The EVE Online x Doctor Who Event Postmortem

As of downtime today the Interstellar Convergence is over, Daleks have been banished from New Eden once more, and the cluster has moved on to its usual daily business.

When galaxies collide

I suppose CCP can declare “op success” when it comes to me, as I logged in and ran through most of the event.

As I mentioned at the start of the event, I took a high sec PI alt on my only subscribed account to use.  I had considered running an alpha clone as Yadot did.  I actually have an unsubscribed account with two fully trained up scanning characters on it.  But the restrictions on skill levels made that somewhat moot.  I could get to level 3 skills on an untrained character pretty quickly.

The reason I considered Alpha… and even thought about a fresh character… was CCP asserting that at least some of the event was going to be accessible by new players.

This event includes significant elements designed to be accessible for new players

That is a theoretically true statement, but unlikely in the extreme.  A new player entering the game and facing the training that CCP suggested one might need in order to participate would likely still be working on skills today… unless, of course, they bought one of the event packs that offered up skill points.  But I suspect that was the point.

Anyway, I had a high sec alt with a million unallocated skill points, which I dumped into the suggested training plans in order to get him viable for scanning and manufacturing as well as the T1 Abyssal Caracal fit that was on the suggested list.

I ran ran the scanning and hacking missions from the career agent, which netted me a free Heron, probes, and a launcher, along with the relic analyzer I would need.

I got out there scanning right away and eventually found some of the event sites.  I heard that they were much more plentiful in low sec, but I had no great ambition to provide easy kill mails for PvP prowlers, so I stuck in safer space.  Jumping a few more systems is less inconvenient than having to go buy a new ship, as well as being considerably cheaper.

How did I do?

I finished the event, which proves that it was sticky enough, rewarding enough, or easy enough to keep me going.

930 out of 900 points

I was actually going to stop at 800 because that was when the last event SKIN was awarded, but I was already out doing some filaments, so I carried on.  Between that and cleaning up my hangar after I was done, I managed to get to 930 points, so once CCP fixed the event progression, it was very doable.

I also made some money.

My character started with 140 million ISK in the bank and ended up with 292 million ISK on hand, plus a fit T1 Abyssal Caracal in my hangar, worth approximately 24 million ISK.

Like all such events, the market for items was very pricey early on, then dropped dramatically as inventory flooded the market.  My biggest sales score was a pair of Mysterious Filaments, which sold for a combined $80 million ISK in the early days of the event.  Both of those sales were to fulfill event challenges, which required you to sell a filament.  You could get maybe $30 million for two at the end, and now they have no value.

Once I was done with the event I emptied my hangar, selling off everything related to the event save for t special edition commodities.  Most of the boosters were sitting in Jita 4-4 on a character that wouldn’t use them, and they all expire in a month, so I mass sold them for whatever somebody was willing to pay.

By the way, right now is the time to go to Jita and buy any of the event SKINs you want.  They will never be cheaper than they are right now.  I say thing having already gone shopping.  You can probably also find all the collectible items for cheap now as well.  I found the following during the event:

• Bag of Gelatinized Confectionery
• Biomechanical Armor Fragment
• Chrologically Curious Blue Diary
• Extendable Plunger Tool
• Fragment Inscribed with Odd Circular Text
• Inactive Sonic Multitool
• Neutron Flow Polarity Reverser
• Scale Model of a Blue Box
• Snow Globe with Peculiar Architecture

Those will no doubt rattle around in my hangar to be looked at occasionally until the game shuts down.

As for the mechanics of the event… well… it was very much an EVE Online event.  It wasn’t bad, and clearly I finished it all, but it wasn’t the 2018 Crimson Harvest event, which I will declare to be the best event ever for a variety of reasons, including accessibility and rewards.

Ghostbird SKIN Drake flying past the Crimson Harvest banana of death in 2018

As I said when the event kicked off, if you enjoy the scanning and hacking game, this was probably a fun event.  If you don’t like those aspects of the game, then it was never going to be a winner.

