Due to the lockdown I've been getting involved in EVE again. Not much has changed, but there are some new elements to contend with. First off are the Hypernet offers a.k.a. the in-game raffle. A seller puts an item up, offers tickets for sale, then the game draws a number and the lucky winner gets the item. The problem arises when you factor in the concept of 'alts', who purchase most of the tickets so that the item never leaves the seller's hands, while every outsider who bought themselves into the auction loses their money. This scam was hatched and perfected within 24 hours of the Hypernet store going on-line and
everyone is doing it now. People are purposefully jumping between systems for no other purpose than to spam chat channels with their Hypernet 'offers'.
The full damage of dividing the game into Alpha (Play-to-free suckers) and Omega (those who pay to play) has become apparent: It's basically Socialism vs Capitalism, with weakling bitches whining about how this and that should be made available to them, and well-established veterans such as myself finding most areas of the game overcrowded by parasitic beggars. To give an example: Combat Anomalies are a kind of 'instance' that just pop up randomly in systems and can be warped to without effort. Most of them are intended for beginners and low-tier players, but one in particular has the chance of escalating to a lucrative mid-tier Combat Site. The Alpha players know this, which is why they jump on them the instant they spawn. Unlike them I don't hunt these sites, but if they appear in my system I'd like a chance to run them. Nope, the game's new 'Agency'-feature tells everyone within a dozen jumps which Combat Anomalies are in which systems, so they swarm in and try to be the first one in. On average about five minutes pass from these Anomalies spawning, until someone jumps in from another system with the sole intent of running it.
"But if you don't like it, find another system." First off I've been living in this system for 10 years, I was here way before they did. Secondly I already tried. My home system is off the beaten path, but I know of a couple of other systems way out in the boonies that no one visits. I spent a week in one of these systems observing the traffic and it was the same: The time it took between an Anomaly spawn and until 2-3 Alpha players jumping in could be measured in minutes. One time there was only four of us in the system, and when the Anomaly spawned I immediately warped to it. Guess where I found the other three players?
But that's just one of my personal pet peeves, there are bigger problems afoot. CCP in their eternal incompetence have announced a "Resource Balancing Pass" which will take place in several stages. What are they planning? They won't say, because advance info on such game changes can (and will) affect the in-game market. But one of those changes was to remove almost all the minerals from the activity known as Moon Mining, leaving only worthless chemical reactions. This immediately made Tritanium (the backbone of the game's entire economy) double in price in a matter of days. It got so bad that the beginner ore Veldspar (the most abundant source of Tritanium) became the second-most valuable ore in the game... and it can be found in abundance in Hi-Sec. This led to lots of hopeful players to start mining Veldspar... which led to a lot of players losing their ships. Not due to suicide gankers, but to the 'new' faction of EVE: The Triglavians.
The Trigs came out of some abyssal dimension and seemingly hate everyone. They have randomly placed Invasion-events which make traveling quite hazardous, but they also have small gangs of Trig-frigs that love to patrol asteroid belts. Your normal run-of-the-mill belt rat is a pushover, but the Trigs hit
hard. They kill mining frigs in seconds and can easily take down everything up to Cruisers. Mining in EVE (easily the most boring activity in the game) is now hazardous in every part of EVE, which pushes up the price of Tritanium even higher.
But we're here to discuss CCP incompetence, and this latest one is a doozy: To try to pad out those Active User numbers CCP introduced a Daily Login Event: Log in every day to get a small reward and some 'XP' contributed to gain a nice pot of Skill Points (50k for Alphas, 150k for Omegas). Those small rewards alternated between Boosters, Blueprints and SKINs. Except all three came with 'strings' attached. The Boosters were immediately activated upon being redeemed, which goes against the very idea of them being in the game in the first place (as a quick boost that could be applied when needed). The Blueprints were made to look like Blueprint Originals throughout the entire redeeming process, but in truth it was a one-run Blueprint Copy, and the SKINs were not only also automatically applied upon redemption, but they were for a random ship in the game AND only had a week-long lifespan.
These were gifts from CCP, but people still felt they were getting ripped off. People complained about this, and the only response from CCP was "We want our gifts to be soulbound to each player, so that they won't be sold on the market."
One of the highlights of EVE Online is the market, which is mostly player-driven. It has been one of CCP's agendas since the launch of the game to make the market 100% player-driven. 'Soulbinding' items goes completely against that agenda, especially for consumable items.
So for the past three weeks players have been logging in, claiming the gift and the XP needed for the Skill Point gift, trashing the gift and then logging out. Until today, because today is Pay Day for those Skill Points. Alpha accounts got their 50k skill points without difficulty... but the Omega accounts got something else entirely. Instead of getting 150k skill points they got an in-game item called "150.000 Skill Points" which doesn't do anything. It can't be used in any manner, it can't be activated, it can't even be sold on the market. This is not what EVE needs right now, an event people have grown to hate leading to a Fail like that.
EDIT: I posted this too soon. I just looked over at what's coming up in EVE... and it makes the above look like a walk in the park. This is gonna be
something.
