There’s a signature out past surveyed space that doesn’t behave right. Probes come back as noise, ships don’t come back at all, and whatever is in there finds the mass and pulls it apart somewhere mid-transit. Hull, cargo, rigs. A capsule gets through intact. Only the capsule.
The pilot on the other side is awake and doesn’t remember anything they ever learned. Twenty years of certifications burned out of the imprint during the crossing. You know your own name and that’s the extent of it. And you’re sitting in a cluster nobody has flown, with no gates anyone built and nowhere to dock.
The actual pitch
A new universe, shipped as a canon expansion. New regions, new systems, none of it copied off the existing map. Everyone who goes through arrives at zero SP with an empty hangar and no standings.
It isn’t a Classic server and it isn’t a rewind, because there’s nothing here to replay. Nobody has nostalgia for a cluster that has never existed. What you’d get instead is the one thing this game stopped being able to sell about fifteen years ago, which is being early. Space nobody has scanned. Moons nobody has pulled. Not one structure anywhere on the map, and nobody already parked on the good ice.
I know the reflex on this, because I have it too, so let me get the one-universe objection out of the way. It stays one place. One new universe, one shard, canon, reached through the game’s own fiction rather than a launcher toggle. New Eden doesn’t get copied and doesn’t get touched.
The population split is where I expect the real pushback, and the answer is that the frontier character is an extra slot on your Omega account that trains in parallel. Your main keeps flying, your corp keeps its structures, and nobody is asked to pick one. If it can’t work that way I don’t think it should ship.
The rules
Everyone starts at zero SP, so the 2003 character and the guy who installed the client last night undock in the same rookie ship. Nothing transfers: no isk, no assets, no characters, no standings, no blueprints. The moment one thing gets an exception the rest follow it inside a year.
No skill injectors for five years, with the end date published at launch and honored to the day. I’d argue for five over three because three doesn’t give a real economy time to form before people start buying past it, and I’d argue hardest against leaving it vague, since a soft date makes every other promise here worthless.
Ships, modules and the skill tree all made the crossing as recovered technology. You already know how to fly. You just don’t know where anything is.
No empire space on day one. You get a beachhead around the wormhole exit and hisec grows outward from there over months. Past that edge nothing is protecting you, and where the edge sits is worth fighting over by itself.
Markets seed from nothing. First battleship, first freighter, and a trade hub that forms wherever people actually pile up instead of where a dev decided it should go. Whatever that place turns out to be, nobody picked it in advance.
Who it’s for
The people who left because they ran the numbers on catching up and decided against it. You know several. The skill gap is the reason they give, and this deletes it.
The people still here who have done everything. You’ve ratted every region worth ratting and there is nothing left to be first at. Over here everything is.
Newbros as well, though that’s a side effect rather than the argument.
What I don’t have answers for
Does hisec expand by NPC decree, or do players push the border outward by building infrastructure? The second is much more EVE and much harder to keep from breaking, and I don’t know which way I’d go.
Permanently open wormhole or scheduled transit windows that become events by themselves. Omega only or an alpha tier. Whether anything at all carries across, and my instinct there is nothing, cosmetic at absolute most.
The one that actually worries me is month one, before industry spins up. Get that wrong and the opening era is six weeks of grinding in Ventures instead of a land rush, and the whole thing dies inside its first patch cycle.
(Posted here because I assume larger initiatives like this will need more community buy-in/ CSM engagenemnt)