Nullsec Alliances Reportedly ‘Fine’ After Being Told Their Jump Gates Will Now Run On Double-A Batteries

NEW EDEN — In what FC Okami described as a ‘bold paradigm shift,’ CCP Games announced Thursday that Ansiblex jump gates will soon operate on a capacitor system that drains with every ship that passes through, effectively turning the backbone of nullsec logistics into a giant shared battery that goes dead the moment a fleet op starts.

‘We believe EVE is at its pinnacle when you haven’t fully figured out the logistical puzzles,’ Okami wrote in a devblog that has already been described by multiple alliance directors as ‘a declaration of war.’ The proposed changes introduce five concentric ‘zones’ radiating from a sov capital, with jump costs increasing by distance until attempting a cross-map fleet move resembles planning a road trip in a Prius with a broken fuel gauge.

Capitals and supercapitals have been banned from Ansiblex travel entirely, a decision that alliance logistics teams are reportedly taking ‘with grace and a tremendous amount of swearing.’ To soften the blow, Rorquals will still be allowed through, because nothing says ‘logistical tension’ quite like a mining barge getting diplomatic immunity while a Titan learns what a stargate is.

‘Look, we’re not panicking,’ said Grimlock Tiberius, a logistics director for a sprawling bloc whose name rhymes with ‘Shmee.’ ‘We just put in an emergency purchase order for forty thousand cyno alts and a spreadsheet that calculates capacitor depletion per ship class. Also we are panicking.’

The changes also restrict Ansiblex access to alliance-only, ending the era of blue lists, NIPs, and that one guy from the renter corp who somehow had gate access for three years. Additionally, anchorable cyno jammers will be reduced from three per system to one, a move that Okami called ‘shifting advantage away from defenders,’ and that defenders called ‘extremely rude.’

According to a Fenris Creations representative, the company is already developing new UI elements to help players visualize exactly how dead their jump network is in real time. ‘Think of it like a phone battery, but instead of missing a text, you miss a war,’ the representative said, adding that the September 2026 release window gives alliances ‘plenty of time to consider wormhole space.’

When reached for comment, Okami emphasized that the studio would monitor the impact and adjust as needed, promising a bi-weekly check-in and at least six months of observation before further changes. ‘We’re in this together,’ the devblog concluded, a statement that thousands of alliance finance officers are currently translating into Excel as ‘divide your empire into five zones and pray.’

The 5% increase has unlocked something primal in the miner community.

REYKJAVIK – In the wake of Fenris Creations’ July 9th patch increasing the Orca’s Drone HP bonus from 10% to 15% per level, a growing coalition of highsec mining corporations has issued a formal petition demanding that Industrial Command Ships be granted entry into the Alliance Tournament.

The buff, which was applied to ‘match the actual damage per level bonus it has,’ has reportedly triggered a mass identity crisis among New Eden’s mining community. What began as a modest correction to ship traits has spiraled into something far more unsettling.

‘I have spent twelve years pressing F1 on asteroids,’ said Goron_Thump, CEO of the Perimeter-based mining collective Ore Some, Bitch. ‘Then I read the patch notes and realized my Orca drones are now 50% tougher. I put them on a Venture in our anomaly. The Venture died. But the drones? The drones lived. We are not miners anymore. We are a warclan.’

The petition, which has already gathered over 4,200 signatures from players who have never participated in PvP, outlines several demands:

• Industrial Command Ships granted a new ‘Siege Warfare’ mode that paints rocks as hostile
• Alliance Tournament brackets expanded to include a ‘Miners vs. The World’ exhibition round
• A formal apology from Fenris Creations for ‘awakening something we cannot put back to sleep’

Fenris Creations has not issued a formal response, though a representative speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed the studio is ‘monitoring the situation and also Googling what a warclan is.’

Meanwhile, nullsec alliances have expressed concern. TEST Alliance Please Ignore fleet commander Vily_Spaceperson posted on GalNet that ‘if these people figure out their drones can also shoot ships, the strategic map changes forever.’ Goonswarm Federation diplomats have reportedly offered the miners free participation in a Burn Jita event in exchange for them returning to belts and ‘never talking about the tournament again.’