Oh, and if you were trying to find regular relic sites while the event was running, RIP your efforts as event relic sites probably spammed your efforts.

The high point was probably the graphics.  The convergence pockets were stunning.

Heron in the event SKIN heading for a hack

And the combat sites over Gallifrey were even more vibrant.

Shooting a Dalek saucer with my Caracal

And I did see and shoot actual Daleks.

Dalek spotted in New Eden

Combat itself was fine I suppose.  The T1 Abyssal Caracal fit worked well enough for the level 1 combat sites, but I was quickly eaten alive in a T2 site with that same fit.

My capsule saying hello to a Dalek

I am not into the fitting aspect of the game, so I left T2 sites alone after that.  But I still came out ahead even losing a Caracal, insurance working out well enough.  I did continue to run T1s in a second Caracal I bought when the event challenges were to apply so much damage to a saucer or some sue.

As for the how and they why of the event, CCP had an AMA over on Whovian Reddit to explain the event and how it came to be.  It feels like the plan was less to attract players, new or old, and more just to do something cool.

Anyway, the event is done.  We’ll see what else they can come up with.

Probing and Hacking for Fun and Profit in the EVE Online Doctor Who Interstellar Convergence Event

Executive summary:  If you enjoy the probing and hacking mini games in EVE Online, the Interstellar Convergence is the event for you.  If, however, that gets old after a you’ve done it a couple dozen times… welcome to the reality of EVE Online PvE.  But there are some alternatives.

The event kicked off on Thursday and I went far enough into the Interstellar Convergence to blow up some Daleks, collect a few screen shots, and say that I had given the whole thing a shot.  But I have now probed down more cosmic signatures in a couple of days than I probably have done in quite a stretch and I have easily done the hacking mini game more times during the first two days of the event than I have done over all of my previous career in New Eden.

I did, however, see a Dalek.  You can too if you have the patience to probe and hack until you cannot stand it anymore.

Dalek spotted in New Eden

There are a few different paths you can take through the event.  The first is, of course, to do it all yourself.  Be the rugged individualist capsuleer and experience the full breadth of the event.  That flow looks a bit like this:

1 – Fit out a probing ship

I went with a Heron due to using a low skill point high sec alt.  This probably would have gone a bit faster with my max probing skills main in a Buzzard or Astero, but it wasn’t a lot worse in the Heron.  The community fitting example Heron worked for me, but you can roll your own so long as you can launch probes and have a Relic Analyzer fit.

Actually, first, make sure you have the skill training they recommend.  I covered that in a previous post.

2 – Probe down cosmic signatures in search of Warp Matrix Convergence Relic Sites

They are somewhat rare and often already in progress in high sec.

A site found

They are reported to be more plentiful in low sec, but you have to weigh the likelihood of being blown up.  The sites seem like a place pirates would haunt in search of easy prey.

3 – Hack the Peculiar Debris Fragments

On the bright side, you get 6 to 12 fragments per site, so even if somebody else shows up, you can still grab a few.  Out in regular space they come in small, medium, and large sizes, which represent the complexity of the hack.  There are also huge fragments, but those come later.

In one of the sites

The hacking game is random, sometimes unwinnable, but at least you get two shots at each fragment.  And sometimes it is an easy win.

Straight to the System Core this time

But either way you want the relevant skills as trained up as possible, as they influence your success quite heavily.

Just keep hacking until you are done.

4 – Loot the Fragments and Pray for Blueprints

The fragments contain a variety of items including collectible trash (I got my sonic screwdriver), things that can be sold to NPCs for ISK (the February MER will show this no doubt), filament blueprints, and components for building the filaments.

The blueprints seemed fairly rare on day one, though a little easier to find over the weekend after CCP adjusted things a bit.

5 – Build some Filaments

Go back to a station, preferably Jita, and use the blueprints you have found to build filaments.  I say Jita because you probably won’t have all the components you need and at Jita 4-4 they will be for sale at likely the lowest price you will find.

