Missions & Complexes

After having done about 200 site in low and null secs mostly, I'd like to post a few comments with the hope of improving the overall exploration experience.

Goods:
1 - In spite of early testing, the minigame is fun. Especially the hardest ones requires thinking some planning and some luck, so good job CCP!
2 - The loot is fair: even solo I mostly do the same isks as before
3 - the future looks bright: CCP can easilly impove it in the future with more options, modules etcc....
4 - It actually improve group play: easier to bring in friends and corpm8s withou sacrificing solo play

Bads:
1 - The miningame is too long and eventually too boring: when u do many of em, having to open 6 cans is very very repetitive and boring
2 - No NPCs means less things to face, less strategy and too mucheasy and boredom
3 - Having to sacrifice a mid slot only to scan for a cool BPC is really bad! Without a scanner you go totally random
4 - The bad plexes are still all there (drone ones, useless faction ones etc...) was odyseey suposed to fix that too?


Suggestions:
1 - Put in NPCs again! (ah ladar sites with hacking containers still have NPCs in them) . If you fail hacking more npcs!
2 - make the hackling containers much less 1 to 2/3 max! Or its really too boring! Improve the loot accordingly
3 - make the spawing containers colored by the rarity of the items inside (no more cargo scanning!!!)
4 - Fix combat plexes PLEASE!

LM

I like this idea, but maybe a little different. Disable cargo scan but give a spew can with a rare item a different color. It would allow to somewhat balance the loot spew for group play as far as the regular loot drops go yet not screw solo explorers over the goodies or make group play/multiboxing a way more effective method for farming. It would really just give the second (lower skilled) guy a means for some decent enough beginner income which i think always was the intention.

Alkso agree with the npc's of course. Too easy to farm the sites in cheap frig.

surely the player pirates are enough of a threat? i had a nasty moment with a 'dictor yesterday, had to juke like mad to not get decloaked.

So in the same post you claim it is both fun and repetitive and boring. Well, covering all bases, are we?

I personally fnd it hard to judge this feature without knowing what the actual goal was. Did they want to make it something for and only for the newest players? I guess its a success in that regard, too bad it doesn't scale beyond that.

The issue of solo farming in 0.0 is hardly an issue of the mini game. I did this with the old system in cloaky setups without any issues. 0.0 is in many parts a completely deserted wasteland, devoid of all life. I have a char in 0.0 since Odyssey hit, I have encountered less then ten other players TOTAL. None made an attempt at my life. Most exciting part of the whole endeavour is scanning down a wormhole pipe to a trade hub.

I find nothing good with the mini hacking game or the loot can spew afterwards.

It has become nothing more than a click fest and the actual isk worth of loot gained for completing these sites has been hit hard by the nerf bat. The mini hacking game takes up too much time which only creates undue exposure to attack.

It is not skill based. It is not exploration. It is not Eve.



DMC

Theres an implant that can give you an additional +5

I've been trying to figure out how the Cov-ops bonus is dished out to the analyzers it doesn't seem consistant and when I checked it just said a flat 10 per a lvl

Is that 10 percent, 10 points? is it split between HP and strength weirdly?

T1 analyzer have base strength of 20, T2 have 30. Cov ops ship gives you flat 10 strength bonus. There is no implant or rig that gives you virus strength, but there is implant which decreases analyzer cycle time.

Beyond some simple rules of thumb:

- Don't mess with walls until you have to
- Don't open caches until you have to
- Don't reveal more than one node at a choke point until you're past it
- Pick up goodies immediately
- ect.

The strategy is all reactionary. I can't tell if you're just moaning about the randomness (it is a little high imo, but exploration has always been about excitement derived from randomness) or if you legitimately haven't figured the game out, so you'll have to forgive me if I rant a bit.

The hisec game is fairly boring, both because it's fairly easy with decent skills and because the utilities are less reactionary; it really doesn't matter when you use self repair unless you're wasting a turn with a restoration node up - also rare in hisec.

The greater variety of utilities and abundance of suppressors and restoration nodes makes the low-nullsec cans a lot more interesting with marginal skills. Again, there are some obvious rules of thumb:
- Save utilities unless you're otherwise ******
- Kill restorations immediately unless you're otherwise ******
- Use kernel rot to take out anti-virus's in lieu of mitigating factors
- Secondary vectors are good against suppressors
- ect.

It's when you're otherwise ****** that you have some not-so-obvious choices to make
- Number of nodes opened up vs. health lost when facing multiple blocks
- Do you keep going hoping for a utility but risking a restoration node when you hit a suppressor?
- Do you risk leaving the restoration node up or go too low to take out the core if you find it?
- Do you open some caches and risk a suppressor/restoration?
- Do you open some caches to buy turns for a multi-turn utility?
- Do you speed up and make mistakes because you're in a dangerous system?
- ect.

I wouldn't play the game if it wasn't attached to exploration, but it's better than any of the other hacking/lock minigames I've played.

All the tips you gave are will are helpful, but i`m pretty sure everyone have them figured out after like 5 mini-games. There is no plan or strategy, when you hit obstacles you need to choose most effective solution. Second grade math with some common sense mixed in, nothing else. If random decides that you will need to be bent over, you will bend over and take can explosion in your face, plan all you want.