In celebration of the forthcoming Empyrean Age content addition, EVE Online developers are planning a live blog event on May 15th:

With our upcoming expansion, Empyrean Age, being just around the corner we thought it would only be fitting that the next Live Dev Blog focused on it. Mindstar, our always present host, will be joined by Greyscale from Game Design and t0nyG, author of the upcoming EVE novel, to discuss and answer your questions about Empyrean Age.

To listen in all you have to do is join the in-game channel 'Live Dev Blog' at 20.00 GMT this Thursday, 15 May, and join audio.

If you need help with that GMT conversion for your timezone, CLICK HERE.

EVE Online has announced its 5th Anniversary Lottery. If you're feeling lucky, here are the details:

BIG Games are perhaps the most well known group within the densely packed lotteries and competition market so it should come as little surprise that they will be celebrating the anniversary in style.

Well known throughout the cluster, BIG are one of the few corporations who have good relations with the main empires, independent factions and mega-corporations.

Log in and check it out. Report back!

RPG Vault and EVE developers take a look at the five biggest misconceptions potential players have about the game. They are:

• Newbies will never stand a fighting chance against old players
• EVE is only about combat
• Mining is the only way to earn money as a rookie
• You can't enjoy the game if you aren't in a major alliance
• EVE is not meant for casual players

The fleshed out reasons why the above are not true is available at RPG Vault.

Jim Moreno tackles the difficult task of roleplaying a merchant in this edition of RoleCraft: "Even roleplayers are known to struggle with this cookie cutter gameplay, and with keeping their characters from looking and acting just like every other character in game. What to do? One sure way to avoid the pitfalls of routine is to realize that there are many other classes in game besides adventurer. It's time to become a professional roleplayer!"

Two announcements of importance to EVE Online players came down the pike today:

• Voting has started for the Council of Stellar Management: These are exciting times, not only for EVE but for the future of virtual worlds in general as the first democratic elections began today for the Council of Stellar Management. EVE Online subscribers may vote for their representatives who will then represent them as council members interacting directly with CCP.
• Tuesday and Wednesday server downtime from 11:00 pm - 1:00 am GMT

Mark your calendars.

In a special treat, we spoke to seven industry leaders about the State of MMOs as they exist today and where they're headed in the future. We take on the biggest topics, such as the cost of development, subscription vs. micropayments, innovation vs. evolution and many more.

In this article, we hear from SOE President John Smedley, ZeniMax Online Studios General Manager Matt Firor, Themis Group CEO Alexander Macris, GamerDNA.com Director of Community Sanya Weathers, EVE Online Game Designer Chantel Zuurmond, IGN PC Executive Editor Steve Butts and the former Executive Producer of Star Trek Online Daron Stinnett.

It was a sentiment shared by most of those we spoke to. It's obvious that World of Warcraft has the market by the throat and have become perhaps the only truly global game in the MMO-space. That means some tough realities for the games in the next tier.

"[MMOs are in a] state of unrest, right now," said Matt Firor, General Manager of ZeniMax Online Studios, a sister company of Bethesda. "World of Warcraft is ruling the subscription game market, and no one wants to complete with them directly, so they go off for niche markets."

As a special note, this will be my final article here with WarCry and it's been a pleasure.

Sean Bulger's periodic community column today looks at the concept of Open PvP (player vs. player) and what it does to games and their communities.

A while back we talked about conflict between players and what sort of a role that it can play in a game and for communities. During this, it was noted that player competition can be implemented in numerous different ways. This week, I would like to revisit this discussion and talk about one of those particular methods: the open PvP world.

Open PvP is one of the more controversial topics in MMO circles and plenty of people have fairly strong opinions one way or the other on the subject. That said, I would like to explore both the positive impacts and negative ones on the player community. Open PvP has the potential to help bond a community fairly tightly, but it also has the potential to truly tear it apart as well.

Read more after the leap.

EVE Online devs are looking for 150-200 intrepid souls to help give the Singularity server a work out. Here's what they need:

This Tuesday, 29 April, we're going to test the new networking layer which we plan to deploy on Tranquility very soon. The test will help us make sure the networking layer is stable in itself and stable enough to deploy to Tranquility. All you have to do to help us with this test is to log in to Singularity at 18.30 GMT and remain logged in until 21.00 GMT, for this test to be successful we require approximately 150 to 200 of you to help us.

Log in tomorrow and help break the server! Better now than later. *g*

Last week, Jonathan Steinhauer's column looked at the design of outdoor areas in The Dangerous Wilderness, Part 1. In Part 2, he continues his thoughts on the basic challenge most every MMO faces.

The easiest solution, though it avoids the root of the problem, is to disperse the ground spawns to a more realistic population level. There are areas where one would expect to encounter monsters, and that is where the heavy concentrations should be. Hard core hunting should occur in the fortresses and camps of the various villains, monsters, and animals that are the bane of the adventurer, not every time you step off the path. This opens up the wilderness for travel and casual hunting while giving players the kind of combat that exist in epic stories: battle in the lairs.

Read more after the leap.

MMORPG.com had the chance to discuss EVE's new "Ambulation Project", social environments for players.

As far as I could I see, there wasn't really too much new information about what ambulation would include, but the team seems to be farther along each time I see the presentation, and it has been interesting to watch the evolution of the project thus far. As fans of EVE and non-fans alike may already know, EVE is known for its stunning space visuals, which were highly regarded even before the recent Trinity upgrade which dramatically increased the level of graphical detail. Now their stated goal is to make sure that the characters on the stations are in tune with the level of detail that players have become accustomed to on the outside of the station.

The characters that represent the human avatars of EVE players currently look like stylized caricatures appearing ina 2D image at the bottom of your screen. In the new system, players will have to make new avatars themselves, as making an automated system to do this for players would ultimately be a waste of the developer's time. Why spend all that time making a complicated system that could never do the job as well as an actual human? Besides, with the previously mentioned level of detail that's going into these new avatars, making a new avatar should be fun.

The article has a lot more details about the finer points of avatar creation so head on over.