by EVE Online Community Team11:00am on Friday 31st July 2026
o7 spacefriends, and welcome back to the Community Beat!
We've got a good mix for you today, a guide for anyone who's been eyeing the warzone but hasn't taken the plunge, an update to one of the community's most ambitious tools, a walk down memory lane, some genuinely excellent videos, an open invitation to get a taste of Alliance Tournament practice, and a look at the new sites lurking in wormhole space.
Get that Quafe ready and let's dive in!
If you've ever looked at Factional Warfare and thought "that looks like fun, but I have absolutely no idea where to start", then great news! Minmatar Fleet Alliance have assembled a guide covering everything you'll need to know to make your first (or next) foray into FW space.
And to be clear, "you" here is a pretty wide net. While this guide is aimed toward newer players, it's written for anyone: brand new pilots, returning players trying to work out what's changed, FW curious peeps, or veterans who are looking for meta guides to ship fits and matchups. The warzone has experienced a lot of change both in the meta and and actual mechanics, and it's easy to bounce off it simply because nobody ever explained what advantage actually does or why everyone keeps yelling about frontlines.
If you don't have a roll of duct tape and a can of WD-40 on your nightstand, that's OK too. The guide is relevant to anyone wanting to get into FW, regardless of empire. This area of space is consistently one of the most active and, frankly, amazingly chaotic, areas in New Eden. Get out there and explode responsibly!
DeT Resprox has just shipped another update yet to EVE Pandora, and it's a big one.
If you haven't come across Pandora before: it's a player-built platform that layers organized, narrative-driven objectives on top of the game. If you're familiar with Corporation Projects or Freelance Jobs in-game, you've already got a rough feel for it and those features draw plenty of inspiration from EVE Pandora. DeT and the team have been at this type of gameplay for decades, and it just keeps getting better.
The largest update to PANDORA so far is now live, bringing campaigns, missions, projects, epics, Fleet Operations, Faction Warfare, pirate insurgencies, rewards, leaderboards and player activity together within one connected platform.
At the centre of the update is the rebuilt map system. You can explore activity across regions, constellations and solar systems, follow fleets, view commander locations and identify battles through crossed-swords markers. The Faction Warfare map shows Frontline, Command Operations and Rearguard systems alongside contested progress and advantage, while the Insurgency map tracks corruption and suppression across affected space.
PANDORA also now makes it easier to see which campaigns support or oppose your faction, corporation or alliance, follow progress, review participants and rewards, and preserve fleet operations through battle records and After Action Reports.
Explore the latest version now at https://www.evepandora.com — find an operation, follow the warzone, join a mission, command a fleet or begin a story of your own.
New Eden is filled with stories, with new ones being written every time somebody undocks. Plenty does get recorded along the way, in killboards, forum posts, videos, AARs, memes, propaganda, and even Beats like this one, but it ends up scattered across two decades and a hundred different places. Mercurialis Inc. decided to collect their 24 years of history in one place to document their incredible history for anyone to check out.
We loved reading through their EVE journey, and it reminded us of some of our own. Scroll through their history, and you'll almost certainly run into a fight you were involved in, an alliance you had Opinions about, or something you'd completely forgotten happened. One corp's timeline turns out to be a surprisingly good way to look at your own.
It's unfinished by design, too. If you ever flew under that banner, they want your screenshots and stories, details are on the site.
Every Friday the Community Team undock for some hijinks over on Twitch for an end of week roam called Live2Feed. Aptly named because we feed...a lot. If you caught last week's action, FC Bee and Banquet were running from a Brotherhood of Spacers fleet of Navy Drakes that had formed up for a much larger fight, and we happened to be in the way. Classic. But as Bee and Banquet were busy trying to survive and catch stragglers, they doubled back and found the entire Drake fleet had simply ceased to exist.
We had no idea what happened. Now we do.
Alasker shared with us their fleet's POV of the fight, and it turns out the answer was a bombing run. It's great extra context for a fight we only saw the aftermath of, and a very good reminder of just how devastating a well-orchestrated bomb run still is when everything lines up. One second there's a fleet, the next second there's a lot of capsules.
Mystery solved!
Delve remains one of the most reliable places in the cluster for excellent mid-scale PvP, and OnlyFleets are great at sharing footage from their brawls.
In their words:
Wings Freedom, and their allies deployed into Delve with the goal of breaking Can I Bring My Drake's sovereignty. When Drakes called for aid, OnlyFleets answered. What followed was a sprawling 870-pilot battle involving multiple fleets, repeated escalations, and an opening exchange that turned enemy Sacrileges into a kill-rate graph resembling a chainsaw. This video is a partial highlight cut, focused primarily on OnlyFleets' perspective and some of the defining moments from the fight.
Battle statistics: 870 pilots · 177.6 billion ISK destroyed · More than two hours of sustained fighting
"A kill-rate graph resembling a chainsaw" is a fantastic sentence, but "okay, let's do something dumb" is simply iconic.
The editing, music choice, and overall style have us feeling all sorts of nostalgia. But it also does a good job of showing what combat at this scale actually looks and sounds like, which is not always easy to convey. Worth your time even if you've never set foot in nullsec. Also shoutout to the carrier pilots, the Ymir is one scary beast!
Alliance Tournament XXII is on the horizon. Competing at this level can feel intimidating, and winners have devoted hundreds of hours to their craft. If you want to know what it takes to be an AT pilot, EVE Rookies have an answer!
They're not competing in the tournament themselves, but they're organizing a practice squad. The entire point is to be practice partners and learn the AT format and get some crucial experience under your belt. You'll find yourself in an arena, flying an AT comp, and doing your best to execute on a strategy that the other team (and your FC) shared with you.
Tournament flying is a very different beast from anything else in EVE, and there is no substitute for reps against a live opponent. Fair warning: the AT bug is real and there is no known cure.
If you missed it, Rampant Drone Fabricator sites are now a permanent fixture in wormhole space.
These first showed up temporarily during the Gallente Election event, and off the back of your feedback they've been made permanent in C1–C6 wormholes. With some changes tailored specifically to J-space, of course. You'll face escalating waves of Rogue Drones, with threat level building based on what ships you bring and how long you're willing to stay. And because you were all far too good at these the first time around, the wave cap went from 30 up to 100.
EVE players never shy away from a challenge, and just a few days after the sites were live the wormhole group No Vacancies became the first group to finish wave 100. It took them just shy of 4 hours, and they had to chew through 11,283 rogue drones. But you don't need to take it to wave 100, running through the first 30 waves can be done pretty quickly.
There are many different ways to approach this site, and iBeast shared his nomadic wormhole solo dread style. Just sneak into someone's wormhole in a PNI, run some sites, and see who shows up. Great content is what shows up, apparently.
Did you know we have a podcast where we ramble about EVE? It's the New Eden Review Dev Show, or NERDS. Each episode we cover some of these stories in more detail and get sidetracked onto a bunch of other EVE tangents along the way. Our latest video is up featuring FC Bee, Swift, Convict and Jotunn. And 1,200 mink? You'll have to give it a listen to figure out what that's about.
That's it for this edition of the Beat. As always, if you're making something, running something, or blowing something up in a particularly stylish way, we want to hear about it. Message your favorite Community Team member and let us know what you're up to.
Fly safe!