One way for EVE Online players to enhance their game play experience is to stay informed with the latest changes and news in New Eden. I do highly recommend not visiting the official EVE Online and Reddit, however. Why? Because those places can suck the enthusiasm for playing EVE out of a player faster than an officer fit Bhaalgorn can drain the capacitor from an Atron.
So what's a player to do? Don't worry, as both CCP and numerous players create and maintain up-to-date information that, in terms of consistent quality, puts both the official forums and Reddit to shame. For me, the only thing worse about trying to filter out the immense amount of misinformation found on both sites is the intense negativity that radiates from my monitor whenever I visit either place. Fortunately, players can escape the neutralizers and nosferatu looking to suck the enjoyment of EVE from them.
Let's begin by looking at CCP. While I disagree with its policy of engagement on Reddit, the company does a lot of things right on the EVE Online community site. First, their practice of issuing developer blogs is fantastic. Any player who doesn't read them is missing out on valuable information. Next, CCP maintains several RSS feeds found on its News Channels page. The two major feeds concerns EVE Online related news and game world (RP) news. The final feature found on the community site are the patch notes. The nice twist is that CCP provides all the patch notes for all the expansions and point releases on one page. A very nice resource for keeping up with game changes.
CCP has two additional websites that provide current updates for EVE Online. The first, EVE Online Now, is periodically updated with information ranging from new theme music for releases to lore information to pictures of new ship graphics. The second side provides updates on features planned for future release.
Players also provide ways for other players to keep up with the news in New Eden. Perhaps the best such site is TotalEve.com. Designed as a one-stop shop for EVE information, the site contains RSS feeds from other aggregation sites such as EvePodcasts.com and Eve Bloggers. In addition, TotalEve.com provides feeds from the two major websites covering EVE news, TheMittani.com and EveNews24, as well as Crossing Zebras, a news magazine site that happens to also host podcasts. The website also provides feeds to a dev tracker for posts on the official EVE Online forums, EVE Markets, and to information published by members of the Council of Stellar Management.
For me, part of the attraction of EVE Online is the information surrounding the game. Keeping up-to-date with the latest news helps me understand the world I navigate every time I log in. Perhaps surprisingly for a game with such a reputation for complexity, keeping abreast of the latest developments is not that hard. Hopefully the links to sources in this post will help others understand the New Eden universe a bit better. All that is required is a little effort outside the game client.
Update: After I published this post, CCP Leeloo announced a new Tumblr site dedicated to following the Council of Stellar Management. I suggest adding it to your list.
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