Eve Online New Expansion Plans Unveiled

This new expansion means all you Eve Online Pirates better get your skills lined up and ready to fight since you will have to fight more than ever in the game.

With five years under their belt, most MMOs would be getting into old age. Not EVE, they still have aggressive plans to grow their game. This summer, they plan to launch yet another free expansion and that's where the aforementioned scoop comes in.

The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be "The Empyrean Age," the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.

"The universe of Eve has always had this fragile peace between the races and now that's going to end," Massey said. This means war and that is the core new feature: factional warfare. "People can actually take an active role and choose sides for who they want to fight for and who they want to fight against."

More details on this expansion are going to trickle out over the coming months, but it marks - at long wait - the culmination of the plan that was once upon a time called Kali and has now turned into not one, but four epic expansions: Revelations I, Revelations II, Trinity and now The Empyrean Age.

Need for Early Training Of Microwarp

As a New Eve Online Pirate pilot, Your goal should be to gain high Microwarp drive early on. Not only will this protect you and swiftly move you away from enemies it will also allow you to move in and attack targets swiftly while avoiding fire from targets. Watch this video and see how fast Eve Online can be!

The Future Changes To Eve Online

While I know this has nothing to do with Eve Online pirating in Eve online, I felt that it should be added for the readers of Eve Online Pirates. The story comes from a few sources.

Eve Online’s senior technical producer, Torfi Frans Olafsson talked with Rock, Paper, Shotgun about CCP’s plans for the MMO. The company is literally changing the face of Eve by giving formerly disembodied players human avatars. Gaming Today covered this announcement and the reasoning behind it last year.

Torif is currently working on the “walk-in stations” which are part of the ambulation movement. They’ll serve as neutral territory for characters to interact with each other socially. Currently there are no plans to enable PvP for these stations.

CCP Games, the company behind the EVE Online MMO universe, has released its first Quarterly Economic Newsletter detailing statistics, info and updates on EVE’s complex in-world economy.

While the report was released by the company’s Research and Statistics Group, it was prepared by Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, the first real-world economics professional to be appointed to study a virtual economy.

Dr. ‘EyjoG’, as he is known on the EVE Online website, says the QEN “is intended to help inform pilots in EVE about the status of the economy and to make it easier for others to understand the level of complexity in the EVE universe.”

He adds, “In fact, with more than 200,000 players, the economic system of EVE is becoming so vast and complex that it is possible for the virtual world of EVE and the real world to learn from each other.”

EVE Online is an extremely economically driven world. The inaugural issue of the QEN covers the macroeconomics of EVE Online, which focuses on the monetary supply, and price levels, including measurement of inflation/deflation in the EVE universe. The report also covers skills and security status and updates demographic figures.

Eve Online has a subscriber base of 195,000 accounts, representing 433,000 characters, or 2.2 characters per account. Dr. ‘EyjoG’ estimates EVE will reach 200,000 members by mid-Q4 2007 with the population rising to more than 210,000 by Q1 2008.

Currently an estimated 40 percent of the population is female, and 60 percent is male. These figures are quite a shift in populous for EVE as males were reported to make up 95 percent of the subscriber base in mid 2007. It’s believed that this shift in demographics is one of the major motivators behind EVE’s decision to add human-form avatars, as opposed to just ships, in an effort to appeal to both sexes. More real woman in the game, Heh That makes things interesting now doesn't it?