Christmas giveaway in EVE Online [2011]

And a chance to win a Talos battlecruiser – details below.

Every year CCP gives away some limited collectibles: ships, implants, modules or consumables. One of the most notable Christmas gifts was the Snowball Launcher and Snowballs (which later become melted by CCP, because players were using them for griefing). They were great, because you could shoot anyone without actually agressing them (the fun part was when someone fired back). Over the years CCP has also released several limited edition ships, like the Zephyr, Primae, Echelon or Apotheosis, which still remains the only jovian ship that players can fly.

A choice this time

This year, CCP gives away a different gift: a choice. There are real world companies, that make similar Christmas presents – boxes with a certificate inside, which can be exchanged for a number of things to choose from. But since EVE Online is all about choice, this year you can choose your Christmas gift yourself.

How to receive it

First, log on to your account management page. You will notice a big banner saying “Holiday Gifts. Will you be naughty or nice?”, click it.

On the second page you are presented with a number of choices:

• 3 Destroyers with a sizable amount of small faction rounds,
• medium and large faction ammo,
• Zephyr, Primae or Echelon
• POS fuel blocks
• fuel block blueprints
• +3 implant set
• CA-1 Genolution implant
• boosters (Quafe Zero too!)
• a free neural remap
• 2000 AUR

Please note, that you will have to make your choice before 21st of December. A day after that, on December 22nd your choice will be available for redemption at logon screen.

150 posts landmark here ->

(means a free Talos battlecruiser for a lucky pilot!)

I don’t know if you know but this is my 150th post. It has been a long and sometimes bumpy ride, starting in March 2010, just before the Tyrannis was announced. Initially my blog was not about EVE: it was about everything computer or photography related. When CCP announced Tyrannis, I began a cycle of posts about its features, playing mostly on Singularity at the time, and giving others the ability to track all the changes in the coming expansion. At this time my blog has received a  facelift, which was basically a whole new more EVE-like theme. I was also writing more and more about EVE, rather than anything else.

Unfortunately there were also bumps on the road, just like on any typical polish road (I think polish roads have more holes per kilometer than in any other country in Europe). On 14th of October my old webserver was ganked by a hard drive failure, which was not detected in time and struck the server perfectly, wrecking  for OMGWTFPWN filesystem damage. I am a seasoned admin, but that doesn’t make data recovery any easier. And  real men don’t do regular backups, you know. With a friend of mine, we have managed to salvage enough data to recover our websites, and we have bought a new server. Ordering new hardware, configuring it, installing OS, configuring OS, recovering the data and finally bringing the new HW to the datacenter took 10 days (I’ve been doing all this in my free time).

Providing information about the next EVE expansion has become my second nature. This status page about Crucible has received 574 unique visits on November 29th, and has been linked on many websites, such as Massively.

It would not be possible without YOU, my audience, so I would like to say:

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

To celebrate, I will give away a brand new Talos battlecruiser with custom black leather upholstery and my signature 😉

I will randomly draw the winner from the comments below this post; please write your character name in your comment, so I can contract the ship to the winner. Thanks!

The winner will be announced on 21st of December.

PS. If you do not have an EVE account yet, I have two 60-day free trial keys available until December 24th. Please contact me if you would like to start playing EVE Online.

PS2. The issue with Captcha permissions has been fixed (for good) and comments should work now.