watched it again. And again...

Here's what gets me about it: they show you almost nothing. No monster. No gore. No jump scares telegraphed from a mile away. Just that familiar yellowed light, those endless corridors, and a tension that builds in your chest without ever quite releasing. The trailer trusts the space to do the work — and it does.

I've watched a lot of horror in my time. The stuff that stays with you is never the thing you see. It's the thing you don't. Jaws. Alien. The Blair Witch Project. The Backrooms concept is uniquely suited to that approach, because the space itself is the threat. There's no monster to reveal. The dread is architectural.

It also has a Severance feel to it — I can't remember where, but I read that the creator of the AppleTV+ series were inspired by The Backrooms when they first saw it. It's the same instinct, but a different palette. Where Severance uses cold white sterility to make the office feel sinister because people are trapped in it, the Backrooms makes it sinister because no one is. Both are playing with the same primal unease: the corporate space stripped of all human purpose until only the wrongness remains.

After watching the trailer I did what any self-respecting horror fan does — I immediately sent it to folks I knew would be intrigued and captivated by it. That'd be my sister, a massive Stephen King fan. She watched it, and her response was immediately: OMG! I also sent it my daughter, who also enjoys a smart horror (Alien, Stranger Things, etc.), watched it and is also fully on board. We've a date in late May. And I for one, can't wait!

How it all came about

The whole arc of this thing is kind of remarkable. It found its audience because it tapped into something real: the fear of being lost, forgotten, and alone in a place that should be familiar but isn't.

If you haven't watched the trailer above, and have made it this far, please go ahead.

Watch it.

Then tell me you don't get goosebumps.

The Ten Commandments of the returning EVE capsuleer (now that the kids have grown up)

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:25:00 +0000

Back in 2010, I wrote a post called The Top Ten Commandments of the Capsuleer Parent. It was about survival — squeezing EVE Online into the margins of parenthood. Nighttime ops after bedtime. Changing diapers between gate jumps. Negotiating screen time with your spouse like it was a sov treaty.

That post came from the trenches. I was tired all the time, I was stubborn with my gameplay and blogging, and I was absolutely not giving up my game time.

Fast forward to 2026. The kids are grown. The house is quieter. The evenings are mine again. I should be living the dream, right?

Well. Sort of...

Here's what nobody tells you about coming back to EVE after a long absence: the game kept going without you (of course it did!). And so did you. You're no longer the same player. The game's not the same game — it is in a way, but it's also so different. And that freedom you spent fifteen+ years fantasizing about? It feels different than you thought it would.

So in the spirit of the original, here are the updated Commandments.

Not for the parent surviving the chaos — but for the returning capsuleer looking at his docked ship and wondering where the hell everything went.

I. Thou shall not turn thy homecoming into a chore list.

This is the number one killer. You log in, open your assets window, and discover your stuff is scattered across forty stations in regions you barely remember. Half your ships are throwing fitting errors. Something you left in a citadel is just... gone. The temptation is to spend your first week sorting, consolidating, and organizing. Don't. That's how returning players burn out before they even undock. Your old stuff can wait. Go fly something. Then you can think of that clean-up.

II. Thou shall fly cheap and fly stupid — at least at first.

Your character might sit in a Iteron. Your hands do not remember how to fly one. The community wisdom here is brutal but honest: ships are ammo, and you're rusty. Fit a frigate. Undock it. Lose it to something embarrassing. Your muscle memory will come back faster than your pride, and that's fine.

III. Thou shall accept that thy old fits are probably wrong.

If you've been gone more than a decade, assume every fit in your hangar is broken. ECM works differently now. Warp core stabilizers are active modules. Nullification requires a fitted module on most ships. The meta has shifted under your feet. Check community fit databases before you trust anything from the Before Times.

IV. Thou shall start familiar, then branch out — but thou must branch out.

The safe move is to go back to what you knew: missions, mining, whatever your old comfort zone was. That's fine as a stepping stone. But doing the exact same things you did last time is a recipe for another hiatus. EVE added Abyssal Deadspace, Triglavian space, new exploration content, Freelance Jobs, filaments, a ton of new ships, and then some more.

At least try one thing that didn't exist when you left. Be curious!

V. Thou shall not grieve what the Forsaken Fortress update hath taken.

If you left stuff in a player-owned citadel and that citadel went abandoned while you were gone, those assets may have been destroyed without asset safety. This is a gut-punch many returning players discover. It hurts. Mourn it, then move on. You rebuilt before. You'll rebuild again. And this time, store the important stuff in NPC stations.

VI. Thy corp is probably gone. Thy friends may be too. This is the real loss.

The ships and ISK are replaceable. The corp you ran with? The FC who made you laugh on comms? The friends who made the game feel alive? Phoenix Propulsion Laboratories is but a long forgotten memories now...

They may have moved on. And that quiet — logging in to an empty chat channel where there used to be a dozen people — that hits harder than any asset loss. Find new people. It's what kept every long-term player in this game, and it's what'll keep you.

VII. Nighttime is still thy best friend — but now because thou falls asleep at the keyboard by 22:00.

The irony is brutal. You finally have the evenings free, and your body has decided that 10 PM is basically midnight. The spirit is willing. The eyelids are not. Adjust your expectations accordingly, or switch to playing much earlier in the day.

I know a few pirates who do so.

VIII. Thou shall not compare thyself to the capsuleer thou once was.

That version of you had fast reflexes, an active corp, and a reckless disregard for sleep. This version has reading glasses, a preference for scotch not beer, and strong opinions about ergonomic chairs. Let the old killboard be a monument, not a benchmark. You're playing a different game now — slower, more deliberate, maybe better.

That's the beauty of EVE — there's a game play for every sort of player out there.

IX. Thou shall find thy people — and they won't be who you expect.

You're not looking for the bleeding edge anymore. You're looking for people who laugh when fleet ops go sideways, who explain mechanics without condescension, and who understand that sometimes you go AFK because the dog needs out. A laid-back training corp, a casual lowsec group, a wormhole crew with a sense of humor — they exist.

Finding them is the single most important thing you'll do.

X. Thou shall remember why thou came back — and it wasn't for the ISK.

You didn't resubscribe because you missed running missions or watching a mining laser cycle. Something pulled you back. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it was the sound of the undock. Maybe it was seeing your kid play and thinking I used to do that. Whatever it was, protect it. Don't let the chore list bury it.

Don't let the bitterness of what changed poison it. You're here. New Eden is still here. That's enough to start.

So welcome back, capsuleer!

You're older, maybe a little slower at the moment, and mildly confused by the new overview settings.

But you've been here before.

And the second time around, you know something the younger version of you didn't: it was never about the ships.

New Eden Banter #2 — Topic announcement: You are the Executive Producer

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:50:00 +0000

Every player has opinions about how EVE Online should be run. Most of us mutter them into comms after a bad patch, or rant about them on Discord, Reddit, or even a blog post for the old timer like me!

In this second New Eden Banter, you get to put those opinions on the record.

This month's topic

CCP just handed you the keys to EVE Online. You're the new Executive Producer — full authority over development, technology, marketing, monetization, and community. The only mandate: make EVE thrive. What's your vision? What do you prioritize, what do you cut, and what sacred cow do you slaughter first?

What do you do?

Maybe you burn the new player experience to the ground and rebuild it from scratch. Maybe you pour resources into lowsec and watch nullsec howl. Maybe you finally kill off a mechanic everyone's been complaining about for a decade. Maybe you leave the game mostly alone and overhaul how CCP talks to its players.

There are no wrong answers here — only choices and trade-offs. Every decision you make as EP means something else doesn't get done. So what's your priority? What's your vision? And what sacred cow are you willing to slaughter to get there?

How to participate

Write a blog post responding to the topic above (any length, any style).
Publish it on your blog Wednesday, April 15th.
Drop your link in the comments of this post (or share it on Bluesky and tag me: @crazykinux.bsky.social). I'll be updating the roundup throughout the week of April 15th, as links come in.
I'll do the roundup linking all entries at the bottom of my banter, and you should as well.

Deadline

Once again, posts go live Wednesday, April 15th. That gives you two weeks from today to write, argue with yourself, and rewrite.

Drop your link in the comments below anytime that week (April 15–21) and I'll add you to the roundup. You can leave a link in the comments below, in the comments of my NEB#2 post on the 15th, or over on Bluesky (@crazykinux.bsky.social).