Also, you need to have some minimal industry skills to do this part.  The blueprint you have is likely for a Curious Warp Matrix Filament.

6 – Use the Filament

Undock in your probing ship and use the filament.  There are no Daleks or other hostiles at this point.

Ready to activate

This will send you into a single Abyssal pocket with an exit gate.  The pocket has a 30 minute timer before it collapses and destroys you and your ship.

7 – Gawk at the Scenery

It is pretty.  Congrats to the art team.

Dude, colors

Be sure to SKIN you ship for the maximum color effects.  The Biosecurity Responders SKINs are awesome, but not the only option.

The orange burst highlights my orange stripe

But don’t hang about doing that for too long.

8 – Hack Some More!

The main point of the pocket is yet more things to hack.  These will yield things that you don’t get out in regular space, including blueprints for more advanced filaments.

9 – Make Some More Filaments

If you’re like me you probably didn’t get much on your first try.  I did get a blueprint for another filament, built it, went back, and got a couple more blueprints, including one for a level 2 filament.

10 – Use More Filaments

The level 2 filament will put you in a 30 minute pocket with medium, large, and huge relics to hack.

Level 2 must be better

The scenery is a little different, so gawk some more, then get working on hacking.  The level 2 pocket has enough stuff that you might feel the time limit weighing on you.

11 – Eventually Build a Combat Filament

I received a combat filament on the first night, but one of the components for it wasn’t dropping, so I had to postpone any fighting for a bit.

But by the evening of the second day I had enough stuff that I wasn’t going to break the bank buying the items I was short on.  I built the filament and got my ship ready for combat.

12 – Enter the Precarious Warp Matrix

The level 1 combat filament sends you off into a single Abyssal pocket for a fight.  Once again, the pocket will last for 30 minutes, giving you time to fight and gawk a bit.

Ticket to Dalek City

You will note that the ship restrictions limit you to a set of T1 cruisers, though two people can fly together into the pocket, so you can bring along a friend.

I used the T1 Abyssal Caracal fit from the community fittings, which use heavy assault missiles.  I went with Caldari Navy Scourge missiles because back in the day the Caracal was damage locked to kinetic.  It no longer is, but I saw that after I bought the missiles.

Also, buy extra missiles and put them in your cargo hold.  The community fit only has enough for one full weapons load and it would be embarrassing to run out of them.  Also, your drones are going to die.  Accept that and move on.

13 – Blow Up Some Motherfucking Daleks

There are Daleks on the other side, including the quite recognizable to me saucer shaped Dalek combat ship.

Missiles Away!

In addition there were a couple of Daleks in their armored suits flying about as well.  I don’t recall from the Whovian lore if them flying about is a thing or if the event wanted you to see the classic Dalek form, but there they were.

Space Dalek One

I did need to run my shield booster a bit, but otherwise wasn’t in much danger.  They shot at me and were draining my capacitor, but I was never close to being low on power.  I blew up all three targets, looted the one wreck left after the fight, and went on my way.

14 – Do It All Again and Again

After all of that over the course of two days I earned a total of 110 points towards the event, leaving me 790 to go to claim all the prizes.

Such Progress

Something was borked with the event though and on the second day it wasn’t counting my actions, so that was all from the first day’s progress.  Welcome to EVE Online.  But they might have fixed that issue today.  I am not sure I care enough, having spent about 10 hours on the event so far, to carry on.

Alternate Paths

You naturally don’t have to do it all yourself.  You can just buy the components or the blueprints or the finished filaments.  There are entrepreneurs in Jita willing to sell them to you.  You can go straight to Dalek bashing right away if you have the ISK handy.

And, of course, you can make some money off of the event by being one of those entrepreneurs.  That is a bit more work, but there is ISK to be made, though the most lucrative point in the event in the first day or two when demand is high and supply is low.  Sell now while you have the chance.

Likewise, if you want to just buy filaments, waiting until next weekend when the market is saturated might be a cheaper path forward.

The team over at the New Eden Post has done a more detailed look into the mechanics and the fits if you are seeking more detailed information.

