Missions & Complexes

Hey all. Been in sleep mode accruing skill points for some time. After Odyssey dropped I spent a great deal of time doing null runs and had a blast doing, it but then the market crashed and IRL invaded, so I went into sleep mode.

Now I'm starting to get some free time to come back in a few days, and just wanted to check in. Has the market recovered or is exploration income permanently crashed? Is it still profitable?

A valid complaint. They need higher difficulty sites and more options, along with more use for salvage and decryptors. It's skewed too far supply side. Ah well, Once I get some time I'll dive back in, but here's hoping they iterate on it some more.

My main dislike is in the hacking process, in that success really is a random luck based event regardless of skills trained.



Moar challenge please

more time doing stuff in sites or traveling to sites. Less time adjusting probes, dropping probes to see nothing, or sitting cloaked trying to nail down signatures. The camera in the scanning system sucked too. Theres a few valid but minor complaints i suppose. I don't think the influx of new explorers is a valid complaint, or affects on the market. I thought the old scanning system was a bit tedious and repetitive, and the controls were unpolished (y u no probe formations!!!), but even that was less of a hassle than the previous system (shudder).

Bueno.

As someone who has been into exploration for years... I've started doing less and less lately. I still scan and run combat (DED) sites, but I no longer roam through multiple systems looking for unclaimed data/relic sites full of treasures.

The driving reason is the value of the loot I'm receiving. I still run relic sites when I find them, as there are a couple T2 bits that are still not worthless, but I've essentially given-up on running data sites. Most of the time I just cargo scan for a faction/T2/Capital BPC, hack (or fail) one can, and warp away to let the site (eventually) despawn.

For me the novelty of the new hacking mini-game has warn off. Now it's just a bunch of clicking. If I'm actually paying attention I get a successful hack >80% of the time, but even with semi-mindless clicking I rarely loose a can anymore. The spew cans are still a pain, but with practice I'm to the point where I get nearly all the good loot found by cargo scanning.

Pre-Odyssey I was finding 30-60m worth of loot in a mag/arch site, with a few lucky sites with >100m. When Odyssey first came out I was tracked the loot value of every site I did and was finding a very similar average value to pre-Odyseey. However since the markets have crashed (too much supply, not enough demand) I'm thrilled to find a relic site with >50m in loot.

Hopefully CCP will implement some of the ideas that were discussed during some of the pre-Odyssey testing to make the data/relic sites more interesting and lucrative.

After Odissey hit, there is something that is itching me. It is not the price of decryptors and also not the price of salvage, but the price of deadspace mods that i am accustomed to - namely the medium shield stuff. It's all dropping in price. (only thing that has remained somewhat stable is a-type invul)

At first i attributed it to summer 'draught', that meaning not many people online and the market having not much incentive to buy. I am however not anymore convinced that this is the reason why prices are falling that much. After the ban of strategic cruisers from 4/10 complexes and the removal of deep space scanner probes (yea i know you can do sorta the same still), i honestly would have expected the prices to go up - but it is not so, they are 'crashing'.

So really i dont understand it at this moment. Either the overall easyness of scanning (you can scan systems way faster now) has 'produced' more drops, or there is something else going on. I could imagine some long term marketing schenanigans, but it seems kinda risky to me. I could also see that the overall attention that exploration has gotten after the last patch is influencing supply/demand (again not talking about relics and datas). And then there might be tweaking of chances on the side of CCP, but i dont really want to get into that.

So yea currently i am leaning towards thinking that scanning is easier, that some market stuff is going on and also that shield modules might actually become less 'interesting'.

Other than that - minigame is fun for a bit, but not so long. The removal of rats from those sites - namely nullsec is imo just not right.

Yes but why is stuff from 5/10 and 6/10 (invul not that much) also going down then? Are c-type the trend setters? Is lowsec affected the same (with easier scanning, probably)? I wish i was a market analyst really ;)

I know it's not your cup of tea, but it's worthwhile to throw in: deadspace medium armor mods are crashing a bit too. Like the a-type invuln, a-type EANMs aren't moving much, but MARs are way off where they were six months ago. So it's not just shield mods; something else is going on.

My guess would be that the drop in data/relic loot value made a bunch of people switch over to farming ded sites. It's certainly something that i considered. Tho i do something else instead personaly.

Oh yeah. I don't like that at all ... but it's more got to do with myself seeing sigs when i am in a non-probe ship and getting all itchy :) I see what you mean tho.