I’m assuming that this event should be new player friendly. Based upon that, I believe 1) it should be straightforward to make steady progress on the tracker in HS, 2) it exposes eve in a good light to newer pilots, 3) it should be financially rewarding to actually do the filaments, and 4) the lower tier activities should be easily accomplishable by low experience/sp pilots,
I can’t really comment on the overall difficulty because the characters that I’ve used to try the event aren’t alpha. However, here’s what I see after doing the event for two days (several hours each day) in high sec.
Filament creation: I have gathered enough mats to do a number of curious sites and 0 higher tier sites. in the curious sites, I’ve obtained 2 higher tier filaments (both explo) but not enough mats to manufacture either.
Because of the above, two tracker elements are currently blocked:
- kill 1 Dalek – the very first combat activity
- manufacture 1 T2 filament
The only way to make progress on these two tracks right now would be to continue to do the explo site → curious site loop and hope I finally get the BPCs/mats I need or to buy stuff from the market.
Let’s see:
a T1 combat (precarious) filament goes for 14+M in jita.
X-37 (needed for T1 filament creation) goes for 1.2M+ in jita
Y-73 (needed for T2 filament creation) goes for 400+K in Amarr
A new player would need to told that they should go to the market hubs for the best prices.
in terms of exposing eve, I’ve seen the following:
- explo – a lot
- industry – curious sites filaments only
- market – sell / buy – some
- combat – none
I guess the event does an okay job exposing bottlenecks to a newer player, but it doesn’t do a good job of getting them easy access to all the activities. It does assume that they’ve pretty much done all the tutorials, but that’s not an unreasonable expectation.
Where things are, the T1 combat sites have a financial hurdle for little actual reward. You have to learn how to fit / fly a cruiser (the abyssal suggestions don’t actually look like the best fits), buy a ship, and grind for the first T1 combat filament to actually access the easy filament.
The majority of the rewards right now reside in the market prices for filaments and the bottleneck mats. They’re orders of magnitude higher than the NPC buy prices. As a result, you can make more isk putting up buy/sell orders for filaments and mats than actually doing the filaments themselves.
What’s the end result of this?
- It’s a grind to create filaments.
- It’s faster to buy/sell filaments than actually build/run the filaments
- Progress on the event tracker can get easily stalled
If the goal was to show the power of the EVE market, then it’s a big success. If the goal was to show how grindy you can be in EVE, it shows that as well. If the goal was to get everyone to participate in all the event activities, I don’t think it does a great job doing that. In fact, it actively puts significant hurdles on some of the activities (higher tier filament creation and T1 combat) that you have to do to complete tracker events.
For me, a good event is one where I want to complete each of the tasks even after I’ve collected all the rewards. I don’t see myself doing that for this event.