Hello,

My name is Arend Stührmann, also known as CCP Whisper, and I am the producer in charge of the project bringing EVE Online to the Mac and Linux operating systems. As you may know, we have been working in partnership with Transgaming Technologies, utilizing their Cider engine to allow  Eve Isk to run on the Mac OS and their Cedega engine to enable operation under Linux.

This project went live in late 2007 and in that time we have seen the same slow, steady growth in the numbers of users of the Mac client that has characterized the growth of  Eve Isk throughout its history. However we have not seen a similar growth in the numbers using our Linux client.

It is for this reason that I am sorry to have to announce that from the 10th of March onwards CCP will no longer be officially supporting the Linux operating system. The low amount of users of the Linux client did not justify the degree of additional complexity having three operating systems imposes on our development and release schedules.

There is the matter of maintaining the hardware infrastructure to facilitate the development work, spending man-hours on testing and diagnosing faults in the client as well as regression testing.

While we did embark on this project with the aim of being one of the few MMOG’s on the market offering a game client for all of the major operating system architectures, we feel that the time and resources that were being spent on the Linux client would be better utilized in areas where more players would benefit from them.

I would like to thank you for your past support of our efforts to bring Eve Isk to the Linux OS. The feedback and commitment we obtained from players like you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system.

Should you wish to continue playing Eve Isk under Linux there are several options available. Some of these are free and some require purchase of software.

A selection of these is at the bottom of this e-mail along with basic instructions on how to use Eve Isk through them. If you wish to stop playing Eve Isk and want to request a refund of unused game time, please contact our billing department by filing a petition in the billing category. They will assist you in obtaining a refund for the remaining game time and closing your account.

Again, thank-you for your support