EVE Online Ushers in the Holidays with Winter Nexus Events Starting Today

CCP has rolled out their plans for the holidays and, sadly, the Yule Lads have been left out again this year.  But there is still plenty planned for the season with the Winter Nexus events.

The Winter Nexus event cometh

I am not quite sure what they mean by “Nexus” in all of this.  Nexus isn’t something we celebrate around these parts, but there it is.

Nexus Login Campaign

No New Eden event can happen unless there is an associated login campaign.  Starting at downtime today, which was about seven hours ago so you’re late already, and running through until downtime on January 5th 2021, there will be 13 special gifts waiting for you.  You will need to log in at least 13 days during that time frame to collect them all, as you can only claim one a day, but you have 26 days to do it.  You ought to be able to manage that.

Thirteenth night?

There is, naturally, the usual Alpha/Omega divide.  Alpha clones will get a set of gifts which include 80K skill points, while Omega clones will get 250K skill points as part of their set of gifts.  You can, as always, go Omega at any time an reap any rewards you missed.  They even include a nice button on the window for that.

Volatile Ice Storms

There will be traveling storms that will bring weather effects along with seasonally themed combat, mining, and data sites.  Sort of metaliminal storms with prized I guess.  These will appear throughout high, low, and null sec.  If you’re a wormholer and want to play I guess you’ll have to come back to normal space.

Can’t find an storm near you?  The login campaign includes Ice Storm Filaments that will whisk you off to a storm so you can savor its bounty or something.

Chilling Spree Daily Challenges

There will be holiday themed daily challenges that will have you launching snowballs and other tasks.  You can earn skill points and lore related items.

Opening Day Options

The login campaign will get you some snowballs and a festival launcher if you don’t have a pile of them from past years already… though, oddly, that isn’t the Day 1 reward.

Abyssal Proving Grounds

CCP’s attempt at arena combat will get its own events for the holidays.  The first event will be a team free-for-all where four teams of two players will do combat in Tech 1 Destroyers from 18 – 22 December. The second event will feature a 3v3 format with T1 Frigates running from 1 – 5 January

Stuff in the Store

And CCP has the Yoiul Star SKIN back in the New Eden store so you can have a holiday themed ship.  I kind of like those SKINs, but they are definitely better on bigger hulls.

Anyway, this all starts today, so you have been warned.  The December 10th Patch Notes update includes more details, as well as some information about some implants.

Also, they fixed the issue where people couldn’t set their death clone in an NPC station that otherwise did not have clone services available.  You can set Jita 4-4 as your death respawn again.  (Why didn’t Jita 4-4 get a clone bay added with the renovations?  They had budget for a freaking space elevator by not that?)

Those of us who have been around a while will remember the Yule Lads and their days in the winter sun back when CCP used to dial the holiday efforts up to 11.

Yule lads of old…

I wonder how many of the lads still work for CCP?

Addendum:  There is currently a known issue where the Nexus event sites are dropping Nightmare BPOs rather than single run BPCs.  CCP is aware of the issue and is asking players not to make a billion copies or try to sell them to other players as that will make their job of reverting all your dumb work slightly more difficult.  This will be fixed with a downtime patch.

WoW Classic gets Battlegrounds and Key Rings Today

Today’s WoW Classic US downtime sees the deployment of World of Warcraft Classic version 1.13.3. (EU realms won’t get this until 1am tomorrow if I read things right… but that will still be today here.)

Classic is as classic does

This update brings with it a few changes, the biggest being the introduction of battlegrounds to WoW Classic.

After the introduction of world PvP and the honor system with phase two of the WoW Classic plan caused… issues… like the expected non-stop gankfests made more sinister by increased populations relative to vanilla and the usual faction imbalances on servers (there might be an all Horde server now)… and also how honor is even calculated… led Blizzard to introduce battlegrounds early, before they got around to the full phase three release.

So, as of today we now have the Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley battlegrounds available, one of the first vanilla things you could queue up for… not counting the queue to get onto the server.

Warsong Gulch is the 10 vs 10 player capture the flag game that allow players level 10 and higher to join in.  It is divided into level brackets (10 to 19, 20 to 29, etc) along with the level 60 bracket.  Last week a level 19 hunter twink in planning paid me 5g to take him through the quest in Duskwood that has the special quiver as a reward, all while he was in ghost form because he was afraid the xp would level him up.  So expect a lot of that.

Alterac Valley is the 40 vs 40 epic zone struggle that allows players level 51 and up vie for control of the zone.  I’ve done Alterac dozens of times and I am still not sure how the whole thing even works.  I just follow the mass and kill the things.

Whether or not these two will take any pressure off the gank fever on the PvP servers remains to be seen.  I suspect life will remain miserable for many.

