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They do add Virus Coherence Bonus and also have a Access Difficulty Bonus Modifier (which probably should make those minigames easier)

After 3 day of doing mainly exploration the feelings about this new system are mixed at best.

The best thing of the changes is obviously the new scanning overlay which makes it so much faster. Thanks for that. Yet it's not without a minor drawback -- most people would be just happy to disable it while they fly in fleet.

The hacking mini-game was interesting only during the first few sites. But as soon as you learn all the possibilities - which is soon - it definitely becomes boring. And the worst thing for me that it feels like playing poker - that is you very much dependent on luck - like in this attempt: http://imgur.com/J2vt0n9 No matter what are your skills you won't pass 4 virus suppressors + at least one restoration node (bye-bye 12 Intact Armor Plates ).
Yet I feel that there is a room for improvement. If we could make an informed decisions where to move (more like in chess) it would feel much much better. And when it becomes less luck dependent you can make fewer cans to crack but with more complicated game to hack and more rewarding loot.

And here it comes to "lootsplosion"... As it is it's absolutely crappy click-fest. Of course you can bring an alt (or a friend) and catch almost all that matters but it feels so alien to Eve - even in combat you don't have to be champion of clicking to be successful. While here all you need is being able to hit minuscule rapid crap and do it fast...
For now I solved this problem by bringing an alt along but IMHO it would be better to scrap it altogether, or (if you feel like keeping it) make the time before containers disappear reasonably long - like 1min - so that you can gather all you want, yet it'll leave a window for all those ninja-looters

Scanning I can deal with. It's a matter of patience with potential for great rewards.

Hacking I can deal with. It is the process of acquiring the reward.

Loot spewing? Now that I cannot deal with. It is like being taken away the lollipop you worked so hard for. It is a psychological thing - very undesirable one a that. You have to invest so much time, patience and effort to get to the reward only for it to slip between fingers.

TL;DR: Loot spewing is fail. You can blow frigates up with cruise missiles and even torpedoes, but the entire loot remains intact. You hack into those data/relic containers (SUCCESSFULLY, may I add) an the thing spews the hard-earned reward all over the space?

The time limit on these can is an added insult to the injury.

Take this however you will.

This has been the most enjoyable expansion for me so far. When I first heard about it I felt like it was made just for me. Exploration has been my favorite part of the game, but it always felt limited and incomplete. Odyssy actually realizes much of the potential of exploration.
The hacking minigame makes breaking into containers actually fun and interesting. Removing the monsters from sites allows me to actually explore in low sec and wormholes by myself without removing the sense of danger because I still have to hide from potential gankers(it's good that one can scan while cloaked now). The new ui for probe scanning is much better looking and intuitive to use. I love 99 percent of what you did with Odyssy. Great work.

However, I agree with many other people that the whole "pinata" mechanic just does not feel right. locating sites and unlocking their containers is slow,methodical work that I find enjoyable. Having to frantically fight with the camera while trying to pick up tiny icons with my mouse pointer while watching my hard earned loot vanish is frustrating and kills the whole experience.
Imagine working overtime to complete a project at your job and having your boss say, "OK, I have your weeks worth of pay here in a stack of dollar bills and I'm going to throw them into the wind. Good luck." I think exploration should be more like mining, in that a player locates a desired object(asteroid/ice/whatever), takes his/her ship over to it,collects the desired item from it,then moves on.

My suggestion for this would be to change it so that the containers work in a way similar to how they did before. Previously, containers would be in a "locked" state by default. Using a codebreaker or analyzer would "unlock" them so they could be opened by anyone. You could make it so that once someone successfully completed the hacking minigame the container would "unlock". The containers locked/unlocked status could be conveyed to everybody nearby by having a status light change from red to green in the overview or even on the object itself. That way, the player(s) who unlocked the container would be able to take all that they earned. This solution would also be conductive to pvp. Players looking to gank and steal could stalk explorers and pounce on them when the containers they were working on went green.

On another note, I do like the idea of cooperative exploration. Maybe some containers could be labeled something like "super secure data bank" and have in their description "this device has such a secure data network that it can only be defeated by x hackers working together". To get the container opened more than one player would have to use a data/relic analyzer on it at once. Then each player would have to conquer their own portion of the game board.

Another possibility for the future might be to give hacking some kind of role outside of just exploration. PVP ewar might be one possibility. Imagine if a skilled hacker in a fleet could hack an opposing ship to disable its engines, temporarily take control of it, or produce some other negative effect.

One final thought on exploration sites: Why not sometimes have the large structures found in sites be the actual objects to be hacked instead of only used as decorations? I have always wanted to have meaningful interaction with the the big rocks, destroyed ships, abandoned stations,etc I found in sites. It would be way cooler than always working on the same things. Maybe some day in the future the large objects could even be involved with simple puzzles presented in their description

A solo player with good dexterity, yes. Alas, for someone like me, who has great difficulty using the tiny icons in space even for stationary targets, exploration has simply become impossible, at least until the little containers show up on the overview, or we get some system like the tab-targeting in other games where you can cycle through and interact with objects in the scene using the keyboard.

Clicking on things on the overview is okay, the lines are wide enough that you only have to worry about one axis of movement (you need to get up/down right, how sideways the mouse moves while you're doing it doesn't matter), and you don't have to move very far to go from item to item, so I can do that accurately. But those tiny, tiny hitboxes for objects in space are very difficult to use on even stationary objects, and it takes me several seconds get the mouse properly over one so that I can click on it. That makes it flat-out impossible for moving objects. The only way I can get any loot at all is to just click rapidly in the general area and hope I hit something. Selecting what kind of container to grab is simply not an option. In the end, I get three or four random cans. Everything else goes up in smoke...

I guess if the intent was to turn EVE into an arcade game where the point is to reward players for being better at tasks of physical dexterity, I guess this change makes sense. This used to be more of a thinking-persons strategy game than a twitch-skill game, though, and it's really disappointing to have wasted all this time building up characters in a game that I thought I was going to be able to play, only to have the game changed into the kind of game that's all about dexterity instead of intelligence. That's a game I cannot play. Suddenly the game has moved into an entire different gaming genre, and it's one I cannot play in... I like games that are mentally challenging. I cannot play games that are physically challenging. Why did you need to remake EVE into the latter?

You're not alone, unfortunately many of us that took up exploring previously are in the same boat as we all did it for similar reasons.

Exploration used to be the place for the thinking, patient types who didn't care if it took a while to get things done.

Time to try find a new niche in the game for the old / infirm / disabled as it would appear CCP doesn't want us playing exploration for now.

and one that anyone can do without specialist skills as long as they have good reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination

I don't expect the cargo scanner method to stay. Mainly since it negates the main reason they added in the horrible mechanic, which is making it a group activity.

I have to say, I a few months the cargo scanning thing will negate all reason for the can spew to occur. I can get most of the loot that appears on the cargo scan solo.

And for some of us it is exactly that - real, physical pain