(Late? Post anyway. I'll add you to a "late arrivals" update — no gnashing of teeth required.)

Weekend refit: My Merlin gets teeth and my skill queue a trim

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:55:00 +0000

These past few weeks, I've had the focus of a fruit fly on speed. Everything seemed like a shiny new toy. So this weekend, I sat down and took an honest look at what I actually wanted to do over the coming weeks, and also longer term.

On one side, there was PvP. I've been wanting to dabble for a while now, and I had a small collection of Merlins sitting in hangars without a proper fit between them. I knew the ship could brawl. I just hadn't put in the work to make it happen.

Then there was the Hecate I'd recently purchased. I'd started training for it with this idea of testing it as a fast-align, small-cargo hauler — something to replace the Sunesis now that the Catalyst update clipped its wings. A T3 tactical destroyer doing courier work. Admittedly a strange choice, but if the numbers worked, it could make for an interesting story.

And finally, blockade runners. Rixx brought them up during our last recording of The Safe Spot (YouTube | Spotify). He'd mentioned the Amarr Prorator as a solid ship for the job. So I started poking around the intertubes, and that's when I came across the Caldari Crane. Love at first sight. Covert cloak, decent cargo, warps cloaked — everything the Sunesis wishes it could do.

So there I was: a skill queue that looked like a capsuleer suffering from an identity crisis, ships scattered across half a dozen stations, and Merlins without a proper PvP fit. Something had to give.

I needed to put things in order before this mess became my undoing.

The Merlin gets T2 teeth (in theory)

The Merlin is supposed to be a brawler—scram, web, blasters, get in close and hold them there. At least, that’s the theory. So far my PvP experience has mostly been staring at the fitting window and imagining the fight… which I suspect skips a few important steps.

I'd been running meta Light Electron Blasters with Navy Antimatter, a Damage Control I, and triple shield extender rigs. It worked well enough for getting comfortable with the ship, but I knew it was leaving a lot on the table. So I spent the weekend upgrading, one module at a time, trying to build something that should hold up when I finally undock with the intent to shoot something that shoots back with purpose.

So here's where I ended up after an hour or two of tinkering:

High Slots

3x Light Ion Blaster II

Mid Slots

5MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Faint Epsilon Scoped Warp Scrambler
X5 Enduring Stasis Webifier
Medium Shield Extender II

Low Slots

Damage Control II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Rigs

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small EM Shield Reinforcer I
Small Thermal Shield Reinforcer I

Cargo (Ammo)

Caldari Navy Antimatter S (default load - x5,240)
Void S (close-range brawling - x5,000)
Null S (range fallback - x2,000)

The Right Stats: 201 DPS (Void loaded) | 7,302 EHP | Cap stable at 8.9%

The big changes

T2 Light Ion Blasters replaced the meta electron guns. That alone jumped the DPS from 125 to 201 — a 60% increase, at least in the fitting window. Whether that translates to actual kills remains to be seen. The Damage Control went from I to II for free resists across the board. And the rig setup went from triple shield extenders (raw HP, no resist coverage) to a balanced mix: one extender, one EM reinforcer, one thermal reinforcer. Shield resists now sit at 51/61/58/65 — no obvious hole for someone to exploit. Or so I'm hoping.

The Medium Shield Extender II (MAPC II) is still there. It demands more powergrid than the fit can spare without it, even with Power Grid Management V. That means I'm burning a low slot on fitting support instead of a second Magnetic Field Stabilizer II. It's a trade-off I'm not entirely happy with, but the alternative (dropping to an MSE I to free the slot) costs shield HP I'm not ready to give up yet. Then again, I have no idea how fast this buffer actually disappears in a real fight.

Ask me again after my first loss mail. 😬

The real unlock — I think — is T2 ammo. Void S for maximum damage at point-blank range. Caldari Navy Antimatter as the all-rounder. Null S for when a target tries to pull away. Three engagement envelopes instead of one. That flexibility is supposed to be the whole reason to fly T2 guns. More on that, and where I got that insight, in a later post.

I'll let you know if I live long enough to swap ammo mid-fight.

The skill queue gets a haircut

My training queue had ballooned to 161 days and 39 skills. It was pulling in about six directions at once: Hecate, Crane, missiles, exploration, navigation Vs, drones. It looked like a skill plan written by a committee.

So I stripped it down to three phases, in priority order:

Phase 1 — Hecate (~17 days)

Gallente Destroyer V <- finished training earlier today
Gallente Tactical Destroyer I <- finished training earlier today
Gallente Frigate IV → V
Evasive Maneuvering V
Light Drone Operation IV
Drones V

Phase 2 — Merlin PvP (~2 days)

Shield Compensation IV

Phase 3 — Crane (~34 days)

Caldari Hauler IV → V
Industry I → V
Transport Ships I → IV

Total: roughly 59 days. Down from 161. Every skill maps directly to a ship I'm planning to fly. No waste.

The stuff I cut: navigation skills to V (incremental improvement, not urgent), exploration suite (Archaeology, Hacking, Astrometrics — nice to have, not flying exploration right now), Heavy Missiles III → IV (not in a missile ship yet), Small Railgun Specialization II (not flying rails), and Energy Grid Upgrades V (marginal benefit for the cost).

A few things I didn't need to add, because they were already trained: Thermodynamics IV (overheating is non-negotiable for PvP), Advanced Weapon Upgrades IV (fitting skill), Tactical Shield Manipulation IV (prevents shield bleedthrough), and all the gunnery support skills at V. My foundation was stronger than I realized. The queue was just cluttered with aspirational training that wasn't serving any immediate goal.

What's next

The training queue fully unlocks for my Hecate in about 17 days. I'm still planning to test it as a fast-align hauler in Propulsion Mode, though I've been warned — fairly — that I might be fighting the ship's design. We'll see what reality says once I can actually fly it properly fitted. If the numbers don't work for hauling, it's still a Gallente blaster platform with mode switching, which is a very different kind of fun.

After that, it's the Crane. Covert ops cloak, warps while cloaked, decent cargo bay. It does everything the Sunesis used to do for low-sec hauling, but better and safer. The Industry I → V pre-req chain is annoying — six days of training a skill I'll never otherwise use — but that's the cost of admission.

In the meantime, the Merlin is ready. 201 DPS, balanced resists, three ammo types in cargo, and a pilot who's still learning how to pick fights he can win.

Finally, I'm also working on a companion post covering overheating and ammo selection — the practical side of actually flying this thing. It'll be a rundown of when to overheat your guns, when to swap from Void to Null mid-fight, how fast heat damage stacks up, and all the small decisions that apparently separate "good fight" from "why is my pod floating in space." It's based on 2 fantastic YouTube tutorials I came across down all this research the past two days.

Stay tuned for that one.

Time to go lose some ships.

Wish me luck...

When CCP snubs its most dedicated creator, it's not just his loss — it's ours

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:08:00 +0000

First things first: congratulations to every creator who made the EVE Creator Awards shortlist. This is CCP's first crack at a formal recognition program, and the names on that list represent real work, real passion, and real contributions to New Eden.

Well deserved, all of you!

This post isn't about any of them. It's about a name that's missing.

Earlier today, CCP Games published the finalists for the EVE Creator Awards — eight categories covering streamers, video creators, podcasters, writers, app developers, and more. It's a genuine effort to celebrate what makes this community unique. But when I scrolled through all forty finalists, one absence hit me immediately.

Rixx Javix is nowhere on this list.

Full disclosure: Rixx and I co-host The Safe Spot podcast together, so I'm not coming at this as a neutral observer. That said, neither of us expected The Safe Spot to make the Podcast shortlist — we've only got a handful of episodes under our belt. This isn't about that.

This is about a creator who just marked seventeen years of EVEOGANDA. Seventeen years. I mean seventeen! Over 3,500 blog posts. Probably millions of words. And that's just the writing. Rixx has produced ship art, comics, posters, wallpapers. Visual work that has become woven into the fabric of this community. Artwork that players print and hang on their walls. He's done all of this while weathering in-game wars and real-world threats, because apparently that's what you get for being visible in this community for nearly two decades.

There is a Written Content Creator of the Year category. There is a Video Creator of the Year category. Rixx actively produces both. How the hell was he not shortlisted for either one — and honestly, for both?

