Note: I know very little about Dr. Who and I have never seen it, so I have no investment in the show or the story, but I’ve been playing EVE for 11 years and I’ve been part of Live Events since 2013 and Agency events since 2017, so I am drawing comparison between this present event and previous challenges such as Guardians Gala, Operation: Permafrost, Winter Hexus, and Crimson Harvest.
The following assessment and opinions are my own.
We’re all 4 days into this challenge, and I wanted to get my feedback down:
Pros:
-SKIN and cerebral accelerator prizes and drops
-extremely visually pretty worlds
-variety of skill sets offered to pursue the event (i.e., combat, scanning, hacking, manufacturing, marketing)
Cons:
-limited types of ships upon which these SKINs can be applied (i.e., I fly maybe 1 of the ship types out of all possible SKINs)
-bugged challenges that won’t reload or work properly (i.e., not counting completely numerical tasks in all cases such as Peculiar Ruins being analyzed)
-too wide a variety of objects which undermine the completion of tasks (i.e., Peculiar Ruins versus Peculiar “Debris”)
-extremely limited drops on materials to make Tier 2 filaments from high-sec sites (i.e., trapping players in a loop of being able to access only Curious exploration sites and extremely rarely Enigmatic exploration sites and Precarious combat sites)
-tedious, frustrating, time-consuming grind of cyclical performance requirements (i.e., find site, insufficient material drops, find sites until you finally get the materials, access next-higher tier site, repeat the process)
-too many tiers, too wide of a variety of material requirements, build-your-way to prizes is not new-player friendly (and lengthy manufacturing times are completely unnecessary)
-unclear if brand-new players will actually be able to effectively handle the challenges presented by the tier 1 sites
-abyssal-type environments might not be fitting for brand-new players
-comparable to War Thunder’s style of play to find materials to make the ‘event prize’
-no real memorable rewards, and no significant rewards of any frequency
-Dr. Who association is largely forgettable in the face of the frustration encountered with processing this event (i.e., attempting to earn enough points to unlock all Agency prizes)
Summary: To be perfectly clear, the SKINs and cerebral accelerators are nice, but the grind is so intense and the materials required to advance up the tier chain are so infrequent that I am burned out of this event on Day 4. I do not see this as new-player friendly. I am not enjoying this. I am more inclined to get this event over and done with as fast as possible so I can return to my preferred EVE activites.
I have been playing this event in high-sec since I started with the understanding and acknowledgement that low-sec and null-sec sites will likely drop better materials more frequently. Nevertheless, I have been able to run only a single tier 2 exploration site because when I finally had enough materials to make EITHER a tier 1 combat filament OR a tier 2 exploration filament, I chose the tier 2 exploration filament because that was the filament required by my current Agency points challenge; no further materials sufficient enough to make a tier 1 combat filament have been acquired at this time, and I have invested hours into this event each day since it launched.
This event is a grind for very little reward. In fact, the amount of time investment to trigger random material drops in an effort to “build your way” to earning the challenge rewards reminds me of War Thunder. War Thunder typically hosts challenges that require you to ‘build a tank.’ During said challenges, players receive random objects and items to apply to a blueprint or a building process, which devolves into a disgustingly long, frustrating grind that not only consumes the entire length of time that the event is available in order to complete the assembly process, but also seems to subtly encourage players to throw up their hands in frustration to put down real money in order to buy the top prizes so they could just get back to doing what they were doing. The event typically consumes the most time in having players continue to play for the rare materials or the very final components that the players of course have no control on acquiring, aside from going to the in-game market which sometimes involves putting up real-world money to buy what they need. That and War Thunder’s building process sometimes has players experiment to determine which process is the proper assembly procedure in order to finalize completing their prize assembly - if they’re wrong, the materials are sometimes lost, which means players have to start all over again.
The fact that a Dr. Who pack exists on the EVE Store alongside this frustrating event is actually quite disconcerting in the previous respect.
The SKINs look nice, but they’re infrequent to the point that they’re almost non-existent. In terms of actual material drops to ‘build your way’ to the next tier, the Curious exploration sites are little better in than the Warp Convergence scandown sites, which seems to trap players in this confinement to Warp Convergence scandowns and Curious sites because the materials required to build the combat filaments or tier 2 exploration sites are extremely rare.
Either way, it personally has taken me several days in high-sec just to be able to find enough materials to be able to build one “tier 2” exploration filament OR 1 “tier 1” combat filament to the point that I am ready to simply stop participating in this event and get back to incursions upon the activation of the next focus.
A friend was kind enough to grant me a package of the materials I was lacking, but this means that unfortunately we were forced to invoke the market in order to supplement the materials that otherwise should be dropping.
Update on January 27, 5 Days Remaining:
After completing 3 Mysterious Sites, I lack the materials required to make even 1 Dangerous Site Filament. The effort required to hack the massive containers even with max skills, an Astero, and a Frostline ‘Clavicula’ Integrated Analyzer (12km range, 131 coherence, 40 strength, with AIR Relic Range, Coherence, and Strength I Boosters applied) was significant and worthy of maximum trained skills; I completed all 21 cans with 10 minutes remaining. However, receiving salvage, even Tech II salvage, led me to conclude that my efforts were being rewarded with quite literal “garbage” and left me unfulfilled. Likewise, the required skills, assets, and aptitude leads me to conclude that this event, especially at Tier 3 sites, is absolutely not new-player friendly, which I suppose is the point. The upper-level tiers are supposed to challenge veteran players, but it was tough as hell to get out of “Tier 1 Hell” until you buy your way out of it on the Market.
The occasional SKIN was nice, but receiving duplicates of the same SKIN or novelty items with no value or use was off-putting. After failing 2 Massive hacks (one because I drifted out of range of the wreck, with that disconnect counting to the failure limit of 2 and destroying the container), I decided enough was enough and I should end this event with what I have. I earned over 900 points, but once I earned 900 points on Day 6, I had no desire to continue this event, even to chance receiving the cerebral accelerators.
In the entire stretch of this event, I made less than I can earn in a single day flying Incursions. The hacking was just as frustrating as scanning down the sites and left me literally exhausted and unmotivated to continue.
Recommendations For Future Events:
-Increase the material count drop rate; decrease material variety
-Increase the value of rewards; no salvage or garbage items; reward increased player effort by increase the drop rate of the better rewards, especially at the higher tiers.
-Less hacking and scanning, more shooting and blowing up targets; combat is exciting; scanning and hacking are boring and tedious.
-Decrease the number of tiers
). I would prefer not to have crossovers become even remotely the norm, however, a Dr. Who crossover is way, way better than having to deal with Fraggles clogging up the space-lanes or Love Boats shipping across the stars (I think 
