The Crimson Harvest Returns to EVE Online

Halloween festivities have arrived in New Eden as CCP with the return of the Crimson Havest event.  Regarded by some as one of the better annual events, it is arriving a bit late this year, possibly due to the data center upgrades being performed by CCP earlier this week.

The Return of the Crimson Harvest

The Crimson Harvest comes along with other treats, all of which are included under the Halloween Horrors banner.

This year players will be able to choose which side of the event they wish to support.

EVE’s premiere Blood Raider seasonal event has begun once again, starting today and running until 9 November! This year, Capsuleers will be met in battle by the forces of the Order of St. Tetrimon, an Amarr religious order dedicated to the preservation of the scriptures of the faith. Join the Order in their campaign to drown this sanguine spectacle in laserfire, or for the first time ever take the side of the Blood Raiders, venerating the Harvest and painting New Eden in crimson!

Somebody will side with the Blood Raiders I am sure.  You get to pick which side in The Agency.

Sites for the event show up throughout New Eden, but some locations are better than others according to the patch notes.  Here are the details:

• Crimson Gauntlet and Tetrimon Base combat sites can be found in most areas of space. These sites should be approached with caution, and capsuleers are advised to fly a battlecruiser, battleship, heavy assault cruiser, or even more powerful vessels if they wish to investigate these locations. Rewards for looting the battleship NPCs found at the end of the sites include items that can be traded for isk, skins, boosters, clothing and more!
• Crimson Harvest Network Node and Tetrimon Network Node data sites are also appearing across New Eden. These hacking sites contain network node structures that can be accessed for more great rewards!
• Advanced versions of the combat and hacking sites can be found within the areas containing the most heated fighting between Blood Raider and Tetrimon forces: the Blood Raider controlled systems within the Delve region and the low security systems within the Derelik region. These advanced sites are rarer and more challenging than the standard versions of the sites but they provide much greater rewards. Bringing a friend or two helps reduce the risk immensely, but beware of other capsuleers who may be searching for the same loot!
• The most elusive and valuable strongholds of the Blood Raiders and Order of Tetrimon can only be found by obtaining a rare escalation from the advanced combat sites.

In addition there are the now traditional login rewards running during the event.

Crimson Harvest Rewards

The prizes include skill points, training accelerators, SKINs, and some fireworks.  As usual, Omega accounts get all the prizes, while Alpha accounts only get the top row.  Be sure to log in every day if you want to collect them all.

In addition, the popular Trick or Treat PvP flag has been set for the event, which boosts the drop rate for items for ships destroyed in PvP, with the dial being set to 90%.

More loot on the field

This will no doubt make some pilots quite happy.  Be extra careful flying your freighter through Uedama, the suicide gank capital of New Eden.

There are also various discounts on upgrading to Omega which include SKINs as well as some event theme SKINs returning to the in-game store.  There is also a a destroyer focused Proving Grounds event running that features boosts to Stasis Webifier range, Nosferatu and Energy Neutralizer strength, and Laser turret damage just to maintain the Blood Raider theme.

In addition to all of that, the patch notes also show that CCP is still adjusting the CRAB beacons introduced with last week’s update, with rewards and the requirements to build the beacons being changed up.

There was also an exploit notification posted about CRAB beacons.  Don’t get caught doing that trick now.  CCP is watching.  (Also, another reminder that players will find every flaw in CCP’s plans.)

Related:

• CCP – Halloween Horrors Announcement
• CCP – Patch Notes

The EVE Online Invasion Expansion Arrives on May 28th

CCP has announced the arrival date for the next big EVE Online expansion.  Titled Invasion, it will be landing on May 28th.  I almost missed the announcement because they are also in the middle of the EVE Online Invasion world tour of events.  I guess we know the 2019 theme for sure now.

Invasion is coming

If the name and graphic were not enough, the announcement straight up tells us that the Triglavians are coming to get us.  I supposed we’ve been messing around too much in Abyssal space.

The Triglavians will also be bringing along three new hulls, an assault frigate, a heavy assault cruiser, and a command destroyer, giving them a range fleet options.