Friday Bullet Points for EVE Online about the CSM, the December MER, and Doctor Who

I am going to have to go back and check, but I think EVE Online has gotten the most Friday Bullet Points entries over the life of this particular feature.  No doubt at some point I’ll be bored and go back and do a summary of these summary posts, but not today.  Today, with the 59th edition of Friday Bullet points, we’ll just go straight to New Eden.

• Progodlegend Steps Down from the CSM

In a surprise turn yesterday, Progodlegend (PGL) posted an announcement that he would be stepping down from the Council of Stellar Management, EVE Online’s elected player council.  The CSM has seen its share of membership drama, and there was a stretch where somebody got booted by CCP at least once a term.

This time however personal reasons were listed for the departure.  PGL has certainly had a full year.  He and Vily both led TEST into World War Bee and are often seen as the prime instigators of the war.  While the initial stages of the war went fine, the whole thing bogged down into a stalemate for months and led to the PAPI coalition tiring of the whole thing.  As a result TEST lost its old territory in null sec in addition to its captured holdings and ended up having to retreat to Outer Passage in the distant northeast of null sec, as far from the Imperium as they could go.  If you had to pick an alliance that lost the war, TEST would be a prime candidate.

Since then the alliance has struggled to find its way, with some key groups leaving the alliance.  Vily abandoned the alliance to join Pandemic Horde and now PGL is stepping away from the game for a while as well.

As PGL has served most of his term, this cycle will count towards his eligibility if he chooses to run again for CSM17.

Arsia Elkin is the next in line for a seat based on the CSM16 election results, being the final candidate eliminated, and has been brought on board the council.

Coverage:

• EVE Online Forums – Update to Membership of CSM16
• INN – Progodlegend Steps Down from CSM16
• TNG – Progodlegend Steps Down from the CSM

We should be coming up to the point where we’re talking about the CSM17 elections soon.

• CCP Disavows the December MER

CCP released the Monthly Economic Reports for November and December this week, claiming that technical issues had delayed them.

The MER is this odd labor of CCP, where they care enough to post it every month, but don’t care enough to check it for errors before they do so.  So there are issues almost every month.  Often whole regions are missing from the regional data.

While the November MER had the usual spate of issues, the December MER was problematic enough for CCP to actually sit up and take notice after many complaints.

December 7th saw the imposition of the New Dawn Quadrant permanent scarcity plan mining changes… the economic beatings will continue until morale improves… so many eyes were on it to see just what impact the update would have.

The December MER, as published, showed an almost catastrophic drop in mining done in New Eden, undermining CCP’s “prosperity” promises yet again.  Again, I am not sure why CCP doesn’t even glance at the MER before they post it, but now they are promising an updated version.

Just a quick MER update!

The Mining Values in the December MER are inaccurate. Attached is a graph comparing Volume of Ore mined – that is ore that is successfully mined (aka after residue). Intentionally absent is the Winter Nexus Event Ice, so that a proper comparison can be made to previous months.

The teams are looking at what caused the issue for the December MER Mining Values and will have an updated MER with more accurate information as soon as it is available.

Included with that note was a graph showing mining was up in December, though no data or further context was provided.

CCP says mining was great in December

CCP’s performance on the economy and absolute determination to implement their plan while ignoring any feedback has led to mistrust on the part of many players.  We will see if we actually do get an updated MER.  CCP’s track record on that is fairly unsubstantial as well… I think they have done so once, and only because they included the wrong month’s graphs in the archive.

• Updates for the Interstellar Convergence

The Doctor Who / EVE Online crossover event, the Interstellar Convergence, kicked off yesterday.

I actually got out there right away and… the going was a bit rough.  The event sites, which you need to scan down, were fairly rare on the ground and people were tackling those that appeared rapidly.  Since components and blueprints from these sites are required in order to advance into the event… as well as being part of the event that new players can access… their scarcity seemed like an odd design choice. (So does making new players learn how to probe down sites, but that is another story.)

