I have managed to let a bunch of EVE Online items build up on my list of potential topics, so I am just going to blast them out as bullet points and move on.  I am not sure I have anything meaningful to say about any of them at this point, so in descending order of… something… here they are.

  • The Q4 Expansion, Fractured Skies, Arrives November 10th
    • CCP/Fenris – Fractured Skies Expansion Arrives 10 Nov

End of the year expansion time.  This will be the second in the trio of expansions focused on low sec and faction warfare.  If I count right, six of the previous eight expansions since the return to the twice yearly cadence have been focused on low sec and faction warfare.  So you know what the company cares about when the ninth is also about low sec and faction warfare.  Then again, every time the look at null sec the decide to try and break it, so maybe it is for the best that they are focused elsewhere.

EVE Online Fractured Skies Features

The highlights include:

  • New navy faction attack battlecruisers – The company plan to “navy all the things” continues.
  • AIR Academy ships – Maybe if we give new players free ships they’ll PvP… or at least not just quit in the first 10 minutes… if they can even get through that new tutorial.
  • Updated HUD UI – This could be good, but a long history of bad UI choices makes me cautious.
  • AIR Career Program becomes Achievements – But you’ll have to do them over again because, as always, they don’t care about your history with the game.
  • Something to try any make Faction Warfare exciting – I don’t play in that corner of space, so maybe?  Good luck storming the castle or something!
  • EVE Vanguard being handcuffed to EVE Online – It will be a paid alpha because they need money

At least this time around the low sec focused expansion doesn’t also include a “nerf null sec” ambition… at least not yet.  We won’t know what most of this really means until we get the patch notes.  Anyway, that is coming to a New Eden near you soon enough.

The Voting for CSM 21 Has Begun

  • CCP/Fenris – CSM 21 – Cast Your Vote Now!
  • CCP/Fenris – CSM21 Dev Blog
  • CCP/Fenris – CSM 21 Candidate Announcements
  • CCP/Fenris – The Roles and Duties of a member of the Council of Stellar Management
  • TAGN – EVE Online and the Road to CSM 21
  • TAGN  – The Road to CSM21 – The Official Candidates List

The time has come again.  You may cast a vote for your Council of Stellar Management candidates… so long as you have a subscribed account.  And you can cast a vote for every subscribed account.  Multiboxers win again, though even I have two active accounts.  You need two if you have a capital ship.

Council of Stellar Management 21

As of yesterday after downtime the voting period for CSM21 has been open.  It will run until downtime on the morning of November 3rd, which means you probably need to get it done by Monday, November 2nd.

I put together a table with all of the candidates, their affiliation, their/my bias, and a link to their campaign post.  The campaign post is key and I remain surprised/dismayed that the company makes every candidate do one, then fails to link to it in their own candidate list post.

My usual advice is to avoid people who are promising to make the company do things and focus on the people who want to stop the company from doing more dumb things.  The latter works out for the best slightly more often than the former, though “nearly never” applies to both generally.

  • Partner Program Giveaways Policy Update
    • CCP/Fenris – Policy Update – Giveaways

The company has changed the rules for the partner program when it comes to giving things away that the company provides.  Turns out you’re not supposed to sell or otherwise setup a situation where it profits you.  And while this applies to the whole of the partner program, since most of that is Twitch streamers and most of the problems listed are related to Twitch, it feels like a crack down on abuses on that particular platform.

Things you can no longer do:

  • Sub goals and Hype Train unlocks. “Hit 100 subs and I’ll give away a Machariel,” or “Hype Train level 3 unlocks a PLEX giveaway.” Giveaways cannot be unlocked or triggered by paid support, even when everyone can enter.
  • Paid prize pools. “Every 1,000 Bits adds 100 million ISK to the pot.” Paid support cannot make a giveaway bigger.
  • Paying to speed things up. “Every gifted sub takes five minutes off the giveaway timer.” Paid support cannot bring giveaways forward or make them more frequent.
  • Extra chances for Bits or donations. “Cheer 500 Bits for a bonus entry,” or a prize for your top donor. The parity rule now explicitly covers any financial support, not just subscriptions.
  • Channel point rewards. “Redeem 50,000 channel points for a SKIN,” or spending channel points to trigger or enter a giveaway. On Twitch, subscribers earn channel points faster than everyone else. You can’t control that, but it’s a fact of the platform, so no in-game items or giveaways can sit behind channel points.
  • Back-to-back giveaways. You can now run no more than one giveaway in any rolling 60-minute window, so one at 20:55 and another at 21:05 would break the limit.
  • Drawings spread across a stream. Any winner picked more than 10 minutes after the first counts as a new giveaway.
  • Giveaway streams. Giveaways should support your content, so there needs to be content for them to support. Streams that exist just to host giveaways and run their own bespoke points systems are not allowed.

You can report anybody who is doing the above and CCP might look into it.  Their actual enforcement of the rules varies greatly based on who is doing the violating and what they are doing.

