EVE General Discussion

@Tippia

so basicly there is good reward and such on high sec but due to the sheer easyness of it those sites are farmed out quickly and in order to get those I need to catach them fast and before everyone else. right?

Pretty much, yes. There are a few nuggets in there, but they're balanced along the other highsec exploration content to be accessible and solvable with very low skills. So these days, when both the average equipment and skill level is vastly higher than what they've been balanced for, they get popped almost as soon as they appear.

With a bit of luck, you can find a backwater constellation that sees little traffic and where a few might collect over time, but what little population such system sees still has a nasty tendency to be explorers since they all know this…


On a more general note, another antedeluvian design flaw that lives on today is the “bigger is better”-method of difficulty progression. Higher difficulty is created by throwing more crap at you — more scramblers, more ewar, more neuts, more dps, more HP to chew through. This is why highsec PvE is mainly a straight line towards battleships: because they can withstand that neuting, dps, and chew through the HP in short order. The introduction of speedboat missions were a nice break from this norm, but they never really got back to that and made anything with it, and they're all stuck in null anyway.

This design is part of what restricts the ability to create difficulty in exploration as well: the (flawed) thinking is something along the lines of, “onoz, it's highsec so it must be frigates or cruisers only, but that means we can't use waves upon waves of neut towers and torp launchers and jammers, whatever will we doooooºººº°°°°…?” And without resorting to something that requires battleships or high-resist T2 ships, they're stuck on creating the kind of skill progression that would target content towards older characters. Getting away from those old patterns would be one way of opening up a wider spectrum of difficulty (both in terms of execution and skill requirements) with rewards to match.

Please tell me where in high sec you will see interceptors shotgunning anoms.

"Relative safety" may be high in certain areas or at certain times, but it is just that, relative. Compared to null, yes, hisec is "relatively" safer.

Logic ************. Do you speak it?

Edit: the only 'protection' one pays for in null is for infrastructure. Thinking you are paying for your overlords to keep you safer than hisec is exactly what an uninformed hisec dweller would think normal.

Really?

Wow, FA and MC and RED and IRON covering my ass at various points back in the day when I was blue to them, and goonswarms hot pursuit of me on several more recent occasions as a non blue intruding in their sov must have been my ******* imagination.

(say what you will about goons, they are generally attentive to intruders).

Either that or your alliance clearly sucks ass and your blues are not getting their monies worth.

In my case, and perhaps this is an anomaly, I've been killed far more often in high sec than null, despite frequently running back and forth between them.

Ok, I'm fine with your little fantasy of the pvping overlords that are there to protect their serfs from any and all harm. Let's fantasize some more...

Nobody could ever slip a bomber or a wing of interceptors past the almighty overlords.

Oh, also every system is perma-scouted by people with their mouses hovering over local ready to report intruders to the instantly-responding home defence fleets.

There are no wormholes.

and...

You will never, not ever, have someone login inside the anomaly you just warped to.


Just so it's clear, after all that *facetious*: I am the hunter, and the hunted.

I undock in hi-sec to run a mission. Whatever 'risk' there is of other players interfering is entirely decided by me. Don't want to get ganked? Don't fit pimp. Don't want to be ninja'd? Don't shoot back. Don't want to be war-dec'd? Hop corp.).

I undock in null to run an anom, guess what? Other players can and will interfere with me.

If I don't want to be tackled I align. Dropping dps, lowering isk/hour. Risk/Reward.

If I choose not to align, it is because I am in a ship I am confident could 'blap' whatever tackle off the field before making a hasty exit. In other words I am preparing specifically for a situation, and should be rewarded for that. I am still taking a greater risk though. What if the pilot is really good/skilled or fit in a way my risk doesn't pay off?

However you look at it, risk mitigation is the name of the game in eve. Unfortunately, most players tend towards 'zero risk'; a concept that should not even exist. No matter what player tools are used by nullsec residents to mitigate risk, they are absolutely dwarfed by the NPC hand-holding that is concord/crimewatch/corp hopping. (forgot the faction navies but they are usually more help than hindrance to criminal types)

Because that's what it is, hand-holding. Take responsibility for your own actions in this game and you won't need anybody to hold your hand.