I did manage to get a couple of blueprint drops and was able to get into the next level of the event twice.  It was very pretty, if elusive.

Out in one of the second level sites in my Heron

In addition, while I managed to grab three blueprints for the filament that brings players to the third round of the event, I was not able to manufacture any because the drop rate for one of the components, the Strange Matter Component Y-79, was so low as to make them almost unobtainable.  I say “almost” because somebody was finding them now and then, and they were going for a mint on the market in Jita.  I declined to spend a few hundred million ISK on the filament.

However, today’s patch notes promises some relief for those attempting to participate in the event.

• Small miscellaneous balance updates have been implemented for the Interstellar Convergence combat filament encounters.
• Improved the text describing the difficulty levels in the Show Info descriptions of the Warp Matrix Filaments.
• Increased the spawn rates of the Warp Matrix Convergence relic signature for the weekend to help accommodate the initial rush in the event.
• Fixed an issue that caused the Strange Matter Component Y-79 drop rate to be far too low, causing bottlenecks in Warp Matrix Filament manufacturing.

As always, we hope today will be better than yesterday, and tomorrow better still.  I just hope they are not in a hurry to dial back the relic sites too quickly.  If you want new players in that part of the event, making them a pain to even find does not seem to be a winning strategy.

Then again, making them more available might not be representative of the reality of the game.

Doctor Who and Daleks Invade EVE Online with the Interstellar Convergence

The Doctor Who/EVE Online cross-over event, the Interstellar Convergence, begins today.

When galaxies collide

I went over some of the problematic aspects of the event last week, ranging from small items like lore problems, to the pernicious sense that CCP is like a cell phone company from 20 years back and only cares about new customers, to the as yet unproven drawing power of Doctor Who as an incentive to come and play EVE Online.

But that is all water under the bridge at this point as the event is live as of this morning, Daleks are in New Eden, and we will just have to see how it all plays out.

As with any EVE Online event there are the usual list of included items.  There are daily login rewards.

Skills are a good start to the event

There are also a few special SKINs in the New Eden Store.

SKINs only for expensive ships

And there is, of course, a set of special packs from the web store that range from $5 to $60 in price and offer up cosmetics, PLEX, skill points, SKINs, and event filaments that you might otherwise be scrounging around to find in game.  These are prominently displayed on the launcher.

Since the announcement CCP has started to take more seriously the new player aspects of the event.  CCP Swift stated earlier in the week that new players would have some access to it:

Great news! There will be elements of the event open to players who are just starting, as well as the option to join a more seasoned player in the more difficult areas.

This was reiterated at the top of the patch notes for the event:

• The Interstellar Convergence event has begun! This limited time Doctor Who crossover event runs until downtime on February 1st.
  • This event includes significant elements designed to be accessible for new players, as well as advanced challenges for veterans. The main focus of the event is exploration, with significant elements of combat and industry gameplay.
  • The “Warp Matrix Convergence” relic signature is appearing all over New Eden, and probing it down is the starting point for this event.
  • Use a relic analyzer module to collect materials and blueprints to build new limited time jump filaments capable of bridging realities.
  • Explore peaceful and bountiful relic fields with the Curious, Enigmatic, and Mysterious Warp Matrix Filaments.
  • Face off against deadly biomechanoid adversaries with the Precarious, Hazardous, Dangerous, and Perilous Warp Matrix Filaments.
  • Special agency challenges and daily login gifts are available during this event.
  • Rewards include items that can be sold for ISK, new SKINs, unique character clothing, boosters and cerebral accelerators, fireworks, and special Doctor Who easter egg trinket items for collectors.

Saying it over and over doesn’t make it so however, and new players are still going to have to get through the intro story invested enough in what is, by all accounts, a complex and often unintuitive MMORPG.

On Tuesday of this week CCP put up a dev blog about how to prepare for the event, something clearly aimed at newer players.  It brings together some of the past informational videos along with suggestions as to what ships a new player might aspire to and training plans available in the new training UI.  I suppose this will be a real test of the latter.

