EVE General Discussion

So I'm watching a 10 year eve veteran live streaming data and relic site exploration in lowsec in a covops frigate this evening. This veteran has 168 million skill points and some of you may know of him as I speak of daopa the developer of the eve database fan website http://www.ellatha.com/eve

after several hours and finishing at least 10 data and relic sites the loot tally was an embarrassing and abysmal 4 million isk worth of useless garbage loot that any 1 month old rookie could have acquired from level 2 mission salvage.

on several occasions he needed maxed out scanning skills with Tech 2 relic and analyzer modules and a fully bonused covops frigate to succeed in retrieving 500,000 isk worth of tech 1 salvage

He even went to New Eden system scanning every relic and data site along the way which considering the importance of new eden in eve's lore makes this new exploration can spewing minigame a truly embarrassing failure for expansion feature and a 160 people were watching it all live.

If i worked at ccp and decided to implement this my pride as a developer would be less than fantastic

It's confirmed. lowsec exploration profitability is worse than farming highsec level 2 missions.

http://www.twitch.tv/daopa/b/412995112

Skipped to near the end. Saw some problems:

1) He doesn't scan very well. I can scan a site down in less than 1 minute actual time - sometimes significantly less - with my poor scanning skills. He loses the sites and has to start rescanning them.

2) He just seems to click semi-randomly on the hacking game which doesn't really maximise your chances of succeeding. Sure there is some luck to it but you can maximise your chances better than he is.

3) He grabs random items from the loot. You should grab certain containers first (I like part containers). Then as they flash you should try picking them up first so that you maximise the number that don't explode.

4) He keeps double clicking the containers. You need to be calm and single click them when they go 'green'. Wait for it to be tractored in and the click the next. If you double click you move towards them and that just seems to slow things down unless you are doing it purposefully to make sure you are not out of range of some containers.

He does make one fair point - he says there is freezing/lag when the containers first come out. I get that too if I'm zoomed too far in.

I ran 3 sites today while bored, in high sec. Mainly to try the mini-game...

From the 3 sites, I made 53m isk... I then laughed at the click-fest and went back to printing isk with my BPOs....

CCP has learned to launch new things pre-nerfed. Much better customer response if they boost things a month after introduction vs. nerfing a month after intro. If it's really that bad, they'll buff it, fear not.

Personally i love the new scanning system and the ship balance changes CCP Rise and CCP Fozzie did a fantastic job with that effort.

The changes to hacking and archeology mechanics are pretty bad. If ccp had kept the exploration sites the way they were in Retribution and just fixed the scanner the forums wouldn't be overfilled with disgruntled exploration flame posts.

I trained to scan and do exploration years ago but found absolutely no enjoyment gained from having to deal with the scanning system that was introduced for Wormhole exploration.

I could have done more exploration in the past with the old scanner but my enjoyment levels with that after an hour of poking around to find things even on the test server with no chance whatsoever of being engaged in pvp was a resounding "meh"

Odyssey fixed that outright then broke it again with the archeology and hacking changes.

The hacking and archeology changes really don't affect me at all since i never did exploration before Odyssey. This could have been an entirely different change to perk my interest, get me and many other players engaged with exploration but it seems that was an overly ambitious dream for someone wanting to enjoy new changes to old eve features.

alas exploration is still not good enough to have me invest my time farming scraps inn data and relic sites i can easily get anywhere else.

Combat, gas and ore sites being easy to find however I absolutely love to tears.

I -never- got a combat site escalation until I used the new scanner on sisi. Unfortunately escalations were disabled at the time but this looked to be a very fun, potentially challenging way to enjoy my game time in eve as someone that does absolutely nothing with pvp.

Your mileage may vary. Pulled 10m out of a lowsec site yesterday, and over 16m out of a hisec one. RNG is random I guess. As someone who has hacked a lot of sites pre-Oddysee I don't feel nerfed in terms of loot, moreso in terms of time and safety. On the other hand finding sites is easier. So you spend less time sitting around cloaked and more time on the actual signature. To me that's a good change, I met more people in Radar sites over the last 2 days then in the previous 2 years combined.

I hated the scatter mechanism too... untill I started stealing other people's containers... By the way that gives you a simple Suspect timer, so it can be used to open pvp in hisec. Now that you are better off in a small fleet collecting loot, I'm starting to see more options to have fun with the sites as a whole. Pose as a lone hacker, steal some cans... get shot and come back quickly in a combat ship, kill the fleet that was with the hacker and take their stuff. Like ye olde canflipping shenanigans.

Since I am not an ISK/hr junkie, I think I will eventually grow to love the new exploration system.

I approve of this response. While things have been simplified the system changed in another way, so now clueless people doing the sites get almost nothing out of them. So while the mechanical parts have been simplified, there is still minor knowledge barriers, that differentiate between competent explorers and bumbling amateurs. I'm starting to like the new system the more I play with it.