So That's Why CCP Called The Event Arms Race

I thought I'd write a quick little post about the Arms Race event that went live on EVE Online's Tranquility server yesterday. I highly recommend to everyone who is poor (at least by veteran standards) like me to run the sites. I also think anyone who has an Alpha account only trained up to cruisers should also run the sites for the rewards.

The event rewards I think are very well thought out. They are:

• 60 points - Racial battlecruiser + racial battlecruiser skill book
• 120 points - Daily Alpha Injector (50,000 skill points)
• 180 points - Racial battleship + racial battleship skill book

The event is designed to quickly get existing Alpha players into more powerful ships. Since the skill point cap prior to Tuesday's release was approximately 4.3 million skill points, Alpha players still have 600,000 or so skill points they can train for free. What better way than to train additional skills for getting into a battlecruiser?

I ran sites in both low sec and high security space last night on two different characters. The event points earned didn't change. Running one site netted 48 points and three sites the 72 points shown in the screenshot above. Which means an Alpha player can begin running level 3 (and some level 4) combat missions in high sec fairly quickly. I don't live in null, but I'm pretty sure a battlecruiser would come in handy when ratting, especially for those who didn't choose to create Gallente characters and fly Vexors and Vexor Navy Issues. 

I am kicking myself for not creating an Alpha character for each race. I have three Omega characters who can run the sites, plus one Minmatar Alpha. I think I can get all four up to 180 event points and get four battleship hulls. Currently, I only own three: a Nestor, a Maelstrom, and a Typhoon. So in the space of seven days, I can more than double the number of battleship hulls I own. I do like my Minmatar ships, but right about now I which I had a Caldari and Gallente pilot that could take advantage of the event.