First glimpse at the winter 2012 expansion

EDIT: Proper Status Post for Winter Expansion is already up. Go check it for all confirmed changes in the coming expansion.

As Inferno has matured a little bit, CCP started to reveal pieces of information regarding the new winter expansion. It is not enough to write my usual “status” post yet, but the information released is already quite interesting.

Please mind that the numbers below are most likely not set in stone yet and are subject to change. The data are up-to-date on 21st of August.

• Frigate rebalancing

  Continuing the efforts started in Crucible and Inferno, CCP is re-balancing more frigates in order to make them role based (devs are calling this “tiericide”) in favor of the tier based approach. Back in 2003, when EVE was just released, putting ships in tiers made sense, but over time it caused people to fly the top-of-the-line ship, while ignoring the lower tier ships.

  Already Rebalanced:

  Combat frigates – short range brawlers: Tormentor, Punisher, Merlin, Incursus, Rifter
  Attack frigates– tech I ceptors: Executioner, Condor, Atron, Slasher

  In the winter expansion we will get:

  Disruption frigates – dev forum post here
  Weaker version of Electronic Attack Ships

  Comparison tables have been removed – please go to the “status” post instead

  Exploration frigates – dev forum post here

  They will receive an additional bonus to mini-professions, rather than just to probe scanning strength.

  Comparison tables have been removed – please go to the “status” post instead

  Logistic frigates – dev forum post here

  Along with ships rebalancing, small remote assistance modules will get a slight fitting boost as well.
  Maximum remote assistance range will be capped at 28,8km.

   Comparison tables have been removed – please go to the “status” post instead

  More Combat frigates – dev forum post here
  The Amarr have received two rebalanced combat frigates (Tormentor and Punisher) recently, so all the other races are getting a second combat frig to choose from as well.

• ORE Mining frigate

  While Navitas and Bantam will become logistic frigates, there is a need for a small scale, low-SP mining specific ship. The ORE Mining Frigate is still nameless, but we already know how it is going to look like:

  

• DUST 514 integration

  Some details have been speculated heavily by myself in this post, and by Blake from K162space here. According to this news item, CCP is currently working on moving DUST 514 to Singularity test server, which means we will be able to test the integration pretty soon. Players are however concerned by the fact, that CCP claims it takes several days of downtime to connect DUST and EVE Online. Even though the task is rather complicated, I am quite sure CCP would not allow such operation to last more than a couple of hours on Tranquility.

  

• Industry

  We can only guess what the winter expansion could bring here, because there is plenty of room for improvement. The recent addition of new alchemy reactions which allow bypassing Technetium was just the tip of the iceberg. We can probably expect some form of ring mining mentioned in the Fanfest keynote, or UI fixes and multitude of small improvements (especially for repeatable tasks). Another possible improvement could affect planning and tracking of an industry operation, which currently relies heavily on third party tools and Corporation API keys.

  Unfortunately at this point there is no solid source of information regarding Industry changes and we have to wait for a proper dev-blog. On a side note, I like Poetic Stanziel’s idea regarding Ring Mining in one of a his recent posts. Add some risk of ship destruction, and this can actually end up an exciting way to gather resources.

• Graphical changes

  New ship explosions as seen on edge-online.com and previously in one of the Fanfest keynotes (thanks for reminding about this, @wartzilla !)

• CREST API (speculation)

  This would probably be the cherry on the cake, because EVE API in its current form, even though very useful, is still lacking many features. For example, third party applications such as Aura can let you read EVE mail, but in order to send a reply, you have to log on to the game or use EVE Gate. CREST API aims to change that, and it will allow more of a read-write access to the game, rather than current read-only approach. So far CCP has only revealed Developer Preview of CREST documentation but it is lacking any specific details regarding what the new API will and will not allow to do. The devs made no promises on release date either.

• New modules (speculation)

  One of the famous-but-not-existing modules that were supposed to arrive in Inferno was Micro Jump Drive/Tactical Warp Drive – a module that would catapult a ship instantly about 100km forward. Since it did not make it for Inferno, we can still hope it will arrive in the winter expansion.

• New collectible ships (lot of speculation)

  Inferno 1.2 has brought a range of Catalyst variants, which will be most likely collectible ships (think of it like Interbus Shuttle or Iteron Mark IV Amastris Edition). I highly doubt CCP would add them as ships skins in the NeX store, but as long as there is no solid evidence to the contrary, we can’t dismiss it either. There is also a possibility that these ships could be available in specific corp LP stores. This way or another, the trend seems to already have started, and we can probably expect more collectible ship variants entering the game i nthe near future, allowing for unprecedented speculation (don’t know what I’m talking about? Just do a pricecheck on Iteron Mark IV Quafe Ultramarine Edition please).

• Graphical changes (pure speculation)

  Vagabond might get its frill back.