EVE Information Portal

Edit: Guess you meant Havens and Sanctums etc...

Well, even if you run the same sites over and over in the hope of a rated plex spawning, there's still the issue of the terrible/no loot at the end. So why bother?

Hacking is way to booring. Also CCP, you have the incarna technology, so WAKE UP!!!

Make the site a maze, where you enter a site in person, and hack doors, computers and what not to get to the loot ...
Then add some boobytraps (yes i like boobies too :-) and explode the whole thing with you inside if you are to dumb to get out in time....
That would be sooooo much more fun...

Now the only fun we have with these sites, is waiting for a poor solo hacker to enter, and then warp in after he got a few cans open.....

This new exploration has retracted from my alliances gameplay which is a small group of players in NPC 0.0 space.

Before, the sites required some staying power meaning if you wanted to get the loot you had to protect yourself from being attacked from rats and other players, you had to take an active role in your safety and ability to make isk in the space.

This for us, this meant that we could enforce actively the space we occupied ("exerted control") over by our presence and constant threat of catching and killing anyone that tried to do these sites in our area, it also meant more conflicts as the ships needed to do the sites were not the single most evasive ship in the game...

Now there are NO rats present in these exploration sites, they are all the same, there seems to be no difference between the data and relic site mechanics which means all you need to do them is a Covert Ops and five modules, Cloak, MWD, Relic and Data analyzer and a Cargo Scanner.

Generally, sites only have 1-2 cans that are worth anyone's time meaning they are completed in a short amount of time.

This means more traveling Covert Ops ships, yes. But they are very hard to catch consistently on gates using cloaked Interdictors and interceptors.


In my opinion this feature is a failure because:

1. There are too many sites, they are everywhere, so finding one isn't a problem.

2. They are TOO EASY, once you get the hang of it you can quickly complete most hacs in under a minute AND
they can be done by one person in a fragile frigate.

3. The best ships for doing the sites are also one of the most evasive and hard to catch ships in the game.

- To catch them you either have to sit cloaked in a stealth bomber or interdictor in a site waiting for them.

The only ship that has a chance to catch them unawares are stealth bombers that warp in cloaked and get a lock before they cloak. (Because of no locking delay after decloak.) That is if they don't cloak as soon as you enter the system, or have already finished it by the time you land.

OR

- You sit on a gate cloaked in an Interdictor, and decloak them in a bubble to kill them. Not the easiest of ships to catch in a camp, they are right up there with covert ops nullified ships.

Something that would improve gameplay would be to make it impossible or hard to cloak when close by the cans (but please don't use those stupid resource hogging clouds, people will definitely complain!).

Make them more scarce, I know you think the number of sites completed is a "good metric" for a "successful feature" but that is not the whole story, you need to consider what other implications it will have, you have basically turned exploration into risk free mining...

Another thing I want to mention is the risk vs reward factor, because these sites spawn consistently throughout space the supply/demand will eventually even out and be nothing more than glorified mining while harder exploration combat site require much more risk and effort.

For example a DED 10/10 plex practically requires 2-4 ships in a specialized and coordinated fleet, all of whom will cost significantly more than a Covert Ops, that have to be exposed to more risk for longer periods of time.

Because they aren't all frigates that can warp cloaked and they stay locked and perhaps warp disrupted by NPCs throughout the process of running the combat complex and at the end the reward may not even have been worth the effort, with only 133 million isk being guaranteed to drop (23rd Tier Overseers Personal Effects) and anything else being dropped is left to randomness. Even if you complete that in an hour, with three people you will barely break 50 million isk for each. Then it bec

Now, there are other combat sites that seem to give better rewards for lesser risk, but this was just to make a point of how disparate the risks vs rewards are considering exploration vs combat sites.

The low entry barrier is really hurting. I expect the equilibrium somewhere where nullsec sites pay barely better then l4 missions. At which point they will be pretty useless for a lot of people. At least l4's give a standing grind and don't require long travel times. But the low skilled players and casuals will still haul enough salvage and decryptors to the markets to prevent prices from bouncing back significantly enough.

It should be harder to probe down the sites and not all of them should pop up on the system scanner (for example Crystal Quarries). The hacking should require more skill training specialization and more expensive mods/rigs to do efficiently. Also some form of danger in the sites that requires a bit of compromise in the fittings. I'm ok with no rats. It's a good idea that not everything is basically missions. But something like explosions as result of failed hacks would be good.

Only with such tweaks i can see the sites to remain profitable in the long run. Better, wider loot tables will only have short term effect because as the sites are now every single item will be run into the ground.