Things you’re still good with:

  • One giveaway in any rolling hour, open to everyone on equal terms and not tied to paid support.
  • Several prizes or winners in one drawing, as long as every winner is picked and announced within 10 minutes of the first.
  • Re-drawing a winner who turned out to be ineligible or didn’t claim their prize, as long as it’s the same prize and the re-draw isn’t used to drum up more engagement.
  • Celebrating milestones that have nothing to do with paid support, like a follower goal, within the one-per-hour limit.
  • Giveaways tied to fundraising milestones on charity streams, under the conditions below.

There are exceptions for charity streams, but you can’t be directly receiving and financial benefit.

The big question for me is whether this means that CCP/Fenris itself will no longer give away GalNet SKINS for channel points.  Does the policy apply to them or only to their Twitch partners.  I ask because of the next item…

  • Alliance Tournament XXII Finals – October 31 / November 1
    • CCP/Fenris – Announcing Alliance Tournament XXII
    • TAGN – The Road to Alliance Tournament XXII

So that is coming up in a week.

EVE Alliance Tournament XXII

Due to changes in the tournament structure, with earlier elimination rounds, the finals are more compact than they have been in past years, fitting into a single weekend this time around.  Putting on Halloween weekend… well, that was a choice.  But I am told that the New Eden player base is aging, so maybe none of us have plans for a weekend that included a major party holiday.

Also, all the updates are on Discord so I can’t really link to them and they’ve all scrolled off into infinity because that is how Discord works.  Oh well.  All I want to know is if I’ll get another GalNet SKIN if I leave Twitch running in the background.

  • Monthly Ban Report – September 2026
    • CCP/Fenris – Monthly Ban Report – September 2026

This has become a regular thing in recent months.  The company wants to assure you that it is banning people, even some of the people you are reporting… though the vast majority of bans are for automated account creation.

I do want to point out that on the Ishtar did not make the cut for the top ten most banned ship types when it came to macro use (i.e. botting).  The top ten were:

  1. Moa – 315
  2. Algos – 31
  3. Praxis – 24
  4. Venture – 21
  5. Apocalypse Navy Issue – 19
  6. Machariel – 17
  7. Miasmos – 13
  8. Gila – 13
  9. Pioneer – 13
  10. Stormbringer – 10

That is because Ishtar drone ratting is so self-sustaining that you don’t need software to do it.  The ships listed need the help… though the Gila might feel close to the Ishtar due to being a drone boat, but that is used to run abyssals and isn’t just orbiting a can in a Forsaken Hub somewhere.

  • The September 2026 Monthly Economic Report
    • CCP/Fenris – Monthly Economic Report – September 2026

The MER is still a thing.  Somebody probably still cares.  The company highlights from the report:

  • Mining Value declined again in September.
  • Mining increased slightly in High Sec and Wormhole space, while Production rose in Low Sec.
  • Destruction showed signs of increasing in Low Sec and Wormhole space.
  • Gas Volume Mined in Wormhole space rose compared with August.
  • Gas volume mined in Vale of the Silent increased by approximately 113% in September compared with August.
  • Low Sec saw a small, brief rise in Ice Volume Mined toward the end of September.
  • Active ISK Delta shifted from +82.2 trillion ISK in August to −144.7 trillion ISK in September.
  • The Mineral Price Index continued to fall.
  • The Module Price Index fell by approximately 4% compared with August.

I used to care and pay attention to all of that.  Now, not so much.  The company seems laser focused on… some real trivia in their summary.  I mean, me too back when I covered the MER, but I used at least look for reasons why things occurred.  Matching game changes and activity to results seemed to be the point.  Oh well.

  • Have You Told Your Research Agents You Love Them Lately?
    • CCP/Fenris – Keeping Memories Alive

The company is wiping agent memories like their the men in black as part of the upgrade from Python 2.7 to Python 3 something. (Python 2.7 has only been completely unsupported since 2020.)  There is a long winded explanation of the why and the how of the whole thing in that linked dev blog.  Mostly things won’t change.

Unless you still have some active research agents.  Remember those?

It has been a long time since I posted something about research/R&D agents.  That was some 2009 level posting.

Once upon a time that was a mildly lucrative, low effort ISK faucet.  You setup with an agent, let the research points build up over a few months, then go turn the points into datacores (required for Tech II research), bring them to market, and profit.

CCP nerfed that some since the good old days, and added in other sources for datacores.  The current Crimson Harvest event, for example, is raining datacores, so prices are currently down.  But they still can get you some ISK.

But to keep that trickle of ISK live, you must go visit your research agents and run at least ONE MISSION for them.  That is pretty easy.  They either want you to deliver something or given them something like 2,000 pieces of Tritanium.

How to find your research agents, or figure out if you still have some… I have no idea how to do that in the current UI.  The company still has the fucking Proving Grounds in the UI, but I cannot find research agents anywhere.

This is part of why I keep my half working copy of EVEMon around because, like the Pepperidge Farms meme, it remembers.

My research agents revealed

You will know you have successfully run a mission for them because they will get back to you after the next downtime to complain about a problem.

This is why I got out of management

You can ignore that, like you always do.

Anyway, I ran through my agents, collected all my cores, and sold them before the event.  That was worth somewhat more than $150 million ISK.  That won’t make me rich, but that is another modest doctrine ship I can purchase.