Missions & Complexes

(a) I've also scanned 70 systems in a row, and had some 4+ hours of game time without a ded4, and that was followed up by finding one that the person ahead of me had already gated (too far behind).

(b) current buy orders for gurista ded 6 loot
1,702,201,000.00 (invuln)
1,259,000,000.00 (booster)

There's a very powerful and valuable commodity available for highseccers that drops in one site in one area of eve.

"by all means dont target the module, just get rid of the site from highsec!"
"make people actually do more tedious scanning"

Meh. Screw this thread.

Finding multiple 4/10s in a single night is normal. Finding multiple 6/10s in a week is lucky. The bounties are a pittance (i'd trade all the bounties away if it meant i could clear the site in 15 minutes). The 'danger pay' is the OPE, which is about 50 million. If you talk to anyone that explores regularly in lowsec or null, and describe the OPE as "cherry on top" they will laugh at you, especially if they've called a buddy so they can clear the site in less than an hour (this becomes a really attractive option when you find that 10/10 at 1am in the morning). Respectfully, I don't think you know what you're talking about, and you're distracted by the big numbers.

More generally, I'm trying to say that comparing the rewards of the 4/10 to the rewards of the 6/10 is a bad comparison, because in highsec its completely viable to search only for the 4/10 and never run out of systems to scan. Furthermore, while competition in highsec may be annoying, it insures that the cycle rate of 4/10s is rather high (repeating your loop/route isn't absolutely futile). In lowsec and null, a variety of factors combine so that you basically have a fixed set of systems within your area of operations that are viable for you to both scan and clear before the risks become untenable. Because the time investment of running a site is significant (both the site itself and to ensure safe travel), its much more often the case that you take some time to scan, find what you find, and pick the best thing to run based on site difficulty, ease of location, and rewards. In hisec you're basically just doing drive-bys on the 4/10s when you find them. This is possible in low/null with two skilled accounts, but this too has its downsides. If I could take a single covert tengu and clear a 6/10 in 20 minutes without refit, then going on an epic lowsec 6/10 hunt would be much more viable. Note, you can do this for lowsec 4/10s, which is exactly why i think taking 4/10s out of hisec wouldn't be so catastrophic to the casual, single-account explorer, who would prefer to spend his non-explo time in hisec. Breaking DSPs would also work, but I think this is a bad solution for a number of reasons.

On a COMPLETELY different subject, Deadspace shield boosters and the faction/deadspace invulns are ridiculously overpowered. This is reflected in the price, but that's not the point. I generally don't go in for the nerf-shield buff-armor arguments, but faction/deadspace armor modules are incrementally better (like 10% per meta lvl in terms of cap efficiency or hp/s) over their t2 counterparts. Faction/deadspace invulns and deadspace shield boosters cannot even compare to t2 shield mods in terms of how good they are. Pimping your armor mods lets you do the same thing better, pimping your shield mods lets you do things not otherwise possible (exacerbated by armor mods competing for lowslots with damage mods). This is not news in any way, these mods have been unchanged for at least 6-7 years. But this has had an undeniable distorting effect on all types of PvE, to a lesser extent PvP, particularly as the playerbase has gotten older and richer. I personally think the game would benefit if the aforementioned modules got a giant nerf/rebalance, but perhaps CCP feels that this is just another facet to differentiate shield and armor tanking, which is a valid design objective. Plus nerfing invulns or buffing EANMs would make shield capitals even less attractive (but who really cares about this, although officer/deadspace chimeras are fun).

Here's a short illustrative example showing the performance differences between the t2 versions and the closest upgrade

invuln t2 - 30% to all resistance
invuln DG/CN - 37.5% to all resistance upgrading t2 to faction is an ADDITIONAL 11% reduced damage for the first module

EANM t2 w/ lvl 5 comp skills - 25% to all resistance
imp navy EANM, same skills - 28.125% upgrading reduces damage taken by 4%

t2 med shield booster - 30hp/sec, 1.5hp/GJ
pithum c-type med booster - 54 hp/s, 2.7hp/GJ upgrading to the lowest deadspace module is an 80% boost by both metrics

t2 med armor repairer - 26.6 hp/s, 2hp/GJ
centum c-type - 33hp/s 2.2 hp/GJ 10% boost in efficiency, 25% boost in speed. Corelum version has less rep/s improvement but the same efficiency.

Anyway, over the years there have been dozens of threads by people that have documented this more extensively than me. Here's one that exclusively looks at small modules: http://eve-search.com/thread/154097-1/page/1

As a relatively new player in the exploration game, i have a few thoughts:

So far, i have explored hi sec and low sec. I use an all-in one vexor. No guns, just drones, armour tank, cloak and exploration gear. I have had some pretty good finds. My best night was a hi sec serpentis watch which escalated into Jet-Set hooligans. I managed to get all 4 escalation triggers and in the first 3 i found over 850M worth of loot (mainly from 2x T2 implants). All of that was found in hi sec - i didn't do the final stage of the escalation as it is beyond my capabilities. Needless to say i was keen to repeat that performance.

I think most of hi-sec exploration is great as it is. It's extremely luck-based, which is not to everyone's taste but I enjoy it. I thnk any increases to loot payout would likely end up being countered in the long term by an influx of new explorers. Currently, those who try it out are going to be put off by any of the following

a) saturation (well-trodden systems are often bare or just have a few wormholes)
b) high number of "trash" sites - mag, grav, drone asteroids..etc
c) tengu speedrunners in ur sitez
d) general difficulty/learning curve of scanning down sites (may not be an issue for many)
e) tricky fitting requirements /or/ annoying ship-changes

These all act as a natural screening process which keeps numbers down. I think we have to think carefully about how changing these things might affect the viability of exploration as a career. Personally, if there are >35000 players logged into eve at the time that I log in, I prefer to do ninja looting in hi sec. Both careers (ninja and explorer) benefit from scanning skills so it's a nice dual-career.

Any other explorers here who do ninja'ing on the side? I was thinking of ninja'ing some incursions but wasn't sure if it was even possible

Yep, read it all, agreed with it all o7

Respectfully you should stop insulting people that you are having a discussion with, and just have the discussion.

If you do 10 GTRCs in the time someone does 40 GSOs - a not unreasonable result for a dedicated hunter, you will have 690mil vs 60mil in OPEs. ie the OPEs in a GTRC wind up being worth a top of the table loot drop in a GSO over not too long a time frame. in fact the only point of concern is the relative drop rate of the faction tables, not the deadspace tables. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader to tell us whether a faction cruiser with a 12th OPE has the same faction drop rates as faction cruiser with a 7th.



this is exactly the discussion that should be had, and I've already pointed out one of the major compensations



sure and in gurista lowsec, you'll do the ded4s and ded5s that spawn in within your safer area.



You'd have a 20bil isk weekend before too long.



I know, I already posted the same point earlier. armor is (in the devs minds) balanced for the game overall because EANMS remain functional even if the target is fully neuted out.

High sec DED 4/10's should respawn in low sec
Low Sec DED 4/10 should respawn at a 50% - 30% chance in high sec.

Maybe it is because I haven't explored caldari space but I really don't feel like 4/10s are a problem. Perhaps I am really unlucky but 66.6% of the time a 4/10 is just a crap drop for me.

If you mean more scanning bonused ships- for the luv of jeebus NO!

I believe I'm on topic with this:

Can you really probe so fast that you can do system after system looking for a DED 4/10 and eliminating the others? Can you put up a filter for these sites like you can with ships?