The upcoming expansion

Well, I've been fairly quiet the last two weeks. I have however been following the developments on Sisi. For all the hue and cry about certain changes, Sisi is serving it's purpose allowing the more proactive members of the community to poke holes in CCP's design.

The most proactive of course have been driving the massive market speculation in T2 materials we've been seeing the last few weeks. For the more involved in the T2 marketplace, I highly advise at least reading Akita T's number crunching post that tries to estimate the eventual migration of the T2 materials prices. Of course you need to take any pronouncement on the MD forums with a bag of rock salt (after all the MD forum is rife with scams). But still the speculation that is running rampant is fun to observe from a distance.

There should be little change on the T3 front this update since it's mostly focused on 0.0 and it's mechanics. These changes are huge and will significantly impact life in 0.0 for certain player groups. The first is logisticians. The true backbone of any land holding alliance were the guys who kept the towers fueled. This is not to say that towers won't still be necessary. They will, but they will go back to their original intent. Industrial or Military hard points. There should be an increase in moon mining towers. Especially since there will be a decrease of incidental "might as well plunk a moon mining module at this sov tower to offset some of the fuel costs".

There is speculation that this caused vast amounts of low end moon mud to hit the market causing vast over supplies of the low end moon products. Since there should be an increase in consumption of low end moon minerals with the upcoming T2 manufacturing changes, we'll have to see how that plays out in the market. I suspect that in the end low end moon minerals will settle at close to their production costs with everything else being more profitable and the new bottleneck items being more valuable than the old R64 moon goo.

We'll have to see what style of tower gains currency for defending important items like sov markers, cyno beacons, bridges and cyno jammers. I'm not sure which would be better, a dickstar (concentrated on ECM batteries) or a deathstar (offensive weapons).

On the fleet fight side of things, I suspect we'll be going back to fleet operations of a style not seen since the introduction of Titans. I've been told that things got interesting at one point when there was a patch that broke the doomday AOE weapon for a bit. I predict that full sized fleet battles will become much more drawn out affairs. I also predict that with the new sov system we're going to see a rise in the roaming gang which will necessitate a rise in the counter roaming gang.

There continues to be changes to the way Projectile weapons will work with the expansion. As someone pointed out: Minmatar ammo and gun choices look like they will become complex. We'll see how it all works out.

All in all it looks like this update (now less than 2 weeks away) will be the biggest impact expansion that eve has seen in a while. Definitely for the 0.0 boys. Apocrypha for all its success at providing alternate game play from the existing high/low/0.0 will not have affected as many people as this upcoming expansion will. Most of the changes we're going to see will have far reaching consequences for everyone in game. I'm pretty sure we'll get a better game out of it in the end, but as usual there will be a period of adjustment.

All in all I'm glad that CCP has chosen to take the bull by the horns on this one. As much as I want to see tech 3 frigates and modules (alluded to in the fanfest presentations as on the block for a post Dominion update) and as much as I want to see expansion on the wormhole content, these changes were a long time in coming. I'm also glad to see that we're seeing the emergence of parallel development projects within the framework of the EVE development team. This should allow minor improvements and continued addressing of changes outside the main focus of a specific expansion. For example even though this expansion is going to focus on 0.0, we're seeing the long awaited Projectile balancing also coming in this expansion. There was a point in time that when there was a major development, bug fixing and balancing would slip by the way side as the development resources were concentrated on new content.

I'm looking forward to the December 1st patch day. The changes in 0.0 should be profound.