Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Exploration, whether it's on Earth or in a space ship video game, is primarily exciting due to discovering the unknown. Trekking where no one has been. Manipulating and/or analyzing environments you've never experienced.

In EVE online, exploration has become nothing more than a routine of button-clicks in order to acquire loot. There is no unknown, that whole aspect has been removed. Removing the main aspect of something generally holds the risk of ruining it.

I had trained my main for nothing but exploration, but switched him over to combat once the new changes were put into place. Many, many other explorers have chimed in that they as well have abandoned the career path.

Exploration used to make you feel like you found something special - and thus made the routine of finding it somewhat exciting knowing what you could find. There was risk/reward as it could many times be a waste of a full hour if you didn't find anything lucrative, while other times you could pump out 50 million on the hour.
Now it has become akin to salvaging by comparison: A bunch of tedious, boring clicks that spins a wheel as you hope it lands on something valuable. The only "exploration" is jumping through stargates in order to find a list of signatures that seems appealing enough to scan down.


How can we get exploration back on track while keeping the new changes?

Exploration would be much nicer if the following was done:
1) Do not show any cosmic signatures by default. Your on board scanner should simply detect there are X cosmic signatures somewhere in the system, but gives you no details as to where they are.
2) Move the most valuable signatures far, far away from the orbital plane, making it a lot more difficult to locate them.
3) Add back Deep Scanner Probes to balance the above, and so that those with Astrometrics V are 'specialists' once again. If it seems like they will be overpowered reduce the effectiveness of the probes by some degree.

The changes might seem minor and mundane even, but it adds back the main aspect of exploration: Discovering the unknown.
One would argue your on-board scanner should technically detect nothing if we are looking for true unknowns, but I believe most people wanted that changed. Scanning down 3-4 systems only to find nothing was quite tedious, won't lie. However I would welcome a return of that mechanic if it means fixing all this other hand-holding non sense that has become the state of exploration.