05 | December | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The holidays arrived in New Eden this morning at downtime as the annual Winter Nexus event kicked off in EVE Online. The event runs from today through until downtime on January 4th, giving us 30 days of holiday fun.

Winter Nexus 2023

There will of course be event sites to fatten your wallet, which spawn in snowy metaliminal storms to tax your video card. There are also daily challenges themed to the event and, of course, login rewards.

You can find the whole point and challenge system for the event in The Agency.

The Winter Nexus Rewards Program

The login rewards contain the usual mixture of skill points, SKINs, evermarks, and boosters, along with the event specific filaments that will bring you to a Winter Nexus storm so you can find the event sites for those rewards in the Agency.

Winter Nexus 2023 Login Rewards

The best rewards will require you to log in for 23 out of the next 30 days, but CCP has again padded the event so that you will keep getting boosters and filaments after that. They don’t want people to stop logging in because they got the big prize.

And the big prize is probably skill points for most. Alpha clones can get 150,000 skill points over the course of the event, while Omega clones get all of that plus 525,000 skill points on their own track, for a total of 650,000 skill points.

I’ve been training up alts this year, but I am apply all of the found skill points to my main to see how long it will take him to make it to the next 10 million increment.

You can, of course, subscribe and go from Alpha to Omega and collect all the missed Omega rewards at any time during the event. However, a loophole has been closed. However, you can no longer wait until the end of the event and buy the Weekend Fleet Pack and haul in the largess… because the Weekend Fleet Pack has been removed from the online store.

Weekend Fleet Pack is no more

I don’t know if they did that to stop this loophole or if it was being exploited in other ways or if it was just not economical, but you cannot do that now. (And I will admit, I did that for one event to get a specific SKIN for an alt.)

Addendum: The Weekend Fleet Pack is back in the store. I now suspect it was only pulled for the EVE Vanguard testing event.

The first day login rewards naturally include a fireworks crate, with this year’s fireworks and a festival launcher.

Fireworks time

I will opine that normalizing fireworks in New Eden is one of the best low key things CCP has done. Fireworks make a lot of situations better. If I have a doctrine ship with an empty high slot, it gets a festival launcher.

In addition to all of that, there are Twitch Drops, CCP’s new favorite thing. I think they’ve given away more via Twitch Drops than any other game I’ve seen… and New World and Lost Ark are owned by Amazon, which also owns Twitch.

Watching Mind1 for the Twitch Drops

If Mind1 isn’t my most watched Twitch channel for 2023 I will be greatly surprised. I keep his channel tuned in on Saturday night for music already, but with the drops I have been on his channel a lot more.

And then there are special packs and bonuses and things in the various stores related to CCP, including SKINs if you order physical merch from that shop.

So there we go, the season is upon us. I still miss the Yule lads, a holiday theme back in the day, but I will be logging in to get my rewards.