It had something to do with communism and China’s internet censorship.
Thank you very much! Can I have a look at the version history of Tranquility too? I want to know if the corresponding Tranquility and Serenity version numbers are exactly match or different.
Yeah, that’s partly true, but I have more thoughts on that.
First thing is that in this digital age, data is a rich gold mine that many useful things can be refined from it. For example, 13 years ago, data from the Corrupted Blood incident was used to study how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic.
I think the government cares about keeping the rich mine of data for themselves more than anything else. The underlying cultural competition brought by games however, is only a secondary concern. And the competition of culture itself is deeply dependent on economical development and how much money people will spend on it. You have more money and more technology, you make better things; this is the reason China is catching up or even taking the lead in fields of manufacturing and engineering, but still not able to make a lot of world-popular games (also because there are more cultural barrier in games than in consumer goods, for example most games popular in Western world are not popular in Japan). And government, though has censorship as a weapon, doesn’t really stop people from looking for better things–just look at how many Chinese players are using Steam right now.
Censorship itself, is sometimes just an excuse for redirecting the data flow, and an excuse they try to make consistent. But they will still give up censoring stuffs when the censorship will damage the integrity of the game. For example, they always hate skulls and skeletons for whatever reason and many references to skulls and skeletons are changed to something else (google for “Haunted Mines” and “鬼灵矿” and you will see an example of that), but they gave up on censoring Leoric in HotS.
A good example of this is what happened to PUBG. PUBG was a hot FPS game last year. Some people says it looked more like a sandbox game and always fun playing it. Some says when compared to Overwatch, you won’t have the same game played over and over again, and five nice players screwed up by one idiot. In a nutshell, people liked it.
On October 27 2017 Chinese government published an article which deemed PUBG as “unhealthy for young people, against socialist core values”, declared “games of this genre will have difficulty gaining approval to operate” and discouraged game developers and platforms to do anything developing or promoting game of this genre.
在游戏工委官网上，官方发布了《对“大逃杀”类游戏总局业务主管部门的基本态度》一文，文中指出，广电总局认为《绝地求生》等同类型游戏“严重偏离我国社会主义核心价值观和中华民族的传统文化习惯与道德规范，不利于青少年消费者的身心健康。”并对此类型游戏“明确持有否定态度，将难以获得出版运营许可。”
基于广电总局的意见，游戏工委建议“国内游戏企业不宜安排研发、引进此类游戏，不提倡以测试此类游戏方式吸引用户。同时，电竞、直播等平台也不应为此类游戏提供宣传、推广等服务。”
It sounds very harsh, but guess what actually happened after that?
There soon came other similar games developed by Chinese companies, like Knives Out-荒野行动 by Netease. On November 22 Tencent announced they are going to release the Chinese PUBG in the future. People are still playing this game, still making streams and videos of this game. The most important difference is perhaps they play the Chinese version of this game and thus keep the data within China.
And the only censorship I see are green blood, changing the backstory of the game from “kill each other until the last one/team standing” to “a military exercise aimed at selecting strong soldier(s) for world peace”, and changing some wordings like from “kill” to “defeat”. Yeah, any adult is able to de-censor it by brain.
Motto of this story is that you can censor things, but instead of fighting a popular culture with high demand, you can just find a local publisher, grab your data and move on. Still, if the game is too much about data, like Pokemon Go, there is no easy way to pull it through.
Now speaking of EVE. EVE’s playerbase, though somehow unique and deviant, is still way too small for government to care, in my opinion. But sometimes “don’t care” actually means not doing anything to your game, including approving your game’s new patch.
There had been censorships on Serenity in the past, but it only changes some names:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/zfyyh/latest_mindblowing_game_update_from_serenity/
If I were to name something they still don’t like, I’d say the idea of “clones” and corpses in space may look disturbing to some eyes. But there are still acceptable corpses after censorship, for example Diablo III.
Example of how censorship is done:
Maybe CCP can make some alternative lore if the need arise. Another more difficult thing is the gameplay itself, which allows you to “be as evil as you can”. There are no less ranting from people getting killed/scammed in tieba than in this forum. Many people, not only me, had talked about all those stuffs.
Beside all those said, another thing I would like to mention, is that if Serenity closes without transfering to another Chinese publisher, it will make EVE a “foreign game” to China. This could have political repercussions on how people and governments view this game.
