I want the services hinted at to investors in South Korea proclaimed to the world at Fanfest. Services that the player base will love. Services that don't include selling ships in the EVE Online cash shop. Hopefully in the run-up to Fanfest in May CCP will start dropping information showing I'm completely wrong. But I have my doubts. I really, really do.
I really want CCP to make the first live Fanfest in 3 years something to remember. In past times, the run-up to the event involved hearing and reading about a lot of the content the developers planned to introduce at the yearly event. Hopefully Tuesday's news item is a taste of things to come, listing five areas of change coming soon to New Eden.
The first area involve nerfs to Upwell structure defenses. The nerfs are:
- Standup Point Defense Battery: Will now require ammunition along with a longer reload time.
- Standup Guided Bomb Launcher: Will hold fewer bombs and have a longer reload time.
- Standup Anti-Capital Missiles: Damage to be reduced.
- Standup Arcing Vorton Projectors: Will no longer have the ability to target subcapital ships. The projectors will lose the ability to headshot fleet commanders in a subcapital ship such as a Monitor.
The one buff involves increasing the missile speed of Standup Missiles to allow them to catch and damage subcapital ships.
The second area involves mining. After years of nerfs, the Rorqual is receiving a buff in the form of a new module. The industrial capital ship will soon have the ability to conduit jump 30 mining ships next to them, giving mining fleets greater operational range.
The third area involve buffs to subcapitals. The Proteus Tech 3 cruiser will receive more fitting room to allow for a better tank and full rack of blasters without the need to sacrifice a slot for a fitting module. And in response to recent battleship buffs, the Tech II bomber will receive reduced cooldowns for their bomb launchers.
In addition to the ship and module changes, CCP is introducing the Feature Preview system. From a separate dev blog published Tuesday:
As a part of our ongoing efforts to lay the foundations for EVE Online’s third decade and continually improve the world’s largest living work of science-fiction, we're happy to introduce the Feature Preview system – allowing players to opt-in and engage with complex features still undergoing active development, test driving them directly in the EVE client.
Our aim is to more fully incorporate feedback into our prototypical process by allowing you access to these features early while we design them. Your invaluable feedback on past features has already allowed us to improve and shape them into better additions to EVE – and this new way of testing will allow far more exposed development, enabling earlier chances for players to express important feedback while also allowing our team to gather information on how you play EVE and what will best aid you in that pursuit.
The preview system is available on Singularity and comes to Tranquility in April. The debut preview feature will be a UI unification project, aimed at improving consistency, creating a better onboarding experience for new players, and reducing cognitive load for all players. The features offered in the preview system are temporary and can be easily turned on and off. Your participation is optional, and it is important to note that the features you will be given access to will not be in their final form. We look forward to learning from what you, the players, think as we introduce new features and build the future of EVE Online hand-in-hand.
Finally, CCP will work on blueprint changes to faction ships, dreadnoughts, and capital ships, releasing their work in April before Fanfest.
Not everything is promising. We still have the specter of the developers introducing new RMT systems at Fanfest as we discovered in a Friday night news dump.
One of the topics for Fanfest is a new project that we’re in the middle of developing, that will transform these and any future packs - a paradigm where packs of this type will be supplied by players, ensuring that any ship we offer to new players through sales, will have origins from actual player work in New Eden: Made for new players, by veterans. This feature will also not only supply each ship from the player base but allow the community to influence which ships will be put in these packs.
Still, CCP seems on its way toward ... something. Hopefully, we continue to hear good things until CCP reveals all at Fanfest in the first week of May.
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