EVE Online's Theme For Q1 2020 Is Fight Or Flight

As CCP Burger announced at EVE Vegas last October, the theme for the first quarter of 2020 is "Fight or Flight".

From the EVE Vegas 2019 Keynote

Yesterday a news article that should wind up on the launcher popped up, giving a little less detail than I hoped.

EVE Online will be splitting the year into four sections - Quadrants - that will allow for releases, events, offers and more to exist within a given theme for that period of time. The first of these Quadrants for 2020 will be "Fight or Flight" starting 16 January, which will be themed around PvP in EVE, and will offer explosive rewards, challenges and changes!

A major benefit of Quadrants will be that they will allow work and efforts to be focused throughout the year with a more regular cadence. Each Quadrant may contain seasonal events, balance changes and game health improvements, permanent meta changes, challenges and rewards that could be themed, for example, around a particular style of gameplay, or any aspect of EVE.

Don't get me wrong. I like that CCP has abandoned the idea of springing everything as a total surprise on the players. As I wrote three months ago:

An important lesson I hope CCP learned from the "Chaos Era" is that EVE players do not like being treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed fertilizer). The new framework for the roadmap seems a concession for players' desire for knowledge. Starting at the beginning of 2020, players will receive the names and theme's for the upcoming three months, and the name of the theme for the following quarter. 

Then again, has CCP really abandoned the idea of springing big surprises on players? On Monday, CCP Dopamine announced on the forums the Singularity test shard is closed to the public. Of course, if CCP is practicing a deployment that involves a major change, like taking out the POS code, to see what breaks, we should applaud the QA effort.