EVE New Citizens Q&A

So. I went along and finished most of the tutorial quests with the Agents that teach you how to do EvE. Combat is alright but missions get boring and I'm still to incompetent for PvP and Low-sec. Trading and Mining I find dull and I'm still having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around the manufaturing process.

However, sofar I really like exploration. The gamble of searching in dead space for I-dont-know-what. But in my playing of the game and dealings with other people, I have come up with a few questions that I cant find the answers to (or get to many mixed opinions).

1) What is the practicality and potential profits for Exploration in,
a) PvE
b) PvP
c) Industry / Corperations

2) What is a good ship to use? Sofar I'm using a Catalyst but it seams that the Istar (drone build) looks like the ideal all around exploration vessel.

3) I herd a rumer that if you have to many probes overlapping the same site, you actually get a penalty to the scan accuracy.
Is this true?
If so, at what point do you start to receive this penalty?

Sofar this is a great game tho. Looking forward to swimming in the deep end

1.) Exploration doesn't make profits into another form of playing. Exploration is just a PvE thing you can do to make ISK from. How you use that ISK is up to you.

Some people use exploration to fund their PvP, the only downside from it is that explorations is like gambling. It's a game of luck and chance, so not a really stable form of income. It can pay off very well on 1 day while the next you find near to nothing.

So I don't understand what you meand with a, b and c options.

2.) Catalyst is okay. For high-sec you could do with a probing frigate (there are a T1 and T2 frigate in each race with bonuses to probing) and then a 2nd ship that does run the site. You scan down a site with your prober, bookmark it, reship in your running ship and clear the site.

Eventually you might want to consider a T3 (Strategic Cruiser) as it's a more all-in-one ship for exploration, though they don't come really cheap and are a bit of skill intensive for new players.

3.) No idea on this one, never heard of it.

1a) Already covered by the other posts, you get things to shoot at, and if fate is on your site, you can get some decent cash even in highsec. If you feel you got a hang on it and feel like you could need some adrenaline, you can venture forth into lowsec, and ultimately nullsec, doing sites there.
Potential Use: Growing ammount of isk to spend on shiny ships and expensive items (Best used to blow things up)

1b) You can always use your exploration skills to probe out other players, either by finding the players themselves or by finding the sites they run. Also works the other way 'round, so keep your eyes open in low/null.
Potential Use: Understanding of game mechanics (How do those nasty pirates always find me? / Where do I find that wartarget hiding? / Where can i find some unaware loot pinatas)

1c) Radar and Magnetometric Sites provide items needed by industrialists, corporations who have a manufacturing/research branch could also be interested in those items. Ladar and Grav Sites can be used by miners, location can be sold or given to corp members.
Potential Use: Improves stuff you build, makes you potentially interesting for industrial corps. Also nice starter income

2) This really depends on the sites you want to run, and how much isk you want to invest. the racial scanning frigs are quite good, and with some rigs on it they can boost your scanning strength. Some sites are harder to scan down, and in a combat ship with only a basic probe launcher they can be quite tricky to get to 100%. You can boost that with a sisters core probe laucnher and sister drones, after you got some starter isk of radar sites for example. Get to know your sites, and if needed, change ship. While a probing frig might be able run most radar sites (since they usually got not many if any at all npcs), there are some ded4 combat sites where that frig won't last long, so shipping up might be required. With some probing and combat skills trained to 3/4 a cruiser/bc should be able to run most/all highsec sites there are as a one in all ship. Ishtar works, if you trained for another race, there are viable options as well.

3) I usually try to get the spheres of the probes quite close together, but you shouldn't overlap all of them into one single sphere, that doesn't work so well.

Be aware that highsec scanning has lots of competition, and I mean LOTS. Sites are done quickly, and many won't stop if a site is started, and try to get the nice things first. Competition gets less in low, but risk increases (as it should), it is still worth trying in some cheap fits, as a couple of nice sites might outweight potential losses.

Some sites offer special blueprints (faction items/ships/drug production/..) and components for invention (which is required for some t2 production). As you might have guessed, if you want the chance for the jackpot, you need to go to nullsec.



As others mentioned, that's not true and in fact (afaik) it is exactly the other way around: You want as many probes overlapping the signature as you can.