EVE New Citizens Q&A

It's not going to hurt to train your astro skills still, but saying that, the details should be in a dev blog any day now confirming exactly how and what will change.
So i'm sure you have plenty to keep your queue full for a week or so more.

Edit: From todays Dev Blog 14th May:

"EVE's Team Superfriends are working on broader changes to Exploration and are supporting us in updating the modules that you will be using. All existing modules and skills have been mapped over to this new system so those who have already trained them will have similar advantages that they currently enjoy."

Full blog: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/hacking-in-odyssey/

1. The exploration skills (for probing out sites) are also useful for probing out people for PVP.
2. They're changing it, but it sounded to me like they were making it more prevalent and useful, not less.
3. What are you going to do between now and, when was it, end of summer? More missions?

Oddysey is focused on exploration, hacking, archaeology, namely tasks that involve searching for valuables and recovering them successfully.

With that in mind, I'd start training up the astrometrics skills now, as well as get a ship ready for when it hits. I think it's very early June, IIRC? Certainly worth the time and effort, from what I've seen at Fanfest.

It's mostly accessibility and UI changes. The core ideas and mechanics of exploration will still be familiar.

The skills will still be relevant. Don't bother training for deep space probes (they look like they're going) but everything else will still be very useful.

Positioning your probes and scanning the target down via triangulation mechanics will stay the same but you now have the option of preset probe formations. It's worth getting used to the current system to get a grasp of triangulation theory and practice on probing things down quickly.

The on-board scanner is getting a complete overhaul and becoming the discovery scanner but this will only tell you direction of signatures and only give warp-ins on anomalies. You'll still need to probe so the skills (player and character) will still be useful.

tl;dr
Scanning will need a little less player skill, a little less character skill but you'll still need to practice/train both to get the most out of it.

Scanning is a lot of fun, but it's quite hard to understand when you start. I recommend you train a few skills and give it a go. Make sure you watch the official tutorial on it before you start... otherwise you might scratch your head a lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heYfTA00Idg

Scanning isn't hard.

It's just

1. Boring
2. A chore switching between multiple ships to scan, fight, then come back and analyze/hack/whatever unless you're doing it in highsec or something then you can do it all with 1 ship and a couple drones. In low and null where the bigger rewards are, you need at least 2 ships which means you need good standings with a null entity or have to always run past pirate camps.

Long story short, it just sucks and hopefully will get refined into a proper profession over time.

With reference to the above (which I do agree on), moving from PVE to exploration isn't a huge change.
You'll do the above many times and you'll end up just fighting in an deadpspace location anyhow regardless of the method of getting there.

The main difference is the isk involved. In null (not so much low or highsec), exploration can be worth the time. Using a combat and a probing ship, you can make isk quickly. Sometimes you'll come away with little (i.e. 20mill's worth of loot and salvage) but other times you can make 1.5bill + in a single visit (i.e. mach BPC, officer modules and then the usual loot+salvage).

They're obviously changing the mechics on June 4th but imo, probably for the better, so it'd be worth the skills.

As someone mentioned earlier, scanning skills are really useful for PvP and also when you're playing in wormholes.

I think the Dev Blog boils down to:

We are replacing the rats with a puzzle game. There will be supporting skills (more time sinks) to make the puzzle game more interesting.

I may do an abrupt change of direction and ramp my hacking and arch skills to IV or V.

The change that concerns me the most is the can scatter. The explorer is locked into mini game, leaving them completely exposed. (See Blog, if you leave the hack/analyze the can blows up), and once the can opens we have to play a clicking game to gather the prizes. From the CCP presentation it seems that the prizes (cans or containers) will despawn rather quickly so I might need a friend. This means that I could lose out on potentially very valuable loot, because my clicking skills are bad, or my computer lags. Plus the potential for ninja looting is now present. I don't know how I feel about that aspect yet.

I'm not all gloom and doom, but I'll wait to pass judgment