Noticed this snippet near end:
“The siege of Zarzakh has been bloody and intense, taking its toll on capsuleer fleets as well as enriching the most intrepid pilots. Over 500 ships, worth well over 100 billion ISK, have been lost to Tyrannos Strategos, while Drifter officers have dropped more than 700 modules. At the same time, capsuleers have destroyed well over 3,000 Horizon Breach Engines.”
Does anyone else feel that these numbers look very low for a potentially lucrative, module-dropping event?
I confess, I don’t do events very much for the past 2 years or so. I preferred old-style events that were broadly accessible to the player base (eg. the ‘Purity’ type events that took place around the Coronation of Catiz back in 2016, or the original Crimson Harvest events, etc.).
The newer event styles with the long chains of unlocks and/or much more restricted ship builds and locations doesn’t really interest me, so I don’t see the numbers participating as much. Back in the day, when ship skins and accelerators would drop from older events, the market would get absolutely swamped with drops. I’m wondering if CCP is aiming at too small an audience with more recent events.
Destroying 500 ships/100B ISK, and 700 modules dropping seems like a drop in the bucket. Is that because of the Zarzakh timer changes, or was the event too restrictive in design? Are player numbers in events dropping off steeply? Or was there lots of participation, but ship loss and drops were just very rare?
Not really? 700 officer modules is honestly a pretty large number, especially when you factor in that the officers don’t spawn “naturally” (you have to figure out how to get them to show up). And 3,000 siege engines destroyed doesn’t mean only 3,000 sites were ran - it just means that 3,000 sites were completed. I know some folks who didn’t complete the site - they thought subsequent waves would be too much for them so they took what they had made so far and left.
Usually CCP needs to “seed” new items in a decent amount at roll out and then start slowly trickling out replacement modules and stuff slower to keep prices and supply/demand curves happy for those who use, those who farm, those who try to make an isk off them in the market, etc.
Sounds like the roll out was decently successful in terms of raw new mods into the game. Lets see what the long term numbers look like in game and on market.
Hard to guess what the “completed vs. ran” numbers might be. But a 2-week event with hundreds of thousands of players logging on every day completing 3,000 sites with 700 drops seems slim to me. Maybe not everyone remembers just how many people used to participate in events a decade ago.
The concern to me isn’t even the raw numbers - as the title suggests, it’s about the overall trend of event design at CCP. CCP has gone, IMO, from “inclusive” events that the majority of the player base can participate in, to “exclusive” event design where the various staging issues for the event exclude larger portions of the player base.
More recent event design has been putting more limitations for more effort with less reward (or rewards with less overall useability). “Exclusive” event design adds various filters that restrict more and more of the player base:
Make the event strongly favor higher end ship/build/skill setups: cut out X% of the playerbase.
Make the reward ladder longer and with rewards that appeal to fewer players: lose Y%
Feature the best rewards in specific locations that most of the players don’t access: lose more
Require respectable fleet sizes to compete/complete: lose another large chunk of players
For many players, “offer a 90% drop rate” not only means they won’t participate in the event, they’ll barely be active at all for the month. Personally I don’t mind that aspect of Crimson Harvest and think it’s thematic and interesting, but it does add another “players active” reduction.
I saw very few people interesting in Siege of Zarzakh while it was on, and I’m seeing less Crimson Harvest interest this year even last year, which was already low IMO.
I guess we’ll see how well CH boosts activity when the October numbers come out. I don’t think Zarzakh did much for September.
But what would they be worth if everybody got one? A days gametime? A week?
Like everything else in the market, the first few drops would sell for plenty. Then day by day and then hour by hour as the market flooded, they’d be selling for less and less until it isn’t worth the time it takes get one.
That’s why you need to keep them rare. Like Marshal BPs. Hard to get, but worth the slog in the end.
I’m not saying they need to be priced the same as T2 modules, buy surely there’s a happy medium here? (ie: somewhere between Faction and current Officer)
The market sets the price. And the frequency of drops affects the market.