At press time, sources confirmed that a Procurer with tech II drone damage amplifiers had been spotted camping the Niarja gate. CONCORD was not called. Nobody knew what protocol to follow.

Fenris Creations did not respond to requests for comment, though a community manager was seen updating the Orca traits page for the third time this week.

JITA, New Eden — Operation Avalon, the first cross-universe event linking EVE Online with its new FPS spinoff EVE Vanguard, took an unexpected turn Tuesday when Vanguard alpha testers discovered that the enemy mercenaries they had been enthusiastically headshotting for three days were, in fact, real EVE Online players attempting to participate from their spaceships.

The confusion stemmed from Vanguard’s ground-combat integration, which allows FPS players to board and destroy capital ship subsystems while EVE Online players attempt to repel boarders via a new mini-game best described as Space Invaders, but your mortgage is on the line.

We saw these guys in ratty armor running around our Avatar’s engine room, said veteran EVE player and wormhole hermit Arcturus Vex, speaking from his Rorqual. I thought they were NPCs. Then one teabagged my corpse and yelled something about my mother on proximity chat. Turns out that’s just what fourteen-year-olds with WASD controls do.

The revelation caused widespread panic in the Vanguard community, where players had been celebrating their amazing K/D ratio against the AI. Streamer and self-described tactical operative xX_DarkShadow_69420_Xx broke down live on Twitch upon learning his 47 confirmed kills included a 52-year-old Icelandic fisherman who had been playing EVE since 2003.

I thought those were bots, the streamer sobbed, wiping Cheeto dust on a sweat-stained RGB mousepad. They just stood there. One guy tried to fight back by right-clicking on me. I thought it was broken AI.

Fenris Creations issued a brief statement Wednesday morning clarifying that Operation Avalon is a living, breathing crossover experience where consequences are real and lawsuits are pending. The company also confirmed that the 5,000 accounts banned earlier this month for RMT and botting were unrelated, but honestly, given the confusion, we understand why you’d ask.

Operation Avalon runs through July 20. Fenris Creations representatives reminded all participants that friendly fire is enabled, cross-platform communication is mandatory, and legal guardians of Vanguard players under 18 should be aware that the spaceship they just vaporized may have belonged to someone’s actual dad.

EVE Vanguard FPS Players Stunned to Learn They Must Kill Actual EVE Online Players in Operation Avalon; ‘We Thought These Were NPCs,’ Says Devastated Teen

JITA, New Eden — Operation Avalon, the first cross-universe event linking EVE Online with its new FPS spinoff EVE Vanguard, took an unexpected turn Tuesday when Vanguard alpha testers discovered that the “enemy mercenaries” they had been enthusiastically headshotting for three days were, in fact, real EVE Online players attempting to participate from their spaceships.

The confusion stemmed from Vanguard’s ground-combat integration, which allows FPS players to board and destroy capital ship subsystems while EVE Online players attempt to repel boarders via a new mini-game best described as “Space Invaders, but your mortgage is on the line.”

“We saw these guys in ratty armor running around our Avatar’s engine room,” said veteran EVE player and wormhole hermit Arcturus Vex, speaking from his Rorqual. “I thought they were NPCs. Then one teabagged my corpse and yelled something about my mother on proximity chat. Turns out that’s just what fourteen-year-olds with WASD controls do.”

The revelation caused widespread panic in the Vanguard community, where players had been celebrating their “amazing K/D ratio against the AI.” Streamer and self-described “tactical operative” xX_DarkShadow_69420_Xx broke down live on Twitch upon learning his 47 confirmed kills included a 52-year-old Icelandic fisherman who had been playing EVE since 2003.

“I thought those were bots,” the streamer sobbed, wiping Cheeto dust on a sweat-stained RGB mousepad. “They just stood there. One guy tried to fight back by right-clicking on me. I thought it was broken AI.”