Also on the list of things WoW Classic is getting today is elemental invasions.  In the zones Un’goro Crater, Azshara, Winterspring, and Silithus elemental invaders will be showing up.  I am sure this is in furtherance of some event, but I honestly don’t recall what at the moment and the patch notes don’t say.

In addition we are also getting the key ring today.  This is a special 12 slot inventory space that lets you store the keys to various things so that they don’t take up your otherwise limited and often critical inventory space.  I have at least three characters that will get an extra inventory spot because the key to the side door of Gnomeregan will go there.  Worth it to me.

Oddly I remember both the key ring being added and later being removed from the game.  If you want to know more about it, WoW Head has a guide.  Just remember it doesn’t show up in the UI until you actually have a key to store in it.

Finally, there appear to be a few changes to the LUA interface to keep addons from doing more than they should, a way to access paid character transfers has been added though such transfers are not yet available, the executable has been renamed, and some bug fixes have come along for the ride.

I have seen some people saying that with all of this we now have phase three in place, but that is not so.  Phase three won’t be fully deployed until Blizzard opens up the Blackwing Lair raid and adds Darkmoon Faire to WoW Classic.  We won’t see those until “early” 2020.  That will bring us up to the July 2005 level of vanilla content.

Somebody did a nice post about the phases of WoW Classic if you are interested in what else is coming.

Now back to my nice comfortable PvE-RP server where open world PvP issues aren’t really a thing.

The December Update Brings Gambling and Structure Changes to EVE Online

The December update for EVE Online has gone live after an extended downtime and brings with it an array of changes for New Eden.

Called the “Free Market” release, the headline item for the update is the HyperNet Relay gambling interface that will allow player to pay CCP to allow them to run raffles in the game.

The New Face of Gambling in New Eden

I covered this return to gambling in New Eden in a previous post.  CCP received a lot of feedback on this feature, responded to none of it, and shipped it as announced.  We shall see how it plays out.

There is also a new wallet UI being added with the update.

The New Wallet UI

My enthusiasm for this is fairly small as well.  As usual, being used to one awkward UI makes the next one seem difficult.  I suppose they are trying to get rid of yet another rows and columns grid that helps keep the “spreadsheets in space” theme alive, but I still think they need to fill that senior UX designer position sooner rather than later.

There are also some changes to the player trading interface that is supposed to make what is being traded more obvious by, for example, displaying the type of ship being traded rather than the name the other player has given the item, closing a loophole for some scams.

Also coming with today’s update is another of the Team Talos projects, Kicking over Castles.

Team Talos strikes again

This project has its own dev blog, but in short it is an attempt to address some of the ways that people have been using the mechanics of Upwell Structures to the detriment of the game.  The changes are:

• Defenders can no longer choose a day of the week for exiting the hull reinforcement cycle. Structures will exit reinforcement at the next available hour of the defenders choosing (+/- 3 hours) after the following durations:
  • Wormhole space: 1.5 days
  • Low and Null security space: 2.5 days
  • High security space: 4.5 days
• Updated vulnerability windows now takes 30 days to take effect (instead of 7).
• In a solar system where the Activity Defense Multiplier is above 4.0 and where an Infrastructure Hub is held by an alliance, pilots that are NOT members of that alliance will be unable to deploy medium Upwell structures (Astrahus, Athanor and Raitaru).
• The random jitter range on reinforcement exit times is increased from +/- 2 hours to +/- 3 hours.

These changes will give attackers a chance to get a timer that isn’t both mid-week and 180 degrees off their own on time zone as well as keeping down the ability for hostiles to drop staging structures in your home system.

But the biggest change coming as part of this, to my mind at least, is related to Faction Warfare, where the ability to ignore the NPC stations by bringing your own structures has been somewhat game breaking.

New FW Tethering Rules

Basically, if you’re in FW space held by the other faction, you can no longer happily tether up and feel safe on any old structure you come across.

While that falls short of simply not allowing Upwell structures in FW space, which probably should have been the default mode back when they were introduced, it at least makes attackers in FW a little less safe.

Also, the time limit is up on Ansiblex Jump Gate and Tenebrex Cyno Jammer structures that are anchored within 500km of a structure.  Any that have not been moved out of that range will now be offline until they are moved.

Finally, in another blow to fans of Player Owned Starbases, blueprints for many POS modules have been converted to be blueprints for Upwell structure modules.  They are not gone yet, but there isn’t much left of the once mighty POS.

There are also the usual array of minor fixes and adjustments.  These are covered in the patch notes for the December update.  The release has been reported as successfully deployed, so all the changes are there waiting for people to log in.

Tinnudir and Annuminas

Tinnudir is the hub of Evendim, the central point from which most of the tale of the zone is told.  Oatbarton, Dwaling, and High King’s Crossing lead you into the Evendim, but Tinnudir is where you are set up for the long haul.

