So I've done three different types of events for Winter Nexus. While it’s been interesting about the changes they have made this year to the event over last year, so far, it’s not been worth my time. There has been at least some mining, combat, and exploration.
Like most events in Eve Online, this one has a daily log-in reward system. Like they have been doing for a little while now. They have also shifted some rewards to a point system to reward those being active in running the sites as well. Trying to find a balance between passive and active rewards.
Winter Nexus is a bit of a long event. With 34 days of login rewards, it lasts 34 days. A bit strange that they were not a bit more generous with how many days you have to claim rewards, with many players being gone for the holidays. At least the rewards were made in a way that it seems they took players missing some of them into account.
A lot of rewards are focused on skins, which do look rather amazing, boosters, and skill points. For many, it’s the skill points they are after. The last day of the event that rewards skill points is the 26th, with a whopping 325k skill points for Omega players. The rest of the login rewards are cool, but not enough that you feel you are missing out on something by not claiming them. There is a total of 655k skill points in total for just this part of the event.
The skins themselves do look dope if you get your hands on some. The one for the Hulk mining ship looks amazing. A screenshot of it fails to do it proper justice for how shiny the metal looks in-game.
The part that feels a little lacking for now is earning points from the event section of rewards. In the last event they did late into the event unveil some extra rewards for earning a lot more points. I wonder if they will be doing the same for this event.
The big reward for now is the ice mining destroy ship blueprint copy. Like many, I don’t care much for that reward. There is also not much in terms of Plex to skill points among the skins to make this event so far feel like I need to go out and grind points.
The points themselves are earned from mining ice, farming combat sites, exploration, hunting Yoiul, and even launching snowballs at NPCs. I have done a couple of these acuities myself.
I’m going to start with the biggest issue in high sec for those running this event. The normal rewards are really bad. I’m taking 500 ISK badly. The normal exploration cans are all taken and not worth it. The normal mining reward for just turning in ice is usually a worthless tier 1 salvage single piece and maybe some shards. It’s just bad all around.
This event focused on farming sites and NPCs that spawn within the Winter Storm. The storm itself can be seen on the map by filtering for Metaliminal Storms. Then you get a heatmap of where they are occurring.
The good news is these storms are happening across a wide range of space in New Eden. They also move over time. For the first couple, they changed daily. That seems to have changed somewhat now, with a day they are repeating where some of them haven't been. They also started around major areas of interest, like near trade hubs.
The first day, every site was filled, and it was hard to find even some ice where I was. After that, the crowds around this event faded quickly. Last night, one other person was farming an entire ice field by themselves, with another ice site not even being touched. To me is a sign that players are rather uninterested in this event. As the base rewards, at least in high sec, are dreadful. I can’t stay, they are much better if you also have some Cryo Tech.
With exploration being the thing I enjoy so much during events. I was rather disappointed. Every site I warped into was already cleared. Moments later, another few players would warp in behind me to an already empty site as well.
This was not unforeseen when you only have a couple of areas of space that can spawn in the sites. Along with a lot of players wanting to do this activity. From my understanding, the only thing more disappointing was the normal loot can. Players for the rest of the first couple of days shared their anger in local chat about how bad the loot was compared to past events.
Next up, I went to get my mining ship and farm some ice. The first two days of the event, I was lucky to even mine seven ice, which counts as one turn into an NPC inside the site for a box. After that, I had ice fields almost to myself. As the rewards were so dreadful, the only reason it felt to even do this was for the event points.
There is a way to get “better” rewards, and that is from turning in Cryo Tech that I'd end up farming myself. However, even that was awful. I’d end up getting back after opening a few of them, about 40% in value compared to what the Cryo Tech was telling me on the market. Ouch! I guess I did not get lucky with a “good” drop to make it worth the gamble compared to just selling the boxes.
The last thing I'd go off and do would be to farm Yoiul. For that, I'd need combat probes and a combat ship. I ended up using my tier 3 destroyer, a Confessor. I also waited a couple of days before doing so when there be less players fighting over them.
To my surprise, there are quite a few up, and they respawn quite fast. The closer your farm is to the center of each of the storms, the more there are. Systems that are on the end of the storm would sometimes end up without any spawns for a short while before more would show up.
This also ended up being the most rewarding activity I could partake in. I ended up looting about 120 million in Cryo Tech in over three hours of my time. With that said, that's still not that great for an event. Prices for the Cryo Tech are also dropping fast. So I'm double I'd get anything near that by the time I made it to a place I could sell them. So I ended up using them myself and was rather disappointed at the low amount of value in the loot I got.
Overall, so far, I've found this event, other than login rewards, to be rather disappointing. Now I'm sure someone might be thinking, Why didn't I go farm these sites in low sec for better loot? Well, with this event showing up on the map, and in only a couple of sections of space in different areas. That's not going to end well, as anyone wanting to gank and PvP will just sit in sites waiting for someone to come along and farm them. After checking some systems on a kill board, my assumptions about that look to be quite true.
I’ll still be giving this event a try in a couple of days. In the past, events tended to ramp up towards the end. I can only assume the winter storm will intensify at some point. Hopefully, by then, it will be a bit more rewarding. In the meantime, it looks like I'll get to enjoy some exploration sites to myself soon enough as the number of players partaking in this event drops by the day.
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Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.
