EVE Easter Extravaganza III: The Finishing Line

Yeah, technically it's not Easter anymore. But I got annoyed enough today, so I declare today to be Easter Wednesday and finish this. (Seriously, someone pushed my doorbell so hard it broke and the fucker let himself into the building. We're lucky that guy was no stranger trying to rob us. Now I hear the faint buzzsound of the door being permanently kept open. I can only hope our property management can repair our doorbell soon, it's ridiculous otherwise. And pretty damn unsafe, I'll bet.)

And now that I've typed this, our door luckily has locked itself shut again and the buzzing sound is a lot fainter now. My doorbell and opener are still broken, though.

Welp, let's get on with this.

The Odyssey Odyssey III: The Last Great Run

Mysterious station-ruins in Lonetrek. Another scary little stage of our odyssey through New Eden.

The Traumark-Ruins. Once a mighty Amarrian fortress, now fallen into the hands of Sansha-pirates.

One of the more bizzare requests from CCP was a screenshot of Prime Arkonor. And here it is.

Not really one of the requests, I think. But I travelled through a lot of wormholes anyway during this long journey.

Another weird request: A screenshot of dead people. (Other people, that was specified for some reason.)

The next screenshot on our list was a burning capsule. Normally that's kind of hard to get, since capsules are quite flimsy and tend to explode too fast for a screenshot. Like this picture shows, I was willing to try it the real way first.

My plan was simple: Taunt pirates in Rancer, famous for being a (real player) pirate stronghole. Then when blown up, make a few snapshots of my crumbling capsule just before the final explosion, done. So here I am, pretending to be an ice miner while being in a frigate.

Yeah, I really didn't think that one through.

In hindsight, the entire idea was stupid. I hope those poor pirates can forgive me for this. I must have had a very, very low opinion of their intelligence to even try this stunt. Claiming to be in a Hulk? What the hell was I thinking here? Apparently I just kind of hoped the bloodthirsty pirates would warp to me without ever looking at d-scan and wondering why this little frigate was pretending to mine chunks of ice larger than the ship itself.

After a while I actually got some guys to bite on my bait. They bit down so hard my reflexes couldn't keep up.

Here is my second attempt in a Crucifier-frigate. (Interestingly, this weird misshapen lump of metal is what the Crucifier looked like before the redesign.)

But again I die too fast to get the picture I need, so I finally see reason and order one of my alts to fire on my capsule in a sanctioned HighSec-duel.

This is what success looks like.

I went a bit overboard and made enough screenshots of my burning pod I could re-arrange the pictures for a short animated film. Seriously, those two shots are just the highlight-reel.

Poitot. One of the few named places outside of High- and LowSec. It's always a funny joke to see if a newbie actually tries travelling to Poitot before noticing Poitot isn't in HighSec.

A black hole system in W-Space. What CCP wanted was a screenshot of a Wolf-Rayet, the rarest of the rare systems with special effects in W-Space. Finding that one took the most time, so I made most of the other screenshots I needed by wildly teleporting around New Eden via Wormhole-Express.

Did you know Fountain belonged to Test once? That mighty player alliance has fallen on hard times again and again, but they're still going strong in some other region today. By coincidence I landed in Fountain just days before the last battle against the CFC and the fall of Fountain. Kind of funny how at the time, I was annoyed at all those people forcing me to be extra-careful and didn't think twice about what was happening.

A Pulsar-system. Still not what I need, but I'll take it.

Here I got excited, but this W-Space system turned out to have a red giant in it. Still a false positive.

Inbetween trying to find one of the elusive Wolf-Rayet systems, I made some pretty pictures of nebulae.

Either we needed two different nebulae, or I just made two screenshots just because. Honestly, I forgot. And who cares? The pictures are still nice enough.

Shintaht in Providence: Another named system in a sea of weird number/letter salads.

Finally! On my way to the last stage of the odyssey, I lucked out and found a Wolf-Rayet.

And after a last chain of wormholes, I reached the very last screenshot CCP demanded from us: Steve.

This is Steve. The first player-Titan ever destroyed. Now his wreck forever roams the starways.



And with this last screenshot, the Odyssey Odyssey was over. All screenshots were collected. Soon afterwards we collected our prizes and the contest was over.

Today I wish CCP would try something like this again, it was really fun! Sadly, in CCP's mind exploration is a niché so small, we don't even deserve a small line of exploration cruisers. Frigates, a faction pirate cruiser and whatever T3 or other ship we can rebuild to be a exploration vessel. That's all we get.

Now excuse me, I have to go back to my Pilgrim for another long-range voyage.