CCP has announced the next free game expansion for their MMORPG EVE Online. The expansion will be named Empyrean Age, and it will finally introduce the long awaited Factional Warfare.

The 5th EVE Online Alliance Tournament has been announced and the bravest capsuleers have once again been called to battle for fame, honour and fortune.
16 matches will be hosted per day and streamed from CCP's studio in Reykjavik, Iceland. This is a multi-stage championship, similar to the FIFA World Cup. The 40 teams are divided into 8 groups, with the two victors from each group progressing to a knockout phase compromised of four single-elimination rounds. A firm winner will be determined after this elimination round.

Dr Eyjo, the real world economist hired by CCP to examine and report about production, profit, prices and growth in EVE Online, has released his economic report for the 4th quarter of 2007.
The report is downloadable as a PDF from here .

Tomorrow the EVE Online dev team will host a new live chat with the developers in a game chat channel about the game art.

The latest issue of EON magazine is currently passing through the hands of mail delivery technicians across the globe and is arriving on doormats and in the mailboxes of happy and contented buyers. All buyers will also receive a free DVD featuring highlights from the recent Fanfest.

Until now Trinity, the newest game expansion for EVE Online, has received many praises both from veteran and new players. It is not common at all that a MMORPG developer decides that it is worth to invest into updating the Graphical engine and redesigning 70% of the game graphics instead than just putting all that time and money into a new game, and this gives a clear idea on how serious is CCP about the long term projects for EVE.
But as usual, the bigger the updates are, the longest the issue lists. So, forgetting for once the boot.ini issue that has been covered sufficiently by the other MMORPG websites, let's see what others are the known problems that came after the deployment of Trinity, while waiting, as usual, for a bugfixing patch.

Tolas, an EVE Online player, member of the Aerthyrian Sovereignty, has compiled an informative FAQ on the EVE Online: Trinity update.

We would like to give our best congratulations to all the people working on EVE Online for reaching the milestone of 200,000 active accounts, and for breaking another time the record of concurrent users online on a single server, reaching 37,481 PCU.
To those who haven't tried EVE Online yet, we strongly suggest you to do it since it is a wonderful game that deserves its success. And to these people who have tried it some time ago, please give it another chance, because The latest Revelations updates have really given a new breath to this wonderful game.

A 14 days trial is available here . To activate the trial account no credit card information are required.

The third issue of the EVE Online Quarterly Economic Newsletter has been published as a downloadable PDF .

Dr.EyjoG, the economy expert hired by CCP to monitor and report about the EVE Online economy, and so help the Dev Team with the design process, has written a new Dev Blog. After his first article about mineral prices , it's now time to have some details about ships manufacturing.