With the Invasion expansion we will also get further changes to the War Dec system and and overhaul of the unloved interface of The Agency.

There will also be a range of smaller fixes and changes, including allowing faction weapons to use Tech II ammunition.

All of that is coming at the end of the month.

Some Better Luck with Operation Permafrost

Thanks to a tip in the comments from the last post about the event I went looking at the December patch notes… patch notes get updated for follow on fixes… and I did see that CCP ended up doing some tweaks for the Operation Permafrost event, so I thought I might give it another shot.

It is what we have now

Among the fixes listed were missing ore and NPCs podding players.  I was having problems with the former and am glad to have not had to experience the latter.  That can be a nasty surprise.

I was able to get out the Procurer again and actually found some ore beyond the west gate that I was able to harvest.

Procurer mining like it should

I don’t know if the asteroids still only respawn at downtime or not however, since the site I entered was empty of other players.  So the asteroids I found there might have been respawns, but it is possible that the rush to mine was done already.

Here I was finally able to discern deeper differences between this and the Crimson Harvest event.  Again, while similar to a certain degree, CCP sought to change things up some.  During the Crimson Harvest event the tasks from The Agency seemed to be pretty much infinitely redoable.  You mined so many units of the event ore, get the points, then do it again.  Kill so many NPCs, collect the points, do it again.

You can view that as dull or serene depending on how you look at it I suppose, but I gather CCP felt it was more towards the former.  So for the mining side of things it did start off with a series of “mine X amount of ore” followed by “mine X+Y amount of ore.”  But then it started in with some other tasks, like reprocessing a set amount of ore.  I flew back to a station to do that.

Then there was more mining to be done, then a requirement to process a given amount of ore using the structures in the West pocket, which I didn’t know you could do until that came up.

Using the structure

At that point I had to go back to the station where I had stashed a load of the ore to bring back in order to meet the goals for that task.

On the way back I decided to figure out the three tasks asking you to examine each of the three gates.

There is no “examine: option

I had previously used them and looked at the info display for each gate, but that didn’t seem to do anything.  Google didn’t help either, though I did find one guy’s video about the event where he too couldn’t figure out what to do.  Fortunately, in the comments, somebody said to use the “look” command on the gates from the overview.  Doing that got Aura to pop up and explain each gate in turn and let you claim the claim the rewards for the tasks… which were worth one point each.  This is why I wasn’t in a hurry to figure it out I guess.

Aura explains it all

The words about the gas cloud harvester would come into focus shortly.  Once I was done with the next ore refining and harvesting assignments the tasks moved on to gathering Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor.  Gas.

More than a dozen years into EVE Online and I had not once harvested gas.  Still, how hard could it be?

Something in the back of my brain knew that the Venture was the choice for gas harvesting.  I had to go get the skill and train it up on my alt, but I had some free skill points hanging about, so I popped that up to level IV right away.

Then there was fitting the Venture.  Being a mining frigate it is small and not very tough.  I recalled Johnny Splunk telling tales of avoiding NPCs while harvesting gas in by speed tanking them.  Signature size also plays into that, so I decided to go that route.

I toughened up the Venture against thermal and kinetic damage to give myself a bit of buffer, fit two gas harvesters to collect the vapor, fit a rig to give me a little more capacitor space, then strapped an oversize prop mod in the form of a 10MN afterburner, something meant for a cruiser hull, onto the ship.  That prop mod would let me go 2km/sec but keep my signature smaller than a 5MN microwarp drive would.  And it all fit.

I headed back out for the site, went through the West gate, and started up the gas harvesters.  I also set myself to orbit the gas cloud at 1km, since the gas harvesters only had a 1,500m range, and lit the afterburner.

150km out from my warp in I realized that the gas cloud was effectively zero distance from anywhere on grid, so set myself to orbit one of the structures at that range, trucking along at 2km a second.

Venture running along

That kept me far away from the Mordu’s Legion NPCs that were spawning.  They would try to lock me up and I could see them firing missiles… you can see some missiles in that screen shot above… but nothing seemed able to touch me.