The new exploration is of all intense and purpose a fail regardless of statistics.

* Scanning.
- Hidden sites are easly visible to everyone. Where is 'exploration' in that. This in your face mechanics only rewards lazy people.
- now i can find sites with 8 button clicks , no skill required. ( lunch probes , pinpoint formation , drag around celestial , scan ,resize , drag , scan and 100% hit , warp ) Really at this point you can just implement automatic scanning.. Before scanning yes it required skill i could scan with 4 probes making it much faster then someone that had to use 8 and drag them all round , and many more nuances and details that made skill and knowledge rewarding

* exploration sites
- You removed rats , making them all risk free and transforming exploration into "Cov Ops" on line
- They are too abundant spawning too aggressively , you killed any and all competition chasing Cov Ops ships is no fun.

* loot spew.
- You failed in forcing people to brign a friend, when you can just cherry pick the best loot, any more people and your income drops.

* loot value.
You killed a lot of markets, and i predict no matter what you put in there there will eventuality tank as well to the point of lvl4 missions, unless very rare drop but that means most of the players wont see them.

* minigame
- The only actual improvement over waiting for can to be hacked by luck in RNG.

Summary : You dumbed down exploration beyond hope. You killed a lot of PVP and skill aspects of it.

That's good to hear that statistics are not the sole driver behind game design tweaks. But I am not convinced that CCP customer surveys are doing the job, either.

Do you have examples where customer survey results have translated into some recent awesome additions or changes to the EVE Online entertainment service?

Not sure if this is in part adressed at my own comment. Personally i don't want the mechanics to go back to the old system. But i would like signal strenghts to be weaker so people either have to max out their probing skills or invest in some expensive gear (perhaps even both combined) in order to be able to probe down the high end sites.

You are correct that such suggestions follow an agenda that aims to drive people away. Less people doing it means the sites stay worth running for me as i have the skills and am willing to specialize further if necessary. It's pretty selfish but we gotta stay real. Explorers compete over loot that only has a very limited demand. More people doing it = bad for business. That's the harsh reality of Eve's capitalism and also down to the fact that unlike other pve content the exploration isn't an isk fountain. It only creates loot but no isk payouts. Something that CCP seems to have totally forgotten when they opened up the sites to everyone and their dog.



There are enough sites in nullsec. Switch to a different region, probe more systems. I do about 50 every night. Dry spells like yours happen to me aswell but on average i would estimate i find something in about 1 out of 4 systems. Sometimes ther's 5 or 6 sites in a single system.

Yes exactly, that is the problem. Thanks for summing that up so clearly.

Been a few weeks since the latest iteration hit the streets, now we get the statistics, interesting that you roll that out so soon really, looking at the figures it all smacks not only of being unfinished but also of trying to justify something you might possibly have realized has gone badly wrong.

Hubs, we see mention of those, and yes they were seriously nerfed if that's what you used to mine Isk from and I guess you are going to feel the impact of that change to a varying degree dependent on your method of tackling them.

For my part pre-update a three man multi-box fleet consisting of Vindicator, Ishtar and scimitar could complete the Hubs in around eight minutes plus two to fleet warp to the next site, leave you to tot up the Isk earned at around 6 sites per hour, post-update I find that the constant changing of drones to cope with the tackling frigates has increased this to around eleven to twelve minutes per site plus fleet warps, a significant drop in Isk reward value, result, I don't do the sites any more, even tried substituting Sanctums or Havens, quickly found out that as far as Isk mining was concerned it was a bust, not worth the investment in time and risk, my guess is that a lot of players have come to the same conclusion.

As for the Scanning, were you get the term exploration from I have no idea, again proved to be tedious and not cost effective compared to a couple of years back, your 'Statistics' like all such can obviously make a case for it being something it is definitely not if you choose to do so, but the bottom line for most of us that used to do scanning as a group activity and make serious Isk from it is that it is not worth the time involved, the skill/ interest factors involved in being successful has been removed dumbed down as it currently is and the frustration of finding that a lot of skill training once required to allow players to do this activity has been effectively wasted.

The constant system scanning even though the results are not visually persistent is a distraction well done without and missing the most obvious function, that of being able to turn it off, and if scanning the result screen is intrusive, badly laid out and of all things GREEN!, not saying scanning could not have done with work, but to dumb it down to the point of being a waste of time, now that was special even for CCP.

How notion of cov ops oline is a personal agenda ??

What of someone personal agenda is interesting game and not maximizing isk/hour ???