Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
-Gen. Jack Ripper, Dr. Stangelove
Daily login rewards are pretty much a staple of free to play MMOs these days, a little incentive to get you into the game in order to make their active user statistics look better, with a possible chance of maybe getting you to play. From the Hobbit presents in Lord of the Rings Online (including on the Legendary server) to boosters in War Thunder, free games that don’t play that card are few and far between. It is certainly an aspect of Black Desert Online, if you want to continue to stoke that concern.
And now CCP seems to be getting on board with that idea… again.
You may remember two and a half years back, in May of 2016, CCP tried putting a daily into the game. Those were called “recurring opportunities” and awarded players with 10K skill points if they would just undock and shoot an NPC. This “thrill of the hunt” plan turned out to be not all that thrilling, because CCP pulled it a month later, citing little change in logins.
The mistake made, it seems, was requiring a player to undock and do something. That was the old CCP, which really wanted players to get out and blow stuff up. But real MMOs just hand stuff out for merely logging in, so the new Pearl Abyss owned CCP is going to try it that way now.
Sure, it seems like a simple event, a one-off to celebrate the Onslaught expansion released earlier this week. It is only a weekend of double skill points.
How can double be bad?
I am going to get side tracked for a bit on how muddled the message of this campaign is.
That graphic, which they are using everywhere for this campaign, including in an email blast to players, which surprisingly went out in a timely manner, makes it sound like your skill training speed will be going 2x. So if you are training at 2,700 SP per hour, it should be going 5,400 per hour from today until November 19th hits, right?
Wrong.
Nothing is being doubled here, any more than your ISK is getting doubled in Jita.
Instead, if you log in two of the next three days (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), you will get some skill points applied to one of the characters on a given account. You get 25K SP if you have an Alpha account and 50K SP if you have an Omega.
What you see when you log in… with obligatory push to go Omega
That is nice. I never turn my nose up at free skill points. But that is “double” for very specific definitions of the word.
For example, your default Alpha character trains skills at 900 SP per hour, which only gives them 21.6K SP per day. So the 25K SP they get is actually more than double for a day, but with only two gifts over the three days, actually less than double over the course of the event.
And don’t get me started on what double would actually mean to an Omega with implants, attributes optimized, and a cerebral accelerator running.
But double sounds good, and I guess “double speed” sounded even better in a conference room somewhere. It isn’t something to get mad about, but it is an eye rolling opportunity.
And using that terminology managed to get at least one gaming site to declare that your training speed would be doubled AND you would get free SP for logging in as well, which led to a grumpy comment from me as I had provided the tip, taking pains to describe what the event actually entailed.
Anyway, you have to click the claim button when you log in, after which you get one or two 25K SP items in the redemption UI.
This little bit at the bottom of the screen
You just drag those on to whichever character you want and the skill points go to them.
Be warned, you don’t get a skill injector or such in game. These skill points go directly into the “unused skill points” pool for the character you select.
Just do that on two of the next three days and you’ve got your free skill points. Enjoy!
Which may leave you asking why I am suddenly on about daily login rewards becoming a thing. This is just one event, right? CCP has done this before, right? I mean, we had to log in every day for how many days to collect gifts from the Yule Lads for Yoiul that one year, remember?
While CCP has in fact handed out gifts like this on multiple occasions, even making us log into the game daily at times, up until now they haven’t bothered to add an element to the UI in order to support this sort of thing. And so I would like to present Exhibit A:
Exhibit A
There it is, stuck to the Neocom bar, annoyingly close to where I like to keep the notifications button, a specific UI element for “Daily Login Campaigns.” It is the box with little boxes at the corners and an X though it, with another little box in the center… which I am pretty sure is the Illuminati symbol for “trap them within presents” or “boxes of depth” or “I can’t find the circle tool in my drawing program.” Fnord.
It is also on the lower left of the character select screen as well!
So this is your Friday conspiracy theory. CCP is now serious about jumping on the login rewards bandwagon. You don’t add a UI element and name it “Daily Login Campaigns” if you aren’t serious about running daily login campaigns.
Now, maybe it won’t be an every single day thing, like Hobbit presents or whatever. But they will be a regular, recurring thing from now on. You can bet on it.
Others on about this campaign or the idea in general:
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