Flying Solo In EVE: First Week In Cradle Of War

Last Tuesday the Cradle of War expansion for EVE Online dropped onto the main Tranquility shard. I think the expansion is a success so far, but we are still in the early days when things like Omega time sales and givaways may still influence the data. Anecdotally I can only add my time in Final Fantasy XIV has decreased as I've explored the new content om EVE.

Last week the average number of concurrent users logged in jumped back up to 26,000 +/- 500 accounts after a pause in activity the week before the expansion. Perhaps a more important data point was the peak concurrent user mark for the week reaching over 38,000 for the first time in two months. The peak for the year so far occurred in the first full week of the year at 38,860. Perhaps CoW can exceed that if word of month reviews are good enough.

As far as the global PLEX market goes I wonder if over the past year Fenris as removed most of the slack out of the market. During an expansion launch week the amount of PLEX traded week-over-week only increased 2.2%, with only a 1.8% increase in ISK spent on those exchanges. While the last couple of sales concentrated on selling Omega time and skills packages, PLEX was included as a sweetener in both offers.

Speaking of offers, I created a new character to gain the starting experience in the new region of Exordium. So far I've completed the tutorial and gotten a little more than half-way through the career agents. I'm kind of glad I've taken the situation slowly because I see the developers making a lot of tweaks to the new epic arc mission Visions of Greatness. I've also just sat back and trained just in case the new epic arc was tweaked to have a difficult final boss ala the original level 1 Sisters' epic arc. So far I've had no problems purchasing the skill books needed to get through the initial recommended skill training plans.

I do want to point out something that was sorely needed introduced in today's patch. A new Grade-0 variant of Pyroxeres with 50% of the mineral yield of standard Pyroxeres was added. The ore was needed for new players to complete some of the achievements, like the basic resource harvesting one that requires mining 16,000 units of pyroxeres. Let the new players get the basics out of the way in Exordium.

I should also mention I've dipped my toes into military campaigns. I'm glad to see the devs address some of the issues finding agents and turn-in points located in space in today's patch.

Military Campaigns:

Added a new beacon outside of the navy anchorage stations on top of the item trader locations for Crystalline Raspite, Crystalline Polycrase, Crystalline Moissanite, and Crystalline Kangite, so it’s easier to locate them.

The Item Traders will also now show up on your overview anywhere in the system if you have ‘Large Collidable Objects’ added.

Right now I'm just taking one character and having her fill up the ore hold of a Skiff since the ship has an ore hold of 18,500 m³ and I get 200 LP for every 18,000 m³ of Kagan I mine. I do need to move my top mining character to Amo to save some ISK when refining the ore. I'll get into the benefits of doing so next week.