IMHO the main problem here as I see it is lack of balance for risk vs reward.
Its basically more then 90% risk vs less then 10% reward to fly out for escalations. If CCP wants players to get out there for these things in large numbers, then they need to make sure average site rewards are equal to at least the ship that it costs to run these in, and I don’t mean just the hull, I mean the whole set up.
Alternatively, they need to rebalance combat so that people running sites have a much higher chance to defend themselves and come out on top, thus not almost guaranteeing a loss.
So far no one has really commented on what I suspect is the cause. That CCP is weighting the rolls on the escalations to favour LowSec.
Nonetheless I have had some interesting comments resulting in me doing some research on things like NCP Null Sec, DotLan maps and so on from the comments made by Anderson Geten, Chainsaw Plankton, JakeNicholson and a few others.
Did you EVER get two escalation in the same system at the same time ?
and/or : have you ever known of someone having an escalation in the same system as you had one ?
Yeah but maybe they were doing other escalations, we’ll never know.
My hypothesis is, that there can only be one escalation of a given type per system at a time.
That leads to another explanation of why you can’t find an escalation in HS anymore : people got them and don’t bother doing them, in all the HS systems you have access to.
That’s just an hypothesis of course. To me it looks like CCP made the whole random system in eve player-driven : the items you drop, the sites you find, all depends heavily on the activities of players.
So, the more your constellation has farmer, the less interesting sites you may get.
I did dozens of those 5/10 Expeditions to Low-Sec, 10 jumps far away, in ships worth 300-500M ISK. It was worth it when we had a good chance to loot something valuable, like 50% of ship cost. Not only that 46M ISK box. To run those in Lonetrek or Black Rise is hilarious now.
Personally I have a few exploration frig’s setup for different task’s my main one has lasted 3 months now without it getting killed by a player and its been through wormholes/low/null/high everywhere you can think of so I have no idea why you guys think low is that dangerous.
And the fit is something like 140mil so not much of an investment at all.
That is actually likely. CCP Dragon mentioned that their data indicates that lowsec is the most dangerous space, and that they plan on balancing rewards accordingly.
The slides prove to be surprisingly hard to google down, but I’ve seen older statistics that numerically most ships are destroyed in high or lowsec. Null leads in ISK value of ships being destroyed, most probably because of capitals, whereas PvP in high and low is (usually) low value hulls like frigs and destroyers.
That said, those statistics were from 2014 or so and only in the span of a few months, so the situation could be very different today.
I’ve never done a mission in lowsec. PVP roaming and FW button-sitting, but no missions vs. NPCs. How does it work? You shoot red crosses, while also watching dscan and staying aligned for bailing/warp out? Seems kind of stressful, could lead to hypertension. I mean, ratters in null warp out when one lonely neutral appears in local. How about in low sec, where there’s more traffic, and everybody is the same as set to red?
Pretty much. As soon as you see combat probes out you stop what you’re doing, warp to your pre-aligned safe and then dock up. Assuming you survived the gate camps on the way in, that is.
If someone appears in local you don’t know, open your D-Scan and push the scan button every few seconds. The only thing you have to worry about is scanner probes.
If you see probes on D-Scan, align to a save spot and reduce the scan range of your probes to 1 AU. Continue smashing scanner and doing the mission until the probes appear again on D-scan. Then he definitly trys to probe you down and you warp to save. Be a little more careful if you fly a battleship instead of an strategic cruiser because you can probe those pretty fast.
If you are in NPC 0.0, i would allways recommend to warp to a save spot first and then to the station. Otherwise, If they have seen you do that before, they can catch you with a dictor bubble.
Sounds more stressful than it is. Most small gangs / solo roamers dont have probe launchers fitted.
