Friday Bullet Points About EVE Online as Winter Nexus Events Return for 2022

Winter is coming… next week to be exact.  The winter solstice is Wednesday the 21st, the shortest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere.

And that means Christmas and other holidays which, in turn, means in-game events.  And EVE Online is no different where, despite Earth being a distant memory and there being no reason to stick to our particular calendar, New Eden still celebrates. Bring on the Winter Nexus!

The Winter Nexus 2022

Also, there are a couple other tidbits related to the game I wanted to bring up, so this is a bullet point post.

• The Winter Nexus

The holiday events are live, having dropped into the game yesterday.  There are login rewards and challenges and all the usual stuff that makes up the holiday routine in New Eden.

The login rewards for the first 7 of 13 days

You have 19 calendar days to login and collect the 13 rewards, one per day.  SKINs, fireworks, event items, and skill points are on the menu as usual.  New on the list are EverMarks, the currency used to by ship personalizations.  That is good for me, because I was never going to go to low sec and run those missions.

The big payoff on the 13th day is 250,000 skill points!  In real world cash value that is worth… five dollars.

Available at the EVE Online web store

This is your regular reminder that CCP straight up sells skill points.  I’m not even going to link back to long dead promises on that front.

But enough negativity… for this bullet point at least.  Enjoy the holiday event.

All the info is available at the Winter Nexus dev blog.

• Multiple Overviews

In addition to all of that, this week’s patch (scroll down) brought updates to the Photon UI, including the ability to have multiple overviews active in your UI.  That is a huge feature for a lot of people.

We have added the ability to have multiple Overviews when using Photon UI. This can be done by right-clicking an existing Overview tab, or by checking the ‘In New Window’ checkbox when adding a new Tab.

The Photon UI still has issues… and performance under load seems to be one of them… but the ability to have multiple overviews up makes it worth switching over if you have not done so already.  Certainly CCP thinks so, because they reset the opt-out for the Photon UI again, forcing everybody to use it unless the go back and opt-out again.  There are other improvements, but nothing that would steal the headline from multiple overviews.

• Blue Star Mining

As I mentioned in my post about the November Monthly Economic Report, CCP is finally addressing the mineral shortfall around asteroids bound to low sec only by introducing some new asteroids.

From the patch notes:

• The new rich asteroid belts may be found in Blue A0 star systems in null security space and in wormhole space.
• Additionally, these new asteroid belts may also appear in high security 0.5 systems bordering low security systems, and nullsec systems which border low security space.

Now you may be wondering where in the hell are all the Blue A0 type stars?  Well, somebody has made a list of them over on r/eve.  That list includes ALL the Blue A0 type stars, so you can discount the ones in high sec, low sec, Jove space, and so on.  But when you parse that data it looks like most null sec regions have between two (sorry Fade) and four (congrats Fountain) such stars, which will no doubt become mining nexuses for those of you looking for places to hunt.

The news was reported here with the details in the patch notes. (Scroll down, again.)

• Faction Warfare News and Review

The centerpiece of the Uprising expansion last month was Faction Warfare.  CCP seems determined to not repeat a common past mistake of launching something new then forgetting about it… though they could still do that.

So they have been posting about their changes just to remind people.  They have also announced a new page, Frontlines, that will give status and news about the state of the Faction Warfare struggles.

And Faction Warfare does seem to be getting more attention in the game.  In the Imperium we have a thread for people who want to participate.  The first step is to have an alt, because Faction Warfare requires you to commit to a side and join a dedicated corp for your faction, after which you might have trouble in empire space if, say, you chose Gallente and now want to fly to Jita.  That was always a tripping point for me, and it remains so.

• Alliance Tournament Official Results
  

In a previous bullet points post I poked a bit of fun at CCP for not posting the final results of Alliance Tournament XVIII, which ended back before Thanksgiving.  They seemed to drop off their coverage with almost indecent haste.

Alliance Tournament 18

It took them a few weeks, but they did eventually get around to it.  There is a dev blog recounting the tournament, its winners, the prizes, and stats and tidbits about the event.  So if you want to know, you know where to go.

• The End of Ship Models… Again

I got all ranty about four years back because MOP was chiding CCP for not having a decent merchandise shop (Also, walking in stations, but don’t get me started.) as though that was going to a tool for profitability.  Merch shops, like live events such as Fanfest, are marketing exercises and most companies are happy if they break even.  CCP had tried to sell ship models in the past, one of the things the piece was demanding, but it was a complete flop.

Still, players keep asking for ship models, so CCP gamely gave it another try, partnering with a 3D printing outfit to produce a range of ships.  And now that partnership is also ending.

Sales stop on December 31st

Why?  Because I’m going to guess that for every hundred people who say they totally want to buy models of EVE Online ships, maybe five actually do… and the player base for the game is noticeably smaller than when I wrote that piece, so there are fewer players who say they will buy such models, and correspondingly fewer who will actually do so.

The reasons for not buying are manifold, including expense, not having the ship you really want, the ships not looking right, deciding you have too much junk in your office already (my excuse), and just never getting around to it.

So this round of EVE Online ship models is ending on December 31st, which means that if you are in that “never getting around to it category” now is your chance.

Details about the end of this option and a link to the storefront are available here.

And so it goes, another Friday bullet points blog post comes to an end.  Enjoy the weekend.