Fenris Creations issued a brief statement Wednesday morning clarifying that Operation Avalon is a “living, breathing crossover experience where consequences are real and lawsuits are pending.” The company also confirmed that the 5,000 accounts banned earlier this month for RMT and botting were “unrelated, but honestly, given the confusion, we understand why you’d ask.”

Operation Avalon runs through July 20. Fenris Creations representatives reminded all participants that friendly fire is enabled, cross-platform communication is mandatory, and legal guardians of Vanguard players under 18 should be aware that the spaceship they just vaporized may have belonged to someone’s actual dad.

The cross-universe reward has left the playerbase in a state of quantum confusion.

The announcement of Operation Avalon has introduced a slate of cross-universe rewards, including a faction damage control module called the Breach Control. According to Fenris Creations promotional materials, the Breach Control "offers resists like a damage control but can also be activated to reduce Breacher pod damage."

The EVE Online playerbase, upon reading this, reportedly experienced a collective moment of existential crisis.

"I have been playing this game since 2009," said Jita local trader and part-time philosopher D4rkM4tt3r_420. "I can tell you the optimal fitting for a Vargur. I can quote mineral prices from memory. I have absolutely no earthly idea what a Breacher pod is. Is it a ship? Is it a missile? Is it… my pod, but breachier?"

The Breach Control module joins a growing list of cross-game items that exist in a state of quantum superposition, simultaneously useful and meaningless depending on which title you happen to be playing at any given moment. While EVE Vanguard players understand Breacher pods as a planet-side hazard, EVE Online players have spent the past 48 hours theorycrafting fits around a mechanic that literally cannot affect them.

A Fenris Creations representative, reached for comment, stated: "The Breach Control represents our commitment to seamless universe-building. Players in EVE Online may not encounter Breacher pods today, but tomorrow is a new day. Also, the module still functions as a regular damage control, so… it has a use. Technically."

The confusion has not dampened market enthusiasm. As of this writing, contracts for the Breach Control are already appearing on the Jita market at prices suggesting buyers believe it will protect against something. What that something is remains an open question.

Operation Avalon runs through July 20, giving players approximately two weeks to figure out what 73% of the reward track actually does.

Local miner credits "sheer spite and a broken Netflix subscription" for the achievement

JITA — In what Fenris Creations is calling a "remarkable testament to player dedication," Caldari capsuleer Dirk_Steamroller became the first pilot in New Eden to reach 100% system influence in the newly launched Operation Avalon, completing the milestone approximately fourteen hours after the patch went live.

When asked what 100% influence actually unlocks, Steamroller admitted he had no idea. "There is a bar. It fills up. I filled it. That is the game now, right?"

Operation Avalon, introduced in the July 7th patch, tasks players with scanning down roaming AEGIS haulers to uncover hidden Points of Interest, which can then be hacked, salvaged, or shot at depending on which emotional support destroyer the player brought. Completing sites raises "influence" in a system. At 100%, a special site spawns containing additional rewards, after which the investigation ends and players presumably stare at their monitors until the next daily login reward.

Steamroller’s method was as straightforward as it was unhinged. "I sat in Sifilar with a Magnate and a bottle of energy drinks. Every time a hauler spawned, I scanned it. Every time it dropped Resonant Cyphers, I felt a brief flicker of something resembling joy. Then I remembered I have forty-seven thousand of these tokens and the traders only sell SKINR components and a damage control I will absolutely forget to activate."

The new seasonal event structure has drawn mixed reactions from the community. Hardcore explorers praise the hidden POI mechanics for adding "a sense of discovery" to gameplay loops that previously required only the stamina to press F1. Critics, meanwhile, have pointed out that Operation Avalon represents the fourth seasonal reward track added in eight months, with some veteran players reporting they now spend more time managing login calendars than flying spaceships.

"I used to log in to blow things up," said Gorvan Kaine, a nullsec fleet commander who spoke to the Onion from a hospital recovery ward following what he described as a "minor existential episode." "Now I log in to check dailies. Then I check the seasonal track. Then I check whether the Avalon traders restocked the officer inertial stabilizer. By the time I remember I own a dreadnought, it is 3 AM and I am reading patch notes for typos."