And beyond the writing and the videos, there's nowhere for the rest of his work to even be considered. No visual art category. No creative category. No legacy or lifetime contribution category. The ship art, the comics, the posters — work that is genuinely iconic within this community — has no home in these awards.

So we're not talking about a single oversight here. We're talking about a creator who could have been recognized in at least two existing categories and wasn't, while the work he's arguably best known for — his art — doesn't even have a category to be excluded from. That's not a gap. That's a pattern.

And it points to a deeper problem: CCP's growing blindness to the blogging community that helped build EVE's culture in the first place.

Before the streamers, before the YouTubers, before the podcasters — there were bloggers. For years, the EVE blogging community was the backbone of out-of-game content. Writers like Wilhelm Arcturus at The Ancient Gaming Noob, NoizyGamer at The Nosy Gamer, EVE Hermit, the Greybill, marketsforISK, — some of them were the ones writing about EVE when nobody was watching. Analyzing expansions. Documenting fleet fights. Debating mechanics. Building the cultural layer that gave this game a life beyond the client.

And I won't even loop in my own blog, CrazyKinux's Musing — I stepped away for a long stretch and only recently came back, so I can't claim the kind of unbroken dedication these writers have shown. But that's exactly the point. They never stopped. And neither did Rixx.

Many of those blogs are still active today. Still producing thoughtful, substantive content. And yet the Written Content category leans heavily toward wikis, news outlets, and Reddit posts. The Greybill was included — and rightly so — but it's the exception. The message, intentional or not, is that long-form blogging doesn't register on CCP's radar anymore.

And that's a real shame...

Meanwhile, some finalists appear in multiple categories — iBeast in three, Lorumerth and Oz in two each — and good on them, that kind of range deserves recognition. There's clearly no rule against recognizing prolific creators across multiple areas of contribution. So Rixx's total absence across every category where he could have appeared isn't a structural limitation. It's a choice. Or an oversight. I honestly don't know which is worse.

This is CCP's first year doing this. First efforts aren't perfect, and the fact that a formal recognition program exists at all is a step forward. But recognition programs only work if they're credible. And credibility demands completeness. You can't claim to celebrate the creative spirit of New Eden while leaving out someone who has arguably contributed more sustained, diverse creative work than almost anyone in the history of this community.

Rixx Javix will keep creating regardless. He was doing it before these awards existed, and he'll be doing it long after. Seventeen years and 3,500 posts tell you that much.

But when CCP overlooks that kind of dedication, the message reaches far beyond one person. It tells every long-term creator in this community that longevity doesn't matter. That breadth doesn't count. That if your work doesn't fit the categories someone in Reykjavik decided to build — or even when it does — it simply doesn't exist.

That's not just his loss. It's ours.

The Safe Spot — Episode 4: "FF4A & Beyond"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:14:00 +0000

In this episode, Rixx and I catch up, announce some exciting podcast distribution news, then dive deep into Stay Frosty's legendary Frigate Free For All (FF4A) event.

I also share the story of my first real hauling adventure in low sec — complete with the sweaty palms and the adrenaline rush — and Rixx drops some hard-earned wisdom on surviving gate camps, dealing with AFK mistakes, and not panicking when things go sideways.

We wrap up by talking about Rixx's new weekly show, Pirate's Corner, and the importance of opening up and sharing stories with the community.

Let's dive in!

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Now on Spotify (and Apple Soon) — Rixx announces that The Safe Spot is officially available on Spotify, with an RSS feed rolling out across other podcast platforms and Apple Podcasts expected to follow within days. — Podcasts on Netflix? — We briefly geek out about the trend of podcasts moving to video and even landing on Netflix, and joke about staying a solid decade behind the curve.
The 12th Annual Frigate Free For All (FF4A) — Rixx breaks down everything you need to know about Stay Frosty's massive player-run event on April 11th in Amamake: six hours, 10,000 free fully-fit T1 frigates, alpha-friendly, a free-port Keepstar, and absolute chaos at every belt, sun, and plex in system. — Not Just Frigates — Veterans bring assault frigs, cruiser fleets, carriers, and even capitals; Rixx has undocked a Naglfar, a Marshal, and last year flew an Orca straight into a belt to get slaughtered. — Getting Over the Fear of Loss — A big part of FF4A's purpose is helping newer players experience PvP with zero investment and realize that losing ships is just part of the game. — A Brief History of FF4A and the Death Races — Rixx traces the event lineage back through the Tuskers transition, the early death races through Providence in 2010, and explains why they call this one the 12th annual despite it really being more like the 15th or 16th.
Thera, Filaments, and the Layers of EVE — I ask Rixx to explain Thera and filaments after they come up in the FF4A discussion, and he walks us through wormhole shortcuts via EVE Scout, the different flavours of filaments (Pochven, null sec, quiet vs. busy space), fleet size limits, and how these mechanics have added incredible depth to the game over the years.
53 New Systems and Player Retention — Rixx mentions CCP's announcement about adding 53 brand-new systems to EVE, which he covered on Pirate's Corner, and we discuss the potential impact on the new player experience and whether it could help move EVE's historically terrible retention numbers in the right direction.
My First Real Hauling Run — I share the story of helping a friend move billions of ISK worth of assets across high and low sec in a Synesis — a ship I'd never have guessed was a hauler — learning the map filters, setting up the overview on the fly, and the adrenaline rush of docking in a system with six or seven reds in local. — The AB/MWD Warp Trick — Rixx teaches me the one-cycle afterburner trick that cuts align time in half on slower ships, and I immediately realize I need this in my life.
Surviving Gate Camps and Low Sec: Pirate Wisdom — Rixx goes deep on gate mechanics, covering cloak timers, gate gun behavior, suspect timers, security status, sensor boosting, instalockers, and bubbles — and why the answer to every gate camp starts with "Don't Panic." — Organize Your Overview by Distance — Rixx's number one practical tip: sort your overview by distance so the closest threats are always at the top. — AFK = Dead — A cautionary tale about probing down an AFK Thorax four rooms deep in a dungeon site, plus Rixx's short about bumping a cloaked Tengu in a belt. — Local Intel and Third-Party Tools — I mention keeping a thin local chat window open while hauling, and Rixx recommends Local Thread and similar services for quick intel on who's in system with you.
Pirate's Corner Weekly — Rixx talks about his new weekly YouTube show where he picks a topic each week — from the 53 new systems to surviving EVE's social side — and shares stories, advice, and opinions from 18 years of pirating, all recorded on Sunday nights with zero scripts and no fancy studio setup. — The Social Side of Surviving EVE — Rixx opens up about dealing with trolls, Reddit haters, Discord mockery, and even account hacking over the years, and how CCP and the community have gotten better (but not perfect) at handling that stuff. — Letting People In — Rixx reflects on how he used to keep his real-life identity and his in-game persona completely separate, and how over time he's learned that sharing more of himself — the process, the mistakes, the stories — is what actually builds connection.
Call to Action — We invite listeners to share their own crazy EVE stories in the comments on Eveoganda, my blog, or The Safe Spot's YouTube channel, and float the idea of having guest speakers on future episodes.

Where to find us!

Fly safe. o7

Clipped wings, new teeth: Refitting the Sunesis after the Catalyst nerf

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:42:00 +0000

Three days. That's how long my "Learning to Fly" post lasted before CCP clipped my wings.

I'd just finished writing about the Sunesis — my fast-align small hauler, Athena's Wings — and how she could haul almost 1,200 m³ of cargo while warping in 1.75 seconds. Sub-two. Practically uncatchable. The whole point of the ship.

Then the Catalyst major update dropped on March 18th, and CCP decided the Sunesis had been having too much fun.

What changed

The short version: CCP bumped the Sunesis's base inertia modifier from 2.0x to 2.85x and cut the base cargo bay from 600 m³ to 450 m³ (see the patch notes here). Their reasoning? SoCT ships were too dominant for their cost and skill requirements. The Sunesis in particular had become the default answer to too many problems — hauling, utility, the SOE epic arc, you name it.

Bla bla bla...

Even if they were right — they're the Devs ok, I know — it certainly doesn't mean I have to like it.

And I certainly don't, or did not...

