Eve Online’s blackout period with local chat restriction is over

After about 66 dark days, CCP Games thought it was enough. The Nullsec blackout period introduced more than two months ago is over, which means that players can use their local chat again to see who is in their area.

At the end of June there was already an unexpected alien invasion and as if that wasn’t enough, July followed a blackout that hit the entire Nullsec space. This was part of the previously released Invasion expansion of the game. Developer CCP described the change to the local chat as a “delayed mode”, where the chat function corresponded to the limited operation in a wormhole. Pilots will then only appear in the local population list if they actually post. Normally, this chat channel contains all the players present in a galaxy and their relationship to each other.

This had quite a few consequences for the players. Before the blackout took effect, organized groups of players could watch enemy ships enter their territory. By passing on that information there was a kind of protection against groups of pirates. After the blackout, that warning system disappeared and the space became a lot more dangerous. That didn’t appeal to everyone; an Eve Online tracker showed that during the bimonthly blackout activity in the game dropped significantly. This can also be caused by other factors, such as the summer period.

Hilmar Pétursson, CEO of Icelandic Eve Online developer CCP Games, recently indicated that the radio silence period was always planned as a temporary event, even though the company said when announcing that the duration of the blackout was indefinite. Pétursson also said it’s a bit of a crude instrument and the company now clearly knows and understands the value of a more sophisticated instrument. He made no secret of the fact that he believes that Eve Online in recent years is stagnant and that there may be some commotion in that sense. At the end of July, Petursson also spoke about the desire to introduce a ‘chaos era’ and that players should prepare for this.