Annuminas feels legendary

Tinnudir isn’t much of a place even.  It lacks the pastoral charm of Oatbarton and the overwrought epic nature of High King’s Crossing.  Esteldin is sprawling compared to it, Ost Guruth feels like a fort when set against it.  Tinnudir is barely a place at all, some minor wreckage in a zone filled with the epic structures of the kingdom of Arnor.  It is just so much dirt and a few broken walls.

Tinnudir at night

It has all the requisite NPCs you need to hand, a task board if you feel you need to work on your standings (you won’t), a stable, a dock, and the usual crafting stations and skirmish camp off on the periphery.  While you’ll speak to many NPCs about quests, Orchalwe… whom I call “Ollie” in my head… is the main focus.  He sends you thither and yon around the zone.

Evendim as a zone

If you do every quest… and for maybe the first time ever I gritted my teeth, determined to do every last quest I could… you will pay a visit to nearly every acre, trod on every island, go up on  every hill and down into every dale before you’re done.

In the past I have always done everything to the east of Tinnudir, and all the islands, but I am generally getting so far ahead of the leveling curve by doing that that I tend to skip the Eavespires at the north end of the lake and the swathe of quests that lead down the western side to where the wood-trolls live.

This time I did the whole thing, even stopping at the wood-trolls long enough to make some headway on one of the dwarf racial deeds.

Advancing enmity of the trolls

I spent a few nights working my way around the zone, playing for an hour or two tops on any given night.

I even made it over to the blue lady and her corner of the zone.

Show respects

She is a bit out of the way and doing her quests require some swimming, something that will be familiar to anybody who did the zone in the early days before boat travel was added.

The number of places you are sent off to visit and the plethora of quests that await you make it feel like you’ll be there for a long, long time.  But, in the end, you don’t really travel that far… except to go to and fro with Gwindeth… and the quests go by quickly enough.

Soon enough I was on the boat to Men Erain, the way of the kings, where the tombs of the kings of Arnor lay.  Arriving there is the sign that the end phase of the zone is nearly at hand.  There is a series of quests to run there that send you in and around the tombs as well as way up into the hills behind, far enough that you can look over the peaks and see the bridge and the way back to Oatbarton.  Meanwhile you’re practically hanging over Annuminas, slaying the inevitable tomb robbers.

Fighting on a slope

At one of the peaks your quest objective is simply to use the /look emote to see what you can see about the state of the tomb robber infestation.

Looking out and reporting

But even that long trek takes less time than you think it will.  And soon you’re done with Men Erain and are back at Tinnudir speaking to Orchalwe again.  But this time he isn’t going to simply send you off on another task.  This time you’re to meet up with him in Annuminas, the final area of the zone.

Annuminas Map

Annuminas was the capital of Arnor, and while it lays in ruin it is still an amazing site.  In a way it is crazy that Turbine spent the time to create this area, something that is barely a footnote in the books most of us have read.  But it is really the highlight of the zone, the payoff for tracking about after the various and sundry foes.  Here the forces of Angmar congregate.

I spent a mithril coin to take a swift travel trip to the camp of the Wardens of Annuminas within the city just to avoid picking up too much along the way.  The camp is spare, though still arguably nicer than Tinnudir.

The Wardens camp in Annuminas

It doesn’t have all the amenities, but there is a task board and vendors and a few quest givers standing about the place.  But you really only need to speak with Orchalwe.  Once you start with him he joins you as an ally in your exploration of the old capital city.

Standing with Orchalwe

WoW has had quest givers like this, ones that accompany you along the way, letting you turn in quests and pick up new ones as you go.  I’m not sure who had the idea first.  But I haven’t had a quest giver quite like Orchalwe anywhere else.

In Annuminas you have a few larger scale quests and Orchalwe has some specific tasks for you to open with.  But the real adventure is the exploration of the city as, in each district or area Orchalwe will pop a quest for you.  But you only get the quests if you get to the right places.  So I always make an effort to get into every nook and cranny.

Some areas of the zone are fairly challenging, featuring groups of signature mobs.  Orchalwe assists you, and throws some heals in battle that can keep you going, but I rolled in there at level 38 which is a bit behind the curve, so there were some tight fights.

Orchalwe providing vital intel

However, I was fairly lucky during my explorations.  While by this point I was well behind the main pack of players, many of whom were already lingering about at level 50, I still managed to run into fellow travelers along the way at key points, forming ad hoc fellowships of need in order to tackle challenging objectives.  A level 45 bard showed up to assist me with the one small fellowship quest I needed to tackle.

I actually reached the point where Orchalwe was done.  I had achieved his over-arching objective and could have dismissed him and headed back to the camp.  But I knew from memory that I still had four or five of his location based quests left to do, so I dragged him along as I sought them out.