With this nerf and my existing fit — 3x Inertial Stabilizers II and all three rig slots burned on Cargohold Optimization — Athena's Wings now aligns in 2.58 seconds and carries about 872 m³. Both numbers are worse than what they used to be in every way that matters. The cargo is livable — sorta . The align time isn't. 2.58 seconds is above the magic two-second threshold, which means the whole premise of the ship — warp before anyone can lock you — is gone.

Athena's Wings is grounded.

Rethinking the Sunesis

Here's the thing, though. Look at what CCP actually nerfed — and what they didn't.

The turret and missile role bonuses dropped from 25% to 20%. The cargo bay got slashed. The inertia modifier got hammered. But the drone bonus? Untouched. The Sunesis still gets a 50% bonus to drone hitpoints and damage. It still has 25 Mbit/s of bandwidth and a 25 m³ drone bay — enough for a full flight of five light drones. And it still has that 37.5% bonus to Core and Combat Scanner Probe strength.

Now read what CCP's own description says the ship is for: "It serves well in research and exploration but truly comes into its own in combat." Not hauling. Not logistics. Research. Exploration. Combat.

So the question isn't whether the Sunesis is dead. It's whether it still has its use for what I want to do after this latest nerfing.

The answer is probably yes, or more accurately maybe, it depends. Instead of a hauler that avoids fights, I'll try turning it into an exploration ship that picks them.

That's the "hope".

The refit: Artemis' Hounds

New role, new name. Athena's Wings was about speed and evasion — a goddess of strategy taking flight. Artemis' Hounds is about the hunt. Probing down sites, cracking cans, and letting loose a pack of drones on anything that objects. Artemis was the huntress, and in this fit, the drones are her hounds.

The general idea: a Core Probe Launcher and scanning rigs to lean into that 37.5% probe strength bonus. Data and Relic analyzers for cracking sites. Light missiles for supplemental damage. A cloak for the MWD-cloak trick through sketchy gates — this ship is still going to low-sec, after all. A Nanofiber to claw back some of the agility CCP took away. And five Hobgoblin IIs filling that 25 m³ drone bay, hitting well above their weight class thanks to the 50% damage bonus.

I haven't nailed down the exact fit yet.

The Sunesis has 218.8 CPU and 78.8 powergrid to work with, which is... not a lot when you're trying to cram a probe launcher, analyzers, weapons, and combat drones into the same hull. Something's going to have to give — probably T2 modules downgraded to compact variants, or the shield extender dropped entirely. I'll figure it out in the fitting window.

And honestly? I might be completely wrong about the combat angle. The Sunesis might work better as a pure exploration platform — probes, analyzers, cloak, and drones strictly for site defense rather than going looking for trouble. The "teeth" might end up being more like "a polite suggestion to leave me alone."

This is definitely part of the fun for me. Figuring these things out, one module at the time.

We'll see where this takes us.

The honest assessment

Let's not pretend this is an upgrade. Athena's Wings was a purpose-built machine — she did one thing and did it perfectly. For the moment Artemis' Hounds is just an idea.

CCP was clear about what they wanted: the Sunesis should stop being the answer to every logistics problem. Fine. I'll stop using it as a hauler. I don't really have a choice do I.

The Sunesis got to be what CCP always said it was. Right there in the description: "...a ship that shows its value when understanding the universe requires a strong hand as well as a sharp mind." The drones will have to be the strong hand — let's just hope I can be the sharp mind.

What's next

So the hauler chapter of the Sunesis is closed. Oh, how brief it was... The exploration chapter is just starting.

But not quite yet. I've got a six-day skill queue standing between me and the Hecate I recently picked up — more on that later.

Then I'll work on fitting Artemis' Hounds with the above fitting I mentioned. In the meantime, I've slipped back into my trusty Merlin and I'm hoping to head out with my EVE Uni corpmates for some PvP training flights.

Because apparently my skill queue isn't the only thing having an identity crisis.

Different wings. Same pilot. Still learning to fly!

CK out...

Star Wars would be better off without the Force

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:24:00 +0000

==> [Join the conversation on Bluesky once you've read the full post!] <==

Star Wars doesn't need the Force

Let me put it another way... Star Wars doesn't need the Force to hook us in, to make that universe captivating.

The Force has become a deus ex machina for a lot of the Star Wars content these days.

Hear me out...

The best Star Wars project ever made — and I mean ever — had no Jedi. No lightsabers. No Force pushes, mind tricks, or mystical prophecies. No chosen ones. No ancient Sith knowledge. No midichlorians. No glowing blue ghosts dispensing wisdom from beyond the grave.

Andor's second season hit a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest-rated live-action Star Wars anything — beating both its own first season and The Empire Strikes Back. It became the first TV series in history to land five consecutive episodes with IMDb scores of 9.5 or above. It won five Emmys from fourteen nominations, including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Its finale topped Nielsen's streaming charts with 931 million minutes watched in a single week, beating everything else on every platform.

No Force required.

So maybe it's time to ask the question that Lucasfilm clearly doesn't want to hear: does Star Wars actually need the Force at all?

The case for gutting it

Think about what the Force has become. Force healing. Force Skype. Force projection across the galaxy. Force-sensitive babies lifting entire squads of stormtroopers. Palpatine somehow returning through the Force. The sequel trilogy turned the Force into a Swiss Army knife that could do whatever the plot needed at any given moment, and in doing so, stripped it of everything that made it interesting.

Every time a writer runs out of ideas, the Force bails them out. Every time a character needs motivation, it's destiny or bloodlines. Every time a plot needs resolution, someone waves their hand. The Force has become the franchise's most reliable crutch, and crutches don't make for good storytelling.

And it gets worse.

The Force creates a power ceiling that makes stakes meaningless. Force users in modern Star Wars are basically superheroes now. Rey could heal mortal wounds. Grogu stops fire with his mind. When your characters are demigods, the audience stops worrying about whether they'll survive.

Meanwhile, Cassian Andor could die from a stray blaster bolt. And that's why we cared.

The Force also shrinks the galaxy. Every major conflict funnels back to Force-sensitive bloodlines. The entire Clone War was a chess match between two Force users. The Rebellion only won because of a Skywalker. A galaxy of trillions, and every story that matters comes down to a dozen people with magic blood.

But Andor proved you don't need any of it. Mon Mothma's political maneuvering. Luthen Rael's moral compromises. Kino Loy's desperate courage on Narkina 5. These are stories about ordinary people under impossible pressure, and they're more gripping than anything a lightsaber has given us in twenty years.

So yeah. Ditch the Force. Move on.

Except... no. Not quite.

Here's where I have to be honest with you.

I don't actually want the Force gone. Not completely. And if you've read this far without rage-quitting to the comments section, you deserve the real argument.

The Force is the connective tissue of this galaxy. It's what makes Star Wars feel different from every other sci-fi franchise. Without it, you've just got spaceships and politics. The Force is what gives Star Wars its soul.

But here's the thing. The Force works best when it's rare. When it's whispered about. When ordinary people aren't sure if it's even real. When it shows up at the edges of a story and makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up precisely because you weren't expecting it.

The problem isn't the Force. The problem is that Lucasfilm has made it common.

The original trilogy understood this

Think about A New Hope. The Force is barely there. Luke gets a nudge during the trench run. Vader chokes a guy across a conference table, and everyone in the room looks terrified because they've never seen anything like it. Obi-Wan dies and vanishes, and it's genuinely unsettling. Han Solo — one of the three main characters — doesn't even believe in it.

That tells you something crucial about this galaxy. The Force had been so thoroughly suppressed and forgotten that even a guy who'd been everywhere, who'd seen everything, who'd had a Wookiee co-pilot for years, dismissed it as nonsense. The Force was mysterious. And that mystery is what made it powerful.

The Force went from that — from something that made people whisper — to something that's basically a Marvel superpower.

And we can pinpoint exactly when the rot started.

Midichlorians were the beginning of the end

In 1999, George Lucas made the single worst creative decision in the history of Star Wars. He explained the Force.

Midichlorians. Microscopic organisms living in your bloodstream that determine how strong you are with the Force. The more you have, the more powerful you are. Anakin Skywalker has a count higher than Yoda's. That's how we know he's the Chosen One. Not because of anything he does or believes or chooses. Because of a blood test. Boring...

