EVE General Discussion

Please improve data site loot/the hacking profession, or dispense with it altogther. In its current state null hacking is a complete waste of time.

When I first subscribed a few months ago hacking was my chosen profession. It isn't what I thought it would be.

I've just run a site - total value 1.5mill!!!!!!! 1.5mill when you risk pirates, plus the time it takes to find/run the sites.

then there's the weight of the loot - a covops doesn't have a big enough cargo to carry the stuff data cans drop. What are you supposed to do? Hack and fill cargo and then transport your 2million isk worth of goods through gate camps and bubbles to jita to sell? A joke.

Surely data sites should be worth 50mill +, then it would make them worthwhile.

Well to her/his defense, there is a point in her argument.
Once the loot-spew mechanic was removed the value per shard decreased a lot.
With the loot spew you would find usually at least an encryptor worth 500k to 1mil minimum in the majority of shards, Now without the loot-spew, per a 3-shard site one usually contains Carbon and the others usually a datacore and the other encryptor (results may vary ofcourse but usually it's this).

Before Kronos the average pay-out on a site was, for me ~4.5 mils.
Now I'm happy if I get 2 mils per site - this in the rare case I actually FIND a site.

Personally I blame it on the huge influx of "explorers" brought on by Kronos.
Once the Contested sites hype fever dies, I think the number of scannable sites should go up (as there are less explorers) and as such profits should go up also.

There may be a problem with the site spawning timers also, as bugs were reported. We'll have to wait and see.
Sincerelt ATM there's no incentive to risking your ship in Null (as it's pretty much void of sites) and High and Low is simply overcrowded by rookie frigates with scanners.
But for the moment all the explorers seem to claim the same thing - explo rewards took a huge nerf to the knee.

But but but my (rare, elusive and probably hipotethical) shineys! :(...

Cool

More for the rest of them

And /thread.


OP, please take a moment to realize that the value of any in-game item - including data site loot - is determined by this very cool feature called 'The Market'.

If the average data site loot market value is indeed as crappy as you say, it means that either there are far too many people that are running the sites or that very few people give a damn about the stuff you find.

Remember, it's other players that give you ISK for your exploration efforts, not CCP (NPCs).

Why should players pay you more if they don't need the stuff you find?

What? What on earth do you use rigs for? Are your skills at 1 or something?

Ah, yes, the completely worthless plexes like radiance and hierarchy. It would be nice if CCP actually added a good loot table to the overseer rats there so they drop deadspace drone modules on a fairly regular base. And not after some escalation which leads to nothing all to often. Or just remove them all together from non drone space.

I also agree that exploration has been made too easy. I used to do a lot of that in the early days, but since they dumbed it down everybody and their horse is doing it, and its hard to find decent sites. It was better when you actually had to think about it. I also think they should reintroduce rats into data and relic sites again. I also think they shoudl remove the autoscan feature, and return it to how it was, so you had to actively scan for anomalies with your ship scanner, and need to throw out your scanprobes to actually find out if ther is a sig in system at all.

Good points, mostly agree. It was never the greatest way to make tons of ISK, but it was a good way to get by in the game. Some evenings I'd make 20mil, other evenings 200mil, sometimes even more when really lucky. But regardless of that, it was still fun, and so the whole luck thing was fine.

I've thought about it over some time, what they should do, and I think that it should be left as it is for the most part. But to do what they should have done in the first place which is have both the old system and the new system in place, running differently, different modules and such so it would work. Just reintroduce the old system as a new type of hacking site. Rats, can popping, all the stuff that made hacking sites fun. Then people that want to keep running the newbified mini-game sites with the rigs and the modules, well they still have that. Maybe even the reintroduced sites not spawning in highsec, but everywhere else.

I just don't think it should have been a rewrite of the old system which worked fine, but should have been a new thing for exploration while leaving the old. Adding something rather than overwriting it. The 'More Pssshhh' comes to mind, ya know? To me it seems like exploration had been hit with that mindset of overwrite to try to get some weird perfection goal rather than adding just more things to do with it which imo is much a better way to go.

When Odyssee hit the prices of typical data loot dropped significantly, because they saturated the market. So you are still seeing the market effect of a huge amount of data loot being injected into the economy, making the stuff very cheap. Check back in a while, as more and more items are consumed their price might actually rise due to lesser availability.

Have someone gank them and do the sites yourself?
In highsec I mean, if there's too much competition around.