Open the Events button, top-right of the map view, to see what's running. Most events don't need you to formally join -- the moment you complete an action that scores toward one, it counts. The exceptions are Daily Reputation Events and Ticketed Events, which show a Join button so you can decide up front whether to spend the resource they're tracking (Reputation Points, Uncommon or Rare Event Tickets) before it starts counting against you. Collect rewards as soon as they're available: once an event leaves your Events tab, any reward you didn't claim is gone with it. Leaderboard events only pay out when the whole event ends; milestone events pay out the instant you cross each threshold. When the event button turns green and says WINNER, that's your cue -- tapping it claims everything you've earned across every event at once and shows a combined summary.
Alliance-wide events have stricter eligibility than solo ones: you need to have been in the alliance before the event started, you need to actually score points in it, and you need to stay in the alliance until it ends. Leave or join partway through and you're locked out of that event's rewards entirely. The safe habit is scoring before your alliance crosses each milestone rather than after -- if the alliance hits the threshold first and your points land late, you can miss credit for it.
Faction Reputation Events require tapping Join Now before they'll count your points. That's deliberate: earlier versions auto-enrolled everyone, which meant you could silently lose reputation for a faction you cared about just by playing normally during the event window. Requiring an explicit join keeps that choice in your hands.
Daily Goals and event scores sometimes take a while to visibly update -- the points are registered correctly on Scopely's end even when the on-screen counter hasn't caught up yet. One specific case worth knowing: if an event has more than one scoring condition active at the same time (say, destroying a hostile with a specific Officer or Ship both count), only one banner displays even though both conditions are being credited. Check the event screen itself for your real total rather than trusting the pop-up banner alone.
The Battle Pass is the one event that runs after every single game update, and it's really two tracks stapled together. The Free Path is available to everyone just for playing the special daily and event-based missions tagged with the Battle Pass icon. The Elite Path -- and above it, the Mythic Path -- unlock through a store purchase, and buying in retroactively hands you everything you'd already earned on the Free Path plus a second, higher-value tier: bonus materials, officer shards, cosmetics, and limited-time items. Because the unlock is retroactive, there's no benefit to buying early in the cycle versus buying right before it ends -- the only cost of waiting is not knowing yet how much Free Path progress you'll have banked.