EVE General Discussion

How many probes are you using, what ship are you using to scan? If you aren't using something with bonuses it can be difficult to get the necessary probe strength to even scan down certain sites. Are you using the scanning rigs? Additionally, signal strength vary wildly, but usually the harder something is to scan down - the more valuable it is.

You could do with increasing some of your skills as well.

With Astrometics 4 I use a standard "six star" (middle, up, down, left, right, dive, fly) and I've never really had issues scanning anything down.

Remember, shift and alt are your friends. Shift will move all probes, alt will move them with reference to the "center" of your probes.

And yeah, it's sort of like gambling. You aren't always going to get something nice, and it's best to scan at least in low sec rather than high (- null is where the money is at, you can get sites that drop pirate BS loot as well as some of the best deadspace/faction loot in the game) surprisingly enough, once you get past gates you're pretty safe. Just find a quiet area, keep an eye on dscan for scanner probes.

You need to set the filter to show all signatures.

Frigate level is 4. Using a Probe with bonuses. Hardwires and appropriate skills.

Join channels exploration and/or scanning in game if you're still having problems, they are quite quiet but you should get some help if you're nice ;)

and as mentioned above, check filter settings: - http://swiftandbitter.com/eve/misc/Reset_Filters.jpg

You know it's probably this

Wtf

Remember that you can use shift and alt drag to move the probes around en mass. That massively improves one's ability to probe things.

You should also be in a CovOps ship with the proper rig and a Sister's launcher and probe, as well.

Having said that, you are better off doing something more productive with your time. Exploration is one of those neat ideas CCP implemented but then forgot to support in any meaningful way, resulting in the entire thing being kind of a waste of time outside of Wormholes.

Hello Boudicca,

Take a look around here for mechanics and required skill set

After latest changes to probing you can't get everything with just a couple skills at 3 and T2/faction stuff, you need to to get decent skills witch means at least primary one at 5 and then all others to 4, a T2 dedicated ship, T1 riggs for scanning and you can also add Sisters Probe Launcher+Sisters Probes.

With this kind of stuff you can get almost everything, I mean almost because some sites will still be close to impossible to get and will require you to have all 5's and eventually a low grade virtue set.
Exploration requires some dedication and effort because the rewards you get doing it can be really huge if you do it right.
Start by your skilling and keep scanning to understand how this stuff works, it takes some time but once you get it it's awesome.

I appreciate every one's input thus far.

I made it "show all" last night in a quick exploration run but found nothing but WH's. Waste. I really just wanted to salvage/analyze but it looks like I need to skill up hacking as well. The mining portions I could let my brother do I suppose. It's been really frustrating dumping all that time in the exploration skills, and I haven't seen a single bit of profit. Just lost time. My skills aren't quite up to 4, but they're good enough to at least start finding stuff in high sec.

Archaeology 3
Acquisition 2
Rangefinding 2
Astrometrics 3

Yeah. Those can go up but I should be finding SOMETHING, right? I mean, as it stands now, if I pinpoint a site, it just ends up disappearing. So frustrating. I don't want to mine, so I don't know any other way to make ISK other than buying Plexes. I eventually want to live in low/nullsec but I'm going to need cashmoney to support that endeavor.

Hell yes your skills are very low, that's why you have the feeling it's unprofitable or too hard to get it.

This is the following plan I can advice you to become better at exploration, not the best of course but a fair good one:

Astrometrics: skill it at 5 ASAP

Astrometric acquisition: 4

Astrometric rangefinding: 4

Astrometric pingpointing: 4

You can do high sec exploration to learn to deal with sites and rats, high sec exploration brings some profit but nothing to think it's very profitable.
Low sec WH and null sec exploration on the other hand can be extremely profitable depending on the sites you find and how skilled you toon is to deal with those.
In low sec you can easily spot Radar sites (yummy named Data Cores, skillbooks, BPC's, items) and alos DED sites. In those DED sites you'll need either 2 ships for an average skilled toon (flying T2 stuff) or a single one if you're experienced enough and know what you're doing but the rewards can go from 1 to several billions for a 30min completion time.

Of course you don't find those all over the place, you need to move and do a lot of scanning. Skill for a good ship is very important and all this takes time, be patient.


Edit: Filtering

You can also create several filters to make your scanning easier. Edit your filter or create new one, choose create new one.
Check "Anomalies" then check Radar, Ladar, Magnetometric, Gravimetric, check also Unknown.

Unknown is about WH's, if this is checked will save you some time because you will always be able to scan it, if you don't check it the signature will appear but will get lost (ignored) at about 4 AU.
So just choose to check it or not it's up to you but imho you should so you can learn easily how to spot WH's and eventually choose to get those or not.

If you choose to just go for a certain type of anomalies just create a dedicated filter so you can scan systems faster and therefore increasing your isk/h income.
Personal opinion here but it's a start for you, then with time and training you'll fix yourself what is good or not to achieve your goals.