DEV Zoom wrote:

For now they will all be seeded for NIC on the market.

All the new stuff suddenly lost its appeal. It's player bought structures, not player built.

Can only certain roles deploy probes?
How will "Assigning" probes work?

Probes can be deployed by anyone in the corporation, and this puts the deployer on the list of users at the same time. This makes him able to assign other users for that probe too. CEOs and Deputy CEOs can see and modify the user list of any probe of the corporation from anywhere in the world. User assignment works simply by adding members from your corporation roster to the probe's user list via the probe's settings window (available from the world map or terrain right-click menus).

Alexander wrote:

The only issue I have is the large amount of silence and then information overload. So I am left thinking we won't hear any more information officially until patch day now.

This was mainly due to the holidays - two of us also moved during the last week of december, so we had our hands full.

Hate to say it, but none of the proposed items excite me in the least.

Walls - Long ago in a galaxy far away, we were promised terraforming.  We still do not have that, and tbh, I'd rather see the devs deliver on that promise than "walls".  Instead of NIC, time and effort would have to be expended, EP spent on skills to perform that effort, and countermeasures to it could be an enemy coming and undoing the terraforming work performed with their own terraformers ( think sappers back in history used against static defensive positions such as walls and castles )

Bombs - We already have people advocating massive damage and short timers, so guess what they are thinking, lol.  Nothing to do with walls, more to do with small hit and run gangs using derp tactics to thin the opposition or persuit.  Again, long ago in a galaxy far away, we were promised ARTILLERY that would do area effect damage.  An artillery mech can be countered, shot, jammed, whatever, and the mech and skills involved would require multiple EP expenditure points that would require some form of specialization.  Instead of coming up with this "new" item, lets see follow thru on the originally proposed addition that the devs committed to last summer.
Based on the dev blog, seems their "intent" is as a counter to the walls, corp A builds walls, corp B blows holes in it.  See "walls" above for the alternate way to do that. 

Inter Island Mobile Tele -  Well, damn, lets give an even more "easy" button.  There is no where on Nia we can't get to in more than 20 mins with the right bots, and multiple entry points exist for each island.  Current practice is arhke scouts on tele.  So now we add a limited range inter island tele, and this does what? Dumps you right at a static tele on and island, and viola!, arhke scout goes peek-a-boo I see you.  So nothing really changes. 

Proximity Probes - Frankly, the only item I see as new innovation here that could potentially radically change pvp game play.  It makes roaming gangs a little easier to track, adds a challenge for the roamers to evade them or destroy them. The major downside here is just the same as the benefits, potentially makes roaming gangs TOO easy to track, and too hard for roamers to evade persuit, even masked.  Currently, we have detectors and sparks to boost that capablity, as well a potential auras at outposts, but even with that a masked gang can negate most of that detection benefit.  Destroy someones probe, you immediately send a signal that there are hostiles on the island, place probes in extremely inaccessable points for most bots, and you have no way to counter it.  It's a defenders wet dream, and an attackers worst nightmare, but it would significantly reshape how beta pvp would be performed.

As stated above, the DEVs should deliver on the blog promises this past summer, artillery, terraforming, destroyer mechs, before going down this road at this time.  Most of the new blog proposals would have been addressed if we already had artillery and terraforming.