Anomalous Materials: The Research Race of YC 116
Greetings trailblazing capsuleers!
This is CCP Fozzie bringing you a quick dev blog covering an ingame event that is running for the next week.
This blog represents the out-of-character side of the story that began with two in-character news reports released yesterday and today.
The Story so Far
Yesterday the Sanctuary Corp (the leaders of the Sisters of EVE) published a research paper that highlighted unusual new behavior among Sleeper Drones in W-Space.
Today all four faction navies have put out the call for help from capsuleers across the cluster. Although nobody knows the original cause of this new Sleeper activity, the navies are eager to take advantage of any opportunity to learn more about Sleeper technology and its potential applications.
The empire navies are requesting donations of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries to help them reverse engineer the code changes that have triggered this novel behavior.
The Practical Results
Out of character, I can reveal that this storyline and the associated donation drive will lead directly to new technology falling into the hands of players in the near future. The relative success of each empire’s donation drive will determine in what order each faction will get access to this new technology.
Each faction navy will also express their gratitude through a special ingame item representing an honorary commission to their forces. The commissions will be given to the character that donates the highest value of Neural Network Analyzers and Sleeper Data Libraries (combined and weighted) to each faction over the course of the event.
Each commission will be a unique item that will forever contain the name of the winning character in the description.
How You Can Participate
The navies are looking for the following items:
- Neural Network Analyzer (worth 1 point)
- Sleeper Data Library (worth 4 points)
These items can be obtained from the wrecks of Sleeper Drones in all types of Wormhole space.
To contribute to your chosen empire, create an item exchange contract containing these Sleeper Components to one of the following characters:
Federation Navy – Auvier Bauvon
Caldari Navy – Hikemi Korrado
Republic Fleet – Heder Elislar
Imperial Navy – Ren Karetta
We will be periodically accepting all the donation contracts assigned to each character, at which point the donation becomes official and is counted towards the score.
It does not matter which station you make the contracts from.
These characters belong to their respective NPC Navy Corporations; remember to double check that you are contracting the items to the correct character.
This event is open now, and will run until downtime on Tuesday, October 14th.
We will be periodically updating a post in the comments thread for this blog with the latest donation numbers for each faction, but we will not be publishing any information about how many items any individual has donated (other than to congratulate the four winners at the end).
We’re very happy to be opening up this new way that players can influence the lore and history of EVE, and we can’t wait to take the lid off of the new tech that it will unlock.
This is only the beginning.
- CCP Fozzie
