Hello fellow EVE Fans! 2016 came and went super-fast and what an amazing year it was for all of us at #EVE_NT. The team underwent huge growth in 2016 vastly expanding the content we provide to the EVE Online and EVE Valkyrie communities. From the organisations more humble beginnings organising a player meet in Nottingham to hosting regular tournaments, operating a full twitch channel, producing and promoting player events all over the world, #EVE_NT has come a long way. We have a lot of things to be proud about in 2016 year including:

• #EVE_NT team has growing from 10 people to over 100
• The launch of our Twitch Streaming Service, our YouTube Channel, and our new website
• Provide over 30 hours per week of dedicated EVE Online and EVE Valkyrie content on Twitch
• The hugely successful hosting of the EVE Online Alliance Tournament first weekend which attracted over 6,000 viewers over the Saturday and Sunday.
• The merger of the longest running EVE Player Meet, EVE London, under the EVE_NT brand
• Produced over 200 articles on our website promoting in game and out of game events, analysis on various tournaments and our CSM coverage.
• #EVE_NT Nottingham 4 and 5 in which 200 people attended each event.
• Hosted 2 live player tournaments at #EVE_NT Nottingham
• Organised the 1st #EVE_NT Cardiff
• The completion of the 1st season of #EVE_NT Collides with approximately 120 participants in 8 teams.
• The completion of the 1st season of #EVE_NT Fight Club with approximately 150 participants in 10 teams.
• The merging of #EVE_NT Collides and Fightclub into the first #EVE_NT Championship to create a 12 team league with 180 participants who received an estimated 1 Trillion ISK in unique ship SKINS were given away as prizes.
• The creation of #EVE_NT Cup to provide an accessible platform for new teams to enter the tournament scene.
• Hosting the first and only player run EVE Valkyrie tournament pitting the EU and US servers against each other.
• Raised over £5,000 for charity since the start of #EVE_NT
• Given away over £3,000 in prizes including headsets, keyboards, t-shirts, posters, to name a few on stream and at our various events and streams in 2016 alone!
• Launched ISK Starter which has risen over 36bn ISK for community projects over the last two months from very generous members of the EVE Community.

All of these projects were run and completed with the fantastic support of the many volunteers who work behind the scenes at #EVE_NT. The Directors, management team, and myself are forever grateful for their continued hard work, support and time that the staff give us for no reward creating what, I hope you will agree, is a fantastic community organisation dedicated to the games CCP produce. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you; without you all none of this would have been possible.

But more importantly, thank you to all those who watch our shows, participate in our tournaments, attend our events and donate ISK to help keep everything running smoothly – it is your continued support and enthusiasm for the things we do that keep us working hard to produced content.

With 2016 now over what sort of things can we look forward to in 2017?

Kicking off our 2017 tournament season is a brand new competition: the #EVE_NT Cup. A new league specifically aimed at those who want to give the tournament scene a try and/or allow an entry point for teams to compete within the #EVE_NT family of tournaments. We have recognised that getting into the alliance tournament going up against some of the more established teams in the Championship is a somewhat daunting prospect if you have never done it before. So the mastermind genius of Bei Artjay formulated the #EVE_NT Cup, an entry level tournament aimed at giving everyone an opportunity to participate. The response has, for the lack of a better word, been phenomenal and has far exceeded our expectations; 28 teams having signed up to participate with the first round of matches starting on the 21st of January. Those teams who battle their way into 8th place or higher will win between 5 (for 5th to 8th place) to 12 (for 1st place) PLEX and the top 6 teams will be offered a place in the next season of the #EVE_NT Championship.

Speaking of which the 2nd season of the #EVE_NT Championship will be kicking off hot on the heels of the #EVE_NT Cup starting the week of February 5th. The matches will be held over a period of 5 weeks with a one week break in-between. Rules are still being finalised and prizes will soon be announced so keep an eye out on our site for more information when it becomes available.

But if you think that two tournaments weren’t enough we have MORE planned! We are not quite ready to reveal any additional information yet as they are all still in the early planning stages but we do have something a bit different lined up for the last half of 2017, so stay tuned for more information.

The 1st #EVE_NT London of the year will be held on February 18th as #EVE_NT’s first player gathering of the year. The event will be held as the same time and place as it has always been. You can find out more information on our event page here which will be updated with information shortly.

‘But what about #EVE_NT Nottingham?’ I hear some of you cry. Currently there are no confirmed dates for this year’s Nottingham event. We are currently working to confirm a new event in the last half of this year that will be a radical shake up of what you would normally expect from #EVE_NT. It will be in a brand new format and brand new location that will be very different to what you have come to expect from #EVE_NT. We are still working out the details and make final confirmations with the venue so we are not quite yet ready to share, but if all goes well it’s going to be huge! The team is very excited and we just cannot wait to reveal our plans to you all.

But we are also planning to hold our very first international gathering at this year’s EVE: Fanfest in Reykjavik Iceland on Sunday the 9th of April. We are looking at venues for this event so keep an eye out closer to the time for more information!

We are also very pleased to announce that a number of other player organisations have also merged into #EVE_NT Brand, this includes Trillionaire and The Neocom.

