Missions & Complexes

Sorry, you were too subtle :P It sounded like serious misconceptions that I encounter still in game. Join Goons for pvp experience, just pay whatever fee they ask and you're in. :P

That's over the top :)

Pilgrim is the right ship :). For radar/Mag sites, the way to go.

My advice, pick an out of the way area and move a few ships there. Bomber/Covt Ops for travel to high sec, Pilgrim for Mag/Radar and Drake for Sites. Maybe a cane for PVP and some rifters and thrashers for fun. Get some ammo BPOs as well., melt T1 loot for ore. Stay there for a few weeks as a challenge. Learn the locals and let the locals learn who you are. Talk with them if you want and never show them tears. After losing a few ships, befriend them and maybe provide them some intel. Lose that 5.0 Sec status asap, just makes you look like a target.

Get a scanning alt in covert ops. Really can't underestimate the usefulness of that in scouting gates and finding sites.

If the system is hot, scan with combat probes. Let the other carebears think you are after them. If they run away, finish the site for them. If they don't, consider getting the Cane.

Mag sites in low can actually be worth it, unlike high sec. Both Radar and Mag sites will require a MWD. The cans are too far apart and the longer you stay on a site, the more at risk you are.

Combat sites can almost always be done in a good drake. Just stay away from warp in and Kite the crap out of it. However, note, low sec drops aren't much better than high sec drops imho. If you are in it for ISK, just stay in high. You have higher isk drop chances (b-types), but the sites are less frequent, require killing 20-30 battleships and after an hour of work in that trusty drake, you'll find yourself with 1000 faction ammo and some T1 mods. In the 20-30 sites I have done, the only ones that have dropped so far are the rated sites (5/10, 6/10). The annex's etc....I haven't had much luck. But the Annex's are fun anyways and 20m in bounties is nice. In High Sec, I find 4/10s every few systems on a good day. They take 10 minutes to complete and I have gotten drops worth up 1b. When you don't get a drop, it isn't a big deal, little time spent.

Thanks, mate

I personally think, that information is the most precious good of all. When i started exploring, i often enough simply travelled to a system, because i wanted to give it a try. That sometimes was good, more often it was bad. So i started to filter the information i got, why a system is good, and why a system is bad for exploration. As time passed i learned more and more methodes and techniques to gain more information. At a certain point i projected the information i gathered to the systems i wanted to fly to, and measured how right or how wrong i was. After i got enough experience to be more right than wrong in my projections i turned the coin and now i chose the systems by certain informations even before i fly to there.

Dont get me wrong, you never can recon everything, without ever been there.

What i want:

Systems with only few inhabitants and traffic. The less action, the more sites. The more sites, the more profit. I prefer to stay there, once i have chosen a system, for at least a week or longer. (This might not fit to everyone, but in common, travelling means loosing precious play time. Locust lifestyle - like i live - also forces me to scan and explore while i am travelling to a certain spot. Often enough i found riches and treasures in 0.9 systems even.)

Indicators for such systems
- Far out from trade hubs (20-30 jumps min.)
- Few stations in surrounding system
- No agents, mission hubs, cosmic missions hubs, ded sites, epic agents, incursions around 5 jumps
- No trade lane with high traffic (like from nullsec to lowsec - to hisec - to trade hub)

Once you have identified interesting systems on star map, note them down. Then recon them remotely by the use of your starmap. Open stars tab, check for statistics and collect information about
- Jumps last hour; do that more than once at different times, so that you can get a profile about activities
- Police/Fraction ships killed last 24 hr
- Pilotes active and docke
- Ships killed last hour, and last 24 hr
- Stations and Cyno

Also check the surrounding systems, so you can identify how high the activity is in common there, since you will need as a casual player like at least 3-5 systems to fill your evening with fun in Eve.

Some basic rules
The higher the activity, the more systems you need
The lower the activity, the less you need to travel
The higher the activity, the more often sites will respawn, but the more competition you will have
The less you need to travel, the less danger and risk for you

Activity should be separated into your active time and your inactive time. A system which is heavily active while you are offline, might be empty when you are online, full with respawns

Dock into station, check selling activities, check corp buros and indicators, which are the most active players, and corps there and when they are active. Every piece of information is a puzzle piece, forming a picture of a system, activity and players. The more you know, the more you have to interprete, the better your forecasts about profit become. Personally i go much deeper into that, but i love to do this kind of work and this might not interest everyone

What you can learn about this?
Eve is complex. Everything in Eve can be scaled down to a depth, whereas you might find your favourite play style, making you unique in a particular segment of the most complex interactive online world. And maybe, only maybe you learn enough and convert this kind of experience into your real world and gain real profit of it.

Cheers

The situation is not static, but very dynamic. When i have chosen to go to a certain region because of the filtering and intelligence i have done before, the situation will not always remain in that status. It will change, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes it has changed when i arrive there. If the situation would be stable, there would be no need to change the location.

Example: i was feeling quite well around Moro and Efa in the Khanid regions for some time. As it is now, the war in Querious brings more and more traffic into that region, which also brings a lot of pirate activity into that single lowsec system Efa, which is the only system between hisec and nullsec. Though Red Alliance has not claimed sovereignity in C-7SBM (3 jumps from Efa) which is providing a good place for a safespot POS, the pirate activity has increased so much, that you cant clear a complex without having to warp out more than once or take the fight, which i consider a bad idea. For that i was looking for a change, allthough the 0.5s around Moro and Efa and the nullsec systems a few jumps away from Efa were a good place for exploring.

Same is due for time table shifts. When explorers from the same time zone are in the same calm region, the competition is quite high, which is bad. If explorers from different time zones like Asia, Russia, Europe and USA are in the same region, but online at different timers, the situation is quite opposite. It is not competitive, it is prosperous and full of treasures.

Cheers

While it's certainly not conventional advice...I've seen bombers mentioned a few times. If you've got good skills, you can actually run a lot of exploration stuff with a bomber. Actually pretty fun kiting around loads of larger ships/slow frigs.

Of course, you might not have any knowledge of transversal, in which case...

Haha, in fact i did that more than once. It is just not very proficient, since you even need 2 volleys for a frig in about 60% of the situations. But for hisec Rads and Mags a bomber is good for the fight. But not for hacking AND analyzing ;). Nasty is then, when you warp out after having killed the last ship, it might happen, that the site has despawned when u come back, and no loot.

Cheers

You will make good money in low sec if you are lucky, especially in the guristas area.

However, you will most definitely get carpal tunnel from spamming D-scan if you PVe actively in low sec(not afk cloaking) for an extended amount of time.