Blazing away at me with missiles to no effect

I seemed pretty safe.  The harvesting, however, was taking some time.  Each cycle only harvested two units per collector, and I had two tasks set for me, one to harvest 350 units and one to harvest 400 units.  So I left myself in my big orbit slowing gathering up gas.

I also had along a pair of Hornet II drones to take care of anything that might stray into range.   I think they got maybe one frigate.  Otherwise they just flew along with me.

Hornet drones just following along

With nothing happened I was lulled into a false sense of security.  I seemed to be pretty much invincible in my orbit.  So I walked away from the computer as the numbers slowly counted up.

I came back to find myself still in orbit, however I was now just in my pod.  The wreck of my Venture say in space not too far behind me.

Just a wreck now

I had gotten pretty far along however, almost half way to 400 units harvested.  I didn’t look at the kill mail, thinking it was likely just a bad luck NPC spawn or maybe one of them had managed to cut me off somehow.

So I went on back to Amarr and fit out another Venture, the same as before.  Then I went back and, thinking maybe I hadn’t gone far enough out in my orbit, I aimed away from the warp in and put a good 300km between me and the nearest NPC, harvesting as I went, and started an even bigger orbit.

Venture venturing out

Once set I tabbed out to look at something else, then tabbed back only to find myself dead again.  Well, clearly I was doing something wrong.  So I grabbed another Venture in Amarr, but didn’t waste time fitting much to it.  Gas harvesters and the prop mod was all I brought with me this time.  I went for an even larger orbit.  In addition, some other people had showed up, so I figured they might give me some cover.

Look at them in the distance

I hung in for a bit, enough to finish the harvesting tasks and get another, when suddenly I was taking damage.  I turned to warp out to one of the local citadels, shutting down the AB, but before I was aligned I was in my capsule yet again.

I saw the damage flash by on screen, but had to go check the logs to be sure about what I had seen.

[ 2018.12.21 19:51:31 ] (mining) You mined 2 units of Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:31 ] (mining) You mined 2 units of Hiemal Tricarboxyl Vapor
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:45 ] (combat) 355 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:50 ] (combat) 253 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits
[ 2018.12.21 19:51:55 ] (combat) 123 from Atmospheric Instabilities - Hits

I went and looked more closely at the kill mail and saw that I had been done in by an “invisible cloud.”  According to zKillboard, invisible clouds are doing in lots of ventures and destroyers.

So I now I knew that the site hits you with damage every so often, enough to blot out my ship in ten seconds from the first hit.  Well that wasn’t going to work out with the Venture.

I hadn’t notice this with the Procurer since it was getting hit by NPCs pretty constantly and is pretty tanky.  But I would have to be quick, aligned out, and, more unlikely, paying attention to the screen to warp off to safety before I was hit.

Meanwhile, I had another task for 350 units of vapor and a new task asking me to refine a bunch of vapor at the structure.  And, of course, I had lot both my ship and all the gas I had harvested.  I was starting to tire of the whole routine again.

But I can see how the pattern of the event changed when compared to the rather more simple Crimson Harvest event of earlier this year.  CCP decided they wanted to go with a more directed experience, setting a selection of different tasks before players to get them doing various things.  I suppose this has some merit.  I did learn a bit about gas harvesting after more than a dozen years playing.  But the whole random invisible cloud attacks on grid put me off the whole thing.  And unlike some events given through The Agency, the tasks do not appear to reset.  I’m still on the hook for harvesting and refining more gas, which isn’t worth the price in Ventures to my mind.

I did manage to get through the second set of rewards and on my way to the third, sitting at 269 points into the event.  And there is still more than a week to go.  Maybe I’ll get out and blow up some Mordu’s Legion ships with medium sized weapons… another rather specific task… to round out the event.  Or maybe I’ll learn to hack.  That is another thing I’ve managed to skip so far in the game.

Mining My Way Through the Crimson Harvest

Basically, I wanted the Gila SKIN.

