Here Is Why The EVE Online X Doctor Who Crossover Event Looks Bad

Today, released not only the patch notes for today's content drop, but advice for new players on how to prepare for the Doctor Who crossover event. Aside from defect fixes, the patch introduced the following:

Audio:

• Reworked the music in exploration sites, mostly to avoid two music tracks playing in parallel. As a side effect some sites will now have no music at all.

Skills:

• Saving shared Skill Plans creates a copy to Personal Skill Plan.

Technical:

• The support for DirectX 9 has been removed. This means that the EVE client can no longer be started on PCs, which do not support DirectX 11. More details can be found in this dev blog.

User Interface:

• 🤝 Filaments are now saved as part of ship fitting.
• 🤝 Added a button to go directly to fitting simulator from the Show Info window of a ship.
• 🤝 Added the ability to have quick access to adjust fleet formation.
• Improved Help Pointers

By comparison, the Doctor Who article contains six EVE Academy videos plus a lot of advice I would have loved when I began playing back in 2009. We even received recommendations for the ships to use. For exploration, the ship of choice is the Magnate. For combat, the article recommends four tech 1 cruisers: the Rupture, Omen, Caracal, and Vexor. I don't believe we have any information on the Dalek ships we will need to fight.

By themselves, the above subjects are unremarkable. The problem comes when adding context. Back in November, CCP announced economic changes that would lead to the end of the Scarcity Era. After player feedback from testing on Singularity, many changes were altered or put on hold. As we saw today, none of the economic gameplay issues were addressed in today's patch.

Now, perhaps expecting CCP to revamp their plans in time for a January release is unfair. But the Doctor Who crossover is launching as scheduled on Thursday. I've heard a lot of complaining that what the game needs is more concentration on problems and less on obvious monetization ideas. In a small way, this week's content drops won't help.