Think about what that did. In one scene — one throwaway line of dialogue in The Phantom Menace — the Force went from a spiritual mystery that anyone could potentially connect with to a genetic lottery. You either have the blood for it or you don't. The Force stopped being something you could believe in and became something you could measure with a needle.

It's the franchise's original sin. Once you reduce the mystical to the biological, you can't put it back in the box. Midichlorians turned the Force from a religion into a science. From faith into genetics. From something that bound the galaxy together into something that separated the gifted from the ordinary.

And the franchise has been chasing that mistake ever since. The sequel trilogy didn't bring back midichlorians by name, but the obsession with bloodlines — Rey's parentage, the Palpatine reveal, the idea that Force power is inherited — is the same instinct dressed up differently. If your parents weren't special, you aren't special. The galaxy belongs to the chosen few.

Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke the Force was an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us. It penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. That's a beautiful idea. That's something worth believing in.

"Your midichlorian count is off the charts" is not.

Rogue One got the balance right

If there's a template for how to handle the Force going forward, it's Rogue One.

The Force is present in that film. You can feel it. Chirrut Îmwe chants his way through a wall of blaster fire, and you genuinely don't know if the Force is protecting him or if he's just the luckiest blind man in the galaxy. The kyber crystals powering the Death Star remind you that the Force has a physical presence in this universe. And then Vader shows up in that hallway, and for thirty seconds you remember exactly why the entire galaxy is afraid of Force users.

But nobody in the main cast wields it. Nobody uses it to solve their problems. Jyn Erso can't wave her hand and make the mission easier. Cassian Andor can't sense danger before it arrives. They're ordinary people making impossible choices under impossible pressure. And that's why their sacrifice hits so hard.

The Force exists at the periphery. It makes the galaxy feel bigger and stranger. It doesn't shrink the story down to a handful of chosen ones.

That's the sweet spot. The Force as atmosphere. As texture. As something felt but not wielded.

What "just enough Force" actually looks like

So here's what I'm actually arguing. Not that the Force should disappear. But that Lucasfilm should treat it the way a good horror film treats its monster: the less you see it, the more powerful it becomes.

Most characters in the galaxy should not believe in the Force. Or if they do, it should be the way people in the real world believe in the supernatural — with uncertainty, skepticism, and a little bit of fear. Han Solo's dismissal wasn't just a character beat. It was worldbuilding. And it's the kind of worldbuilding the franchise has completely abandoned.

Force users should be terrifying. Not cool. Not aspirational. Terrifying. When Vader walks into a room, people should react the way you'd react if someone in your office suddenly started levitating furniture with their mind. The Rogue One hallway scene works because the Rebels aren't fighting a villain. They're fighting something they don't understand. That primal fear is what makes Force users interesting — and it evaporates the moment you put three Jedi in the same scene comparing lightsaber forms.

The Force should never solve plot problems. If your story requires a character to heal a fatal wound, bridge the gap between planets through telepathy, or resurrect from the dead, you don't have a story problem. You have a Force problem. The most compelling Star Wars narratives — the original trilogy, Rogue One, Andor — work because characters solve problems through courage, sacrifice, and ingenuity. Not magic.

And when the Force does show up, it should mean something. A single moment of genuine Force use in an otherwise grounded story would carry more emotional weight than an entire season of lightsaber battles. Imagine an Andor-style series where, in the final episode, one quiet, unexplained moment suggests the Force was involved all along. No explanation. No exposition. Just a feeling that something larger was at work.

That's the kind of storytelling that stays with you.

The 2026 slate tells me they haven't figured this out

Look at what's coming. The Mandalorian & Grogu is leaning hard into Grogu's growing Force abilities. Maul: Shadow Lord is centered on a Sith. Ahsoka Season 2 is steeped in Force mythology. The planned Rey film is literally about rebuilding the Jedi Order.

Lucasfilm looked at the data showing their most critically acclaimed project ever treated the Force as background radiation and went: "Great, let's make six more things about Force users."

I get it. Lightsabers sell toys. Jedi sell tickets. The Force is the brand. But the brand is diluted. When every character is Force-sensitive, when every conflict is resolved through mystical powers, when every new show has to introduce its own flavour of ancient Sith knowledge, the Force stops being special.

It becomes furniture. And nobody is awed by furniture.

Make it rare again

Star Wars is at its best when it trusts its galaxy to be interesting on its own terms. The original trilogy understood this instinctively — the Force was the seasoning, not the meal. Rogue One remembered it. Andor perfected it.

The franchise doesn't need to abandon the Force. It needs to respect it again. Let ordinary people carry the stories. Let the galaxy breathe. Stop treating every new project as an excuse to expand the mythology of Force users, and start trusting that a smuggler, a senator, a spy, or a soldier can hold an audience's attention without a lightsaber in the room.

And when the Force does appear — when someone reaches out and touches something genuinely beyond human understanding — let it feel like what it was always meant to be.

Something rare. Something unsettling. Something you can't quite explain.

Because that's when the Force is actually with you.

Dune Part Three: Darker, bigger, and exactly what was needed

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:13:00 +0000

The trailer for Dune: Part Three — the final chapter in Denis Villeneuve's trilogy — dropped yesterday. I've been watching it over and over, trying to pick up every hint and detail buried in those two and a half minutes. If this trailer and the first two films are any indication, we're in for a hell of a ride. What an epic finale this will surely be!

Despite what some will say, I'm not usually one to go full fanboy, but I'll make an exception here.

Villeneuve's adaptation of the Dune universe has been close to perfection — though honestly, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, I shouldn't be surprised. The man knows how to make magnificent cinema. But even Villeneuve would be the first to admit that none of this works without Frank Herbert's brilliance on the page. This pulls me right back to cracking open that first Dune paperback in college (what we call CÉGEP here in Québec) and realizing I'd found something different — a universe so layered with political intrigue and backstory that it felt less like science fiction and more like something that actually happened, or would in humankind's far future.

That's a long way from the almost comical early adaptations we endured on both the big screen and television.

And now we're getting Messiah.

Tipa says: "A few spoilers ahead for folks who haven't read the books."

What We Know So Far

For those unfamiliar, Villeneuve split Frank Herbert's original 1965 novel across two films — Dune in 2021 and Part Two in 2024. Part Three adapts Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah, a darker, leaner book that essentially deconstructs everything the first novel built up. Where Dune gave us the hero's rise, Messiah asks what happens when that hero becomes something far more dangerous. Herbert wrote it specifically to challenge the cult of personality readers had built around Paul Atreides. It's a political thriller disguised as science fiction, and it's arguably the bravest thing Herbert ever wrote.

Villeneuve seems to understand that. He's called Dune Messiah his favorite book of the series and has said Part Three might be his most personal film. That's a striking claim from the director who gave us Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. But when you consider the story — power corrupting, a leader trapped by his own myth, the machinery of empire grinding forward regardless of one man's intentions — you can see why it resonates right now.

The film picks up seventeen years after Part Two. Paul is Emperor, married to Princess Irulan, still bound to Chani, and surrounded by forces conspiring against him — including the Bene Tleilax, a secretive sect of genetic manipulators. The cast is massive. Chalamet, Zendaya, Ferguson, Bardem, Pugh, and Taylor-Joy all return, with Anya Taylor-Joy now fully stepping into the role of the adult Alia. Robert Pattinson joins as the shape-shifting Scytale, and Jason Momoa is back as a resurrected Duncan Idaho.

December Can't Come Soon Enough

The production details alone are enough to get excited about. Shot on 65mm film with sequences in 15/70mm IMAX, filmed across Budapest and the deserts of Abu Dhabi, with Hans Zimmer returning for the score. Full speed toward the December 18th release.

That can't come soon enough. I'll be there opening weekend, planted in an IMAX theatre with friends, letting Zimmer's score rattle my chest once again, and Villeneuve's vision fill every inch of that screen.

The wait is almost over.

Almost.

News articles about the released trailer

My previous posts on Dune

Learning to fly: Finding my wings in EVE Online

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:32:00 +0000

Just like that Tom Petty song, I've been learning to fly over the past few weeks. Not in the poetic, soul-searching kind of way — more in the 'please don't let me die on this gate' kind of way.

A few weeks back, a new acquaintance within New Eden (thanks for the intro, Rixx!) asked me to help gather a ton of stuff scattered across a few dozen systems — some in high-sec, some in low-sec. We're talking stations I’d never visited, assets worth Billions of ISKs, collecting dust like forgotten relics of a past life in space. The kind of stuff you want to move quickly while unnoticed.

