The new daily event titled, The Agency, is up on the test server now for players to play with. CCP Sledgehammer released the following statement in regards:
Sisi is back up now with the goals adjusted for easier testing. We really want some feedback on these, so please leave it here
Rewards for this event are granted in the form of special boosters, PLEX, and SKINS, including a slick new Tengu Sukuuvestaa SKIN. Further comments by CCP Dragon iterates that the final loot/rewards table is not in place and the final iteration will be tweaked based on findings within the testing of the Event.
“Who controls the Agency? Where does it come from? What is their agenda? Everyone that I’ve sent to inquire about that has turned up missing. I’ve stopped asking.” –Source wishes to remain anonymous
For those of you that are testing:
The rewards are being granted at an accelerated rate so that you can make sure they are being granted correctly. The points required will be changed and require a few more when it goes live on Tranquility. The rewards should be placed directly into your Redeem Items window (redemption queue? or whatever youngsters are calling it these days). After obtaining all of the rewards, completing challenges will still grant you points, but they will not carry over to the next event.
At the moment it is not showing the amount of PLEX you are being awarded, but that’s something that we want in the future. The amount of PLEX being awarded currently might be different on Tranquility. We haven’t decided yet.
Also, you will notice that the challenges do not change from day to day. This may change for future events, but it’s something we wanted to try out for the July event. We also want to allow players to “discard” challenges or as I like to call it “reroll” challenges. The plan, the design, the hope… is that we’ll have a way for you to reroll the challenge and it will immediately pick something else for you instead. We’re still working on the mechanics for this, but I was thinking you could spend some ISK to reroll once per day or something like that.
If the T3 cruiser challenge isn’t working, we can try to fix it or change it. I’ll make sure we take a look at this next week.
We’ve taken note of the Notifications not notifying you of what you are completing. Very noteworthy. That should be in for the September event some time soon.
Seasonal sites will be coming back, just not for the July event. We want to focus on getting feedback about the Agency before introducing other elements.
The login booster is literally a booster that we auto-inject upon logging in. I can’t remember (it’s Saturday night and I don’t have all my notes with me here) if we did per character or per account, but I’m fairly certain it was per account. We want to improve this in the future, because there is no indication of which character is going to get it. And there is no way to tell when the timer is up. The plan, the design, the hope… is that we will allow you to control which of your characters gets it and when.
Please let us know if you have any other concerns!
The Event is based on the same version as previous Eve dailies ‘Shadow of the Serpent’ and the ‘Scope Network’ systems, but meant to be a more neutral option than the others. CCP Sledgehammer says,
Since the SCOPE News Network is a Gallente organization it wouldn’t make sense for them to feature challenges that are aggressive towards Gallente (which may be the case in the future) or other Empires (being a news service). We changed it to The Agency to have a neutral party dish out these challenges.
As is customary players are divided on the merits of dailies in Eve Online, with many players complaining that dailies are a Skinner Box, and other complaining back that ‘Hey, I like Skinner Boxes’. Data gathered from previous events suggests that players that logged in, would take the time to kill their rat and get their 10,000 experience points, but that if a player was not planning on logging in already, they were not likely to do so merely to get their daily. Newer players were an exception to this so an argument could be made that gearing dailies towards rookies is a good way to help the longevity of Eve. Giving players a direction after their initial introduction into the game helps them get the ball rolling.
From my personal experience, even if previous dailies were not particularly worth logging in for to veteran players financially, they still provided plenty in the way of good content. Every opportunity to get us into space gives us that much of a chance of a meaningful interaction with another player and that is at the heart of Eve. Whether dailies are ‘worth it’ or not, they give us a reason to undock and potentially get into trouble, they put more spaceships in space, and they facilitate more cool explosions.
What do you think of dailies in Eve? Will you run them? Are they good for the ecosystem of Eve? If they aren’t what could CCP do to make them more engaging to you personally? Let us know in the comments!
