Phoebe: Hitting this out one of the park

The dev blog on the full changes coming in Phoebe was just released, and I got to say, it hits it out of the freaking park. It's not just the quality of changes, but the quantity as well--approaching or even surpassing, I would say, some of the full "expansions" EVE has had. Dev blogs on many of the changes haven't even been released yet, including multi-sell ability, rebalancing of exploration rewards and the addition of null sec data/relic sites to class 1-3 wormholes, and some much needed removal on restricts with trial accounts...like trail account players being allowed into faction war, a change I've been suggesting for a while now. In addition, the invention changes are coming, which I am hugely excited about, having recently gotten into industry and invention.

I was planning on doing a sort of review of the new "release cycle" after Phoebe, particularly looking at whether the release cycle would bring more changes to the game than expansions, or less. I am a big fan of Hyperion and Oceanus, but I was getting worried about the long-term sustainability of such releases. Phoebe, however, puts those concerns to rest: If you look at all the changes in the past three releases with Phoebe included, there should be no doubt that Hyperion+Oceanus+Phoebe significantly surpasses the amount of content we would have seen in the usual winter expansion (which would be released roughly around the time Phoebe is coming). Plus, much of the content has already been iterated on and looks to keep getting iterated on--something that, with an expansion cycle, we wouldn't have seen until the following point release a few months after the winter expansion, and maybe not even then given that CCP has a history of releasing content and simply moving on.

What we haven't seen a lot of, though, is ship rebalancing, but this is partly explained by the new module rebalance work (which I am also a huge fan of thus far) and the big null sec project. However, with the current "research" event going on, and the comment at the start of the dev blog that "And this is not even everything, we have a few more things that are likely to make it in," there's hope that we might still see either a T3 rebalance, or the introduction of new T3 ships or modules (and the latter would still suggest that a T3 rebalance was approaching). The nerf to bombers on the test server also suggests that a broader bomber rebalance is coming.