The latter comment referenced a minor but widely mocked entry in the July 3rd patch notes, which listed the correction of "tpyos typos" as an official defect fix.

"That was not a typo," said a Fenris Creations representative who agreed to speak on condition that we refer to them only as "Probably_Not_A_Drone." "The word ‘tpyos’ was an intentional reference to an ancient Minmatar dialect. It is absolutely a real thing. Please do not look this up."

As for Steamroller, he has already moved on to the next system. "I heard Poitot is the only named system in Syndicate," he said, activating his warp drive. "Did you know that? Someone at Fenris definitely knows that. They put it in the patch notes. They want us to know they know."

He vanished into the warp tunnel, bound for another hauler, another bar to fill, another cypher to collect. Whether any of it matters remains unclear. The influence bar, at least, will confirm that it does.

**DUDREDA** – Tensions in the Strait have reached a cultural breaking point.

The ongoing blockade in the Strait of Dudreda has entered what military historians are calling “the propaganda phase,” which in EVE terms means both sides are now producing posters, banners, and elaborate in-character manifestos accusing the other of crimes ranging from the mundane to the metaphysically impossible. The conflict, which began as a dispute over a Medium Navicitas Refinery in a system nobody had thought about since 2019, has now generated more community art than most actual wars.

The defending coalition released a propaganda poster this week depicting the attacking fleet as a nest of shrieking space rats emerging from a crack in reality, overlaid with the text “Dudreda Is Ours.” Stylistically ambitious. The problem is that close inspection of the poster reveals the background image to be a still from the 2019 EVE Online cinematic trailer featuring a Titan fleet over a planet that is definitively not Dudreda. The CCP logo is visible in the lower right corner. Several members of the attacking coalition have since set the poster as their desktop wallpaper, which the defending coalition has described as “ironic.”

The attacking coalition, unwilling to be outdone on the propaganda front but seemingly allergic to visual communication, responded by publishing a 4,000-word document titled “The Legal Status of the Strait of Dudreda Under Historical Maritime Law and Its Implications for Contemporary Sovereignty Disputes.” The document cites the Treaty of Westphalia, three different interpretations of UNCLOS, and a 14th-century Icelandic water dispute that the authors appear to have discovered during a genuinely extensive Wikipedia session. It does not contain any images. It does contain a footnotes section. It has been widely praised by people who have not read it and accused of being “unhinged” by people who have.

Both sides have called for a diplomatic solution. Neither side has explained what they are actually fighting over, which at this point may be the blockade itself. A follow-up propaganda poster featuring the opposing fleet as tax collectors has been announced but not yet released, pending legal review of whether “tax collector” is historically accurate enough to avoid the CCP promotional video problem.

**VALE** – The most consequential forum thread of the week has reached 96 comments.

User HuntBuzzR successfully killed the Rorqual of a player widely understood within the EVE Online community to be one of the most prolific input broadcasting botting operations in existence, netting a comfortable 2.3 billion ISK in hull, modules, and what appears to be the digital equivalent of a sourdough starter that has been running continuously since 2019. The killmail was celebrated briefly in local, then screenshotted, then posted to r/EVE with the headline “Maybe This Will Finally Be The One That Gets Attention.”

It was not the one that got attention.

Instead, the thread devolved within minutes into a 96-comment argument about CCP’s enforcement record on input broadcasting, with opinions roughly splitting into three camps: those who believe CCP is actively investigating and will act “soon,” those who believe CCP does not care about botting because bots pay subscription fees like everyone else, and those who have simply posted screenshots of their own Rorqual losses as a kind of cathartic screaming into the void. A betting pool has since opened on the EVE subreddit with odds on whether the broadcaster in question will receive a ban before the heat death of the universe, with the current favorite being “never, actually.”

