21 | December | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The annual holiday tradition of video game discounts has arrive at Steam as they unleash the 2022 version of their Winter Sale.

Another seasonal discount opportunity

This is the part of these posts where I go on about how these sales used to be a big deal and now they have been normalized and it is just another sale in the year and our expectations have been set to buy things at a discount and blah blah blah.

Yes, all of that, but it is still a pretty big sale and likely worth looking over your wishlist to see if anything is marked down a lot. Sometimes this is a test, as with OGRE, which is marked down 90%.

They make it up with volume

If I don’t buy it at that price it is fair to ask if I ever had any intent of buying it at all ever. But I put it on my wishlist ages ago because I played the original board games OGRE and GEV back when they were sold in poly bags at the hobby shop. A Steve Jackson Games classic.

And, as has become the normal practice, it is also time to vote on the Steam awards.

Voting Begins Now

The nominations for those were part of the Steam Autumn Sale, which I did not write about because I am a traditionalist and only care about the long standing Summer and Winter sales or some such. Or I was too lazy or forgot. Something like that.

Steam also has everybody’s Year in Review stats up. If you go to this link, and are logged into Steam on the web, you should be able to see your own stats. I’ll get to mine on Saturday probably, dumping them in with my XBox year in review. They aren’t that impressive mostly because I play mostly MMORPGs that cannot, or do not, link to either service.

So we shall see what I buy, if anything. The sale runs through into the new year and somewhere along the line we’ll get the results for the Steam Awards and the category lists for the top performing titles on Steam.

I was a bit disappointed last week when CCP made a change up and removed the daily challenges from the game last week, if only because I had just started running them with my main in order to earn some Evermarks.

The daily challenges, which showed up as a group of three, were often very focused on running Abyssal filaments and blowing up a certain number of drones or Triglavians or Sleepers.

Challenges for the day

There were some other things injected now and then. Mining ore or simply blowing up a certain number of NPCs made the cut now and then, and even the occasional event related task, like hitting an NPC with fireworks.

Okay, I guess you don’t have to hit the NPC

So there I was, getting into the groove with running a few Abyssals now and then to get some Evermarks, or some skill points, though that was less of an incentive because, closing in on 270 million skill points on my main, it takes a lot of skill points to get me out of bed in the morning. And the Evermarks were coming in decent chunks, with some rewards 5-6K for completion. The challengers also auto-completed, whether you were paying attention or not. If you did the task, you got the rewards.

Then, as I said, the daily goals went away, replaced by some new items in the AIR Opportunities UI, which I honestly haven’t paid much attention to up until now. They fall under that icon that I think of as a life preserver on the Neocom or in the menu structure.

Over there

Once there, at the top of the opening page, you will see the new AIR Daily Goals. According to the patch notes (down the way a bit)

After each downtime, players are assigned a set of four daily goals, each aligning with distinct career paths: Explorer, Industrialist, Enforcer, and Soldier of Fortune.
The set of goals is the same for all players each day.
Successful completion of these goals rewards players with both ISK and EverMarks.
Players who accomplish at least two of the four daily goals are additionally granted Skill Points.
The AIR daily goal interface has been integrated into the AIR Opportunities window.
ISK rewards are taxed by the player’s corporation and EM rewards are duplicated, giving the same amount of EM to the player as well as the player’s corporation.
All unclaimed Corporation Projects and AIR Daily Goals rewards that are older than 30 days will be claimed automatically. This process will start in January 2024.
AIR Daily Goals replaces the Daily Challenges system.

This all came up during the Winter Nexus, when I was already doing stuff that popped up in The Agency, so I managed to stumble into this new stuff on my own… though I did wonder for about a day where the Daily Challenges went.

And true to above, these do now pop up daily and are the same for everybody, as opposed to the Daily Challenges, where everybody got their own random trio. Not sure if that is better or worse, though if I see something easy on one character I know I can do it on another.

This change causes some of the expected, usual complaining on Reddit, where somebody was pissed that you could farm skill points so easily. I was not convinced that 10K skill points a day was really going to get anybody to setup a farm for them, and the statement about what was “easy” seemed off. Mining 2K units of ore isn’t at all hard, if that happens to come up for you. But scanning five signatures… easy if you’re in the right system with the right skills. It can take some time if you’re not.

Opportunities done

And, unlike the old Daily Challenges, you have to go and click on them to claim them when they are done.

Claim your reward for 2K ore

The patch notes say that outstanding opportunities will be auto-claimed after 30 days, but it isn’t clear to me if they will stack up every day or if you don’t get a new daily reward if you fail to claim the old one.

Claiming, however, is worth it. You get 500K ISK and 500 Evermarks for each one you claim.

And when you do two in one day, you can also claim 10K skill points. I am pretty sure those don’t stack up if you forget to claim them.

As for the daily tasks representing one each of the four AIR career path roles… that seems a bit less likely.

The Four AIR Roles

Enforcer is PvE combat, Explorer is scanning, Industrialist is manufacturing and mining, and Soldier of Fortune is PvP, so far as I can tell. That is what their descriptions indicate. And some days, the four tasks do seem to align to them.

Four Tasks for Four Paths

And some days… well, the system seems to favor one role or another.

Manufacturing twice and nothing for an explorer

Still, those little quirks aside, it seems like a bit of a boost for newer players. Getting 500K ISK for a task is decent enough that I went and did a manufacturing job on my main… I still have all those blueprint copies they were giving out as daily rewards at one point… and spent a bit of ISK on running the job, broke even with the materials when I sold the hull, and put a million ISK and 10K skill points on my character. I’ll do that trade all day, every day.

And I even got a few Evermarks for my main. Not as many as I was getting before, but some.