EVE General Discussion

I made this character as a trial account a few weeks before Ascension hit, with the intent of letting it be an Alpha account, at least initially. After I was inspired by the video of CCP Rise's presentation in Vegas, I decided I would try some exploration in null-sec with this character to see what would be possible for me.

A little about me: I'm an older player that played many years ago and recently came back to check out some of the new stuff. I was never a hard core PvP'er, but I have had a little experience living in null sec, and am familiar with some basic survival skills in null sec, as well as having a solid understanding of the scanning mechanics in the game.

So, while I had a bit of a head-start skill training wise versus a completely brand new player, I tried not to give this character any outside assistance from my other account. I played through almost all of the Gallente career agents and made enough money to buy skills and ship fittings I needed to set up a cheap exploration Imicus. I can post the fit if someone cares, but essentially it was a scan probe launcher with core probes, a 5mn compact MWD and tech 1 data and relic analyzers.

I spent most of this weekend playing (probably 2-4 hours a day) and had a huge amount of fun, and can safely say that very little went as I expected. I fully expected to die, repeatedly, but, with an empty clone and a ship worth about 1.7 million, I knew I could replace it a time or two before I would be broke.

Day 1: I found a WH pretty close to Jita and ended up in Syndicate null. There weren't a lot of people around, and signatures were quite sparse, much to my surprise. I found one relic site and made about 12 million in loot from it, off of the cans I could actually hack. I didn't run into any gate camps, but I had a few close calls with people who clearly wanted me dead. Mistakes and/or bad ship fits on their part likely contributed a lot to my ability to escape. I met some nice people along the dozen or so systems I traveled through, and was advised that signature hunting in Syndicate was not likely going to be very profitable for me, and I should try to get to sovereign null-sec. One nice player suggested I try to get to Curse. I jumped back into a WH and logged there for the day, happy that I hadn't been killed, and was at least having a lot of fun and a little success.

Day 1 profit: about 12 million from 1 relic site.

Day 3: I didn't have as much time to play this day, and after scanning down something like 30 sigs in the C5 hole I was in, which takes a good while with Alpha skills, I started to get the feeling that I was the only one there. Normally, I pick up other player's scan probes on d-scan when I'm scanning, and I tend to be very cautious about going after any sites if I see probes near them, but I hadn't seen anything from anyone at all in the few hours I was in there. I looked up the KBs on this system, and there was almost no activity at all.

I remember reading on the forums that people will buy and sell WH locations, so I started to look into this to see if this C5 might be worth something. After reading a few forum posts, and speaking to a few people in various channels in-game, it seemed like this might be a viable idea. I fired up my combat scanner and started looking for active POS towers. I found only a couple of dead ones, and no 'lootable' structures at either. I reached out to a couple of wormhole 'broker' type folks I found on the forums, and negotiated a deal with one of them to sell him the hole for a discounted price, since I didn't feel comfortable trying to handle the sale myself.

After a bit of an adventure trying to scan down an exit, and getting a lot more practice using Tripwire, I was finally able to help him get his alt into the WH, and he paid me the agreed upon amount (100 million). I logged off in a C2 that looked promising.

Day 3 profits: ~105 million from the wormhole sale and a crappy data site.


Conclusions: This was some of the most fun I'd had in Eve since I started playing again, and my journey certainly didn't go like I expected. I figured I would get killed a few times, but come back with a tremendous profit from the treasure trove of exploration sites that surely were there waiting for me once I got to null.

As much as it was fun, there were certainly some things about being an alpha clone that were frustrating and/or stressful:

1) Lower scanning skills end up making things take a lot longer to scan down. It could easily take me 30-45 minutes to get through a system with a ton of signatures.

2) Lower hacking skills! After I added a cargo scanner to my setup, I had a better idea of how much loot I was losing when failing hacks, and it was roughly 50-60 million worth of all of the sites I did after the second day. I'm sure this is by design though, and an Omega character should be able to have a better success rate. But it was sad when I'd see a board with resto nodes and 90 strength firewalls all over, because I knew I had no chance.

3) No cloaking device! This really kept me on my toes though as I was always making safe spot bookmarks, and bouncing between them anytime I thought other players were in-system with me in w-space. I was probably a lot more paranoid than I needed to be, but I wanted to see how long I could stay alive without a cloak, and as it turns out.. if you're careful and smart, the answer is: a pretty good while. I'm sure I'd get caught and killed eventually, but for the most part I was very pleased with how I did in this area.

I'm sure these things are by design though, and I will likely upgrade this account to Omega since they have some cheap deals going right now, if nothing else just to get the faster training and flesh out the skills more quickly.

TLDR: Alpha clone exploration adventure was a success. I made a couple hundred million exploring over the long weekend, in a ship that costs about 3 million total, with no cloaking device, and staying out of high-sec entirely. I had a blast, and highly recommend this to any new player that wants to see a lot of the galaxy.

Very interesting stuff!

So, very roughly, you could go 'omega' and sustain yourself from PLEX on the back of roughly 11-12 days of 'work' each month. Perhaps a little less once you start failing the hacks less (and can fly ships with a better bonus), perhaps a little more when you have a run of bad luck.

Good read. As I suffer from BitterVet© syndrome, I'm always looking for something "interesting" to do on my alt(s), and this put me in the mood to give relic/data sites another shot sometime in the future.

A little trick you may or may not be using.

Create a bookmark 150km + from the cans and cloak/ warp back and forth after you hack each can.

Keep forgetting no cloak for Alpha's.

How do you do wormholes?
I tried one once after doing the exploration carerr agent and it was empty as far as i could tell and it took like 20 minutes to get into.
Do you have to rescan with probes once youre in the wormhole or should stuff just be there in the open that you can see like a normal mission complex.?

I'm by no means a wormhole expert, but I will try to answer your questions based on my few days spent exploring inside:

There are Cosmic Anomalies, which show up on your probe scanning window for everyone, and Cosmic Signatures that have to be scanned down with scan probes.

I generally turn off Anomalies on this window altogether, so I don't even see them. I don't think there are any I could run in my ship anyway, so I just focus on signatures.

Anytime you leave the system, or log off, you will need to re-scan the signatures *IF* you want them to show up identified in the probe scan window. You can bookmark, or make note of which Signature ID corresponds to which signature after you've scanned it once. A tool like Tripwire can help with this as well.

I tend to look for only pirate faction data and relic sites. They have names that contain Angel, Guristas, Serpentis, etc.

Any sites you see that say "forgotten ", I believe are guarded by sleepers, and you will need a ship that can clear them out before you can hack anything (I did not attempt any of these, so this is just what I've read online).