The Safe Spot — Episode 8: "Our EVE Fanfest 2026 reaction"

This one's our reaction episode to EVE Fanfest 2026, which wrapped up the day before we recorded. Rixx and I sat down Sunday evening to talk through everything — the Polaris Award he picked up while not even being in Iceland, the Cradle of War reveal, the Google DeepMind sit-down, where Vanguard and Frontier are headed, and a pile of asides along the way. 

It's a long one, but a good one. 

Pour something cold (or hot, in Rixx's case) and dig in.😂

Show Notes / Table of Contents

1. Welcome back to the Safe Spot — Rixx and I open the episode, flag that this is our Fanfest 2026 reaction show, and joke about needing a drinking game for every time someone says "Fenris Creations" instead of CCP, or was it the other way around. Sorry, I've been drinking way to early tonight! 
   
   
2. Rixx's Polaris Award and the lead-up — The big news: Rixx took home a Polaris Award for lifetime contribution to EVE, and we dig into the strange road to get there — his original confusion about being left off the Creator Awards shortlist back in March, the passionate blog post I wrote at the time, the cryptic DM from FC Convict the day before Fanfest hinting he should "definitely" tune in Saturday at 19:00, and a full day of wallowing in his own anxieties before the ceremony — t'amber also winning a Polaris, deservedly, for everything he's done with the ship-scanning designer platform that helped Rixx with his fan art way back in 2014–2015 — and a shout-out to the literal hundreds of people who reached out through Bluesky, Discord, Facebook, and everywhere else with congratulations and stories.
   
   
3. How far back we go — A quick walk down memory lane: a screenshot contest Rixx ran where I won using shots from sneaking inside a POS shield to photograph an Avatar Titan, plus his old Battle Clinic win with a carved pumpkin that said "Rixx is in local." Probably 2008 or 2009. We've been at this a while.
   
   
4. Fanfest then vs. Fanfest now — My first Fanfest was 2008 at a much smaller venue (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, EVE Fanfest Memorabilia Giveaway, EVE Fanfest 2008 Blues) before Eve Vanguard or Frontier or any of it existed, so coming back this year (watching from home) the production quality felt like a different league entirely — Rixx, who's been going every year since 2014, walks me through what you actually miss on the stream: the hallway conversations, the hugs, putting faces to names, the bumping-into-people-you-haven't-seen-in-years stuff that's the real heart of Fanfest — which is also why I just bought my ticket for 2027.
   
   
5. Hosts and vibe of the stream — Quick appreciation for the between-session hosts (Yrsta, Lauru, Toxic, Oz, and the rest), how well FC Convict held the Creator Awards together, and how some of the old geeky charm — the friendly heckling, devs snapping back at players, players hassling devs — is still very much intact under all the polish.
   
   
6. Cradle of War and factional warfare — Rixx is genuinely pumped for this one. We get into the new Military Campaigns, the four empires getting more dynamic personalities, new hubs, and the new Navy Destroyers and Plexes (interceptor-only, solo-only, battlecruiser-only) — what it might mean for Stay Frosty and low-sec PvP — and the broader question of whether this finally hits the right balance between hand-holding newbros and pushing them out the door into the real game.
   
   
7. The newbro story — A classic EVE-in-a-nutshell: a Stay Frosty pilot tries to gank a month-old miner in a Pioneer, the miner escapes, they chat, and the Stay Frosty pilot gives him 60 million ISK out of the kindness of his heart to buy a special mining ship. Within an hour, a different Stay Frosty pilot blows him up in it. The miner has of course promised revenge. He'll never come back. They never do.
   
   
8. The Art Department and citadels — Why I'm so glued to the art team's work — the visuals are what pulled me into EVE in the first place — and Rixx tipping me off that the gorgeous docking animation I'd been geeking out about is on the player-built citadels, not the new air stations. There's a public Keepstar in Amamake (Minmatar lowsec) if you want to see it yourself, and Rixx predicting (correctly, again) that the first question at the Q&A would be about ship customization.
   
   
9. EVE Vanguard — It's finally starting to feel like a real game. We get into how Fenris seems to have learned the lesson from Dust 514: don't try to force the two games to mesh, just let them share the universe — different audiences, same New Eden — and that Operation Avalon, the first alpha playtest, runs July 7–20 on Steam or via the Eve launcher. I'll be checking it out. And you should definitely watch the Operation Avalon Details Reveal, with FC Collins & FC Rattati, freshly back from Fanfest.
   
   
10. The "514" mystery solved on air — Neither of us could remember what Dust 514 actually stood for. Google AI saved us mid-podcast: it's a nod to the Shanghai devs, an auspicious date, and a play on the Mandarin phrase "I don't want to die" — a reference to capsuleer immortality.
    
    
11. EVE Frontier — Rixx is out: it's just too much like EVE for him, and if he's going to play a sandbox space game he'd rather just be playing EVE. I'm still scratching my head on it too — the survivalist vibe gives me a claustrophobic feeling every time I log in, and I came back to EVE for the community, not to be alone in the dark. We do appreciate the premise (thousands of years post-New Eden, our stuff as ancient ruins) and the open-source modding angle, even if neither of us is a modder — and we raise the obvious question of what happens when someone mods Frontier in a way that ruins your experience and you don't even know they did it.
    
    
12. The Google DeepMind sit-down — Hilmar's fireside chat with Adrian Bolton was — by design — kind of boring, and that's exactly what should have eased everyone's nerves: this is strictly a research collaboration, with maybe something useful three-to-five years out — Hilmar's track record of attaching EVE to big partners (Sony for VR back in the day, now Google) is a real strength — and what excites me is the possibility of AI eventually putting some real intelligence into NPCs that currently just run pre-programmed scripts. Also: the right answer to "what if the AI learned to win EVE?" is that you can't win EVE.
    
    
13. What we're still waiting to sink our teeth into — Cautiously optimistic across the board, especially on Exordium and the new empire systems with titles, achievements, and the empire-progress hub. The expansion doesn't drop until June 9th, this is the first of a three-arc Theatres of War saga, and a lot of it is trust-us-it'll-work until we can actually play it. One interesting wrinkle: new players may not have to pick a race right away anymore. I wish I'd had that option — I rolled Caldari at random.
    
    
14. Wrap-up and the closing song — Two thumbs up from a freshly minted Polaris Award winner, see you in Iceland next year — and Rixx teases the outro track, which he pivoted at the last minute to something factional-warfare-themed in honor of this episode.

Where to find us! 

If you enjoyed this episode, you can catch The Safe Spot wherever you get your podcasts — find us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Past episodes and full show notes are up on the blog at crazykinux.ca. And if you're watching on YouTube, do us a solid — like, subscribe, and drop a comment. It helps more than you think.

Fly safe. o7