I didn’t really need those quests.  I had long since finished the final quest count deed and I had hit the kinship level of faction with the Wardens of Annuminas Men Erain.  I even had the advanced slayer deed for invaders from Angmar done.  But I really wanted to get in and see and do every last quest.  Given how long it had been since I had run through the zone last and the small likelihood that I was going to be doing it in this depth again anytime soon, I felt I had best treat this like it might be my last visit.  You never know what the future might bring.

And when I the control points had all been take and I finally got to that last boss on Tyl Annun and defeated him, I dismissed Orchalwe and made my way back to the camp, done with Annumiunas in just an evenings play.

From there Orchalwe says to meet him back in Tinnudir, which he pretty much has to say since he’s going to be there when you get back anyway.  From there it was a final quest turn in with him.  Then I hit the faction vendor to make sure and pick up the mount from them.

Then my quest log had tasks pointing me at Rivendell and the Trollshaws.  I was still shy of 40, which you need in order to take the stable mount to Rivendell, so I went to the Trollshaws.  I left behind me quite a few deeds left undone.  The numbers needed for the slayer deeds start to add up, sitting at 270 total kills needed for some.  I had no problem hitting that number with the ubiquitous tomb robbers and the invaders from Angmar, but others I let be.  I got all the titles and basic deeds, but the advanced deeds I’ll leave for another time.

And so it was off to the Trollshaws, a zone that is always a bit problematic for me, to get level 40 and continue the epic story line.

Flying Unlocked in Legion

That actually went more smoothly/quickly than I thought it would.

When I came back to WoW in late October I was wandering around in search of a goal to get me back into the game and, naturally enough, flying was my choice.  I still had to unlock world quests, do the Suramar quest chains, and get myself revered with a series of factions.  But that seems like a decent mid-to-longer term goal.

A side goal in the whole thing was not to burn myself out on the game in trying to unlock flying as soon as possible.  I could have gone after world quests in a big way, running them down constantly, and have gotten tired of the whole affair pretty quickly.

Instead I mostly just rolled with the emissary quests, the daily set of world quests for a specified faction.  You do four of them and you get a nice bonus boost of faction.  I would do those, then move on to something else, like pet battles or working on an alt.

Soon enough I had a few factions at revered, and most of the rest close.  The exception was The Wardens, which seemed to be lagging behind.  They were only just honored when I had another faction already at revered.  So I made a point of hitting a world quest or two for them every day as well.

I also used the anniversary event to boost my faction yield.  Likewise, with Darkmoon Faire up this past week I made sure to ride the merry-go-round for the one hour faction/exp gain boost before I went off to do my quests.

Riding for a faction boost!

By Friday I had the Legionfall Commander achievement wrapped up, having done enough on the Broken Shore for that and the exploration achievement.

That meant the Broken Isles Pathfinder Part Two achievement was set, save for the fact that you need Part One as well.

It was then just The Wardens left, about 2,000 faction points shy of revered.  So I decided to binge a bit, sprint to the finish, using the last day of Darkmoon Faire to boost me a bit.  That got me close, a couple hundred shy of my goal. I would have kept going, but world quests for The Wardens dried up for me.

This morning however, there were two waiting for me.  I flew off and did one that left me just 45 points shy.  The second one was in an awkward corner of Suramar, and as I was planning how to best ride out there I realized that I had my daily Vanguard of the Silver Hand token to pick up.

Get One World Quest Free!

That lets you send out an NPC squad to run one non-elite world quest every 18 hours, which is effectively daily.  I headed back to the Paladin order hall, picked that up, stood over in a likely spot for a screen shot, and sent them on their way to pick up that final run for The Wardens.

The moment

It was actually a bit too dark where I stood.  My shoulders do stand out though!  That gave me a short cascade of achievements.

The Achievements of the Day

Now I wondered if I had to do anything else.  So I went back out into Dalaran to see if I could simply fly at that point.  Sure enough, off I went into the skies of the Broken Isles.

First Flight in Legion

And of course, that also means that flying is unlocked in WoW Legion for all of my characters.  I have been working my hunter up to 110 as one of my side tasks.  Now he will be able to fly to his quests as well.

Tistann over the Broken Shore zone

Now I have to figure out what to do next.  I will carry on with pet battles and alts.  I have Argus still to finish up. (And no flying there!)  And then I have to see if it is worth getting exalted with any of these factions.  At revered they all seem to have a battle pet for sale, and I like that, but I haven’t explored what exalted might get me.  Mounts?  Are there mounts?

Anyway, I’ve walked my last mandated mile in the main part of the expansion.  Now to fly free where I can, collect those remaining hidden treasures, and probably haul my daughter around to help her get flying unlocked as well.