Test Server Feedback

Christ. This is depressing.
The hacking game is ok, but theres no sense of direction.

Sites where far and few in between - found one buggy site:
Sansha regional data fortress - cant reach the spew containers - bumping off an amarr station wreck

I made 32 jumps, found 5 sites made 600,000 isk.

Other things I noticed where:

the radial menu where you enable the scanner overlay never closes if you pick an option, so you have to press escape.

Scan results lose focus and thus wont show up after a completed scan cycle. You have to click on them to see them in the system map again.

The lootpuke mechanic is horrible: combine low fps clouds (i know that will be fixed) + eve's horrible bumping mechanic on structures + maniacally clicking little icons in space and you get by far the worst mechanic ccp ever invented for exploration.

Its worse than making hundreds of bookmarks to get a no overlap probe placement and have to carry 24 different kinds of probes with you to wait on timers exceeding 2 minutes to get **** loot.

CCP,

You want to make exploration a profession? Well, it kind of was already was no? However, your system of taking all the rats out, except WH's (and thank you for at least that ) has the effect of negating a big part of any profession. That part is progression. Increasingly more difficult rats in sites meant you needed better ships to do them in. More SP. Now you can run it all in a covops. Too little risk for too much reward. Nothing to really look forward to over time. It will get stale quickly. Great for new players perhaps...at the expense of your tried and true stalwart subscribers. And over time, those new guys will get bored with it.

I guess the mini-game is here to say, though I would have been much happier with you guys just building a bunch of new cool sites to go out and find, or maybe some kind of uber dangerous WH space that has no moons, no planets, nothing but deadly sites to run. I don't know, like stuff to..... explore. It would be nice if you guys filled out some of the loot table and created a whole new bunch of faction drone stuff as many of the non-rated drone sites are currently not worth doing.

I mean we have all these new cool drone damage amplifiers --- why not some other meta versions? Same for the other mods.
How about meta versions for the ASB's, MJD, etc etc etc. There is a lot of content you could just add to exploration and it would have been very fun. What sucks is repetition and too few sites. I would prefer more sites, even at less individual reward, but with much more variety. There are a lot of super hard non-rated sites that have crap loot though they are harder than some 10/10's though respectively lower rated. Some balancing of combat sites as some are WAY harder --- like neuting blood raiders are in some sites much harder than say many Angel sites (and certainly no corresponding increase in reward.) How about more escalation that you know...actually escalate. In null sec these come with some HUGE risk to run (well, at least in NPC null, I guess not in care bear null.) Would love to do more of those...but often not worth the squeeze.

All it needed was more content, new mods, make drones worth doing, and some new space...some cool uber dangerous.. unlivable WH space to explore.

Not a mini-game and a horrible, terrible, annoyingly bad twitch grab the can game.

Just tried a hacking site. I don't want to judge after one short test, but I did not have the impression that personal skill is required or useful. I just click nodes and then find the system core or I find lots of firewalls. I always left firewalls alone until all other routes were exhausted, to find repair mods and other utility nodes first. That's about the only tactical possibility I can see so far, however. Rest appears to be blind luck.

Still, it's not too bad and an improvement over the non-game hacking was before.

The loot from that hisec site was laughable, but then I never got anything useful from a hisec site on TQ either, years back when I still did them.

The loot release mechanic is not too bad. Yes, for the record, I don't hate the loot release mechanic :p If my impressions are correct, it is not as twitchy as it first appears, because you can only grab one can every few seconds anyway (you click "take" when it's in range, then your ship uses a kind of shiny tractor beam and pulls the can in). Fast-clicking several cans in rapid succession did not seem to speed up the process, though I could be wrong about that.

All in all, collecting the loot requires a lot less fast reactions than doing pvp, so if you hate it so much, you're probably a goddamn carebear

Maybe a bug: Radial menu and also selected item menu for the loot cans does not have the "take" option, only right-clicking them works. That's weird and inconsistent, needs to change.

I had four hacking modules fitted, but it seemed that one module would have worked just as well, activating more than one on the can did not increase my virus strength. Is that confirmed?

What still bothers me is that those sites are best done in a super-cheap frigate, so no incentive to hunt down explorers in low/null/wh. Why don't you make the analyzer modules a lot more expensive, so they at least provide some value. T1 analyzer should be around 10m and T2 30-40m each (if you really need only one on a ship).

Lol. What was the name of the site, maybe "The Pentagon"?

Q: Why does the Antivirus have 360 coherency?
A: Cause when you see it you turn 360° and walk away.

Sorry, could not resist.

Thers definitely some tactical aspect to how it's now in nullsec sites. For instance if you open an antivirus node you have to find tools first and destroy it before you can think of finding and hacking the core. Gets worse if you happen to open two antivirus nodes. The "bad nodes" also seem to be more prevalent on nodes that are surrounded by other nodes so look careful and find a way around the outskirts. at least that's my tactic for now.



I think you just randomly clicked cans. They have names that indicate possible good loot or crap. So while one can gets tractored you're busy hovering over the others to find the next good one just in time. It gets unnerving when the camera moves around, you're stuck in geometry or your ship overshoots the cans. Forget about checking dscan while doing this.



Easy targets with possibly juicy loot in the cargo. The cap rig and faction pos bpc's should go for quite a sum. At least until the market has adjusted to the supply.

The problem is that the riots will be of CCP's making and very easily avoidable. That is the true shame of it.

Funny, I was in the same situation today and expected the site to be gone when I came back with another ship, but it was still there. The previously spawned rat was gone, but not the containers.

Maybe you had already done all the containers in the site except one? Could be the site despawns when every container has been tinkered with and then everyone leaves the grid. Which wouldn't be so terrible.

sadly it was the second fail attempt. first rat was a frig and the second one (that i was having issues killing) was a cruiser. I would get it to about half shields and it would just rep back up.


Also wanted to add that it seems the value's that the "heal" utilities seems to be a lot lower than it was before the patch yesterday. They are almost no help at all now where as before they would actually allow you to keep going past the 2 firewalls you can fight now.

Even solo, you can still form a fleet with yourself. This way, you can tag the containers you already dealt with. Tags will persist if you leave the grid, but not if you dock or change system unfortunately. But it saved me a lot of wasted time in the past nonetheless.