On Friday the 2nd of October, EvE Online Updates page was swamped with a swath of new and upcoming features the months leading up to winter and into spring.
You can watch an overview of the upcoming update from CCP Seagull in the video below.
Some of the more interesting updates include the long awaited ‘Brain in a Box’ which is in essence a complete re-write of the entire way EvE calculates every individuals player skills. A massive change to a core EvE system. At the moment every time you move system, undock, dock, or explode the server is running calculations based on your skills and applying them to you and your ship. In turn this has an effect on every person who may be in systems that share the a single server node, particularly when large volumes of people are involved. Brain in a Box removes the reliance on the node that contains the solar systems to run the skill calculations and moves them onto a separate server to be handled independently. Every time you jump system, dock, undock, change ships, or get exploded, the recalculations the server node would normally need to do is handled somewhere else.
You can see more about this from the 2015 EvE Fanfest Presentation: Rewriting Old Dogma (below). This will at first result in a boost in server side performance for every day use, and it is also hinted at that this will also open up opportunities for future feature development. Possibly changes allowing EvE to have a more flexible and dynamic attribute (not those attributes!) system to allow introduction of new modules and features.
The Four New Tech II Destroyers will have defensive and speed bonuses, and very interestingly will be able to use area-of-affect Micro Jump Field Generators. This will allow any nearby ship to micro jump from one location to another without the use of a local micro jump drive or the mobile micro jump drive deployable. In theory, this ship could be used as an escape method for a fleet, or a means to disrupt an enemy formation. It will be interesting to see what the community makes of this new ship and its potential uses.
A foundation shaking change to the EvE meta is the introduction of falloff for Energy Neutralisers and Remote Repair Modules. This will effect the on grid dynamics of fleets as it will mean logistics ships will need to be closer to the main fleet to reach their optimal effectiveness, placing them within direct fire range of the enemy fleet.
The Winter updates also see a feast of changes to the graphical look of EvE. Including Ship Kill Marks, which will be added to your ships for every final blow you score with that ship, new engine effects, and finally: Battle-Ravaged Hulls where your ships will age the more damage they receive in battle and, the older they are, the older they look. You can see examples of this in the videos below.
These changes are of just some of the highlights, of which there is limited information, include:
