The theme of the December release (for goodness sake's people, an expansion was Apochrypha, re-arranging deck chairs is not an expansion) will be announced in 3 or 5 days at GamesCom.

It will be focused on the continuing transfer of wealth generation from high sec to null sec, like the appropriation of a huge chunk of ice revenue and ore mining was. I fully expect to see the announcement of the beginning of the end of T2 mfg in high sec, and that null sec will eventually be the only place it can occur, which will dovetail nicely with the soon to be announced decimation of mfg and R&D station slots in high sec, and another order of magnitude in null sec station slots.

Before then, we will see the end of the Marauder as a mission boat as it is "re-balanced" into a PvP boat.
The command ship and command link nerfs hurts everyone, but no one more than incursion runners.
That is no co-incidence. And when CCP figures out the spaghetti code surrounding OGB's, that will also disappear with the winter release.

The cartels are issuing more propaganda about how they need renters to maintain their income streams. Frankly, the demand for rental space is unlikely to fill the space being offered, so CCP, in its ongoing efforts to turn Eve into NullSec Online, is going to have to incentivize players to want to go to null. That can only be done by wiping out high sec profitability and increasing null sec profitability.

So that is what the winter release will be about. CCP has been bleeding high sec by inches for a long time. But the bleeding will accelerate with the December release.

Dinsdale nailed it as usual. He's been right so many times in the past, it's hard not to trust his predictions this time too!

(But I think he forgot the Pandas - for nullbears only of course)

GǪother than Inferno, Retribution, and Odyssey GÇö all of which added more tools to the game than we've seen in a looong time.

What do you think the next expansion will be about?

Personally I'm hoping for something to rekindle my interest in this game.

Unfortunately all of the things I have been looking forward to seem to be firmly in the "soon" box with no hope of ever making it into the game (modular POS with interiors, comet mining, WiS).

I predict some minor tweaks and a "re-skinning" of an existing feature (production/ invention maybe)

GǪother than Inferno, Retribution, and Odyssey GÇö all of which added more tools to the game than we've seen in a looong time.

Boobies and more phallic shaped ships

i would appreciate .... walking out of Captains Quarter !

We'll be getting a bathroom in the CQ.

Why? Just pee off the balcony like I do.

I heard we will be able to grow wings on our pod and soar about inside the stations that we always see while ship spinning...

I suspect that a fair few of them are working on overhauling and rewriting back-end code--which is both the most difficult and tedious part of any developer's job, and the most thankless--and I suspect that there's enough of that to keep them slaving in the proverbial coal mines for a few years yet.

On the plus side, each system they redo yields them a new set of options. The winter expansion announcement will probably let us know what they're close to completing.

The only concrete detail I have, from one of the CSM threads, is that it will touch every part of EVE. So look beyond specific gameplay features and toward some of the basic features of the game. Industry, say.