CCP Soundwave has taken to Youtube to highlight some of the design decisions behind EVE Online's big Crucible 1.1 patch. While that might not sound so exciting, Soundwave does bring a certain brand of humour to his developer discussions, saying that with the success of Crucible, CCP decided to "do the right thing as a corporation" by cancelling the development teams' Christmas vacations to get a 1.1 patch for January.

Jokes aside, EVE Online's Crucible 1.1 Patch is a solid quality of life update for players, and CCP is certainly doing well on their commitment to re-focusing after Incarna and the nuclear fallout of "Monoclegate." Trailer below!

As EVE Online's next major patch, Cruicible 1.1, draws closer, we have been given a detailed list of features for tomorrow's release. The new patch brings a neocom update, different UI customization and adjustments, as well as changes to issues players have been begging CCP to address since 2008. Tech 2 assault frigates are getting a rebalance to bring them in line with other ships, and alliances can now sign up for faction warfare. 

An increase to all sizes of Null blaster ammo, new deadspace invulnerability fields for shield users, a full portrait viewer, and many other changes are in store for tomorrow, so check out the official Crucible 1.1 feature page for all of the different changes.

CCP has revealed some new details behind their fan festival taking place in March, 2012. The venue is confirmed to be taking place at Harpa, a concert hall and conference center in Reykjavik. CCP is also offering guided tour events for anyone hoping to explore the city of Reykjavik and its countryside. Finally, there will be some great Fanfest events planned, including a pub crawl, Poker, PvP tournaments, Battle of the Bands competitions, and a "Party on the top of the World" blowout.

Check out the reveal trailer below to see how you can get in on CCP's Fanfest 2012!

With Crucible's recent deployment, CCP decided to give the fans a holiday gift... stats! In their latest dev blog, CCP Diagoras breaks down to the bare numbers since Crucible's launch.

They go into some pretty granular details, so if you wanna know the sheer numbers, head over to EVE Insider's Dev Blog and get all the charts and graphs you could ever want.

Hot on the heels of their newest Crucible expansion, the EVE Online team is slashing prices on their most popular PLEX packages in a special offer they're calling the Crucible PLEX sale. Maybe you can give yourself a big 'ol PLEX bundle for Christmas to keep up your EVE habits, or maybe you could purchase a PLEX package for a quick and easy Christmas present!

Either way, be sure to capitalize on the sale before Tuesday, December 6th (tomorrow!), because that's when the Crucible PLEX sale ends.

14,502 explosions per day, 604 per hour, 10 per minute, roughly translating to an explosion every six seconds. Boom. One more! CCP has released a whole pile of PvP statistics for EVE Online, tallying up all of the millions of ship explosions that occurred from December 5th, 2007, all the way up to November 29th, 2011. Remember, this is only limited to PvP, so that's a lot of player aggression.

CCP is also once again proving why EVE Online is a mathmatician's game, as they go into finer detail, covering the probability rate of getting squished per sector, the top 20 ship groups targeted, the individual ship types targeted, the highest death rates to NPCs, and... well, you get the point. There are a lot of numbers in there, and even a few pie charts thrown in for fun, so if you want to look at a lot of stats for EVE Online, mosy on over to the EVE Online dev post to check it out.

I'll admit, this... really makes me want to play EVE Online. So I guess the trailer did its job. I'm just not sure if I want to lose months of my life the instant I pick up the game. For any of you who can spare the time, however, EVE Online's newest expansion trailer for Crucible is looking incredible from all angles. Better ships, a huge graphic updates, bigger explosions, hundreds of bug fixes, all set to a funky soundtrack? Sounds like a recipe for greatness.

Or an EVE Online expansion. Take a look if you don't believe me.