To pull this off, I needed a ship that could do three things well: carry a decent amount of cargo, move fast, and — most importantly — get out of dodge before anyone could lock me down. Not just fast. Sub-two-seconds-to-warp fast.

Enter the Sunesis.

Why the Sunesis?

If you're not familiar with it, the Sunesis is a Society of Conscious Thought destroyer that doesn't care what race you trained into. No skill requirements beyond Spaceship Command I. It can even be flown by an Alpha. It can use any weapon system, any drone, and it gets bonuses to scan probe strength and virus coherence — making it a surprisingly versatile little ship.

But none of that is why I picked it.

I picked it because you can turn it into one of the fastest-aligning ships in the game while still carrying a useful amount of cargo. And when you're jumping through low-sec systems where someone might be waiting on the other side of that gate, fast align isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between getting home with the goods and waking up in a clone bay.

The magic number: Sub-two seconds

Here's the thing — if your align time is under two seconds, you're essentially uncatchable on a gate. The server ticks once per second, and if you're entering warp before that second tick after you break gate cloak, no one can lock you in time. Not a Loki, not a Stiletto, not anything. You're gone.

That was the goal with this fit. Get the align time under two seconds while keeping enough cargo space and tank to be useful.

The fit: Athena's Wings

Here's what I landed on:

High Slot: Empty. No weapons, no utility — this ship isn't here to fight. It's here to move fast and not die.
Mid Slots: 1x Small F-S9 Regolith Compact Shield Extender and 3x Medium F-S9 Regolith Compact Shield Extenders. Four shield extenders might seem like overkill on a destroyer, but this isn't a combat ship. The buffer is there for one reason — surviving the undock. If someone's sitting on a station with instalock ships, those few extra thousand EHP buy you the fraction of a second you need to enter warp.
Low Slots: 3x Inertial Stabilizers II and 1x Expanded Cargohold II. The inertia stabs are doing the heavy lifting here — they're what crush your align time down to sub-two seconds. The cargohold expander pushes your cargo capacity to just under 1,200 m³, which is plenty for hauling small volumes of high-value goods.
Rigs: 3x Small Cargohold Optimization I — squeezing out every last bit of cargo space.

Total estimated price?

About 45 million ISK. Not nothing, but cheap enough that losing one doesn't ruin your day.

The skills that make it work

The fit works out of the box with relatively modest skills, but there's one skill that really makes it sing: Evasive Maneuvering V. That's the skill that governs how quickly your ship enters warp, and at level V it shaves enough off your align time to comfortably land below that two-second threshold with this fit.

It's currently at the top of my training queue — about eight and a half days out as I write this.

Once trained, I should be at 1,65sec to align and warp. Pretty decent.

What's next

The Sunesis is doing the job beautifully right now. But it's a stepping stone. Caldari Hauler IV is in my training queue, which opens up the Tayra for high-sec bulk runs. And further down the road, the Crane — a Caldari blockade runner that can warp while cloaked — could be the long-term upgrade for this kind of work. Imagine doing what the Sunesis does, but with a covert cloak and more cargo space.

I say could because I'm still keeping my options open. PvP is calling. Exploration is calling. My skill queue looks like I'm on meth — missiles, scanning, hacking, hauling, all jumbled together like a capsuleer having an identity crisis. But that's the beauty of EVE, isn't it? You don't have to pick one lane.

You just have to make sure you can get out of the next gate camp alive while you figure it out.

For now? I'm learning to fly. One low-sec gate at a time.

P.S.: One thing I haven't touched on yet is the Overview. After flying with the default for way too long, I've finally switched to a proper setup — and the difference is night and day. I'll be sharing that in a future post.

I'm also working on a guide about align time. Once you start digging into how it actually works — the math, the server ticks, why two seconds is the magic number — you end up falling down a rabbit hole of navigation mechanics that changes how you think about fitting entirely. Stay tuned for that one too.

Disclosure Day: Spielberg goes back to what he does best

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:15:00 +0000

The legacy

What happens when the world finds out we’re not alone? That’s the premise behind Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi film, hitting theatres June 12th in IMAX.

Spielberg built a good chunk of my childhood imagination when it comes to making first contact. Close Encounters (1977). E.T. (1982). Even War of the Worlds (2005), which doesn't get enough credit for how effectively terrifying it is. The man knows how to make these moments feel real — the awe, the dread, the quiet terror of realizing the universe is bigger than you thought.

Disclosure Day looks like it's tapping into all of that again.

And it's worth remembering that Spielberg's fingerprints have been on this genre even when he wasn't directing. J.J. Abrams' Super 8 back in 2011 was essentially a love letter to Spielberg's alien films — kids in a small Ohio town in the late '70s, a crash-landed alien, a government coverup, all shot through that same lens of wonder and dread. Spielberg produced it. It wasn't subtle about its influences, and it didn't need to be. But it was someone else channeling Spielberg's sensibility, not Spielberg himself.

Disclosure Day is the real thing. This time Spielberg steps back into the director’s chair, with his own story, for the first time in over two decades.

What we know

Here's what we know. Josh O'Connor plays a whistleblower who gets his hands on long-held government secrets about extraterrestrial life. His plan is full disclosure — tell everyone, blow the whole thing open. Emily Blunt plays a meteorologist who starts speaking in what sounds like gibberish on live television. Except it might not be gibberish at all. Colin Firth is the authority figure trying to shut the whole thing down. Colman Domingo and Eve Hewson round out the cast.

The trailers have been doling out footage carefully, but there are glimpses of Roswell connections, black-and-white archival shots, and what looks like some alien tech in Firth's hands. Spielberg conceived the story himself, and David Koepp wrote the screenplay — the same guy who wrote Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and War of the Worlds for Spielberg. That partnership has a track record.

Behind the camera, it's a full reunion. Janusz Kamiński is back as cinematographer. John Williams is scoring it. It's his 30th collaboration with Spielberg.

Filming wrapped between February and May 2025 across New York, New Jersey, and Atlanta, under the working title "Non-View."

The full trailer that dropped earlier today gives us the clearest look yet at what Spielberg and Koepp have been building.

Why this one feels different

This isn't a reboot. It's not a sequel either. It's not IP.

It's Spielberg going back to the genre he helped define, with an original story of his own, at a point in history where the subject matter feels less like science fiction and more like a headline we could be familiar with.

Assuming the world holds together long enough to get there.

Full disclosure: on June 12th, I'll be there. 🤭

Resources:

Disclosure Day Featurette - First Look (2026)
Disclosure Day - IMDB
Disclosure Day - Wikipedia

The Safe Spot — Episode 3: "More Questions"

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:51:00 +0000

Episode 3 of The Safe Spot is here! This one was all about me bringing my "dumb newbro questions" to Rixx and getting real, practical answers from a veteran pirate who's been living the lowsec life for almost two decades now.

I spent the weekend of February 14-15th not actually playing EVE but doing the metagame — researching skills, reorganizing assets, and realizing my stuff is scattered across New Eden like a space hoarder.

So naturally, I came to the show with a list of things I needed to figure out, from picking a home system to knowing when I'm actually ready for PvP.

Here's what we got into.

