finally an event that isnt a copy paste of some mission site (= warp in, kill all rats)
good rewards: the SKINs look good and cerebral accelerators are always useful
negative:
lag can make the event difficult … when you are stuck in the warp tunnel between gate for 10s a few times, you run out of time in the harder tasks
INCREDIBLY BORING
Who thought that pressing in “jump” four HOURS is a good event? This is insulting. At least try to come up with an interesting PVE event! Even cheap F2P Asia grinders make better grind events/quests.
Suggestions:
Add an actual race that requires manual piloting, i.e. touch all the beacons in deadspace area while dodging sentry fire, statis web towers, damage coulds, etc
Add some story. Lore about the sites we are visiting.
Add a treasure hunt where we have to collect keys / fragments / parts
This event got off to a poor start for me - first two destinations were Pashanai and Lanngisi - the two systems that aren’t beacons.
Okay it’s a boring grind after a while, but the rewards for new and newish players are excellent, and you don’t need to have played for years to be able to get the best ones.
Okay, I wouldn’t do it every month but as a one-off, and with some refinement, it is good as an occasional change from the Gila/missiles/drones ones.
I am very much afraid that this is giving too much credit. When it comes to showcasing EVE universe or its lore, fanmade videos, heck even blog posts, do a much better job.
Now that I thought about it for a while - a racing event when you had to use the FPS camera could be quite fun. But you would still have to give the racers some sort of immunity or put down some NPC guards that would attack anyone even aggressing the racers.
I’d rather have a cookiecutter arena site than this. I’d rather have a “Mine X ore, Salvage Y wrecks, Produce Z items” checklist than this.
I have some feedback to offer on the event that may different somewhat from other players. I’ve gone through it completely with one alt and am nearing completion with another. Overall it strikes me as a diamond in the rough: the core idea of a race event is good, but there’s room for improvement in the details.
Pluses:
The rewards were very good, and structure of this was good. Some nice valuable rewards in the early stages helped provide a carrot as well as a useful source of funds for newer players if sold. The silver and gold packages were especially nice in value for both newer and experienced players.
Common starting site of Luminaire for each leg of race helped create a sense of group activity and even community. I think I saw this reflected to varying degrees in the in-game chat channels, and there was more a sense of group interaction and engagement than I can recall being created by past events in quite some time.
The event has been successful in attracting the interest of a fair number of players. During the weekend I noticed that Luminaire was consistently the third-most populated system in the game most of the time, ahead of Dodixie but behind Amarr.
The common starting site for the race spurned some localized economic activity. I contributed to this with two hauling/trading alts and even dusted off an underused manufacturing alt to help meet the massive demand for shuttles.
There was a good mix of high-sec and low-sec destinations, and the one site effectively requiring a trip through nullsec provided some extra danger that would be good exposure for any newer players.
Making it possible to skip a race segment by waiting out the timer provided a good balance between rewarding those who were willing to try any segment versus allowing those with an aversion for lowsec or nullsec to avoid these areas.
Restarting each race segment back at the starting point was a bit of a mixed bag, but I put into the plus column because it made it feasible to randomize the race segments somewhat and reduce the chance that PVP-minded players could easily shut down the entire race.
It was nice to have a frigate-oriented event, although one was not strictly required to to use frigates (as shown by most players using shuttles a majority of the time).
Using a race as the core concept led to different ship fitting optimization than for the usual combat-oriented events. This also made it feasible to use some non-traditional characters (like a hauling alt) in the event since combat was not required except for possibly in PVP.
Negatives:
Although the random selection of race destinations provided some variety, it ultimately proved a bit grindy due just not enough variation in the activity. A greater mix of race segment types might help with this: both single and multi-leg, some multi-system travel mixed with single-system intrasystem travel destinations, etc. Other players have made other suggestions in this area and I think this is something that should definitely be explored with a creative mindset to come up with interesting race variations.
Not enough challenge overall: as long as one had basic navigaton skills somewhat trained, most race segments could be done in a shuttle. Only the lowsec and path-through-nullsec sites encouraged one to use a frigate or other ship (like the cruiser-hulled luxury yacht or perhaps a T3 destroyer). The main driver in the latter cases was the risk of PVP. That did introduce some variety to influence ship fittings, but it all came from player-created content in the form of gate and race-destination camps. It would have been nice to see some of the challenge coming from the race scenario elements themselves.
Overall I like the race concept, and it should be kept and improved upon. I can see the Federation-sponsored race event becoming an annual thing with perhaps one or two of the other empires sponsoring their own version of it at other points of the year. This would also provide a good opportunity to vary the content based on the lore and history of the sponsoring empire, e.g., I can see the Amarr sponsoring a more draconian version of it with some survival-of-the-fittest theme in which your ship and clone are destroyed if you fail to complete a key race segment (not unlike an Abyssal deadspace pocket).
Kudos to CCP for trying something different as an event despite some warts. This is definitely a keeper for me if some of the above issues of insufficient variety and challenge can be addressed.
I finished the event last night with 101 points just before DT. I completed every single race the Agency gave me and always took the shortest route, the security space of the route or destination didn’t matter to me. In fact I actually wanted the more risky destination runs just to make the event more exciting.
The thing that I disliked the most, other than the massive click fest, was that the Agency mostly gave me high sec runs worth 1 to 3 points during the last half of the points spread from 50 to 100, like it was purposely prolonging the race. I never once got a 6 point race nor did I ever get a race with a destination that took me through or to null sec space.
Other than that, I still enjoyed the event and it actually got me to use some of my assets that I’ve had sitting in station for years.
Who knew. As with every event, CCP can’t resist the urge to claw more money out of our pockets and to destroy the last saving grace of a terribly implemented event.
