EVE New Citizens Q&A

Well, to bluntly answer your question, yes.

As an Alpha Clone you're restricted to only using a small set of skills, ships and modules which in turn makes it very tough to compete with others in Eve, specifically Omega Clones..

Now if you fleet up with other Alpha Clones in your corp, you and your fleet mates will be able to quickly and easily complete more sites, thus increasing the amount of loot that can be divided among all fleet members. Plus it's a lot more fun achieving those goals with other like-minded players.

Good luck to you and may you have a long and rewarding career here in Eve.



DMC

Bringing more friends is always a good idea. Maybe you could even team up with one of these guys. The person who does the most damage to a wreck owns it, so if he does more damage to a wreck than another guy in the site, that person will go suspect if they loot the wreck, which means that you can kill him. Whatever drops from that ship will probably be worth more than a few of these skins.

@OP

Anything in EVE that pays well and has an identifiable single "payout point" is subject to the problem you described.

This includes almost everything you can do in highsec that pays better than mining or missions (an Alpha can do all the L3 (including the harder ones)). People will drop in and take the best loot from some missions too, but it's not as common as with the better paying random & scannable sites.

Everything that pays in the tens of millions has specialists in ships many times as powerful as anything an Alpha can get (or even a sub-10 million SP beginner can get) running the sites.

You can't blame them - most of that kind of activity can be "blitzed" in a sufficiently powerful ship, and CCP allow very powerful ships into them. in addition the design isn't to spread the loot across the whole site: it's concentrated into a few predictable "places"( often ships).

Bottom line - for someone who knows enough, and has the SP and ISK to over-gear, cleaning out sites nominally intended to be beginner-friendly provides a good ISK/hour income. Such players are far out of your league. But as I said - you can't blame the players - if it works, in a sense they have to do it.

There's nothing practical you can do about it in highsec either. The number of Alphas it would take to block these specialists is way too high, and if you attack them concord will come visiting - you'll all die long before they do. Similarly you'd have to trust an impossible number of players to run these sites as fast as the specialists do and share the loot, since it's concentrated in one or two "places".

You could always try the same strategy. Wait for everyone else to clear the first two waves, wait for some damage to the battlecruiser and then try to snipe it. Or just fit some warp stabs and steal the wreck from everyone else.

Thanks for all of your replies! Your advice was really constructive.

I think I will continue hunting for emptier systems - haven't checked out the Amarr region much, this might be the perfect time. Or else I'll try to drag the hubby on to do a few together.

I don't blame the players for going the path of least resistance, I can understand why they do.

Basically just want to experience completing one, don't really care about the SKINs. And you're right, 2nd week will probably have less capsuleers gunning for them.

If you get out of high sec there will be less competion and in sov null you may even be able to find a situation where you can be left to finish your site if you are the one that started it.

However in Eve bringing friends is the answer to any question and even the answer to most non-questions. It is a PvP MMO Open-world sandbox so typically the more the merrier when it comes to fleet stuff.

I'm in Amarr space, tonight 50% have had people come in during the run, most have left if I was first in. Flying a Tornado might have something to do with that, but it really appears to be more civilized overall. So far though, my SKINS have become, "What kind of ship is that!?!?"... Thalia?

I agree with Jonah Gravenstein,

From my experience that's exactly what happens. Those 'backwater - out of the way - off the beaten track' systems will have massive amounts of exploration sites which have a natural life span of 3 to 5 days before they de-spawn and re-spawn somewhere else.


DMC

Alternative approach: Corvettes are free and fast. The big blingy ships Omegas use to quickly clear the sites are slow, and too many of them choses to operate from 20k+. You could just keep a d-eye on the sites, and warp in when the time comes..

Unlike shooting defenceless rats, the snatchy way is quick and fun.

This is certainly true - but EVE has the weird characteristic that it's more dependent on social contact with trustworthy people than most MMO games, yet it has exceptionally high barriers to making contact with people you can trust.

It's probably too late to change this. CCP certainly couldn't force major changes quickly in that area. But there's a lot they could do to encourage grouping where trust is less important - and just increasing the natural rate of player-to-player contact would help establish trust.

A simple example: loot distribution in missions, sites, and events is very friendly towards drop-in blitzing. This doesn't look like an accident. It makes sense in player-owned space, so it can't be criticized as "always a bad idea". But concentrating the loot in a very small number of items makes it ridiculously difficult for groups of low-SP highsec players to get together for these activities.