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Weekend in the Metagame — I talk about how I spent the weekend not running missions but instead researching exploration skills, cleaning up my skill queue, and realizing I've got ships and modules scattered across a dozen-plus systems — which led me to buy a Badger and start thinking about consolidation. — The Space Hoarder Problem — Rixx shares his own system for managing assets spread across 100+ systems, including using an alt hauler on a monthly contract cycle to collect loot and sell it at Jita, Dodixie, or Amarr — and admits that after 15 years he'd never trained a hauler skill on his main (Rixx) because his alt handled everything.
Choosing a Home System — Rixx walks through how Stay Frosty chose Ouelletta as their home — scouting systems for traffic, residents, and activity over weekdays and weekends — and why a lowsec pipe system next to highsec turned out to be the perfect pirate base for the last decade. — Home Base Advice for New Players — For someone like me who's still mostly in highsec doing PvE, Rixx's advice boils down to matching your home system to your activity: proximity to trade hubs, agent levels, mission availability, and minimizing travel time. — Lucifer's Hammer and the Alliance — Rixx corrects an omission from last episode, noting that Stay Frosty's alliance includes Lucifer's Hammer with about 250 members doing industry and mining out of the adjacent highsec system, plus wormhole structures.
The New Map and Strategic Mapbooks — I mention that I posted the old spiral-bound strategic mapbooks by Serenity Steel from 2008, and Rixx confirms they're still about 98% accurate — plus the in-game map now has a 2D view and is infinitely customizable with overlays for kills, traffic, factions, and more.
The Overview: Most Important Thing You'll Set Up — Rixx calls the overview quite possibly the most important tool in EVE and explains that you can now share overview settings by dragging them into chat — plus there are community packs available for download, so you don't have to build one from scratch.
The Most Common Returning Vet Mistake — Rixx says it's the overview, hands down — sharing stories of a friend who got killed by a ship that wasn't on his overview because it didn't exist when he left, and another returning player who got booshed off a station and had no idea what happened because the mechanic was added after he quit.
When Are You Ready for PvP? — Rixx's answer: you're ready right now — PvP isn't about skill points, it's about understanding your "window of engagement," meaning knowing what your ship can realistically fight and what you should avoid. — Skill Points Don't All Come With You — A 350-million-SP pilot in a Rifter only brings the skills relevant to that Rifter, which means a newer player with the same ship skills maxed out is on roughly equal footing in that hull. — The Comet vs. Vexor Navy Issue Story — Rixx shares a recent fight where he took a 25-million-ISK Comet against a half-billion-ISK VNI piloted by a relatively young character, got slaughtered, but considered it a risk worth taking because the potential payoff was enormous. — Every Fleet Needs You — No matter how young your character is, fleets always need tackle, scouts, and support — Rixx recalls his early days in nullsec becoming useful in Crows and Manticores long before he could fly battleships.
First Steps Into PvP — Rixx recommends joining a faction warfare group in lowsec (like Black Rabbits) for structured PvP with built-in fleet content, or joining a nullsec training corp — or just flying into lowsec in an Astero to observe, make bookmarks, and get comfortable before committing. — The Cloaked Drake Story — Rixx tells a hilarious early-career story about fitting a cloak on a Drake and sitting cloaked in a belt watching people fight for half an hour, not realizing you can't warp cloaked in a Drake — a perfect example of learning by doing dumb things. — Don't Fly What You Can't Afford (or Aren't Skilled For) — The episode wraps with a reminder not to rush into ships you're not ready for: if your cruiser has all Tech II modules except Tech I guns, experienced players will notice and you're going to have a bad time.

[Written on March 14th, 2026]

Where to find us!

Fly safe. o7

Four screenshots. That's all it took for me to buy Planet of Lana II

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 04:34:00 +0000

I usually don't play puzzle-platformers. I think Child of Light was the last one I played. My Steam library is a graveyard of city builders, strategy games, and the occasional RPG that have swallowed months of my life. If you told me yesterday that I'd drop money on a side-scrolling adventure about a girl and her cat-like companion, I'd have laughed.

Then I saw this post from The Indie Boss Bluesky this morning.

Four screenshots. Hand-painted environments. A dense forests, alien ruins, light cutting through fog in a way that made me stop scrolling. I didn't know what game it was. I didn't care. I just needed to see more.

Turns out it was Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf, the sequel to Wishfully Studios' 2023 puzzle-adventure. I'd never heard of it. It's sequel, Planet of Lana II, launched yesterday, March 5th. I had zero knowledge of this game's existence before this morning. None whatsoever. No trailers watched, no previews read, no wishlisting on Steam.

I looked it up on Steam. 10% off for launch. I bought it before I even watched the trailer.

Sometimes your gut just knows. You see something and the decision is already made before your brain catches up. No research, no review hunting, no hemming and hawing over whether it's worth the price.

Four screenshots of a world that looked like it was painted by someone who actually cares about beauty, and that was enough.

Here's the release date trailer that I watched after I'd already bought the game:

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf — Official Release Date Trailer

The game is a cinematic puzzle-adventure set on a planet called Novo.

From what I've gathered so far, you play as Lana alongside her companion Mui, a small creature who helps you solve environmental puzzles and navigate a world where nature and technology collide. The sequel picks up two years after the original, with new biomes, underwater exploration, and a story told without spoken dialogue. Just visuals, music, and an orchestral score by composer Takeshi Furukawa.

It's supposed to be a 6-to-8-hour experience. That's it. No 200-hour commitment. No loot grind. Just a short, focused journey through a world that clearly had a lot of love poured into it. Quite the difference from EVE Online, or my usual city-builders.

I'll report back once I've played it, since it's seriously getting late here, and I spent way more time than I had planned spending in New Eden tonight. It'll have to wait in the morning.

But I've got a good feeling about this one.

Sometimes you just have to trust your eyes.

A lament for the Galaxy that could have been - A Star Wars poem

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:08:00 +0000

The following is a poem inspired by the raw, harsh, and brutal world of Andor and Rogue One (watch the videos above and below if you need reminding). A series and a film that gave us the true visage of what Star Wars could have been — should have been. The more I rewatch these two cinematographic masterpieces, the more fed up I get with the prequels, the sequels, and the weak series we were force-fed on Disney+.

Yet I still have hope...

They Flinched — A Lament for the Galaxy That Could Have Been

I wanted the dirt beneath the myth.

The rot inside the throne room walls.

I wanted hands that shook on triggers

and men who wept in bathroom stalls.

They gave us puppets. Gave us clowns.

A stumbling Gungan. Dancing bears on forest moons.

They sold the war to children

and set the galaxy to cartoons.

I wanted Anakin undone slowly —

not by dialogue that bled of feeling,

but by the quiet, patient murder

of every good thing he'd stopped believing.

Give me Maul with a history, not just a face.

Give me Dooku's treason as a deep wound, not a speech.

Give me Grievous as something worth fearing —

not a coughing toy just within reach.

Erase the diner. Burn the toy aisle.

Gut every scene that begged to sell.

If you're going to tell a story about fascism,

have the decency to make it hurt like hell.

I wanted Coruscant from the gutter,

where clone troopers numb themselves to sleep,

where senators eat well and sign the orders

that bury worlds six systems deep.

I wanted a Tatooine that crushed you just by standing still —

Owen watching twin suns bleed and saying nothing,

Beru wearing calm like armour over panic,

the boy outside, already lost to something.

I wanted Empire not as spectacle

but as the weight that makes you crawl.

Bureaucrats with stamps and quotas —

the banality that swallows all.

I wanted Scarif's shore. That wave of light.

Two bodies holding on with nothing left.

The kind of ending Lucas never dared —

the kind that trusts the audience with death.

Ferrix showed me what revolt sounds like —

not a fleet, not a throne room duel,

but hammers ringing, bodies pressing forward,

ordinary people done with being fuel.

Luthen knew. He said it plain.

He listed everything he'd killed inside.

That monologue did more for Star Wars

than three prequels and a trilogy's pride.

So strip the fan service. Sink the quips.

Let the camera sit in silence when it needs to.

Let the score carry what words can't,

and trust the audience to bleed, too.

They had a galaxy. They had the myth.

They had the dark, the grief, the weight of it.

And every time it mattered most —

they flinched.

They always flinched.

New Eden Banter #1: The MMO that keeps rewriting its own history—EVE Online at 23

noreply@blogger.com (CrazyKinux) — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Welcome to the very first installment of the New Eden Banter (NEB), the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux (that's me!). The NEB involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week or so to post articles pertaining to the said topic.

Check for other New Eden Banters articles at the bottom of this post!

This month's topic: EVE Online is now more than two decades old—older than some of its players. In a genre where most MMORPGs fade or shut down, EVE has kept evolving. What do you think is the secret behind its longevity? Why is EVE still here—and still feeling alive—when so many of its contemporaries have declined or disappeared?

The MMO that keeps rewriting its own history—EVE Online at 23

EVE Online launched in 2003. Some players undocking today are younger than the game itself.

In a genre defined by shuttered servers, EVE is still moving—still generating wars, market crises, betrayals, fear, paranoia, and those "wait, THAT actually happened?" moments you simply cannot script. So what's the secret?

It's not one thing. It's a stack of design decisions that transformed EVE from a game you play into a place you inhabit. One that you live in.