Actually, I didn’t even want that to start with.  What I started out wanting to is just to see the sky boxes.  At EVE Vegas, at the presentation about The Agency & Events, one of the bits of info was that Crimson Harvest would be using the new graphics tech that had previously been introduced in Abyssal deadspace.

I had to go see that, so I grabbed a high sec alt and put her in a Venture and headed off to see what was what.

I chose a venture because the presentation also said that the event had mining as well as combat and it was just easier to grab the mining ship, which I had to hand.

A Venture in the Crimson Harvest event

The Venture, however, was a little light for the task.  It could mine away, but the rats that spawned in the harvest sites were a little too tough for it, so I upgraded to a Procurer.  I used the hardened null sect semi-bait fit that the coalition was pushing back when we moved into Delve.  It was already proof against Blood Raiders.  I brought that out to mine and shoot the rats.

Procuerer out in the Crimson Harvest

This worked out pretty well, and I mined and shot my way along for a while.  I got the cerebral accelerator at 50 points pretty quickly, and then started in towards the Astero SKIN, since that was only 150 points.

The points roll in pretty fast.  Or fast enough, anyway.  You get 10 points for every 500 units you mine, and another 10 points for every Blood Raider event ship you blow up, and 10 more points if you blow up a boss Blood Raider.  The Procurer could hold three and half loads of ore before having to unload and could handle most of what the Blood Raiders could throw at it.  I did learn to be careful flying too close the banana of doom.

The Banana of Doom in the background

Straying too close to the banana spawns a double helping of Blood Raiders, more than my little Procurer could handle right off.

This got a little hairy by the banana

Fortunately there was a citadel in most systems where I ran the event, so I would just warp off, tether up, and repair.  And, on warping back, I was generally far enough away from the remaining crowd of Blood Raiders that I was able to pick them off as they hove into range.

The Gila SKIN became my goal, though it required 350 points, which seemed a long way off from the 150 mark.  But I kept going.  I wanted the SKIN primarily because I have this idea that I am going to skill up this alt to run higher level Abyssal deadspace sites.  Right now she runs level one sites in a Caracal, but I would like to be able to run at least level three sites and the Gila is favored for that and high.  And I can’t fly a ship without a SKIN.  Well, except for the Procurer I guess, but SKINs don’t apply very well to ORE ships.

So I plodded along, mining, shooting up Blood Raiders, and looting their wrecks.  They drop a lot of Agency drugs, which should serve me well later.  Some of them are on the list for Reavers.

Soon than I would have thought I ended up with the Gila SKIN.  I didn’t do it all in one go, but over a couple of sessions it went by fast.  Then there was the Machaeriel SKIN at 650 points, but that seemed so far away.  But I was getting lots of nice loot from the wrecks, so I kept going.

650 didn’t take that long at all.  I had a nice run where somebody dropped in with an Orca and invited me to a fleet and boosted for me.  That sped up mining and extended my the range of my strip miners.

I hit 650 points and it didn’t feel like it took all that long.  After that there was only the Avatar SKIN at 1,000 points, which seemed a long way away.  But I wasn’t doing much else… actually I was only half paying attention to the mining and able to do other things on the computer… so I carried on, eventually capping out and earning the final SKIN.

A thousand points wasn’t all that hard

I don’t have an Avatar, and I doubt I ever will, but I can give that SKIN to somebody or hold onto it until it goes up in value.

Overall I found the event pretty mellow.  I did like how they setup the sites for this event.  Rather than the random sites in this system and that there were just two sites in every system.  One was Crimson Harvest Fields, which was where you went to mine but could also shoot up some structures to trigger a Blood Raider spawn.  And then there was the proximity spawn from the banana.

The other site in each system was the Crimson Gauntlet, which was a combat oriented site.  I got out another character and ran through those for a bit just to try them.  I used my heavy missile event Drake.

Ghostbird SKIN Drake in a Crimson Gauntlet site

The first time I went out I realized I was hardened against totally the wrong damage types, which led to a moment of drama and a heavily scarred Drake.  But once I went back and fixed my resists the Drake was pretty solid with the usual tactic of putting drones on the frigates and missiles on cruisers and up.

