Now Comes The Hard Part

Crucible is a monster of an expansion. With new ships, the desire for new tools to blow other people to smithereens has been filled for the first time since Apocrypha. With engine trails and nebula, everything old is new again. Combined with V3, the game is beginning to genuinely resemble the rosiest of nostalgia tinted glasses. With dozens of interface tweaks and minor gameplay changes, Eve Online is gaining the most client functionality in ages. When the new balance factors are thrown into the mix, the dreaded era of Super Capital Ships Online might finally be coming to a close. Meanwhile, Dreadnoughts are returning to viability through more DPS and shorter siege timers. All told, Crucible is one of, if not the most, welcome, feature packed expansions in years and it's just days from being deployed. Congratulations on creating such a wonderful expansion, CCP; this is the first time I've felt excited for an expansion in years!

However, with the low hanging fruit out of the way, now comes the hard part.

While Crucible packs an amazing quantity of new features that improve the experience of playing Eve Online, it does not, nor was it ever capable of, dealing with some of the deep, underlying flaws of current game mechanics; there simply was not enough time to do so. The task that lies ahead for the task masters and game designers is to address the underlying causes of Eve's economic woes, the non-existence of Risk vs Reward, the ease of force projection, the doldrums of daily life in null security space, the limitations of modern player made infrastructure, the proliferation of outposts, and the difficulties in finding meaningful PVP across much of New Eden, among other problems.

These are not easy problems to solve. The community has been wrestling with most of these issues, in some form or another, for several years. Many potential solutions have been discussed ad-nausea, but there has not been an environment conducive towards putting new ideas for revised game mechanics into production at CCP for many years. Fortunately after the fallout of Monoclegate and the related dramas, the main stumbling blocks appear to have been pushed aside, allowing the designers a shot at delivering what they, and players alike, have all wanted to see done to make Eve Online the best game it can be. I'm looking forward to, and sincerely hope everyone's up to the challenge of, seeing CCP addressing the hard parts.

Good luck and God speed in this endeavor; it's not going to be easy!