I agree. Let's go for it. Guessing, theory crafting, speculation, wishful thinking, etc. From a few comments by Cyrene officials one could conclude that Cyrene will make use of a probably not yet implemented maybe groundbreaking feature or use existing features in a very creative way to come up with something rather unique or a combination of both. But what could it be? An elaborated factions system? How big will Cyrene be? All the other new planets launched with 4-6 areas. Will Cyrene be the same or will it be bigger? We already saw more creatures from Cyrene before launch than Next Island has a year and 3 months after launch. And we saw more vehicles from Cyrene before launch than any other planet has right now. We also saw a couple of Mechs from Cyrene, will they be available on launch? What about factions? Will there be an elaborated factions system Cyrene makes use of? Or will we 'just' play factions by choices in mission dialogues? There are many more questions. (And a few answers already to be found on the wiki: Planet Cyrene.)
The potentially distinct feature... Playable factions? Another hint on a factions system? (I mean... why would 'mutants' have a place on a Systems Roadmap? They can't be regular creatures, they must be a system) And then there are those hints that "creatures" (or maybe not creatures...) fight "creatures", fx Turrelions vs Duster Gang. And there are even images... Tanhok vs Zik? Robots vs Zyn'Dos?
If it's theorising you want I'll give you theorising ;) We see less and less updates. What these updates contain is usually of little substance. Why? Perhaps because they are focusing majority of the workforce on a grand update. A big update that will take EU to vu30 ! all in one swift update ! ha! :-) taming! beacons! instances! space! factions! here it all come :-) See this picture: http://www.entropiaplanets.com/w/images/d/d2/A_Sons_of_Remus_Sentinel_being_made.jpg What do you really see! Look closely! Closer :-) Look at it's name, "A_Sons_of_Remus_Sentinel_being_made.jpg" That is no ordinary picture. It's not a person about to get armoured. It's some type of DNA construction machine. An avatar generator! Shame they didn't give us a pic of a tan-hok being made, that would really have given things away...
I love theorising, speculating, assuming, guessing and drawing conclusions! BUT ... I can also appreciate the level of critical thinking going on here, and those trying to put 2 + 2 together to equal some semblance of explanation. I also love our EU detective squad. Have fun ... the right stuff will be revealed soon!
How about this one. vu12.5 didn't contain all that it was supposed to because MA diverted staff from platform development to bug fixes because of too many people moaning on forums. This had consequences in that certain items that need to be developed for cyrene to launch were not hence Cyrene launched pushed back. This explains why vu12.5 had hardly anything in it and vu12.51 had bug fixes.
That would have been a great step forward. However, iirc an instance system as well as a quest system have been requested by Planet Cyrene a few years ago while MA thought quests would not have any benefit (can't find the Marco quote, if anyone has it please add). Cyrene might make extensive use of the instance system. And that might not be the whole truth... 12.5 could have added a multitude of options for instances currently no planet makes use of. Or maybe just added one part of a more elaborated intance system. I think there will be another 12.x VU, maybe even 13.0, before the release of Cyrene.
That's for sure. For example there is a PvP combat scoreboard which you can bring up from action library but it's not used by any PP. So a lot of things went through but perhaps incomplete or if complete not yet used by anyone. That's speaking of only what we can see. There may be other things that went through which we have no idea about. The point is 12.5 seemed to look like a half-complete, as if they stopped work on it and put through what they could. Meanwhile focused on bug fixes. Now that some of the bug fixes are out of the way they would go back to platform development and hopefully complete all the bits needed for Cyrene.
Actually all this is really odd. We don't have: - factions update - mechs - fully functioning instances So it's difficult to see how Cyrene can be launched anytime soon since it's supposed to use these.
So for a change MA is not testing stuff on Calypso, but worked closely together with the C-team to create the instance system and test it and test it and test it. During that development and testing they figured that the system was OK enough to be used on Calypso as beacons and because we were bitching about the return of them they decided to put it in already and let us test that some more (and we know what happened). With the public testing of the instances a lot of bug were found and will be sorted out before the launch of Cyrene. my 2 pec
Don't forget taming! There was a rumor of a rumor from another rumor that Cyrene is to have taming as well. At the end, it's just MA being MA. As I put, Welcome to MA time.
Now only if we didn't write so much crap we could have worked out whats what ...lol Another small clue ? maybe you want to spill a little on factions ? taming? or ....