The fact that there was one of each site in every system meant that if one site got crowded or was worn out, I could just move over a system or two and find a fresh site.  There also seemed to be multiple instances of the Crimson Harvest Fields sites running in the same system at times.  Access was via an acceleration gate, so that was completely possible.  I would leave to unload then come back and find the situation different.  Then go for an unload run again and find wrecks or people who were there the first time but missing the second.

And the art of the event was very nice.  I took a lot of screen shots, some of which I have piled on to the end of this post.  Click on some them to see them full size.  They are intense.

Overall, a decent event.  I actually got a second Gila SKIN with the second character, it being easy enough to just get that done.

Anyway, while the event doesn’t have much time left to run, you could easily pick up the Avatar SKIN over the weekend without feeling like the event burned you out.

EVE NPE Trades the Epic Experience Idea for More of The Agency

When all you have is a screwdriver, then every feature gets screwed.

Me, somewhere further down in this post

Who remembers back during EVE Fanfest 2016 when CCP Ghost got up in front of everybody and talked about how CCP was going to change the New Player Experience?  He went on about how they were going to make the NPE an epic, engaging, bigger than life, you matter in the fight sort of experience that would try to do something about the somewhat dismal new player retention issues that EVE Online has traditionally had?

Yes, there were a few other little things going on around then that might have drawn attention from that particular bullet point, like the Citadel expansion, the fall of Deklein during the Casino War, and Xenuria being elected to CSM11.  But I did get around to bringing it up in a post later, though that post points to the video of the presentation that has since been removed.  The internet never fails to disappoint.

I got around to it because an improved NPE seemed like a solid choice, what with the free to play plans that CCP announced later on for the Ascension expansion.  Alpha clones were to become a thing, and with them would the new starting experience.

So it sounded like a good idea, getting players invested with some story up front.  I mean sure, EVE Online is a sandbox, so making new players think there was actually going to be something like a coherent story to follow in the game was a bit of a lie right up front.  But it couldn’t be any worse that past variations on the NPE theme, which tended to bounce between the clarity of the instructions that came with our “Made in China” garden awning and the excitement of the Ben Stein history class scene in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.

The literal tipping point to get me to start this blog back in 2006 was the tutorial.  It was such a mess.  After trying to figure that out I felt a burning need to write about it.  It’s your fault we’re here CCP!

Anyway, I did try the new epic tutorial that came in with Ascension, with its voiced instructions and running events that would eventually blow you up, only to revive you and show you how an immortal space capsuleer shrugs off death and keeps on fighting.

Bits of it were admittedly recycled from the previous tutorial, but it was still pretty cool I guess.  There were action sequences where you got into a fight with allies and saw other ships, even capital ships, something a lot of capsuleers never end up seeing.

My Punisher in the NPE with an Apostle

There was even a giant wheel in space to blow up and all.  It was of epic proportions and I remember the art team speaking about it at EVE Vegas and the work they had to do in order to get it to blow up just right.

The ring… it is precious to me

After that I don’t recall CCP talking much more about the NPE, save for a couple of minor updates, so I had guessed they had nailed it… or that it was at least working out marginally better than the previous NPE.

So I was more than a bit surprised to learn that they THREW ALL OF THAT AWAY with the August update.  Not only that, but I remain surprised at how low key that tossing away of the old NPE went.  The entry in the Patch Notes reads:

Updated NPE with beginner tutorial sites and combat challenges available through The Agency.

That is about all there was.  The Updates page said a little bit more, but I tend to lean on the Patch Notes more.  And, generally speaking, this sort of change generally had a Dev Blog associated with it and some forum discussion, but either that didn’t happen or I totally missed it because this new NPE was pretty much a shock to me.  I wouldn’t have even noticed it had there not been a new Alpha Clone doctrine announced for the Imperium which got me to roll up an new Alpha Clone of my own on a lark.

Gone is the dynamic story, the jumping into combat with NPC allies, the capital ships, and the destruction of your ship during the process… at least the intentional destruction of it.