Having worked with the Trillionaire team for over a year and with the ban on 3rd party ISK gambling sites, the decision was made to bring the Trillionaire team into #EVE_NT bringing with them their fantastic technical experience and knowledge. The Trillionaire team have quickly put that knowledge to use and have been working hard behind the scenes to roll out a brand new website stuffed to the gills with new functionality and services to help people organise in-game events and promote out of game events. It’s not quite finished yet, but the finishing touches and early testing is being completed as we speak and so we hope to have news on this very soon.

We are also proud  to announce that the team behind the popular Neocom website has joined the #EVE_NT team for which Proto has provided the following announcement:

“It is with great pleasure that I announce that after two-and-a-half years of self production and publication, that the creative team behind The Neocom is now joining forces with #EVE_NT. Many of our contributors such as Elinari Rhodan, ChocolateRhane, and ScaredPanda have had working relationships with the team at #EVE_NT for some time now with positive results. I look forward to adding the additional talents of Roedyn, Zendane from Eve Reader, Manic Velocity, and Dorian Reu.

The next evolution of the main podcast for The Neocom has always been to transition to a live show streamed on Twitch or YouTube. I have no doubt that with the experience of the team at #EVE_NT, the show which has become a beacon of humor, creativity, and positive content, will get better support and a boost in production value with this transition.

Nashh and the #EVE_NT cast understand the mission of inspiring the next generation of creators in a positive, supportive environment and I have every confidence that under their leadership, the future of content creation that we as a community and CCP can be proud of will continue to get larger and bring upon projects that we could only dream of.

We want to thank our readers and our listeners for their continued support and encourage everyone to be just as supportive as we undergo this transition. We truly love and appreciate you all. Fly safe! o7″

With this influx of talent onto the #EVE_NT team we are looking forward to producing more excellent quality content for you all to enjoy throughout 2017.

In addition to this #EVE_NT TV on Twitch has grown from strength to strength over the last year with thirteen regular shows producing a mammoth 30 hours of EVE Online and EVE Valkyrie related programmes every week making us the leading Twitch channel for CCP related content. We also signed up seasoned EVE streamers Cardinal Syn, Sutonia, and Rahne Chocolate as well as Wan5 and General StarGazer two of the highest ranked EVE Valkyrie players in addition to the other numerous talents that I do a great disservice not mentioning. But we are always looking for new and upcoming talent and if you would like to give streaming CCP related content on a regular basis a go please contact Rahne Chocolate in game for more information.

Remember if you enjoy the content put out on our Twitch channel make sure to check out our ISK Starter and (if you can) please consider donating so we can keep our streamers in ISK to keep bringing you content!

We are also pleased to welcome on-board to the #EVE_NT team last year Jason Quixos who has been working tirelessly with our tournament teams to expand the range of services we provide in the form of EVE Arena, a website dedicated to collecting statistics and results from all EVE Online related tournament events run by #EVE_NT and CCP. Do you want to know how your favourite team has been performing? How about your favourite competitor? How about how they compare to their peers? You can find all this and more on the EVE Arena website, for the first time in the history of EVE Online’s competitive history you can now track the performance of your favourite teams in exactly the same way as you would be able to track your favourite football team thanks to the number crunching our team of EVEsports fanatics.

So EVE Online has been getting a lot of love, but we haven’t forgotten you Valkyrie fans! #EVE_NT’s very own Gigai has been hard at work creating the first community aggregator of all things Valkyrie – The Crow’s Nest. The Crow’s Nest will be a centralised portal where you can everything the Valkyrie community has to offer and ways to connect to it. Forums, twitter, twitch, news, articles, everything brought to you as it happens all in one convenient location. Work is still ongoing but we hope to be able to roll this site out to you very soon.

Last but not least I also wanted to take a moment to thank the web team here at #EVE_NT. Over the last year we have worked to produce over 200 articles over the last year covering topics from the CSM elections, promoting in/out of game player events, analysis of the Alliance Tournaments in addition to our own #EVE_NT tournaments and converting general EVE Online and EVE Valkyrie community news. This work has been consistently supported by you the EVE Community via our ISK Starter which for the last two months has raised over 7 billion ISK in donations to our writing staff which is both greatly appreciated and humbling. We are very excited for our new website which will be rolled out in the near future as it will provide better functionality to help promote in and out of game player events. We are also super keen to regularly promote your events and by submitting a request to my e-mail tiberius.stargazer@eve-nt.uk. I would also like to extend a personal thank you to Elinari who has so diligently produced analysis and articles on all the tournaments that have been run in the last half of this year.

With a very busy 2017 ahead of us I would once again like to thank the team of volunteers for all their hard work and I look forward to working with you all again in creating some bigger and better events, streams, and tournaments over the next year.

But please remember #EVE_NT is an entirely voluntary non-profit organisation and we just cannot do all the things we do without your help. If you enjoy our work please consider donating to our Patreon which will keep our site advert free and help fund servers, events and tournaments we run. This includes covering the costs of renting equipment, provide prizes and pay for general overheads. Any donation, no matter how small would be appreciated! (Note yeah its out of date but we will update it when Nashh stops being a baddie!)

If however you would prefer to donate some ISK then please support us via our ISK Starter campaigns.

Kind regards and best wishes from all of us at #EVE_NT,

Tiberius StarGazer
Editor In Chief #EVE_NT