FYI for everyone peering into their crystal balls (or just looking at what's on SiSi) - CCP has assured the CPM multiple times throughout the holiday season that 1.8 is still being planned out, and that no decisions have been made regarding even a feature list or approximate scope.

Yes, one could easily infer that 1.8 is going to be all about dropsuit bonus changes, or that it'll include new items, etc. etc.....but I cannot and will not guarantee that this is the case. CCP is undergoing a much larger planning process under the supervision of the new EP, CCP Rouge, who will speak about the larger direction of the game and where they want to take it once CCP has finished going through that process. This will take time, its not going to be next week, it may not even be this month......and all things considered the silence you're hearing from them about the future is completely appropriate given how deeply they're examining their own internal processes for building Dust.

This larger planning effort underway will have a big impact on what 1.8 looks like, whether its even called 1.8, when it releases, and what it'll have in it. The CPM does not have answers for any of this because its status is still "in planning" according to CCP. This isn't a situation where the CPM knows 1.8 contents and they're just NDA.....to our knowledge, 1.8 hasn't even finished being planned yet.

Yes, that's a hugely ambiguous and open-ended "status report", but its also because we have seen zero evidence that final decisions have actually been made regarding what will go in the next release. I'm not saying this to alarm people - like I said, the larger planning effort being overseen by CCP Rouge is VERY healthy and necessary, and their discretion until they've finished that process is completely appropriate. I'm not saying CCP is dropping the ball by not talking about the next release yet, its understandable given the context.

All that to say......feel free to respectfully provide feedback on the stuff you see on the test server, but at this time I have no reason personally to get fired up over these given what we know about where CCP is at with their planning. Yes, there was the ferroscale debacle before - but I really doubt this is an analogous situation. At the time Ferroscale plates leaked, CCP would have known exactly what was coming and been working on the next patch with purpose. This time around, I think its much more likely (until they tell us otherwise) that this is a case of designers needing to continue their work on projects with or without a 1.8 scoping, and dropsuit bonus problems being towards the top of their list.

The CPM discussed dropsuit bonuses extensively last summer, and many of our own suggestions are reflected in the general -direction- of these leaked bonus changes, so CCP is not working in a vacuum here. We may or may not agree on the specific details, but the broad strokes were already agreed upon internally for the most part, so I will give CCP some credit here for listening to our feedback and setting up a much more logical approach to suit bonus design.

I look forward to seeing how these evolve in the coming weeks/months, hopefully we'll still have plenty of time to fine tune details before they hit Tranquility.

o7