48 Hours

A deluge of CCP contact in the past couple of days.

It started off with CCP Zymurgist sending all the bloggers a mail stating they'll do more in the future to promote the blogs, details to be announced in the near future.

I see that as a double edged sword, more readers would be nice, but the horror of hordes descending upon a small blog like locusts on a farmers field gives me some pause.

Then overnight we have the dev blogs from CCP Hellmar and CCP Zulu.

Linked for your viewing pleasure.

Paraphrasing CCP Hellmar's blog it essentially says that he screwed up, lost focus, tried to do too much etc etc. While I believe it to be a genuine message we know from bitter experience that actions mean much more than words so we'll wait and see. However it's a good reboot to build upon.

The more interesting of the two dev blogs is the one from CCP Zulu, showing my racial bias I'll cherry pick the announced features for the Winter (Summer for me) expansion.

Hybrid weapons balancing

Factional warfare

Assault ships

Capital ship balancing

New T2 modules

New EWAR-Drones

T2 Rigs manufacturing

Time dilation

So in order we may see Gallente, especially short range ships, become a force once again. Couldn't come soon enough as rust proofing my Minmater ships is proving expensive.

Factional warfare re-balance, or addition, or something? Many people moan about factional warfare so at a guess I'd say CCP will make it more relevant?

Assault ships! Even more cryptic than the above. A re-balance maybe?

Capital ship balancing could not come soon enough. Blobs of titans, supercaps, etc swarming around the seedier areas of New Eden (I don't mean Jita) has ruined null sec warfare. Re-balance the merde out of them I say.

New T2 modules and EWAR-Drones. Cool.

T2 Rigs manufacturing. Well the only way this can go is to make them cheaper to make.

Finally we come to time dilation. To combat against players making the blog ever bigger it will slow the combat down intentionally and making sure most if not all of the server calls are processed properly. Your twelve second module may take twenty four seconds to activate but it will (should) activate every time, compared to the lottery it is now. Will this work? Time will tell.

So the "Winter" expansion will be with us "well before Christmas" according to the dev blog.

In my land of houses with no chimneys, highways named "Bruce" and local Santa's almost dying from heat stroke it cannot come soon enough.