The OP was suggesting that a greater drop frequency the better for the game. To which I replied that more drops means less incentive for people to continue doing the event due to massive price drop.
It’s a quandary, for sure. A greater drop guaranty gets more people involved in the event. But when they try to sell the loot, no one wants to buy because they already have one. So the price tanks.
Someone is angry no matter how the prize pool is set up.
I’m not angry - or disappointed. It would just be nice to see more of these Officer modules drop to a) bring the price down and b) see them actually utilized more.
I should have been more clear: I wasn’t suggesting a higher drop rate. I have no idea what the actual drop rate was; although 3,000 sites completed yielding 700 modules seems decent to me. The issue is how few players bothered to take a crack at getting those drops at all.
My concern is that CCP is structuring their events in ways that limit the portion of the playerbase that participate. IMO the point of events is to encourage more players to take part in more parts of the game and more activities than they normally would.
I feel that older event designs such as those from 2015/2016 (original Crimson Harvest, Purity of the Throne events etc.) achieved this much better than more recent event trends. More players taking part in events is better for the game than fewer players.
It isn’t even necessary to have mega-drops to encourage this. More widely accessible sites with medium-value drops does the trick just fine - as shown by older events.
Agree with Kezrai. The first couple Crimson Harvest events were a more moderate difficulty & therefore more broadly accessible to players of different skill levels. Subsequent event experiments either alternated with event combat sites of higher difficulty (Drifters) or would offer two tiers. For the last few Events, combat sites are on the harder side, and only a non-combat track (data sites) are offered for players who can’t or don’t want to handle tougher combat sites.
Another issue I’d like to re-register is an obnoxious click-to-claim process, on the points reward track. I heard a rumor a couple years ago that it might become automatic again, but the “don’t change any working code” bean counters seem to be winning.
Some of the combat sites are bugged today. Instead of the final boss spawning it perpetually spews minions. If there is to be an Event Hell - this is it.
The answer is probably ‘YES’ to all those questions…
As for my .02 ISK worth:
I use to always participate in Events, now I rarely even look at them. Most of the time within the past few years, I’ll open the Agency, see all the useless rewards along with a gigantic amount of points needed to complete it and just close it to never look at it again.
The last Event I tried was the Abyssal / Drifter event where you had to scan down and enter pockets for BPC’s and materials to make Filaments to progress further in the Event. Along with doing combat, some of the Agency Event tasks were to also buy and sell items in the market… I soon realized that Event was a total loss and not worth the time invested into it… And we all know that time is money so basically the time spent doing that Event just cost me money…
Needless to say this but a scripted Event that makes players jump through specific hoops in order to progress on an ever increasing amount of points that gives lackluster rewards with sites dropping scraps for loot does not entice players to engage in that type of content…
Add in CCP’s brainwashed half-baked idea of scarcity (loot and sites) thinking it’ll promote more PvP destruction actually turns the Event point spread into a major time sink…
So yeah, CCP has fouled the Event waters so much that it’s making them stink clear to high heaven. They need to pull their heads out and get back to grass roots, then Events will be good again…
I totally agree with Kezrai and DeMichael. The events are no longer designed to be fun or lucrative for a larger segment of the playerbase. They feel more like an enforced time sink designed to get a smaller number of people to log in for longer periods of time.
I haven’t participated in any of the events for YEARS due to the “new” design direction. I have far better things to do with my limited time than chase down a 20 part objective for a middling reward.
Nailed it. The hoops for the rewards in these events are almost as bad as the Twitch stream requirements (4 hours of “live” viewing). Really dreading the Winter event…
I haven’t encountered many people saying they’re enthusiastic for the current Crimson Harvest, but I have run across at least one guy saying he’s still farming sites for drops. (It was a quick convo so I didn’t get a chance to ask why he was.)
However this post from CCP definitely has a bit of a “Guys c’mon, the event really is worth doing, please play it” feel to me:
