Over the course of this weekend, the Serenity cluster that hosts EVE China has been taken offline to prepare for the re-launch of EVE Online in China with our new partner, NetEase.

CCP will begin to host and operate Serenity for our players in China as a part of the new agreement with NetEase, rather than having a third party hosting the cluster.

This means that as our infrastructure changes, so does the role of Singularity, our test server for EVE Online.

One of the key aims of our partnership with NetEase is to ensure that Tranquility and Serenity stay as close to parity as possible in terms of content, and we aim to be in a position where Serenity is either running the same release as Tranquility or is one release behind.

This means that as of today, with preparations for the re-launch of EVE China, Singularity will begin to host content destined for either, or both servers.

This will include SKINs, localization and monetization features that are destined only for Serenity, along with changes to the client that are required to comply with Chinese law. Changes to the launcher and client that need to be made because of Chinese law will however only be active in the Serenity packaged version of EVE.

As always, the EVE community is renowned for its level headedness when changes are ported to Singularity for testing, and we expect that our pilots will understand that Singularity is a test environment, and that not everything that is tested there makes it to our live game environment!

If you’d like to discuss this news item, please feel free to do so in this thread on the Test Server Feedback Forum!