Oveur discusses the 4557 Build in his latest blog entry, with insight into the reasoning behind dropping support for Win98 (duh! ;-) ), Agent System Changes, and 'the future'.

I had been reading the forums for patch feedback and such and after responding to a couple of threads, I think it's a good idea I gather everything into a blog, not only for posterity but simply because a lot of people don't read the forums at all, let alone a thread with a dev answer deep inside it.

Why patch Dragon now when the cluster is having so many problems?

We're patching Dragon exactly because of the many problems plaguing Tranquility. Dragon is the biggest code-only fix, improvement and optimization patch we have done to Tranquility in years.

As a result of the extensive work done in the code, (total code is now about a million lines), we know there are going to be deployment problems. Veterans of EVE know this as "Patch Day Syndrome".

Hit the full blog entry over at the Official EVE Online website.