With eh newer 6-week dev cycle for EVE Online, the patches and mini-expansions have been getting a mixed reaction from the community. And Tiamat is no different. There are two major features that are being debated about by the players.
One is the Minmatar Svipul T3 Destroyer
The other is the High-sec aggression toggle for corp management.
The Svipul is a decent choice for newer players with more ISK than SP. The various modes and configurations for the ship should make it a worthy choice for both null sec and low sec pvpers. Confessors already are a common site for me in nullsec gate camps due to their versatility, and I expect the Minmatar T3 to follow that trend.
The much more important change is the inclusion of the ability for corps to toggle on or off the ability for AWOXing to be a Concordable offense for corp members. The clear target for this mechanic is to allow traditionally risk averse players living out their EVE lives in High Sec to feel safer in their de facto territory.
Now, any player who has payed EVE for long enough understands that there is no such thing as safe. Losing Billions of ISK on a freighter alt to an organized gank is a fact of life for most players of a certain in-game age. As are countless other forms of losing ISK. Eventually you will die, and no amount of Concord protection will stop this.
I fully expect that these AWOXing changes will make these corporations a target for scammers and ganks. As I fully expect there will be some corps that will publicly disclose that they use this feature. This will sound alarm bells for the gankers and scammers that there’s targets to be had. In my mind, a player group who expects this to offer any protection except in certain PVP situations is just asking to get caught with their space-pants down. Most high sec exclusive corps have little experience filtering out scammers, and/or spies. So using basic tactics that any EVE spy will know, they can bypass any protection this change will bring.
It’s not all bad, I do think this will serve to eventually teach some High Sec players the hard lesson of just how useless Concord is. If one thing is true about EVE, it’s that’s many of it’s players are ruthless sociopaths, and some are helpless lemmings. The primary fun in this game for me is watching the fireworks when these two groups cross paths. I really do hope these changes create more of these interactions.