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I’ll try get you an updated list of TQ. But I am pretty sure the answer will be no, since TQ has updated tons and afaik Serenity is lagging behind by faaaaaar. But I could be mistaken.
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Well, thanks for your work! I think if the numbers of corresponding patchs are different it could mean the server had more difference than the language they plug inside the language interface.
Ignore the first couple of repetative version numbers in the olden days, I seem to recall that was due to the version reporting old version at downtime and it’s really hard to filter out stuff.
And just as I “felt” TQ updates constantly, Serenity does not.
/c
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Looks like the last number of the version number only represents the chronological order of a patch, not how up-to date the server is, unless they have some way to make a server with 16.02.127**** content to behave mostly like a 14.08.******* server, which seems quite improbable.
“Nuclear Weapons” changed to “Core Weapons”
Why not “Indispensable Weapons”? We are fighting for peace or what? 
Depends really, content can be disabled, as in, they can prevent you from seeing things on the market or from seeding blueprints, they could easily just update and for example, not seed any of the citadel prints while disabling the market groups and BP seeding, which would essentially mean they didn’t exist, balance changes are the same deal as they can just pick and choose what they end up at, some features like the updated map would be harder to remove, i mean its not “impossible” but its very time consuming and generally speaking not worth the effort
Once you get famous, you’ll just be blamed for everything even if you do nothing and say nothing 
One evidence against this hypothesis is the speeding exploit I mentioned in post #93. It was discovered around August 2016 and stayed in Serenity for 1.5 years until someone killed a ship using such exploit. This shouldn’t happen if Serenity is actually running an “up to date but redacted” version of the TQ server.
I never said serenity “was” running that just that it could be done if they wanted to put the effort in to it
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Looks like Fraternity had less than 15 pilots attending Fanfest.
Hilmar had spent 1 minute 35 seconds(37:54-38:29) talking about Serenity on Fanfest:
I like to take a moment right now for our players on Serenity. CCP has a huge interest and commitment to China. The co-existence of Tranquility and Serenity is something I cared about very deeply personally. We know that some of our Chinese players have had their concerns in the past, but I want to reassure you that the future of Serenity is looking incredibly strong. For legal reasons I can’t really go into much detail right now, but I’m hoping, well, I’m not hoping --we will be sharing by the end of the year more details on/about the futures for Serenity. But it is really looking quite strong.
you mean bots have been reduced.
Maybe, there was a sharp decline around December last year.
https://www.luobotekong.com/2018/03/serenity-2018.html
https://m.weibo.cn/status/4228355538036337
Someone on weibo noticed that the EVE Serenity logo shown on Fanfest opening actually belongs to CDC era and is never used by Tiancity. Maybe CCP wants to emphasize the history of Serenity as a whole, not only the years of Tiancity.
The logo on fanfest:
Logo used by CDC:http://web.archive.org/web/20120201130255/http://www.eve-online.com.cn:80/
Logos used by Tiancity at different versions of their home page:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120731095511/http://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/v2/
http://web.archive.org/web/20140214212456/http://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/v3/
http://web.archive.org/web/20140915080715/http://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/v5/
http://web.archive.org/web/20150315054113/http://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/v6/
http://web.archive.org/web/20170921061830/https://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/v7/
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CCP Guard answering a few questions by a Chinese player:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av22249910
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It had been about 1 week since Fanfest, but Tiancity and its partners’ effort in promoting Fanfest or EVE itself was surprisingly low for a promised future “looking incredibly strong”. Maybe it won’t be their future anymore?
Do a google search on “eve fanfest 2018” on Chinese results, compare the results with other years’ results and you will see. There is not one single article dedicated to the 2018 Fanfest on Tiancity’s EVE news page. The Fanfest is only briefly mentioned in a previous article on CCP’s new year’s blessings which I mentioned in post #84. I decided to dig deeper into the history of Tiancity’s coverage on past Fanfests and the finding is quite convincing. This decline cannot be attributed only to the decline of traditional media. Tiancity might be cutting staff and budget just like what CCP has been doing, or worse, terminating their contract. Despite that, Serenity population is still slightly increasing in the past 3 months as shown on eve-offline.net, which may be a ground for Hilmar’s claim that Serenity is going strong.
The data I collected is shown below:
Tiancity had updated their homepage several times and purged the article list in each update so I have do dig web.archive.org. But most pages on eve.tiancity.com is still accessible by a link, though some resources on event pages are lost.