1. One world where everything collides

EVE's single-shard universe isn't a technical flex—it's the foundation for meaning.

In most MMOs, "world-changing" events are world-changing for a fraction of the playerbase, the same storyline playing out across hundreds of parallel servers. EVE doesn't do parallel realities. When an alliance collapses or a war reshapes the map, it's a historical event in the one shared sandbox. Players remember it the way they remember real-world events: where they were, who they were with, what changed after.

That shared history becomes a gravitational force. It keeps pulling people back.

2. Players generate the content loop, not the devs

Most MMOs demand a constant developer pipeline: new zones, new raids, new gear treadmills. EVE's engine runs on something cheaper and infinitely renewable—human ambition, paranoia, greed, and betrayal (plus spreadsheets, obviously).

CCP doesn't need to write a villain—though the devs do dabble in storyline. Players will invent one, crown them, and then argue about it for a decade. CCP builds systems, friction, and pressure—then lets humans do what humans do when you hand them power and competition.

EVE produces stories the way weather systems produce storms. Nobody has to script the thunder, it's built into the DNA of the world.

3. Real loss, real economy, real stakes

EVE's economy isn't a side activity. It's the bloodstream.

Ships explode. Structures get blown to pieces. Stockpiles vanish. That destruction loop quietly prevents the world from becoming solved—because in a solved MMO, the optimal path gets standardized, danger evaporates, and players drift. In EVE, fear is never fully removed. Even veterans with everything still have something to lose: time, assets, reputation, territory.

The game never collapses into pure accumulation. It stays a cycle of building, risking, and rebuilding.

Life requires metabolism. Destruction is EVE's metabolism.

4. Social scaling as a longevity engine

Most MMOs have guilds. EVE has corporations → alliances → coalitions → diplomacy → propaganda → intelligence networks.

At a certain scale, EVE stops behaving like an MMORPG and starts behaving like a geopolitical simulator. That's not flavour—that's longevity. Mechanics go stale. People don't. A shifting political landscape built by thousands of players, layered with grudges and logistical realities, keeps generating new situations years after launch.

Someone always wants what someone else has. That's not a design decision. That's just humans.

5. CCP keeps shipping meaningful change

EVE capsuleers are professionally trained to complain, so this is easy to underplay—but compare EVE to other long-running MMOs from its era. Many are merely kept running. EVE is still being reworked, rebalanced, and poked with sharp sticks.

Not every change lands. Sometimes CCP drops something on Tranquility and the community acts like civilization itself has collapsed. But that reaction is the point: EVE's systems are so interconnected that touching one lever—economy, travel friction, mining, sovereignty—shifts the entire ecosystem. Old certainties break. New opportunities emerge. Players adapt (after complaining a ton), conflict erupts, and the story engine keeps turning.

6. A visual identity that looks like nothing else in the genre

EVE doesn't look like other MMOs. It never did.

While the genre has largely converged on a familiar visual grammar—saturated fantasy palettes, humanoid heroes, action-bar UI—EVE went cold, vast, and indifferent. Space here isn't a backdrop. It's a presence. A lone frigate drifting past a titan feels like a kayak next to an aircraft carrier, and the art direction never lets you forget it: you are small, the universe is not, and it does not care about you.

Most MMOs want you to feel like the protagonist. EVE's art keeps reminding you that you're a variable in a much larger system—and somehow, that's the hook.

The ship designs, the nebulae, the brutalist industrial aesthetic—none of it looks borrowed. It has a coherent visual philosophy that's aged remarkably well, partly because "cold and geometric" doesn't date the way stylized fantasy does. Twenty-three years in, EVE still looks like nothing else in the genre—and that distinctiveness isn't vanity. It reinforces the feel of a world with its own internal logic, its own physics of beauty.

The art and the design are saying the same thing. That kind of coherence is rare, and players feel it even when they can't name it.

And I haven't even mentioned the spreadsheet-like UI. That in and of itself, is a distinction no other MMO has—or wants to have!

"Isn't EVE just running on inertia?"

Fair question. EVE has mythology, reputation, and a "you had to be there" history that can keep a game afloat longer than it deserves. And "I am an EVE player" is a powerful identity to shed.

But inertia alone doesn't produce new stories.

A museum has history. A living world has history and change. The fact that EVE still generates fresh conflict, new industrial empires, novel scams, and new waves of returning veterans (me!) says it's not just nostalgia doing the work.

Nostalgia brings you back once. A living ecosystem makes you log in tomorrow.

Why EVE is still here

CCP built a machine that converts human behavior into content: one shared world gives events weight; player-driven conflict delivers infinite variation; real loss creates stakes; social scaling builds a geopolitical simulator; ongoing systemic change keeps the sandbox from freezing; and a visual identity unlike anything else in the genre makes sure the world feels as distinct as it plays.

The result is an MMO that doesn't stay fresh by adding more rides. It stays fresh because the players keep rearranging the world.

EVE never tried to be a story you consume. It tried to be a place where stories happen.

And as long as humans remain ambitious, petty, brilliant, and reckless, New Eden will keep producing reasons to undock.

What are your thoughts?

So here's the question worth arguing about: Is EVE's model the blueprint for MMO longevity—or is it a once-in-a-generation accident that no studio could deliberately replicate?

Drop your take in the comments.

New Eden Banter Participants

EVE Online’s Longevity — by Tipa, over at West Karana
Hardened to the Core — by The Grey Bill
Top Ten Reasons EVE Online is Still a Thing in 2026 — by TAGN
Eve Online Forever — by Rixx Javix over at EVEOGANDA
It’s the Economy, Stupid – EVE at 23 — by Matt Shigella via Auric Quanta Strategies
The MMO that keeps rewriting its own history—EVE Online at 23 — by Me!

CrazyKinux's Musings

Coriolis: The Great Dark session zero - The exploration begins

A quick bit of context before I go further.

Coriolis: The Great Dark

Meet Safiya al-Khatib

The crew

Running it on Foundry

What comes next

The Safe Spot — Episode 8: "Our EVE Fanfest 2026 reaction"

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Where to find us!

Speedlinking New Eden & more - The May 17th, 2026 edition

EVE Fanfest 2026

EVE Online: Cradle of War expansion (June 9)

EVE Vanguard: Operation Avalon (July 7-20)

EVE Frontier: Cycle 6 - Sanctuary (June 25)

Fenris Creations / business news

Other EVE Online news (May 11-17)

EVE blogsphere & community

What DeepMind's partnership could actually mean for EVE's future

The most likely transformation: NPCs that actually think

The Exordium connection

Dynamic universe events that aren't scripted

The invisible revolution: economic modeling

What I'm skeptical about

The shift nobody's talking about

Source articles on new players retention

From CCP to Fenris Creations: EVE Online enters the Age of AI

So what actually happened?

Why pick our game?

Okay but what does this mean for the game?

The numbers (because someone needs to keep score)

The things you're already thinking

The bigger picture

What I'm watching for

Before any of that though, there's Fanfest

References

Tier-1 tech and business press

Gaming industry trade press

Gaming consumer press

MMO-focused coverage

Primary sources

The Safe Spot — Episode 7: "Pearl Abyss & Fanfest"

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Where to find us!

The Safe Spot — Episode 6: "Exordium | Training wheels don't teach you how to crash"

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Where to find us!

New Eden Banter #2: You're the Executive Producer of EVE Online

So I've got the keys. Congratulations to me, I guess. 😬

The spheres of influence that make EVE, EVE

1. Sandbox vs. theme park

2. Science fiction, not fantasy

3. Player-driven economy

4. Multiple games in one

5. You are your ship

6. One universe, one server, one history

7. Time as a mechanic

8. The social and political layer

9. Loss and consequence

10. The meta-game outside the client

11. The developer-player relationship

The EP's real job

The Safe Spot — Episode 5: "Bad Patch"

Show Notes / Table of Contents

Where to find us!

What returning EVE Online players need to know before undocking

Overview

What are lawless systems?

Step-by-step: How to stay safe

Other changes returning players should know

Tips and best practices

Common mistakes

AloneInFinland's take: Why lawless systems are bad for the game

Summary

Over to you

Backrooms: This is the horror that gets under my skin

How it all came about

The Ten Commandments of the returning EVE capsuleer (now that the kids have grown up)

I. Thou shall not turn thy homecoming into a chore list.