Missions & Complexes

When I came to the game I checked the wiki for drop rates and sources of items and was amazed to not find aynthing about that.
I was used to it from other games.
I dont know what you would gain from hiding that in this game.
It's not like you wont run a site that drops expensive items just because you do not know what exactly can drop and by what probability.
Unfortunately the interface also doesnt allow easy collecting of this data so you would have to enter it manually.
But if such a project ever gets started I'd be interested to join.

Random can not be compiled.

Unlike "the fleet slippers of Zambo" in some elf game, the drops are random.

i do a fair amount of exploration in low sec (that is 1-5 systems/day) and have noticed a significant reduction in the value of the average radar site as well.

it seems they're actually worth about what the average mag site has been buffed to. $1.5 - $5 mil.

It is player compiled. And I was a little surprised when I came to eve and such a thing was not available. But eve is...different. More real? Less gamelike? For some reason the idea of compiling droprates and staring the fact that this is a videogame in the face seems less appropriate here than in WoW (where Blizzard makes everything extremely 'gamelike', as it's doing with D3).


PS: Here's my anecdotal radar experience postpatch: plenty of sites, no site less than 5m, average 10m, combination hisec lowsec (about 50/50).

In Wow the info can easily collected by UI addons and uploaded to web sites such as wowhead.
This makes it easy to gather large sample sizes.
Since players have access to the official test server the loot pool is mostly available when the content goes live.

In Final Fantasy XI the info the game gives you is pretty much non existant.
The players have to band together to discover stuff even game mechanics for themselves.
For item drops this has never been a problem though.
Most items worth anything are either crafted or dropped by one specific source in the game.
Normal monsters rarely drop items other than crafting materials.
So its pretty easy to compile the source of an item that matters.
As to the probability, lets just say, if you want it you either buy it if you can
or grind as long as you need to get the item.

We don't know how drops are chosen. All we know is that there are drop tables. It seems like some items are more rare than others but this may simply be our primal WANT MORE ISK.

I personally think each item has a 1 in something chance to drop, depending on what its possibly dropping from. I think it does some calculation like "how many items will drop", then based on that amount, goes through the loot table and picks the items seemingly randomly. But the items would be "weighted," so faction modules would have much less weight than deadspace modules and some deadspace modules may be weighted less than others, thus introducing their drop rate.

So in theory, when the overseer npc/structure is destroyed, first the amount of items would be established and then which items to drop would be established based on their weights. To simplify things, Item A may have a 70% chance, Item B a 25% chance and Item C a 5% chance. So if when you destroy it and its decided the drop will be 2 items, you will have a good chance at Item A and Item B, with a very small chance that one of them might be Item C instead. And then there might be the rare occasion that Item B and C get chosen.

Just my theory on it.

Oh I forgot about the scanning method. Either way, theory could still apply, albeit with modification as to when that stuff is determined.

hmmm. that's what radar sites were for me pre-crucible.

maybe it's just my region then, or an unusually long spout of really bad luck. i haven't had a radar site drop more than $5mm yet (frankly not even $5mm). yesterday was radar drop fail again :/

also like Flakey Foont said above, thus far they seem to be more rare as well.

I am seriously tempted to just start an exploration log to post online with the drops from sites I run. I would like to see how it all goes over time (hint: it will even out). Then I would be able to just link that to every one of these threads.

I think you should read up on statistics(science to interpret large data sets) and stochastics (part of mathematics dealing with random numbers or probabilities).
There are quite a few things that could be learned from doing this.
An estimate of a site's value, drop rate of specific items within a site, maybe even the rules that are used to determine what drops and in which quantities.