EVE Online Crimson Harvest And Winter Expansion Dates?

Tuesday the release of EVE Online's Cradle of War's Major Update. I know that the most important items, at least in the developers' minds, were the changes to the Ansiblex jump bridges. But before I jump into some of the other changes introduced this week, I want to speculate a little bit about what is coming up over the next two months: Crimson Harvest and the winter expansion.

Introduced in 2015, Crimson Harvest is the first and perhaps most popular seasonal event in EVE. Since the return of the two expansions per year release schedule, New Eden's Halloween event increased to four weeks in duration.

• 2023: October 5 – November 6, 2023
• 2024: October 3 – November 5, 2024   
• 2025: October 6 – November 4, 2025

A funny thing about the Crimson Harvest. The end dates of the event fall in the first full week of November. In 2023 the event ended at downtime on a Monday while the past two years Crimson Harvest has ended on a Tuesday. If the pattern holds we should see the event run from October 6th to November 3rd this year. Correlation does not equal causation, but did Blizzard delay the launch of WoW Forever to November 4th to avoid conflicting with EVE's Crimson Harvest event?

What about the winter expansion? Is Fenris going to delay the launch until December to avoid the launches of both WoW Forever and GTA 6? I think the Major Update dev blog put to rest that question.

The AIR Career Program (ACP) migrates to Paragon Services achievements in November. Anyone with unfinished ACP tasks should complete them and claim the rewards before the move. Once those tasks become achievements, they can be completed again through the new system, so there's a second run at them waiting on the other side. 

In addition to the new achievements system the first military campaigns will also end with CoW. So trying to figure out when the winter expansion will launch actually has a useful component to it. Here are the launch dates of the last four winter expansions.

• Uprising: November 8, 2022
• Havoc: November 14, 2023
• Revenant: November 12, 2024 
• Catalyst: November 18, 2025   

Except for last year the winter expansion has fallen on the second Tuesday of the month of November. Last year I think was delayed one week to avoid falling on a day with so many holidays.

• UK - Remembrance Day
• US - Veterans Day
• France & Belgium - Armistice Day
• Germany - The first day of the Carnival season for Catholic and Rhineland areas of Germany.

So I'm fully expecting Fenris to return to the schedule of the previous three years and launch the 2026 winter expansion on November 10th, right between the launches of WoW Forever and GTA 6. Because let's face it, EVE is 23 years old. The purpose of expansions is to maintain player interest. With these two huge games releasing in November, the expansion is coming just in time to keep the player loss to the new games to a minimum.