The Winter Nexus was So Much Fun I did it Twice

Well, maybe it wasn’t that much fun… but I did, in fact, complete all 900 points on two characters.

What happened was that on my first character running the Winter Nexus event I managed to get to about the 600 point mark, which unlocks the Arazu SKIN, and I realized that I really wanted a few of those SKINs on my main character, Wilhelm, who is the collector of SKINs.

However, the alt I was working on this with was on my second account and all of the SKINs earned through the event point system are applied when you redeem them, so while another character on the SAME account can get them, a character on another account cannot.

So I needed a character on Wilhelm’s account… and I had just such a beast.  It was the same high sec alt that I had used for the Interstellar Convergence event almost two years back now, the Doctor Who crossover event.  He still had the Heron on hand that he used for the event sites back then, so I put him in that and flew him out to where my second account alt was holed up with the Mastodon DST and the Endurance mining ship.

Flying into docking range of the CreoDron warehouse in Avele

There I had him use the Winter Nexus expert systems pack that showed up as a login reward on day four of the event.

Winter Nexus Expert System and You!

That gave him the skills needed to fly the Endurance, which I traded over to him, then set him to work ice mining in event sites.

Out in the ice mines

As I mentioned previously, the mining side of the event is pretty easy to keep going without needing to pay attention to it constantly.  Since I work from home I was able to keep him mining while I did other things, just needing to look over once in a while to see if the ice had been depleted from his current target or if his cargo was full or if it was time to warp out and back into the site to start the cycle of tasks over again.

Some of the sites were being aggressively mined.  I saw a couple more groups with a Porpoise out there to boost for them.

That is some Porp-ass

But at times I had sites all to myself.  A couple of days of diligence is all it takes to get through the last point reward of the event and it was feeling like the people who had rushed in to get it done were now off to other tasks.  Some kept going I am sure… the rewards are pretty good for a low effort task… but there isn’t a lot of fun or excitement to it.  Sure, and NPC shows up to shoot you once in a while, but if you had your drones out to begin with you might not notice until the NPC was just a wreck.

Go get him drones!

As the weekend approached and I had some time to be a bit more active, I was also finding the mining aspect of things to be more than a bit tedious.  So I decided to take my alt and hunt for data sites.  He had flown out in that Heron from the Doctor Who event which had a Data Analyzer I on it as well as probes and a probe launcher.

His skills were not great, but were good enough, and I was able to scan down sites with some effort.

Scanning down an event data site

The effort was mostly that I am not very good at probing and it takes me more time that it probably should.

My main problem was that, like the combat sites, the data sites are competitive and whoever scans down the site first, warps to it, and engages their data analyzer first wins.  I would be in a busy system and would start to scan down sites only to have them disappear before I had even nailed them down.  If I was lucky I would get a lock on a site… which counted towards a daily opportunity, which is a topic for a later post… but on landing at the site would find somebody already there.

Waiting until it was a little more off-peak and looking for some systems that were not so busy, I was able to get into a groove of scanning down sites and getting there in time to hack them.

Alone with a data node at last!

Hacking is the same mini-game it has always been.  Fortunately I hadn’t forgotten the ins and outs of that… and these sites were not all that hard… so I only failed one site on the first try, and I got that one on the second.

Playing the hacking game

So it turned out that in not too much time I had hit the 900 points for that alt and was done.

The last SKIN obtained

Now I just had to get all my loot back to Jita.  I had an estimated 600 million ISK in items in the cargo hold, plus the Endurance in the fleet hangar.

My cargo for the trip home

The only issue with getting to Jita, which was 17 jumps away, was that I would have to pass through Uedama, which is now the favored suicide ganking choke point in New Eden.  I didn’t think I would be a target, but when I checked DOTLAN I saw that there was obvious ganking activity going on and didn’t really want to risk it.

I figured I had a bunch of Winter Nexus filaments that would transport me to other metaliminal storms in high sec, so I got both alts together in a fleet and rolled the dice, filamenting us both away.

And I landed in Ebtesham in the Domain region.  From a travel perspective, that was not so hot.  I went from 17 gates to 41.  On the bright side, there happened to be a DED station in that system, and that is one of the places you can sell the Overseer’s Personal Effects, one of the drops from the event that you need to cash out.  (The December MER will show a huge spike in those due to the event.)

I docked up there and sold all of those right away.

The Overseer’s Bounty

That was enough to make me much less of a target if I ended up having to go through Uedama.  But now I had to filament out again because I wasn’t going to slow boat 41 gates in a DST, a ship that is slow enough on its own.

I got our pair together again and used another filament… and ended up half a dozen systems further away.  That wasn’t so good.  Also, that was when I learned that filaments give you a 15 minute logoff timer and you cannot use another one until that runs down.  So I waited and did another one… and no luck.  I went AFK while I waited for the timer again… and again really far away.  Eventually I hit one that put me 18 jumps from Jita and decided to just go from there.

I had to pass through an incursion on the way, which made me nervous, though it had been beaten down enough that there were not rats waiting on gates to tackle me.  I had to pass through Uedama as well, but I wasn’t too worried now, and soon I was back in Jita.

Passing through the incursion

There I was done with one account.  However, the alt on my alt account still had a couple hundred event points to earn.  I decided to go do some more event data sites with her, because she is a different story when it comes to scanning.  I used to use her to scout wormholes for paths to places and she has all of the scanning skills to max and had a Buzzard sitting in her hangar.

I took some of the event high sec filaments that were only good for a single ship and undocked her in Jita and filamented out to a new system.  There I scanned down a site and… found out I had a relic analyzer fit instead of a data analyzer.

Fortunately, the filament had landed me in Domain again, just three jumps from Amarr, so I was able to fly there and fit a Data Analyzer II, then resume my efforts.  Domain, while still trafficked, was less competitive that being close to Jita for data sites.  I managed to finish off the event for the second character, run to Ebtesham again to sell off the key items I had looted, then filamented until I landed close to Jita again.  This time I was right in the neighborhood.

Right in the neighborhood

And that finished me up on two characters.  I could probably do it all again on a third and a fourth if I had a mind to.  There is still plenty of time left in the event, which runs until downtime on January 4th.  I probably won’t do that, but I could.