Eve....

I'm been swaying back and forth in mood and motivation at the thoughts of the next expansion, and Eve in general. Some things I thought were ok, others were 'meh' or ignored. A lot of what was presented is I think taking the game in a direction that I don't like. After reading a lot from the dev blogs and the media coverage I was left in information overload. I think there was too much analysis which lead onto too many what ifs.

Some things were cleared up for me from Eve Vegas and the commentary in the meta about what was shown there.

What has really cleared my mind and made me actually think better of the coming changes are the latest patch notes.
I dont' think I've seen a set of patch notes that've been laid out in the same way. Not just a wall of plain text bullet points but all the content explained in one go including videos dev blogs and forum links etc. That's not to say they were off the mark before but maybe it's just the inclusion of the embedded video's. Something has made it "better" in my mind this time around.
Maybe there was so much content coming, spread out over so many previous dev blogs for what seemed like such a long time, that having one official page with it all stated was a lot clearer for me...


https://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-eve-online-ascension/?utm_source=ingame&utm_medium=notification&utm_campaign=

As for the greater future of Eve I'm still not sure, I'm a lot less uneasy than I was. Could I be showing a little faith in CCP and the game, maybe, and that scares me.

What I'm still confused about are the coming "rewards". Both my "pre-Alpha" characters are fresh accounts with 2 months of free game time included. So a little bit of a special situation.
The latest update to clear the muddy waters has been of little help to my case.

https://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/update-to-celebratory-rewards/

The subscription-time page also states:

Maybe, just maybe, they will be seen as having "paid" month's.


Time (again) will tell....