Replacing it are a series of “go shoot the barely resisting NPC” missions stacked up in The Agency interface that have about as much connection between each other as consecutive articles in an encyclopedia.

Here we are in The Agency

It isn’t dramatically worse than some of the older NPE experiences, and its actually much better than what I experienced back in 2006.  But it isn’t as good as the dynamic one, so I am curious as to why CCP decided to toss all of that work, especially after they built it up and were so proud of it.

One guess is that it wasn’t working or that it was doing worse than previous NPE iterations.  I liked it, the dynamic story aspect of it was much more engaging to me than the mission running interface of the previous version.  I wonder if blowing up the player’s ship was too much.

Probably the most important lesson that any player needs to learn about EVE Online is that ships are transitory, less like your epic armor in WoW and more like ammunition to be expended.  And it can be a very tough one to learn.   And even when you do get it, losing a ship won’t be a happy experience, but it isn’t anywhere akin losing irreplaceable gear that you spent months raiding to get.  If you’re rage-quitting over a ship loss you have not grokked the game.

But putting that right up front and center in the NPE might be too much to ask.  So it is possible they were seeing players quit the game right then at that point in the tutorial and decided that it needed to be fixed.

Still, it seems like something you could fix more easily by not throwing away all that work.

My worry is that the change was actually driven by the need to force all PvE activities into the interface of The Agency.  That does seem to be an overriding goal of somebody at CCP, and when your tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

Though, to modify that phrase to get the right point of view I might restate it as, “When all you have is a screwdriver, then every feature gets screwed.”  And The Agency is the great big PvE screwdriver.

And I say that because they have traded an engaging and dynamic tutorial for one that is tepid and dry and not very engaging at all.  And in addition to being dull, it has way too many steps.  You can see from my screen shot above that I did the core step for each stage thinking that perhaps that would be enough.  Maybe the subsidiary steps were just there to reinforce concepts for people who didn’t really get it the first time. But no, you have to do all 16 to get credit for finishing the full tutorial.

I guess it does have its own ring thing at one of the stages.

Any ring in a storm

The new ring would barely be visible stood next to the ring from the epic NPE.  Also, it doesn’t blow up.

I am also wary of a tutorial that sets up Circadian Seekers of various flavors that are a push over for an Ibis.

This is easy!

Those look just like the ones that you see in the wild… the ones that would blap your Ibis in one salvo and which call for backup if you’re tough enough to tank them.  Granted, the epic tutorial did that as well, but if they were going to toss the epic aspect they might have tossed the Sleepers as well.

Also, in one of the later steps the give you a new ship, a Merlin for the Caldari, and 100 rounds of ammo, but that 100 rounds is completely inadequate to finish all of the missions from there forward.  Completing the missions doesn’t get you any more, which seems like the logical thing, and the tutorial doesn’t tell you to check the market but if you do you’ll likely not be able to afford the ammo with what is in your newbie wallet.  Granted, you can finish off the rest of the missions in your Ibis, but then why give you the Merlin?  The Merlin was only there to show you how to fit modules, which they could have done with the Ibis.

At least the career path agents are still there and looming in The Agency interface as well.  You can get another Merlin and a useful supply of ammo from the combat training missions.

And, CCP being CCP, they felt they needed to flip the switch for everybody so that every character in New Eden.  So not only does every new character have to see this and go into The Agency, but every character that logs in, young or old, has to be alerted to the presence of this new tutorial.

I am sure that somewhere at CCP HQ in a conference late in the afternoon when everybody was tired that all of this made enough sense for somebody to sign off on it and clear it for some dev to implement.  I just have trouble believing that nobody woke up the next day after sleeping on it and felt that there might be a flaw.

Oh well, if there is one thing I have learned is that if you’re forced to sit in a conference room going over a design for hours on end eventually anything will seem like a good idea.  The Cardassians didn’t have to torture Picard to get him to see five lights, they just had to put him in a conference room and just keep drawing diagrams on a whiteboard and making bad sports analogies for eight or nine hours and he would have signed off on the five light design even if it only had one damn light.