EVE Online Gets Daily Login Rewards Starting with Free Skill Points

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:

• The Nosy Gamer
• EVE Hermit

 

MER – The Peace Dividend in September

CCP has apparently caught up with all the extra work from doing both EVE Vegas and the Onslaught expansion in about a month’s time, so the team has returned to some of the smaller items on its usual list, like the Monthly Economic Report.

Actually, we got two.  I had been bitching about how they skipped September.  But when I saw the October report appear in my feed I went to the dev blog site and found the September one there as well, dated “October 3, 2018.”

That agitated me a bit, because I had been checking for the September report for ages.  How could I have possibly missed it?  But an update from CCP Falcon announcing that both reports had been released on the same day.

Somebody fiddled the dates on the Dev Blog site.  I wonder how much they were paid for that?  Damn those corrupt developers!

I was going to simply skip over the September MER because I am sure nobody is exactly pining for me to put up two MER posts in a single month.  But it turns out the October MER is currently messed up.  The charts are missing two regions, Fade and Cache, and there is at least one chart from August posted.

I’m still leafing through the Onslaught patch notes, in case I missed something about CCP removing two regions from the game, since I am not certain anybody would notice if either went missing.  But the chart from August is a key one I use each time, so I am going to postpone writing about October until that gets fixed, which might mean skipping October altogether.  We shall see.

Back to September, we’ll just jump right in where we usually do, which is with the mining numbers.

September 2018 – Mining Value by Region

In a turn likely to surprise nobody who has been paying attention, Delve both led the pack in September and was up by almost 5 trillion ISK in mining value.  Since peace broke out in null sec in the back half of the month, pilots returned to Delve and resumed their strip mining of space.

We also got the bar chart back for September, so you can see how the various regions ranked.

September 2018 – Mining Value by Region Bar Chart

The highest region in the north appears to be Branch, with the east of null sec more closely trailing Delve, though Querious, owned and mined by the Imperium, is in third place overall.

A 5 trillion ISK jump in mining in Delve doesn’t seem like a huge uptick given the coming of peace.  And, while peace came late in the month, so maybe October will show a greater increase, the September jump is also fighting a drop in mineral prices.

September 2018 – Economic Indices

Mineral prices dropped to a three year low in September, and since mining is measured by the value of the ore mined, if the price goes down then the ore value goes down even if exactly the same amount of ore is mined.

Mineral prices are not yet at an all time low, as the next chart shows.

September 2018 – Economic Indices over All Time

There was a long stretch between 2007 and 2012 when mineral prices were lower.  But since the rework of NPC drops in the Drone Regions… remember when drones dropped minerals… the price has been consistently higher.  Now, though…

Moving on to NPC bounties… well, what did you expect?

September 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

Delve led the pack yet again, though was “only” up by about 1.4 trillion ISK over August.  Again we have the bar graph back so we can see how the regions shook out.

September 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

Branch, where GotG retreated, saw a significant amount of bounty payouts as well.

Overall null sec bounties were a slightly smaller percentage of the overall pic.

September 2018 – NPC Bounties by Sec Status

Yes, null sec still totally dominates, but the percentage was 93.2%, down from 93.4%, with high sec seeming to pick up most of that.  It is a tiny change, but when you consider that the war was ending you might figure that number would go up for null sec.  And doubly so as we see NPC bounties reaching for an all time high again, as the next chart shows.

September 2018 – Top Sinks and Faucets

Bounties haven’t topped past records, but my guess is that the October version of this chart won’t show a downturn.

Then there is the trade front.

September 2018 – Trade Value by Region

As usual, the region containing the central trade hub of New Eden dominates the numbers.  Jita stands so tall that everybody else appears to be… I was going to say a dwarf, but maybe a dwarf embryo might better describe the ratio.

September 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

Removing The Forge from the graph better shows how the rest of the game universe compares.

September 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

With that we see Domain, home of Amarr, standing out with its second place numbers, followed by Delve, home of the Imperium, the economic empire of null sec.

Overall trade is down a lot, with The Forge seeing a drop of nearly 90 trillion ISK compared to August.  While there is still a lot of trade going on, the war boom seems to be over.  Additionally, looking at prices, the market also appears to have back filled demand for Abyssal Deadspace relates items, like Gilas, causing prices to ease up some on that front.

Cloud Ring, where the Imperium was based for the war, saw a full trillion knocked off of its trade value compared to August, bringing the number down below 1.6 trillion.  Expect that to fall off further come the October report.

The same goes for contracts, where Cloud Ring fell off in September for the same reason.

September 2018 – Contracts Trade Value by Region – Bar Chart

Again, The Forge led the way with contracts, but Delve isn’t all that far behind.

And then there is Production.  The war saw some destruction, though not as much as one might have wished.  Still, there were ships to be replaced and everybody needs to build up for the next war.

September 2018 – Production Values by Region

While production for the main market in The Forge was down almost 2.5 trillion ISK in value, in Delve it was up by over 5 trillion ISK in value, pushing it past The Forge for total production.  The Mittani wants us all to own two titans now, so that has to be adding to the mix.  (I still own zero titans, a number unlikely to increase ever.)

September 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

Still, what I would call the “Jita production cluster,” which includes The Forge, The Citadel, and Lonetrek, still add up to more than Delve.

And, as I usually do, I will wrap up with the regions overview chart.

September 2018 – Regional Stats

So that is September.  There was still a war going on, and Keepstars being destroyed, so it doesn’t show what peace really does to the economy, but it does show the start of the transition.  Once CCP fixes the October reports I’ll look into that… though, honestly, I suspect they won’t bother.  We’ll see if I’m in the mood to do another of these this month.

Anyway, you can find the whole September MER here, with more charts and all the data used to create it. (And the October is here if you want a peek.  It might be fixed by the time this goes live.)