CCP Quietly Starts a New Login Campaign in EVE Online

More skill points!  I am skeptical of CCP handing them out freely, but never to such an extent that I won’t log in to get mine.

When I saw the mention of a new login campaign in the patch notes I figured there would be another news post or dev blog about it.  The point of a login in campaign is to get people to log in, right?  And to further that end one might wish to advertise that treats were being given out, to thus encourage that logging in behavior.  So I was going to wait for that to hit.

But this is CCP and sometimes logic simply does not apply.  Still, free skill points… eventually… but things have otherwise changed for this campaign.

The first sign for me was a post about the new campaign over at Evehermit.  Working from home as I was, I was able to go check on this myself immediately.  I found myself with an Omega login campaign window.

Omega rewards for me…

“Oh ho!” I thought, “Maybe CCP is keeping this on the down low because only Omegas are getting something special?”  But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  In past campaigns one of the key elements has been to push the fact that Omegas get better rewards in the face of Alpha clone players.  When I logged in an Alpha to check, they have their own campaign screen.

Alpha rewards for our Alpha friends… and no push to go Omega? Odd!

The reward is a random drug of some sort… in EVE Online we’re pretty pro-chemical enhancement… with a short duration which gets applied to the character you redeem it to immediately, so maybe don’t redeem it until you need it I guess. (Is this a bug? We’ll see tomorrow.)

So the real appeal has to be the skill point give away.  But this time you have to be in it for the long haul to get some.  There is a bar down at the bottom of the rewards screen that fills in some when you redeem your reward.

The tool tip

However, the bar didn’t fill up very much when I grabbed my reward.  I added just 6K points to the 150K point total I would need to reach in order to cash in.

Not very far along

That is just 4% of the total.  I hope this ramps up a bit as it goes along.  There is no mention of how long this login campaign lasts, but if it is 6K a day that implies as much as a 25 day-long trip to claim those 150K skill points.

And on the Alpha front I got 2K towards a 50K total, so again the time frame could be the same.  We’ll see tomorrow.