Over the weekend the other members of the dev team voted for Discovery's next lead developer, and they have elected me to fulfil that role.
You will probably find the biggest differences from this are related to the story and system design. I have noticed threads here and there that are fearful to suggest making big changes because they may eat up dev time. As someone that actually does said system editing, that is flat-out wrong. 4.90 Middle will be inevitably be delayed due to alterations in the story from what is currently planned, tackling issues like story stagnation, jump connections and system sizes. While the overall plot will remain the same and some elements will be more or less as originally planned, some developments will not be happening and others will be completely new, including some system overhauls. All of this means that upcoming changes have to be re-discussed among the team and with faction leaders. However, it's important that we make changes that are needed and to get them right the first time. This should hopefully result in a story that has more substantial plot progress and more exciting updates as well.
The Mining Update is also going to be revised with a new plan that reduces field count to 20 fields, spread across 14 systems to encourage interaction. Two of those are new, experimental and original mining fields like the Azurite Reactor. The plan is still under development but most of the fields are close to a more or less finished state; one or two may yet be subject to change.
I also think that the Development team needs to be less secretive towards the community. While we aren't going to spoil everything, some of our decisions can seem strange to people out of the loop and we're going to have more communication that elaborates on our design and thought processes. As of now, things are going to change in a direction that actively addresses Discovery's needs, from individual gameplay to the overall story. It's time we had a gameplay experience which is designed for players, by players, and that will be my mission goal as Lead Developer of Discovery.
This makes us intensely happy. Not only for personal reasons, but more transparency about internal workflow is great for understanding where dev progression is and for involving people in what's reasonable to request/get people interested in doing some devving for themselves.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)