Because this event is going to be so high profile, I figured I ought to at least give it a shot.  I only have one account subscribed right now and am not really sure about the viability of Alpha clones, so that gives me three characters to play with.  Two of the character on my account, my main and a combat alt, are in the Imperium and, as such, subject to enough war decs in high sec as to not be useful for the event.

That left me with a third, a character I created back in 2008 on a whim and did nothing with for over a decade.  I eventually trained him up to do some hauling and PI in high sec and to be able to fly a couple doctrine frigates that we use.  He had close to 6 million skill points trained and I was able to throw another million skill points at him from login rewards and such I had hanging around.

CCP’s post recommends finishing the explorer and enforcer skill plans.  Those will get you scanning skills, which are required for the event, and a jump on combat skills for one of the tier 1 abyssal cruiser fits that are in the community fitting selection that they are recommending for the event.  There is one for each faction:

• Rupture: T1 Abyssal Rupture
• Omen: T1 Abyssal Omen
• Caracal: T1 Abyssal Caracal
• Vexor: T1 Abyssal Vexor

My pilot is Caldari, so the Caracal will be my goal.  Getting there, however…

I realize that as a character rolled up in 2008, my pilot started out somewhat behind the curve when it came to skills available when created.  I ran him through the previous NPE and had to stop and buy a couple skills because the tutorial wasn’t built for characters with that old build.  He probably had to spend more ISK on skills to get rolling on these plans.

But I still ended up spending a fit cruiser’s worth of ISK on skills, and the plans as laid out end to end would have put me well into next week… and I have an Omega clone, so I train at double the speed of an Alpha.

As I said, I had the advantage of having a million skill points laying around, so I sped him up a bit with an eye to being able to dig into the event this weekend.  I got the enforcer plans run through and most of the explorer skills done.

The skill planning window

Then I looked at the recommended Caracal fit and realized that the skill plans suggested were not enough to get me there.  So I bought some more skills threw them on the queue, including a couple just to deal with the CPU needs of the fit.  And then I added a few more to the end of the list just to make the fit a little more viable.  I could technically fly it with only Caldari Cruiser I trained, but I figured I ought to follow the old rule and get it to at least III before undocking in it.

At some point I will be done, at some point we all have to undock or give up.  It is always strange for me, with my main sitting at 230 million skill points, having to try to make things work on a new character.  I just have it all in the bag already on Wilhelm.  Rare is the subcap skill he doesn’t have at V already.

Leaving aside the knowledge aspect of all of this, I do wonder where a new player is going to come up with the ISK to acquire skills and buy a ship.  The Caracal fit runs 24 million ISK in Jita as I write this on Tuesday night which, while not an insurmountable amount of currency, is still a chunk for a new play.

A more cynical person than myself might suggest that the company is setting this up to sell some PLEX to eager newbies wanting to shoot Daleks.

At least the scanning ship is free if know to go run the career agent for exploration.  I won’t have the Magnet they recommend, but a Heron will suffice I hope.

Addendum:  Now that the event is live, CCP has put it up the, their solution to all PvE questions, though it doesn’t even begin to tell you how to accomplish the tasks.

It is in the Agency, so no further info is needed

I remain quite interested to see how brand new players in their rookie ships will participate in the event when it isn’t clear to somebody who has been around for 15 years.  I’ve been at it for over an hour and have yet to find a single “Warp Matrix Convergence” signature.

Related:

• CCP – The Interstellar Convergence is Live
• CCP – How to Prepare for EVE x Doctor Who
• CCP – Event Patch Notes
• BBC – Join Forces to Fight the Daleks
• NEP – Live Event Guide for New Players
• TAGN – Initial Event Guide

Daleks are Coming to EVE Online

Yes, this was news on Tuesday, but I had other posts in the can already and the actual event doesn’t start for a week, so it didn’t feel like something about which I had to get a hot take out right away.  There were plenty of those out there already.

Besides which, I wasn’t really sure how the whole thing made me feel.

But let’s back up, because history shows that somebody will be reading about all of this for the first time here.

