Jovian Speculation : Could New NPCs Open Door for New PCs?

OK, this thought experiment is admittedly a stretch for what I expect to happen but I don't feel its out of the realm of possibilities.

What if the coming of the new NPCs, which for convienence I'm calling Jove although there is rampant speculation on Tweetfleet Slack #lore channel that it could be any number of groups / sub groups, is also heralding the advent of new player races of advanced capsuleers with access to advanced new ships and weapons, but WITHOUT the ability to transfer consciousness to another clone upon death?

Death Knights of EVE

World of Warcraft introduced the concept of "hero class" when they created Death Knights, a class that started at level 55 instead of level 1 like normal characters, and which a player could only unlock once they had a normal class character at level 55+. The idea is that even the weakest of these new hero characters are capable of feats and abilities far beyond the normal average character.

This can translate into EVE by introducing a hero faction where the base starting Jovian character had millions of skill points and exotic skills for weapons and ships not attainable by normal capsuleers, powerful but not unstoppable. This could open up a world of new technologies and gameplay options for veteran EVE players, but would require some balancing mechanic to prevent them from obliterating players without access to these advanced tools.

One way could be to limit them to a particular section of space but that goes directly against the EVE credo of one shared universe without borders. Another potential method, and possibly hinted at in recent questions from CCP about players and using Perma-death characters, is that the Jovian characters have one life and if they are podded they are gone for good. Sure, your Jove ship and weapons can take on N opponents and win, but what happens when N+1 shows up?

In the end, I don;t think CCP would do this. There is enough difficulty balancing the current roster of ships and skill that is fraught with pitfalls and unintended consequences such that adding another power level to the mix could be disastrous and chaotic in the extreme. Its NGE volatile, if you catch my drift... see what I did there?

Drifter Battleship

I so want one.

So busy at work, blog post on Monday.

Stitching

Welcome, Sleeper Overlords!

Last week in my Logical Design Decisions post I talked about what I think the "new space" should be and argued it would be the existing Jove space (along with new regions) and that it would be "protected by new Sleeper rats in three regions and Sansha incursion rats in the other three".

Almost immediately after that the tumblr blog that EVE set up started putting up some interesting teaser images.

Also of note someone was puttering around the game files and found these interesting assets in the Jove folders:

And someone on SISI found this:

Click for full size.

To put it all together, I think that the new Sleeper rats are in development and will start appearing in K-space soon in the wake of the Circadian Sleepers rats who are effectively automated scouts. I'm willing to bet the Jovian pilot in the above image is an old placeholder while the new Sleeper assets are developed.

These "Drifter Battleships" will be some of the main Awakened Sleeper rats and because of the teasing images on Now tumblr, I suspect that the Drifter Battleship will be a player flyable ship as well (the partial ship images on grey background looks exactly like the intro images for the Guristas and Tactical Destroyers).

And can I say, I seriously want that Drifter Battleship in my hanger. Hey CCP, my 10 year Blogiversary is coming up, how's that revamped reward program coming along?

Update: I posted too soon. From today: