Reflections on a Modest Crimson Harvest

I always get a little bit pumped for the Crimson Harvest event in EVE Online every year for no good reason.

I mean, there is a reason.  My feelings are entirely wrapped up in that ONE really good version of the event that they ran back in 2018 that was a lot of fun and which they scrapped immediately after it was done, replacing it with something dull like the current version of the event.

This year I thought I would give it another shot and… and it still isn’t a great event.

I mean, the suicide gankers love it because the drop rate for PvP ship kills is bumped from 50% to 90%, such that Red Frog had to temporarily raise their shipping rates.

But the actual activities of the event… well, to start with it makes you ask who the event is for.

It certainly isn’t for new players.  The two key items, the combat sites and the hacking sites, both require considerable skill and resources.

The combat sites are best run with a battleship and likely in nothing less than a battlecruiser… and they are open and contested so they are mostly swamped by people in Vindicators blitzing them, collecting, and moving on while you’re just getting started, leaving you with nothing.

Meanwhile, the hacking sites, which are shown as level III sites, are actually much harder than comparable level III sites you might otherwise find, both to scan down and to complete.

So the first message of Crimson Harvest is pretty much “New players are not welcome” because there is nothing they can accomplish beyond the login reward, even with the free Expert System CCP tossed into the login rewards, which only boosts scanning skills up to level 3… which is just high enough to be frustratingly close to being useful… and even if you manage it, good luck hacking with low skills.

And how about the rest of us?  Well, there are problems for us too, which start with the fact that you need to choose a side to support in the event.  We wouldn’t want anybody who role plays as a Blood Raider to feel left out… unless, of course, they’re new to the game.  So you make a choice.

That means that, in a world of perfect distribution, once you have chosen a side there is a 50% chance that any site you run into won’t be for you.

In reality, it feels like most people choose the Order of Tetrimon, so when you go out searching the Crimson Harvest Blood Raiders sites are all gone and you’re left with just sites from the order.

Now, technically, you can do sites from either side, and even though I had sided with the order, I did drop in on a few of their sites after simply getting tired of looking for Blood Raider sites.

And if you hack the Tetrimon sites you do get stuff… you just don’t advance the event in The Agency and the items you can turn in for ISK have to go to a Blood Raiders NPC station, and those are out in Delve.  Didn’t I just leave Delve?

Meanwhile, the somewhat lucrative items from Blood Raiders sites you can turn in at your local DED station in high sec, which is somewhat less of a journey.

I picked up about 200 million ISK with those little babies.

Things from the site, hacking and combat, were pretty much the only reason to do the event.  I got a few nice SKINs, the above mentioned artifacts, far too many fireworks, and a few cerebral accelerators, which boost skill training speed by increasing your attributes.

Advancing the overall event track however, was something of a bust.  Once you could find the right sites, these were some of the most difficult hacking sites I have encountered without hostile NPCs guarding them.

While I was mostly successful, you do end up hitting enough where a wrong guess will cripple your chances and occasional ones that are just impossible.  RNG will do that to you.  So my success rate was under 60% per attempt, but you do get two attempts at each site.  If you blow both attempts though, which was probably a 1 in 6 chance for me, that node just explodes and you need to move on.

When you show up there are three nodes in each site.  That lines up with the need to have three successful hacks for each objective to advance the event.  But if you miss one, or somebody else shows up and snags one… or you show up late and are only able to snag one… it means that you end up having to do multiple sites to get your three nodes.

While you get a few bonus points for the initial challenge, it settles down to ten points for each three nodes for an event where, to claim all the prizes, you need 1,350 points.

So if you’re going the hacking route… and the combat route was far more popular so far more difficult to advance… you needed to successfully hack about 400 nodes… and that just wasn’t going to happen even over the full month of the event.  Not for me.

To start with, the prizes were… not all that enticing.  The boosters for this event, the ones for the login rewards, the ones in the hacking sites, and the ones as prizes for points, were not very useful.

The SKINs, usually what motivates me, were few and far between, while the remaining prizes were all SKINR items that cost to even use, so are not very motivating.

So I did not get very far down the prize path with the high sec alt I decided to run this with.  He had max scanning and hacking skills and the whole thing started to become a bit of a chore.

Clearly I found some time to put in a bit of effort, and that was not completely unrewarded.  And it was something reasonably easy to drop into and out of when I had a bit of free time and couldn’t figure out any way to further my need to get my stuff moved from Delve to Tenerifis.  And it did feel good when I found a site that was empty that I could get to hacking.

But I also spent quite a bit of time trolling through systems in my Buzzard, scanning down signatures, and not finding a lot of sites.  Some of that was because at the start of the event, like the start of every such event in New Eden, lots of people rushed in to try it, so sites were even more scare.  That eased up a bit as some days went by, but it also wasn’t too long before it also became easy to simply not keep looking for sites, knowing that it was an often futile effort.

I binged for a bit on around the second week, listening to an audio book and scanning.  But after that I slowed down.  I collected a few cerebral accelerators, enough to keep my training boosted for a while, turned in my vendor goods, and brought back to station a few other interesting things, like a blueprint copy for the Mobile Sanguine Harvester, the variation of the Mobile Tractor Unit (MTU) that collects corpses.  Might have to make a few of those.

There are a couple more days of the event, but I am not enthused… and I probably won’t be bored enough to go back.  We’ll see.

I guess I am all tuned up for the Winter Nexus event though, which has similar sites plus, unless they messed it up, the ice mining sites.  Those were much more widely accessible to a range of players.  And while the event is localized to the wandering (and video card taxing) space ice storms, CCP hands out filaments to get you there.

But that is still a while off.  We have to get through November and the new expansion release first before we start worrying about holiday events in December.