Test Server Feedback

Done some more exploration this time, this time mostly low sec. I've upgraded my skills so I can use T2 hackers and thus have a STR of 30 and COH of 125, but the low sec sites turned out to be quite hard, mainly due to the prevalence of Virus Suppressors. I once had three of them in site in a 0.3 system, and tons of 70 firewalls. I actually managed to hack a can where I got two Suppressors due to having luck in finding the core, but the loot that was spawned was crap worth around a million ISK. However this might be due to this behaviour:

I also noticed that I suddenly had to double-click the spewed cans - was that always the case? If that is intended I'm going to stop exploring. Hitting these cans once is hard enough, clicking them twice failed far too often.

There also was a site where I couldn't approach the cans at all due to a huge collision box around them from an Amarr station. Bug reported.

1. How do you like the look and feel of the new sites? We put in new containers and moved things around.

Seems easier to fly around, I haven't encountered bumping and 'getting stuck' issues. With 3 ships we manage to pick up all the cans the drop.



2. How do you like the hacking challenge? What were the results? (what was your strength and coherency, did you win the challenges etc)

In null-sec, they are too ridiculous/absurdly difficult. With the archaeology and hacking skill at 4 I can never win any game in where I find a suppressor.
The suppressors are overpowered and guaranteed to make you lose since the damage drop means you need to hammer it for very l;little damage and most of your hp;;; even worse some null cans have more than one suppressor.
The null-sec sites are completely luck based because of this,,, too many firewalls/viruses/suppressors(insta-lose). On average w manage to get win 2 of the cans out of 6 on grid per site.

3. How do you like the new looting mechanic?

Acceptable. The reduction in number of cans dropped makes it so you currently will need 3 ships to pick up everything. 3 ships seems like a reasonable amount; teamwork.

Suggestion:

Perhaps add hacking mods and dedicated hacking ships for the null sites. Your hp and attack for null sites is way to low for the amount of stuff on the screen.

I propose that we always know where the core is located. This mini-game is just random clicks and hope that you don't click the wrong way into suppressors. If we know from the start where the core is then we can work to get to it while strategically avoiding the bad clicks.

We should find some way of negating the random clicking.

Agreed there, just to reiterate something I posted a few pages back our intention is to keep working on improving hacking both as an experience in it's own right and where you can do it in EVE. One of the main problems is that the limited amount of Utilities and your inability to equip any up front means you are eternally at the mercy of the contents of the system you are hacking. Our original plan was to let you equip Utilities prior to a hacking attempt and have them retrievable and tradable but that got pushed back to a later iteration in favor of having a stable minimum implementation we can build on. This is the first thing we'll be implementing once Odyssey is out on TQ.

Second to the above is increasing the scope of Utilities that are available to include those that give hackers the ability to glean some information but not perfect information about what the makeup of the system is. Plus adding in some more interesting Defense Subsystems so that we can do things like altering the contents of systems depending on their theme so you will have some idea in advance what kind of Defense you might come up against.

Third would be providing larger areas for more complex systems and more variety, not necessarily for hacking in sites but to better support hacking elsewhere. The game system itself is completely independent of the object you are hacking so could literally be applied to anything in EVE if a team as interested in implementing it there.

P.S. Whoever coined the term Treasure Hunting to describe the Exploration content is a genius because that is an exact description of what the content actually is.

Do I foresee an official name change for this type of content?

I wonder if I am delusional with my believe that the difficulty of null sec puzzles have been dramatically increased in the last build. Is this the case or is this just due to randomness?

Unless it has been changed recently the hacking game seems way way way to easy

I went through it time and time again just with clicking everything i saw, generally in 5-10 seconds.

In high-sec? The hacking game is more difficult in low- and nullsec. And yes, they changed it lately.

I'm finding it a bit too easy atm across all tiers! The one I had the most difficulty with was tier 3 actually.

If you make it too hard, Hacking/Archaeology 5 will be a requirement in order to even bother.

Can we please have some sort of CCP acknowledgement of the overwhelmingly negative feedback the loot spew mechanic is getting? This is something a lot of people clearly feel strongly and negatively impacts their enjoyment of the profession.

We've been urging you to consider an alternative option for almost the entirety of this thread.