Missions & Complexes

I could definitely be wrong here, as escalations aren't normally my thing. I believe however that you have up to 7 days to complete an escalation, so if you just received them this morning, you should be fine.

Edit: Some searching brought me here. https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/NPTS_-_Combat_Sites_and_Escalation
Which says expeditions time out after 24 hours. I would assume that each stage of the expedition has the same 24 hours after completing the previous.

Ah, I see now, apologies for the misunderstanding and hope a better answer comes around.

I am not sure what happens I you are in the middle of an escalation and the timer runs out.

My first thought is it would stay open until you finish the site.

But it very well could completely de-spawn the site.

24 hours is it.

I was in a Blood Raider Naval Shipyard (DED 10/10) and it despawned while i was in the 2nd room (edit: 2nd room of 3) because it had been exactly 24 hours since i got it from a Blood Haven. When CCP says "you got 24 hours to do this" they MEAN 24 hours lol.

Back in my day warping to an escalation(Guristas Fleet Staging) gave you another 24 hours.

This. No more extending escalations by warping in. Shame, really.

Definitely gotta disagree with you about that.

In my 6+ years of browsing these forums, I never once saw any threads posted complaining about the expedition timer resetting upon engaging warp to the site location.

The player could only do it for 7 days, then the journal entry and the site itself would be removed.

CCP's excuse for messing with it - it's been a long time bug which they've been meaning to fix. When asked why all of a sudden it was imperative to change it after 10 years, the answer was that players were using it to cargoscan the Overseer / Commander NPC's after downtime in order to get the best loot drop available.

In my opinion that's all bullsh*t. As an explorer I never once thought about nor heard about using a cargo-scan on the Overseer / Commander NPC. An easy fix to that is to simply make the Overseer's and Commander NPC's immune to cargo-scans. Same thing should be done to Data and Relic site containers as well.

The only reason the mechanic was changed was to help create more PvP targets.

The original mechanic allowed explorers to cloak and monitor the population activity in the system. Eventually there would be a lull in the activity allowing the explorer time to complete the site.

What the current mechanic does is place the explorer in a rush to not only get to the site location but to also complete the site as well. The amount of jumps, type of NPC's encountered, various in-game events (WarDec), safe spot creation, intel on residents in the system, etc, all contribute to the explorer being rushed for time. Let's not forget to include real life issues as well.

The whole intention is to make explorers become careless, take undue chances and hopefully make a mistake, thus making them an easier PvP target.

Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.


DMC

Funny, I did occasionally scan overseers (specifically at the end of Powergrid escalations, which have a lousy drop rate to start with). While on a single occasion it did help me get blue loot (nothing special, but the first scan had nothing at all so I waited two days for something to pop up) I found the whole thing horribly laborious. I ended up keeping close to the final escalation point rather than wandering like I usually do and couldn't get it out of my head that I was missing better loot from the sites I never saw just by focusing all my efforts on the one.

So yeah. I did it. It worked. It just wasn't very efficient for a solo explorer.

Having said that? Yeah, just make overseers immune to cargo scans. It's simple and it would have achieved the same proposed effect without messing with all the upsides that explorers actually liked. Still unsure why they made the change. Making them easier targets doesn't quite ring true for me as it seems the risk averse will just drop the escalation rather than taking chances. Just dumb overall.

As an explorer I always ran the expeditions as soon as I got them and I always tried to complete them asap. Most of the time the last stage was located in an active system so I'd use the timer reset to make safe spots, do intel on players in local and wait for the combat probes to disappear from D-scan.

Whenever I would sit cloaked in system waiting for probes and local to die down, I'd constantly be thinking about all the other sites I was missing out on. Usually a few hrs later local would calm down and I'd complete the site as quickly as I could.

There were plenty of explorers who wouldn't do the last stage back when the expedition timer would reset. I bet that amount of players has doubled now due to the straight 24 hr timer.

And I still say that change was implemented strictly to help create more viable PvP targets.



DMC

Yeah, maybe but highly doubtful.

The only way to get a new loot drop in the Overseer would be with downtime reset. At the most, a player could only keep the expedition site active for 7 days, after which the journal entry would be removed and the expedition site would de-spawn.

I don't think people would want to waste time and wait on a possible loot drop in expedition when there's plenty of other exploration sites to be completed.



DMC