EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

First, motherships or 'supercarriers'. The name 'supercarrier' is laughably bad, but no one has yet suggested a better one, such as 'assault carrier' or the like. Please, for god's sakes, someone come up with a catchy name; supercarrier is so embarrassing, everyone will simply call them motherships, much as 'HACs' exist instead of 'Heavy Assault Ships'. Fighter-Bombers have enormous sex appeal, with very cool models, and tear up capitals but good. It's impossible to fit both a full rack of Bombers and Fighters, unless you happen to have a Nyx - which is about the only advantage Gallente have going for them these days out of their entire ship line.

Titans seem to have been tweaked into monstrous anticapital death machines; for a time on SiSi they could swat battleships on the test server down like flies, and wisely this has been nerfed. Piloting a titan is now a lot like toodling around in a barely mobile station, given how many hp they have; unleashing single-target doomsdays every few minutes was a visceral thrill, and that's without the new graphics.

Regular capitals are at last getting some love, with short-range dreadnaught weaponry being adjusted at last to be able to hit POSes, something that only took how many years to implement? Phoenixes at last get citadel cruise launchers. And, of course, the Moros is getting nerfed. Note to devs: Gallente still suck ass across the board, with the exception of a bare few ships.

The battle environment will change substantially after these changes go live. Some have predicted that the removal of AoE doomsdays will see an era where carriers dominate and battleships are relegated to a second tier behind HACs. Some have also suggested that we will see a return to the pre-Titan era, where fleets of glass-cannon battleship snipers danced at 250km. Neither of these views is correct. Carriers have a relatively short engagement envelope given the delays in fighter fight; the best counter to a carrier blob remains a battleship fleet at range. "Classic" sniping fleets from the 2005 era will probably never truly return, because in those days there were no interdictors; on the modern battlefield, all it takes is one well-placed bubble and a sniping fleet is mired. The good news is that we've already seen a glimpse of Doomsday-free fleet battles; in late 2008 there was a patch which rendered Titans bugged and temporarily useless, and several alliances had a chance to square off in major engagements without that threat hanging over their head. It was an incredibly destructive slugfest, the kind of hours-long hairball that leaves hundreds of wrecks on each side, won the 'hard way' without any I-win buttons.  If Dominion fights are anything like that, we'll be in a golden era. 

The most unpredictable area of nullsec change will be to the economy. CCP has a somewhat mixed record on economic prediction, and they intend to nerf alliance income from R64 moon goo while at the same time increasing income from ratting taxes and renters. The R64 nerf will apparently come in the form of a redistribution of moon products used in t2 items, with more emphasis on the lower and mid-range moons. Alchemy is getting a 4x buff, further adding to the supply of R64 goo. In theory, system upgrades will provide increases ratting and mining in 0.0, allowing alliances to get more from taxes, but if this adjustment is out of balance with the R64 nerf, chaos will ensue. The biggest variable in this mess will be the sov upkeep costs, which no one has any idea about yet. Even without solid data, the market has already been thrown into chaos as alliances are venting their R64 stockpiles on the market, causing promethium, dysprosium and cadmium (a core alchemy reactant) to freefall in value.

Just as market speculation has kicked in as the patch nears, alliances are beginning to seriously maneuver their positions to prepare for the post-Dominion environment. Everyone anticipates an outbreak of war on December 1st, and because of this many alliances are choosing to preemptively strike their enemies ahead of time. Things are getting interesting again.