I have ratted in the same vindicator for two years through my good planning and decision making, not the crutch of hisec mechanics. Or the magical 'safety field' that you think nullsec power blocs present.

Before that, I escaped by the skin of my teeth countless times by good piloting, and have caught/been caught by countless others by good piloting. A good pilot will make the escape, a good pilot will make the tackle. If both pilots are good then things get interesting.

In hisec that dynamic is gone. Why should anyone even care about the place? Right, because it gives you risk-free isk by the fountain-full.

edit: I don't think it's any coincidence that 10 minutes after posting this I was faced with the risk/reward decision "do I warp off with this neutral in local who wasn't reported in intel" I chose to leave my 10mil worth of drones behind, and it turned out to be the right decision, since he was in a crow. When would that ever happen in hisec?

Well I don't know what everyones definition of "Starting Area" is and how that relates to the whole of "High Sec."

But in regards to "exploration," I would claim High Security space is the Starter Area for Exploration due to the low value items found. If you want to reach the "end-game of exploration" go to null sec or start running wormhole sites where the rewards are much greater.

EDIT: @ OP, I also think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. You are comparing HighSec Exploration to other HighSec activites. When you also consider the bigger, scary, darker securities of space known as LowSec & NullSec, you will find the rewards from exploration can be much greater then what can be earned from Missions or Mining, be that if you mine or run missions in High/Low/Null Sec. Eve is just not all about High Sec.

Didn't I reply to your post personally with my experiences with highsec exploration, and the amount of isk/hr I made, and with an elementary description of why you might not be making a lot of isk ?

Wasn't that equivalent or better than most people make mission running ?

Wasn't it close to incursions - which is a group activity and should be fairly rewarding in a multiplayer game, and could perhaps be better than a solo activity at peak given all the group overhead involved ?

Incursions are where the high-sec combat pay is, 100m an hour casual, 200m an hour with the fast fleets, reliable.

some anti-HighSec warriors here are just hilarious... totally not the issue here yet the keep ignoring main post and main theme of this thread in order to post how high sec is newbie zone and how their e-peen is so big because they play somewhere else.

Hell, this mentality is wrong in so many ways... the game is volatile and dangerous no matter where you are.. get podded in 1.0 or 0.0 it's same resault at the end you are podded.

I was destroyed both in low and high sec and in both places a player must use his head and know what he's doing... it's not going to be safe to travel point a to point b if I'm above 0.5...

only difference between high sec and others is twofold....
1. on high sec you get concord response for aggression so you got to know how to do it right.
2. new players starts inside high sec on academy stations, if new players would have started in neutral zone disconnected from high sec and then had to choose where to go from there you wouldn't think it's newbie zone.

yes, I prefer high sec but mostly because for my activities the rats I encounter are little more then rodents which needs to be squashed and not battleships etc... I got some specific gameplay style I learned to prefer and I enjoy from same as any other player got their own playstyle they like and enjoy from this is what sandbox is all about! hell if I wanted a game where everyone plays same way I would have gone to swtor or something but I'm not.

At any rate we are changing subject every two posts here and it's ridiculous, you would have thought that people which mastered Eve online complexity could manage to have a discussion on topic but instead we get behavior worst then lowliest trolls.

Hisec:

virtually risk free, no cloak required, can use whatever ship
competition from other explorers results in racing
all factions have valuable loot from 4/10
3/10 rewards are okay, less subject to competition.
data/relic rewards vary by faction, plus cargoscanner lets you avoid wasting time on cans with <1m in loot
all complexes are very fast to complete relative to any non-hisec exploration, either b/c of blitzing tactics or just low total HP of rats
bounties and OPE value is negligible

I think hisec explo is in a good place right now. There's lots of stuff to do if you're just looking to do stuff, and the better rewards are also quite good. If you're not finding it worth your while, its probable that you're not doing it efficiently, either in your overall approach and site selection, or in the way you've setup your ship and are running the sites.