CCP’s official statement on the matter, copied from the previous 46 statements, reads in part: “EVE Online has a zero-tolerance policy for any activity that violates our Terms of Service, including but not limited to the use of third-party software to automate gameplay. Players found to be in violation may face disciplinary action up to and including account closure.” The statement was posted to the forums at 3 AM on a Tuesday, received 14 views, and has been reacted to with 23 laughing emoji by people who have been watching this particular Rorqual pilot conduct industrial operations across three different time zones simultaneously for the better part of five years.

The Rorqual has been replaced. HuntBuzzR has been thanked by approximately 200 people in local. The bot continues.

**THE GAME** – The silence is deafening.

The Fourth of July in EVE Online arrived not with fireworks, not with fleet actions, and not with the kind of catastrophic war that reshapes the political map of nullsec, but with something far more profound: a post in r/EVE asking “anyone else just logged on to dual-box Vexors in peace?” that received 400 upvotes and a comment section full of people agreeing that yes, actually, this is peak gameplay. The post has been awarded Community Award. Someone replied “this is the content CCP should be making” and received 89 upvotes. A moderator pinned it.

In the Dudreda Strait, the blockade fleet that had been forming for three days assembled, sat in a formation for approximately 20 minutes, exchanged some choice words in local about the nutritional merits of various grilled meats, and then docked up and went to participate in what multiple pilots described as “the IRL holiday event.” The blockade is still technically active. Both sides have promised to resume hostilities after the BBQ. One pilot from the defending coalition posted a photo of a brisket in local and received more positive reactions than any killmail in the history of the game.

In nullsec, a CEO of a mid-tier alliance attempted to start a war by issuing a formal declaration of hostilities against a neighboring entity that has been their rival for two years. The declaration was met with 14 responses, 11 of which were variations of “brother it is a holiday weekend, we have a family thing.” The remaining three responses were a GIF of someone falling asleep, a meme about the Declaration of Independence being a rough draft, and someone saying “I respect the passion but this can wait until Wednesday.”

The Jita local channel is quieter than it has been at any point in recorded history. Someone reported seeing two players in a station together and described the encounter as “surreal.” Markets are stable. Mining barges are mining. The servers, for once, are not on fire. Every pilot online has described the experience as “actually pretty nice.”

CCP’s community team, which had prepared a full slate of in-game events for the holiday, posted a notice that all events had been postponed due to “player availability constraints.” The notice received 200 upvotes. The top comment reads: “Let them have their peace.” Someone replied: “This is the real EVE.” Nobody disagreed.

**FAN SITE** – Three separate teams are now building third-party clients. One is crashing on purpose.

In a move that CCP has described as “continuing our commitment to player empowerment and the longevity of the EVE Online ecosystem,” the Carbon engine was open-sourced on July 1, releasing the 20-year-old codebase into the wild where it immediately became the most popular repository on GitHub among people who play exactly one video game and are extremely normal about it.

Within hours of release, the community had extracted a fully functional Space Tetris minigame buried in the test files, complete with Tetrimino rotation, line clearing, and a high score board that appears to have been last updated in 2011. A Discord channel was created. The Tetris high scores are being contested. Someone has already made a speedrun leaderboard.

Also discovered: Easter eggs from 2008 still intact, including a hidden “DICK.TASTIC” username that appears in a character creation file with no further context, a complete EVE-themed version of Snake hidden in a planet management UI panel that was never shipped to production, and literally hundreds of developer comments. The most prominent reads, in full: “// TODO: fix this never, no one will ever notice, I’m going to lunch.” The comment was left above a function that determines loot drop rates in asteroid belts. It has been there for 18 years. No consensus has been reached on whether the developer in question should be celebrated or fired.

Three separate teams have now announced they are building third-party EVE clients using the Carbon codebase. Team Obsidian is going for authenticity and stability. Team NovaCore is adding modern UI features and quality-of-life improvements. Team Heritage is explicitly building their client to crash every 90 seconds as “a tribute to the authentic legacy experience,” which has attracted a devoted following of 400 people who say it “feels like home” and “captures something real about the game.” Their Discord has posted a donation link.

CCP has not commented on the Space Tetris situation.