Earlier today, CCP announced the December Patch for EVE Online. This update, entitled the ‘Arms Race’ release, is largely focused on updates to the Alpha Clone program, providing access to more skills and also giving an increased upper limit of Skill Point access. The full announcement can be found here.

Key points for Alpha Clone pilots going into the new patch

– Access to T1 Battlecruiser and Battleship hulls

– Removal of the racial skills lock, making popular faction hulls like the Gila or Machariel available

– Access to T2 weapons systems for small and medium weaponry, including light and medium drones

– an overall increase in usable SP from approximately five million to roughly 20.5 million

There will also be a new Skill Injector available through the New Eden Store, at a cost of 20 PLEX per unit. This item is notable as the first time CCP have offered SP for money directly from the store, as opposed to requiring pilots to train and then extract SP from a character. The Injector will provide 50,000 SP, and only one can be used daily.

Other Changes

In addition to the changes to Alpha Clones, there will be a new event launched, using the same ‘Arms Race’ title. Information from CCP indicates that this event will be focused on the Alpha Clone changes, with the tasks and rewards weighted to encourage pilots to train into Battlecruiser and Battleship hulls.

CCP are also memorialising the efforts made by players during Project Discovery’s Phase One, a project that had was focused on players assessing cell structures to identify abnormalities. Project Discovery is conducted in partnership with the Massively Multiplayer Online Science organisation, which seeks to combine the playerbase of MMOs with citizen science concepts.

There will also be a number of more general optimisation and VFX upgrades launched, including a new empire selection process for new characters, a new support role and further balancing on Resource Wars sites, and the Warp Disruption Bubble updates that were shown off by CCP Lebowski at Evesterdam earlier this month. The controversial Capital ship fuel usage changes will also come into effect.

The Arms Race release will be deployed at downtime on December 5, 2017, in what will probably be a slightly extended server downtime.