2018(Fanfest on April 13-15): No Tiancity article dedicated to Fanfest 2018. One article on 17173 about a wedding on this Fanfest, but not linked on Tiancity site.
2017(Fanfest on April 6-8): 1 article on March 30 on the upcoming Fanfest and a link to an interview between Sina games and Andie Nordgren on April 20.
2016(Fanfest on April 21-23): One Fanfest event page, 1 article on April 15 on the upcoming Fanfest. 1 article about some stamp collectibles on March 3.
2015(Fanfest on April 19-21): One Fanfest event page, 1 article on March 18 on the upcoming Fanfest, 1 article on March 26 summarizing the Fanfest.
Notable events include a meeting between President of Iceland and Chinese players, and the Worlds Collide tournament.
2014(Fanfest on May 1-3): 1 article on April 30 on the upcoming Fanfest, 4 links to 17173 articles on EVE(http://news.17173.com/content/2014-04-29/20140429092342489.shtml ,etc.). The EVE monument was erected on that Fanfest too. Lots of devblogs around that time. The biggest battle in Serenity history, the Battle of 49-U6U took place on March 25, about one month prior to the fanfest.
2013(Fanfest on April 25-27): The first time they created a Fanfest event page, 1 article on May 2 summarizing the Fanfest, 2 17173 links, one about Fanfest in general(link is not working properly, tell me any alternatives if you can), one about a wedding on the Fanfest. A player gathering organized by Tiancity took place on April 13 in Beijing “comparable in size to EVE Fanfest” as CCP says.
2012(Fanfest on March 22-24): The previous publisher CDC announced their contract is ending on January 17, set the game to free-to-play on February 1 and closed Chinese EVE on March 31(404,您访问的页面已经不存在!). Tiancity announced that they are taking over the game on February 21 and opened the game on June 28. There weren’t any articles about Fanfest, probably because they are still busy setting up the game.
Another evidence is Tiancity’s EVE tournaments.
Tiancity had hold 5 tournaments named “联盟精英争霸赛” (first one in 2012 named “联想异能者杯联盟精英争霸赛”) in the past. They usually start in May or June and lasts for several months. The champion of 2014 played in the Worlds Collide tournament.
In 2017 the 6th torunament was replaced by TGG tournament, a tournament involved multiple games published by Tiancity. And the extent of tournament was changed from a month long tournament of many teams to an exhibition game consists of 2 5-man teams(https://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/article/2017/06/13/52639.html)
The video:http://gameinns.com/watch/894637
It looks like a staged match rather than a serious match. See 26:40. Local reads:
TGG EVE 003 > 8 minutes already, feed one Jackdaw
TGG EVE 002 > Let the Hyperion kill one
TGG EVE 010 > Hyperion kill the small ships
TGG EVE 004 > Kill the two small ships
It is not sure whether they will hold any tournament this year.
Other eve related sites show a similar pattern:
Last update on https://news.ceve-market.org/ is about fanfest 2017.
Last update on http://eve.duowan.com/ is about fanfest 2017 too.
https://m.weibo.cn/u/2429531042 still active.
微博
If a change of publisher is gonna happen at the end of this year is the case, we can estimate the approximate timeline by the timeline of last publisher change. We should expect Tiancity to release information around June. A detailed article in both languages about last publisher transfer written by Heimdall/Horacex can be found here:https://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/article/2012/12/18/38758.html
tldr:
The Heimdall/Horacex article said “In 2011, our licensing agreement with CDC, which had at that time acquired Optic Communications, was going to expire in July”. They also mentioned “After months of discussions with potential partners, we found TianCity to be the right publisher to bring EVE to the next level of success”.
Tiancity had onlined 2012.tiancity.com no later than Oct 21st 2011, a promotion site to a upcoming game later revealed as EVE, using many 2012 memes.
首頁 | 遊戲基地 Gamebase
CDC announced their contract termination on Jan 17th 2012. Customer support on their side ended on Jun 30th. Though they did not immediately announce that Tiancity would be the next publisher, there were several evidences/leaks hinting at Tiancity, like https://site.douban.com/127451/widget/notes/5060459/note/196373905/
They said they would shut down the server on Mar 31st 2012. Their FAQ:
CCP Names TianCity Exclusive EVE Online Publisher for Mainland China on Feb 24th.
June 28th 2012 was regarded by most Chinese players as the beginning of Tiancity era.
https://eve.tiancity.com/homepage/article/2012/06/28/36246.html
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