In game chat, especially the local chat channel, is important for at least two reasons. The first is basic intelligence on who is in your system, not including worm holes of course. Another reason is immersion. Seeing other pilots in local makes you feel the server is alive, other pilots are going about their business, and it helps greatly with game immersion.
The Abyss sites, Mutators and Triglavian ships were a huge change to Eve Online, and one that's still being worked out by the player base. The Abyss sites are a new and massive ISK tap, which is fantastic and also potentially terrible for the economy as it is inflationary. Mutators bring a random element to ship fitting, which can put some blur around the edges of those tried and true fits. Finally the Triglavian ships, possibly over powered, certainly interesting, and yet to be fully utilised by the player base.
Are we going to see any huge changes like those above in 2019?
Probably not.
In 2019 we should see the repair or restoration of the in game chat system. The continuing, and long overdue, re-balancing of the war declaration system. Various graphical changes, which will be mostly semi useless fluff. The introduction of the 64bit client, which will not provide any real change from the users point of view, at least initially. Maybe, just maybe, the replacement, or removal, of the old Player Owned Structures (POS), and the replacement of NPC stations.
What we will see is a slow increase in the amount of pilots online, this has already been happening. This should start filling up the high sec areas, as a fair percentage are new players to the game. With luck they'll start branching out into the low and null security space regions, and at some point, although maybe not in 2019, we could be back to the heady days of 2013 and over sixty thousand players online at a peak.
Sounds great!
How many of those were bots back then though?