EVE General Discussion

As anyone who has ever run a nullsec data site can tell you, the site payout averages are complete trash. It's ludicrously awful, and CCP has done but two things to fix the loot tables: Jack and crud, and Jack left town.

The fact that these sites are trash stems from several things. First, there's the size of the loot. When an exploration frigate has a hold that's at best 300 m3, making 1-3M ISK drops that take up 100+ m3 is absolutely stupid. Most loot comes in the form of 1 m3 items in huge stacks, and it's all worthless trash because of that. Seriously. It's like trying to fit Lady Scarlet in the cargo hold. You just can't do it. And it's the main form of loot in just about every can.

Second, items like the Esoteric Tuner Data Interface are worthless. The blueprint copy drops themselves are limited. But--and here's the incredibly stupid part that CCP should have fixed with the Crius release--once you have the item itself, it has unlimited uses. The only value those items have at this point is in the incredibly unlikely event you lose the one you already have. This is straight-up bad game design. I really hope that if a CCP employee takes the time to read this far, they acknowledge this issue. It's a pretty massive oversight.

Third, datacores are worthless because they come from a bunch of other sources with much more availability. Either remove datacores from the drops or replace them with something that isn't already cheaper than a five-cent hooker.

Fourth, the drop rates were already terrible. Then CCP went ahead and cut them back even further when they removed loot spew, in an attempt to "compensate" for the average amount of loot lost. Incidentally, my numbers from before and after suggest that someone seems to have made a math mistake in the drop tables, as the average value of the loot was supposed to be reduced 30%. It seems instead that some brilliant person at CCP reduced both the average value of a stack and the average chance of appearance of a stack in a can by 30%, so the loot got reduced 1 x .7 x .7 instead of just 1 x .7, resulting in about a 50% reduction in average site value instead of 30%. Good job. The solution to this is to undo a stupid nerf and/or double-check math in the future. This math issue also applies to relic sites.

Please, CCP, unscrew nullsec data sites.

Don't circumvent the profanity filter, thank you. -ISD Dorrim Barstorlode

Magic.

"Hooker"?

I'm getting a distinct "People shouldn't explore using exploration frigates" vibe from your post. Perhaps you think I should be probing sites down in a freighter, since that's about the only thing that has room for data site loot. Clearly, you think nullsec should continue to suck ass with regards to income. Don't worry: I'm pretty sure the devs agree with you.

Scan the data sites. scan the cans. move on.

Can anyone clarify if nullsec data sites are supposed to drop any faction BPCs? I've been doing data and relic sites for a couple months and I haven't seen any sort of faction blueprints, just a bunch of marginally useless ASB and AAR BPCs with the regular data trash.

Occasionally you get T2 rig BPCs from relic sites but considering those are as cheap as 2m to make , if you have the BPO you're not going to get much from them unless you make them which I don't have the skills for anyways. Relic sites have decent overall loot drop, but data sites need to be seriously reconsidered.

As an explorer myself, i find i now completely skip data sites as well, simply because they aren't worth the time.

Loot takes up huge amounts of space compared to relic sites and generally only find junk.

The best thing to do even though they are generally a waste of time is to at least fail all the cans so that the site immediately despawns and a new site respawns somewhere else in the same region/constellation. If you don't touch them they take about three days to disappear, versus if you even just attempt one can at least they will disappear within an hour.

There are fabled faction tower BPC drops so I don't know if attempting the cans legitimately is worth it though.

I'm a big fan of people skipping data sites. I think everyone should just start doing that.