We are almost done with the month long celebration of capsuleer day in EVE Online, the annual marking of the launch of the game, this time marking the 21st anniversary.
It is that time again
If you have been keeping up with the daily logins you have already collected the big skill point payout… and if you haven’t been keeping up… well, what’s wrong? I’ve been out of town for more than a week this month and I managed to keep up. (Granted, that required carrying my personal laptop along with my work laptop on business trips and depending on the vagaries of the type of motel Wi-Fi you run into when in the more rural areas of California, but the joy of traveling by car is that you can just thrown stuff in the trunk and go.)
Anyway, CCP has been up to quite a bit this month and I haven’t been covering it… see mention of travel above… so I figured it could all be fodder for a big bullet points post. Off we go then!
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Equinox – Upwell Ships
CCP put out a dev blog about the new Upwell industrial ships which, among other things, have launcher hard points in the high slots.
Upwell, where X marks the spot?
Battle Badgers stand aside, there are new combat industrials in town. I am not sure we’re going to see the new Avalanche freighter, which can fit six launchers, as anything but a comedy doctrine, but if it can fit a weapon New Eden capsuleers will try to get on a kill mail with it. There are posts up about this all over, including one at TNG.
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Equinox – Ship Decorating, not the Usual SKINR Box
The long ago promised ability to colorize your ships (there was a demo at EVE Vegas in 2016) will be coming with the Equinox expansion next month, and CCP has a dev blog out to prepare us for its arrival.
SKINR box is very colorful
This will take the SKINR capabilities that are currently used to add color to Upwell structures… for enough ISK you can set the colors on the Imperium staging Keepstar in 1DQ1-A… and will apparently be usable in space even. Which isn’t to say a bunch of people won’t just sit docked up and playing with it, but I guess if the mood strikes you for a new color scheme, you won’t have to get back to a station.
I just wonder what this will do to the SKIN market. Of all the cash shop items, SKINs probably have the lowest impact, so I suspect that the SKINR will require some monetization… and I suppose I would know the answer to that if I had watched the dev stream on Twitch or one of the videos about it on YouTube… but I haven’t. Once again, over at TNG this is explored more fully, so go there if you want to know more. [Oh, and now The Greybill has a post up about it.]
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EVE Vanguard – Another Alpha Test this Weekend
CCP carries on trying to make DUST 514 Part 2- Shooter Boogaloo a thing, and so the ongoing alpha testing of EVE Vanguard is up again this weekend. In fact, it started yesterday… but you can hardly miss it if you play EVE Online, as they have grafted this game onto the launcher in the hope that it would get the attention of senpai or some such.
EVE Vanguard – Alpha
Anyway, if you achieve certain goals in Vanguard you will earn some SKINs in EVE Online. I played in the first round of testing and found the whole thing so uninspired that I haven’t bothered to go back. Granted, I also am not a fan of shooters, but I’ll go play Hearthstone for a mount in WoW, and I find that dull.
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Project Awakening – Calling all Grifters Hackathon!
Leaving aside all of the extremely problematic aspects of blockchain as a technology… it has literally no value add and anything it does can be done better, faster, and cheaper with existing tech… when it comes to injecting it into video games, usually under the farcical “play to earn” banner, it attracts people who see it as an earning opportunity rather than entertainment and the whole things becomes a grindy job rather than a fun pastime.
Just wake up already
Which I guess means, from the right point of view, at least Project Awakening, CCP’s blockchain survival game, has a chance to make the notoriously grindy and spreadsheet-centric EVE Online seem fun by comparison!
Anyway, I have covered Project Awakening previously, but this weekend they are having a play test and hackathon event for third party developers, and as I noted in a comment over at Massively OP (which got eaten by the spam bot briefly because I no doubt spewed too many crypto terms) I am primarily interested to see what sort of grifters and charlatans this game attracts. Remember, never go up against a scammer when money is on the line.
If you want to join in, you can go to the Project Awakening site to sign up. Me? I don’t even want any of that on my machine.
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EVE: The War for New Eden Board Game
There was a Kickstarter a while back, but Rixx Javix put up a reminder that you can still go over to the GoFundMe site for the project and give them money in return for being on the list to get a copy of the game.
The final totals for the campaign
Anyway, while I was throwing out bullet points I though I could echo that note here as well.
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Pearl Abyss Q1 2024 Earnings
Finally, to wrap this up, we have the Pearl Abyss earnings call and financials earlier this month. I do not generally delve into that, but over at TNG you can find a review of what Pearl Abyss announced as well as a deeper dive into the consolidated financial statement related to Iceland.
So happy together?
There is also a post about it over at Massively OP along with links out to the historical record of such quarterly statements.
In general, the EVE Online IP was up a bit year over year, and remained flat. It is still a decent chunk of the overall company’s revenue, enough that they would miss it if Hilmar screwed things up… more than usual.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 