The EVE Online EVE Insider Dev Blog has a letter to the EVE Online community from Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP, who confesses to recent missteps in the space MMOG brought about by hubris, and outlines plans to address the problems these have brought to the game. He states: "Somewhere along the way, I began taking success for granted. As hubris set in, I became less inclined to listen to pleas for caution. Red flags raised by very smart people both at CCP and in the community went unheeded because of my stubborn refusal to allow adversity to gain purchase on our plans. Mistakes, even when they were acknowledged, often went unanalyzed, leaving the door open for them to be repeated." He goes on say: "forcing players into a mandatory single-player Captain’s Quarters experience was a mistake," and also mentions the "rather underwhelming virtual goods rollout." He proceeds to promise the Incarna expansion ("the real one with actual meaningful gameplay in it") "will be a big step towards the future," and that going forward players can expect "A Humbler, Stronger CCP."

This leads to another update from senior producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason describing their plans to bring the first tangible results of this refocus, which will come in the game's winter 2011 expansion, saying: "More programmers, more testers, more designers and more artists than ever working on bringing you meaningful and engaging improvements and additions to EVE." Here's some of that:

EVE Online´s Winter 2011 expansion will be themed around improvements to warfare and PVP. We will be talking more specifically about each of the features and items in the coming weeks but, for now, here‘s an overview of what functionality, systems and gameplay we‘re going to improve and add to.

Hybrid weapons balancing

Factional warfare

Assault ships

Capital ship balancing

New T2 modules

Starbase logistics management

New EWAR-Drones

T2 Rigs manufacturing

Ship spinning

New font

More captains quarters

Time dilation

I want to make it clear that this is not a final list. As we go through design and implementation phases some things may require more work than initially expected and others may not hold water in the design phase and therefore may not make it into this particular expansion. Similarly some things might get added to the list. We will keep you updated on our progress every step of the way because, as Hilmar said, communication is one of the things we are dedicated to improve.

It‘s time to get serious about these spaceships.