I played heavily from 2006 to 2014 when my son was born. I just recently returned after I became aware of the recent security changes made to high sec but I spoke to several friends who had stopped playing for multiple reasons and were not aware of the recent changes that were released with the faction warfare patch.
These friends read the tittle of the e-mail, considered it Eve spam and deleted it without reading it. If the e-mail would have read “We’ve made space safer; free weekend Omega for returning players!” it would have caught their eye.
I expected more fanfare for this change but it seems like it was just implemented to satisfy a minority at CCP.
I read the patch notes of course … but else there was little warning given. But who can manage a low sec status should be able to deal with loss in highsec.
… and tags are worth something again, one good thing for the ecosystem.
Looking through that email, the “free week of omega” thing was bured in the ‘special offers’ section that is 90% about non-free (gratis) bundles/packs/offers from the store – It took me more time to find it than the total of the time I usually spend skimming through those emails, and in a section that almost entirely skip.
I only learned about the free week of omega stuff by opening the store in game and seeing “7 days of omega, price $0.00 (-100%)” — I thought it was a bug at first, and then it went through and I logged all my alts and redeemed it.
CCP really dropped the ball on the advertising for this.
There’s a lot more they could do, most notably the annoucements in the launcher window. There really should’ve been one that said “we <3 our players, open the store and redeem 7 days of free omega! spread the word to your friends, this is open to all current players, alpha and omega” and I guarantee you the word of mouth from that alone would’ve traveled further than all of the current efforts combined.