On Tuesday CCP did a mass mailing along with a news post to announce that EVE Online was doing a cross promotion with the BBC’s long running Doctor Who series.  Dubbed the “Interstellar Convergence,” (not to be confused with the “Winter Convergence“), reactions to the whole thing were… mixed.

When galaxies collide

I mean, my daughter thought it sounded great, but she doesn’t play EVE Online and thinks the presence of The Doctor improves every social situation, so there is that.  Others were less enthusiastic.

The event, which is set 400 years before The Last Great Time War in the Whovian timeline, brings Doctor Who to New Eden, promising to be “…unlike any other EVE event before it.”

I think it gets there by just bringing another, more popular IP into the game lore.  I’m not sure we’ve jumped that shark crossed that bridge before.

Unearth Doctor Who-related artifacts and use them to track down the Dalek menace. Face off against the infamous evildoers in an interstellar battle of the ages and claim Doctor Who-inspired rewards to take back to New Eden.

After the announcement the reactions and hot takes were rife… so op success if one believes there is no bad publicity.  It got a bunch of people reacting to the news.  The question is whether or not the right people were reacting in the right way I suppose.

There is even a video, the comments on which are all you might expect.  It was nice of YouTube to turn off the down vote counter recently.

 

Where to begin?

This event is, without a doubt, an attempt to promote the game.  Though the BBC has shown it loves EVE Online in the past, with its news division covering New Eden events that most mainstream news wouldn’t touch, the popularity coefficient between the game and the series is decidedly tilted in favor of The Doctor.  I doubt anybody is expecting that Doctor Who will get any more viewers out of this promotion, so the hope has to be to bring attention, and new players, to EVE Online.

In my bag of emotions there is some positive hope that maybe this will end up helping the game by feeding more people into the new player experience and the almost immediate disappointment that playing EVE Online brings to 95% of the people who start it.  If more people get fed the machine, more players will end up sticking with the game.  It’s just math.

But then there is the game lore.  CCP has its own dedicated faction of lore hounds who track, dissect, and occasionally add to the foundational tale of the game.  After 18 years of nailing down what it means to be in New Eden, suddenly having a Dalek invasion was no doubt a bit of a shock.

I won’t declare that CCP is breaking the lore, but they are certainly bending it in strange and new ways.  Objections to the impact this will have on the lore are being met with what is now the standard CCP approach to everything, denial.

CCP has taken the position that this event isn’t at all lore breaking because they dictate what the lore of the game is and if they simply say that this is not canon, then we are obliged to treat it as such. If the event wraps up and you have a sonic screwdriver, a Tom Baker scarf on your avatar, or some other bit of ephemera hanging about, what’s the harm?

My reaction to that is simply to ask if they have ever met the lore focused fan base.  Because I am willing to bet that to them bit of boilerplate won’t wash.  EVE Online isn’t WoW.  It isn’t already so laden with pop-culture references such that introducing a hand grenade that gives you a Mr. T appearance just seems like another day at the office.

I pity the… eeew… you’re creeping me out

While the real world, the community, the rare nod to pop culture, and the occasional Icelandic tradition have worked their way into the game now and then, throwing Daleks and Time Lords into the mix seems like a much bigger step.  For the life of the game we have avoided aliens.  All intelligent life is on the tree that started somewhere on Earth.  The empires are human, the pirates are human, the strange cults are human, and even the Jovians and Triglavians are humans, if heavily modified or divergent.

But now, suddenly, after 18 years, aliens exist… Time Lords and Daleks are things in the timeline of New Eden, which feels like somebody opened a door.  Maybe CCP will slam it back shut once they’re done, but they’ve already proven they’ll throw the lore in the air for a promotional event, so who knows.  As we have seen, CCP saying something on Monday doesn’t mean they’ll live up to it come Friday.

In the end I am sure the lore will survive, but I think this will still be a bigger deal for some than CCP thinks.

And then there is the disappointment factor.

