An Unusual Announcement

I don't think EVE Online did well in September. The final NPC and ship kill data is now available and I'm making graphs and writing a post about what I see. But before I could start typing, CCP made what I consider an unusual announcement.

SKILLING SPREE RETURNS!

We’re super happy to announce that due to popular demand, the Skilling Spree is back!

As of today’s daily downtime, pilots will be able to earn up to 50,000 additional skill points per day by taking part in the Skilling Spree and completing challenges.

Each day, pilots will receive one of three randomly selected challenges at daily downtime that offer either 10,000, 25,000 or 50,000 skill points as a reward for destroying NPC vessels.

If the challenge is completed successfully, the skill points will be rewarded, and the pilot will receive a new challenge at the next daily downtime.

If the challenge is not completed successfully, it will be replaced by another that's randomly selected during the next daily downtime at 11:00 UTC.

Pilots across New Eden are eligible for these challenges regardless of clone state, so there’s never been a better time to lock and load, and head on out into space to earn some extra skill points!

"What is so unusual about the announcement?" you may reasonably ask. This simple announcement of an in-game promotion is missing one standard item: an end date.

If this is another stupid application of "Chaos Era" thinking, making players guess when the feature will expire, I will scream. Another popular event, The Crimson Harvest, usually begins in October. I'm guessing some brilliant soul figures that publishing the end date for this new promotion would tip off when The Crimson Harvest will begin. Can't have that, can we?

Or perhaps someone at CCP wants to run this new "Skilling Spree" for over a month and doesn't want to face a player backlash. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that since CCP Falcon wrote the article, the omission probably wasn't just a mistake. Probably.

Whatever CCP's plans, we'll find out in a few weeks, either through an announcement at EVE Vegas or through the normal course of events. For this announcement, I think CCP is taking the concept of keeping players in the dark just a little too far.