Hello lore enthusiasts! As CCP announced earlier today the theme of the upcoming quadrant is the four empires. As part of this theme, the events team will be putting an increased focus on the four empire-based holidays that land in the summer and early fall. These are the holidays that received minor events with a daily login campaign and capital ship parades last year. This year we’ll be bringing back the parades as well as adding new elements to each of the events. We wanted to give the RP community a heads up because we know that player-run events have long been the backbone of these sorts of ingame holidays and we want to encourage any groups of interested players to start thinking about what sorts of celebrations you might be interested in throwing. We’ll do our best to signal boost any appropriate player-run events alongside the CCP-run content during each of these holidays.
These empire events are:
Gallente Federation Day - June 21st (with the wider set of related events planned for June 15-22)
Minmatar Liberation Day - July 10th (with the wider set of related events planned for July 8-20)
Amarr Foundation Day - August 5th (with the wider set of related events planned for August 5-10)
Caldari Union Day - September 4th (with the wider set of related events planned for September 2-7)
The long-term events plan for these holidays is to slowly build up a set of larger annual events for each of the empires that can become major recurring celebrations over each summer and fall. For instance, for 2022 we already have made plans to move the new and improved Federation Grand Prix back to its traditional Federation Day position in the schedule. For 2021, the plan is to put a special focus on the Minmatar Republic and Liberation Day with the introduction of the Liberation Games - an “olympics-like” inter-tribal event that celebrates the seven major tribes of the Republic. Capsuleers will get a chance learn about the tribes and choose one to support specifically for the event. If this event is received well, we would then build on it and bring it back in an improved form for Liberation Day 2022 as well. The CCP-run ingame events for this year’s versions the other three holidays will be smaller in scale than the Liberation Day event, but they will still be more expansive than last year’s events and we’ll continue adding to the lineup of national events each year until all the empires have major recurring summer/fall events.
As I mentioned above, the main reason we are talking about this right now is that we want to invite capsuleers to run all sorts of events during these holiday periods and let us know what you have planned so that we can highlight your events and hopefully help direct players your way. If you have an empire holiday event that you would like us to help you advertise, go ahead and post in this thread. We’ll be keeping an eye on it and we’ll do our best to help direct players your way. We also hope you’ll all enjoy the ingame content that we’ll be releasing for these holidays.
It feels a bit hypocritical that they do that now after they robbed the players the opportunity to participate in the lore via their characters from the start. I’m asking what is the point of removing these elements when they tell people now that they should explore exactly these elements…
and lore focus? After the Triglavian Invasion lore focused months, I am not thrilled to figure out what they have planned this time. Will we actually be able to prevent the construction of the gate to Stain if we just keep destroying the haulers or mining ops or whatever is needed to build it? If that’s the case, cool, but if it’s just another rehash of an already set in stone outcome, I am not thrilled.
Not to mention that CCP has not released or indicated that they would release any lore texts that would explain why Sansha would allow the empires to build a gate into his territory where they fled to from the empires.
Leaving a player corporation to rejoin an NPC corporation is actually not random. Your highest corporation standing affects which corporation you get selected into. So, for instance, if you run distribution missions for Amarr Certified News (ACN) while in a player corporation, when you leave, you can be placed into ACN.
I would imagine that similar mechanics exist for Tribe-aligned NPC corporations.
Since when? This would actually be what players have asked for for over a decade. But today you land back in the starter corp and not in the old NPC corps like Vizam.
One of my chars has +9.8 standing with Emperor Family but I never landed in that corp ever when it was still a thing to not get thrown back into the starter corp. I always landed back in Caldari Provisions.
I’ve been pointing out flaws for longer and in more places. This is not the time for that. This is the first strong step we’ve seen, complete with multi-year plans, something CCP is historically incredibly reticent to do. This could go very badly, of course, and there’s a million more things I’d like to see them do.
That’s all beside the point, though: this is a huge, public, and forward-thinking step to bridge a huge gap in CCP’s efforts towards the empires. As the leader of one of the longest-lived roleplaying alliance in the game, I’m incredibly happy with the announcement, and I’ll be planning and sharing public events as soon as we can organize them.
That is why I asked why CCP removed the old blood lines selection from the new character creator (that is not even being accessible to all players). I do want them to do more lore things as well because the empires offer a huge amount of potential for amazing gameplay experience. However, past experiences do not fill me with confidence that CCP thinks in the same direction that lore-affine players think in.
I really love the focus on the empires. It’s nice to have lore additions to already established factions and their relations. The conflict between humans with different motivations and ideologies makes the story of EvE interesting in my opinion. Not the addition of always bigger existencial threats without backstory that explains their intentions and motivations.
To be perfectly fair, while yes we can fling mud at CCP as a wider organisation, this feels like the lore team and events team trying their best to appeal to RPers, and especially to Minmatar RPers who play their origins to one of the other tribes. In game mechanics and limitations have, for years, been worked around just fine within the RP community when it comes to the limitations of the bloodline system, so I see this renewed focus as a positive step on things that are achievable now rather than wait for an overhaul in character creation to have it then.
I had thought a former corpmate of mine had been able to change their default, but I was mistaken! I agree that there should be a default NPC corp change change ability.
Probably a bit offtopic, but still related to lore events: Would it be possible to add in more pve events the possibility to participate for both sides? Like the option in the blood raider event 2020 where it was possible to attack Shining Flame sites instead of Blood Raider ones. It would greatly help capsuleers who are loyal to a pirate faction. They would not have to sacrifice their hard earned standing for gaining event points anymore so that they could get the character locked limited event skins for their pirate faction.
btw, @CCP_Fozzie : with this renewed focus on the empires of new eden and the stories of the empires of new eden…
… any chance the World News channel can get any visibility, anywhere? In-game? On the launcher? Linked literally anywhere on the website that isn’t nested in 3 layers of drop-downs and you have to know what you’re even looking for?
If you want people to care about what’s going on… it helps to tell them what’s going on, you know?
There was a video that could explain this action. If I can recall which one it was I’ll link it later.
CCP has done a great deal of work on the new player experience. One of the things they identified as problematic was requiring new players who are completely unfamiliar with the game to make choices on lore details that have a rich background and profound ramifications that they are unaware of.
I believe the decision has been made to temporally re-locate these choices to a time when the player has the ability to comprehend their selection.
I understand your alarm, (I feel similarly about Bio’s). However, I’m reassured that CCP knows it is developing a role-playing game.