I think it is fair to say that at the end of 2021 there was a vocal chunk of the community angry at CCP over a variety of issues related to their handling of the economy.  CCP’s objective and repeated demonstration that they believe that scarcity must be made permanent by essentially codifying it in the mechanics after promising that scarcity was not going to be a permanent state ,and briefly suggesting that the game was entering a new age of prosperity, has left people bitter and distrustful.  We were angry already.

Add on to that the encroachment of NFTs and crypto into the Alliance Tournament and Hilmar out and about extolling the wonders of blockchain and play to earn in video games. (The article says there are no “concrete” plans to add this to EVE Online, but CCP has exactly one video game right now, so unless there is going to be a new crypto version of Hættuspil launched, New Eden is the destination.)

That has rightly made the community suspicious about the company and its plans as it seems quite possible that CCP, perhaps at the prompting of Pearl Abyss, might just drag New Eden into the dystopian libertarian hellscape that is cryto because it will make a few quick bucks now, and the long term be damned.

Then you can pile onto that all of the other things that players have been grousing about for ages, like Faction Warfare, low sec, PvE, and all the things that come up whenever we start examining the game, which has led to a general annoyance about CCP ignoring work that people feel needs to be done.  Players that have been simmering close to a boil about long neglect are unlikely to be appeased by a splashy cross-promotion that reminds them just how far down the priority list they are.

Finally, there is the chemistry, or complete lack thereof, between the two IPs, EVE Online and Doctor Who.

Sure, there is some crossover between the fan bases.  I used to watch Doctor Who back in the day (Tom Baker, best Doctor) and have poked my nose in with the relaunch over the last couple of decades.  But the two are cut from very a very different cloth and they do not mesh well in my eyes.  They each scratch a very different itch in the pantheon of scifi IPs.  There isn’t a huge draw for the EVE community in this, and the Whovians seem somewhat taken aback by the whole thing as well.

All of which has managed to ignite responses online, and especially in /r/eve, hostile to the whole endeavor.  The kindling was all out there and CCP managed to throw a match right in the middle of it.

Welcome to EVE Online.  It must be a day that ends in Y.

The whole thing just makes me feel like I need a nap.

It is a half-assed cross-promotion that breaks the lore and doesn’t really appeal to either fanbase, and feels like it could have been done better.  But CCP apparently needed something to boost the new player count, and you make deals with the IPs that are available to you.  It could have been a worse IP I guess.  At least we don’t ammo for our festival launchers that burst into Mr. T shaped fireworks I guess… though, I might be down with that.

The thing about New Eden is that it is on our timeline, just way out in the future, so you can find a lore reason for capsuleers to discover Mr. T or KPop or Doctor Who.  You could have somebody dig up some holoreels of Doctor Who reruns… if the BBC didn’t copy over them… and have a burst of in-game mania for the subject that leads to ship SKINs or apparel or jelly babies or whatever.  As somebody pointed out, we already have a knock-off sonic screwdriver in the game.  Maybe even have the Guristas steal them and send us off to retrieve lost episodes.  Sillier things have been done.  Instead we’re going to fight actual Daleks.

And the reaction of the EVE player base has been over the top, though that largely due to this promotion sitting on top of a host of other issues that have stirred up capsuleers.  It is another reminder that nothing happens in a vacuum.  CCP is drifting perilously close to the situation Blizzard has found itself, where nothing they do seems to make the base happy.  They are not there yet.  There are still a host of concrete things they could do for the game that would make people happy.  CCP just doesn’t appear to be all that interested in any of them.

In the end I just hope it was worth the cost in Dollars or Euros of Pounds as well as the cost in goodwill from the community.

Related:

• CCP – Doctor Who is coming to EVE Online!
• Massively OP – EVE Online is kicking off a huge collab with Doctor Who
• MMO Fallout – Eve Online Collabs With Doctor Who
• INN – Exterminate This!
• TNG – EVE Online, Doctor Who, and The Interstellar Convergence
• Investory Full – Did Somebody Call for The Doctor
• The Greybill – Exterminate! Exterminate!