Tower down (in a good way)

Over the last, oh say, 6 months or so I've been running my high sec research tower.  It finally got to the end of it's run.  I.e. Everything I wanted researched was researched to the levels I wanted them to be.  Mostly this means up to 20ME and 20PE unless "perfect" happens before those values.  The PE levels were more on the off chance CCP wakes up and notices that the manufacturing durations have very little effect on the price of any manufactured goods and decide "Oh, hey Dr. E was looking for more isk sinks".

Increasing the isk cost of high sec manufacturing/research/copy slots by a factor of 10 or so would do wonders to putting towers (aka targets) in space, not to mention balance risk and reward - you risk a tower - you get rewarded by reduced manufacturing costs and some other pilot(s) gets the isk for the fuel instead of the NPCs.

But would CCP do this?  I think not.  Call me a pessimist at the moment but that looks like a rather straight forward minor change (we're only changing the rates here - no art assets, no new mechanism) that would have a lot of the effects CCP purports to say they are looking for.  When something this obvious is being ignored - especially after devs have pointed out in the past that they would like to increase the impact of PE on cost (CCP Chronotis back in the day), it makes me question what exactly they are looking for instead of what they say they are looking for.

Disturbance in the force

I've been hearing disturbing rumors.  Apparently the revamp of the T1 frigates is not going well.  This saddens me as I was particularly looking forward to the "making relevant" of the T1 frigates, destroyers and cruisers.  I was looking forward to these changes in Inferno.  Bummer.

Honestly there's a few things we could REALY use in a T1 frigate revamp (not to mention a cruiser revamp).  The first element is roles.  All T1 frigates are supposed to be fairly generic.  And usable right away... BUT... I'm of the opinion that they need to give a hint of direction by their bonuses and their usage.  This means, for each faction, there needs to be:

1 T1 Interceptor Frigate
1 Mining/Cargo Frigate
1 Astrometrics/Drone Frigate
1 Missile/Skirmish Frigate (long range)
1 Main combat Frigate (short range)
1 EWAR Frigate

A few notes: 
1) separate the cargo from the astrometrics frigates and put it in the mining frigates.  Newbies should not have to deal with the issues of jet-can mining - they should graduate into that when they hit barges and exhumers.  All mining cruisers and frigates need a serious boost in cargo space.  These should be considered to be "entrance haulers" almost.  This has the advantage of removing a large part of the temptation to can flip in newbie systems (which is currently a ban-able offense).  The point is to change the ratio of mining to travel time at the frigate/cruiser level so it doesn't make sense to use a hauler - leave that complication for the miners who graduate into barges.  You'll get a lot less rage quits that way.

2) Make the astrometrics carriers into true drone carriers and get rid of most of their cargo space.

3) optimize the bonuses of the main combat frigate for short range and the main skirmish frigate for long range.  Side Note:  UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO SERIOUSLY BOOST WEAPONS BONUSES - NO FUCKING SPLIT WEAPONS SYSTEMS.

4) Newbie interceptors.  Bonus to MWD sig bloom, Bonus to scram range.  MORE SLOTS.  All of these need at least two-3 mids and 2-3 lows.  Propulsion/Tackle/Prop mods.  You don't need to bring em up to the T2 level but make em usable and make it so that it's not a refit of the e-war frigate that's considered the serious T1 interceptor variant (Vigil I'm looking at you)

5) EWAR balance between the factions is a perennial problem.  You seriously need to revamp the EWAR side of things before you can balance the ships involved.

What's missing is the logistics at the frigate level - due to the lack of destroyers and what not I'd seriously consider that class for the missing logistics branch on the frigate sized tree.  Logistics is a whole other problem but I won't go into in this post since it deals with frigates. 

Mind you all the above is strictly my own opinion and is what I'd like to see.  Don't expect to see any of that though.  Oh well.