The megaevent of the year has kicked off and the first day has ended with the keynote showcasing future changes and updates coming to New Eden.

As we may have noticed, CCP focused a lot of their recent efforts into rebuilding the NPE with numerous small changes, fixes and additions into all aspects of early gameplay. From UI, tutorials, tooltips and first missions. They claim this made a noticeable change in player retention and they will continue to do so which really is a great thing for pretty much everyone.

The keynote continues to showcase some new concepts of Aura which now gets a full 3D model with cool animations that will most probably get implemented for player characters as well.

EVE Portal, the mobile companion app for EVE: Online, is also going to get new updates that will accompany the ones coming into the game as well. The first thing on the list is adding a new and improved wallet that will show all your income and currency in one place. Be it ISK, PLEX or Loyalty points. This update will also include a global PLEX hub which will enable people to trade PLEX from within the app itself.

Challenges survey

Once again, CCP took a survey to the players and, unsurprisingly, botting is at the top of the list followed by wealth inequality. CCP Larrakin follows up with a short presentation on the botting system they use and the way ingame reports are handled claiming their „Law and Order“ team banned over 100 trillions of ISK in both liquid ISK and assets!

Speaking of statistics, the recent Blackout event, or as they call it, the „Chaos era“ caused a lot of ruckus between players (some of which claimed to unsub 20+ accounts lol, because that’s true). However, even though there was a significant drop in login numbers, the actual PvP numbers did not change… What did change is the number of cheaters – a whopping 50%!

Future updates and 2020 roadmap

Now, this is something a lot of bittervets found as the next reason “EVE is dead”. CCP Burger showed us the way they plan working on the game in the future and it consists of two sections. The 2020 roadmap is divided into 4 quadrants, each of which will come with its own theme. Unfortunately, nothing major was revelled just yet, except that we will know the details of the first quadrant in December 2019 / January 2020 including some details about the next one. This means that starting 2020, we should know exactly what CCP plans for the game for at least the next 6-8 months.

What we do know right now is how they plan to spend their time until the end of the current year. Enter Team Talos – a dedicated development team working on “challenging the core” of EVE. They plan pushing new changes every two weeks and then evaluate how that impacted the game and the players.

We got the first Team Talos update recently (warp-drive changes), and we already know about the next one coming in a few days. Interceptors are getting an update (5% damage increase per level + fitting changes) which aims to reinvigorate the wolfpacks of old, while Assault Frigates will be getting hit by a speed nerf.

The upcoming Trick-or-Treat Halloween event will also include a 100% drop rate of all player ships destroyed which should encourage more PVP and certainly end up with some very blingy killmails!

The next update will be released in November and it’s called “Beat around the boosh” with more info later on today and new version of player bookmarks!