Thanks much - just finished out my first Crimson - was “exciting” but not “dicey”. Shield recharge (active) plus nice fast cap recharge gave me what I needed. May see if I’ve got enough CPU for RHML II’s, as the arbalests don’t hold enough to take down the final BS in one full load…
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There is no other thread, so I post my conclusion here … great event, because again CCP restricted the valuable sites to a small lowsec/nullsec area. Together with the high profitability and the 90% loot drop this created an intense playground with scanners, hunters and hunter hunters for the hacking sites. I only played the hacking part, the combat part wasn’t appealing in comparison, this may have been different for people in highsec.
The lvl4 hub sites have a very difficult hacking maze with a 120 health red core, but you could try as often as you wish and can survive on the site. The normal node sites have a red core too and a strange “3.5” scanning difficulty but crappy loot, so not worth bothering unless you look for PvP and respawns.
The hub loot is very good (20-60-110M in game estimate), on both sides, though I don’t have much use for most of the combat boosters, as I’m not flying lasers often. With one exception, the webifyer extension! This is probably underrated, and it helped me win one fight because I could extend the standard webs on my Hecate out to 16km heated with just a grade 1 booster from the redeeming queue.
Skins, I choose Tetrimon because I felt more comfortable to engage against Blood Raider, but the skins are underwhelming. I don’t care too much, except the price crash of my cold iron collection … lol. On the three days I made 450 points only with hacking sites, and collected ~5B loot (sites and kills, ingame estimate which may not be fully accurate). The points seem more balanced compared to last event.
Looking forward to the winter event, please don‘t mess with it too much, it was perfect last year. 
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Just finished getting the 900 Agency points for the event, was way too long of a grind to complete it.
I sided with Tetrimon to run the Crimson Hacking sites, seemed like majority of players did the same. I kept seeing Tetrimon sites all over the place so I started doing those sites as well, figured if I wasn’t going to complete the Agency points spread then I might as well get as much loot as I could.
I started on the first day of the event in my Loki running in Minmatar space, scan strength of 113 points. The route I was doing consisted of 38 jumps and started off fine, was finding sites pretty easily.
Then it quickly got tougher as more competition started showing up in fast agile Frigates that could make it to the can before me. After 3 days of spending hours upon hours searching, I had only gained about 300 points and decided I had to switch ships as well as location.
I switched to my Cheetah and re-fit it for agility / speed and buffed the scan strength to 129 points. I then went to Derelik Region and set up a 36 jump route that looped back to my starting point. Within a few hours I had gained over half of the points that had previously taken me days to get. There was less competition in the area so the event sites were more easily found.
After a few days competition became noticeable and Crimson sites started getting tougher to find. However my Cheetah was keeping me in the race for cans and the prospect of completing the Agency point spread looked good.
At the start of today I needed 130 points to complete the Agency point spread. It was really slow going and seemed like everybody was in that area doing the same thing as me. I was getting a couple of sites each hour so progress was slow. Eventually I was down to 50 points left and after hours and hours of not finding any Crimson sites, it seemed I wasn’t going to complete the event.
But I stuck with it and eventually was able to complete it. I then switched to my Prowler and collected up all the loot. Estimated value of loot collected from the event is a little over 1.5 bill ISK.
I think this event was designed more for Veteran players with Omega accounts. In my opinion the sites were not new player friendly and probably difficult for experienced Alpha accounts to complete. Due to the amount of competition I saw and the availability of sites, I think for future events CCP needs to increase the spawn rate of sites as well as include novice sites for new players to run.
Lastly, the amount of Agency points required to complete the event needs to be reduced. 900 points is way excessive, even with the sites giving 10 points for completion. And stop making the rewards soulbound to the character, that goes against what this game was built on and more importantly, it removes option of trading or selling to other characters. Also allow Market buy / sell orders for event Gate Keys. I got a bunch of shortcut Gate Keys which I didn’t use that other players could have used.
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Glad to hear you made it. I assume you’re one of those compulsive completionist types. I stopped at 800 pts (all the Sarum SKINs). Ardishapur SKINs (900pts) are just cheap knockoff versions of the default Amarr palette and the booster (850pts) are pointless. No reason for me personally to waste the time.
The data site loot itself far exceeds the actual point based event loot. And those SKINS can be sold. That became very evident early on.
This was the case of my last can, fittingly in my starting system on my way back. A Vedmak had already landed, but was too slow. I was surprised that this far in (with 6 hours left) there was still someone with an MWD fit doing these. If it was Tetrimon I might have let him have it seeing as the cargo scan came back unimpressive, but it was Crimson, and the last one I needed for 800 pts, so…
It was the second day onward. I feel CCP tweeked the spawn rates to favor Tetrimon sites after seeing that most people picked them. And about 3 days in they lowered the drop rate of SKINs and other rarer loot. Even in quiet empty lowsec regions with no competition the Crimsons were noticeably lacking. Did I tell you about the system with 9 sites? 8 Tetrimon and only 1 Crimson? Again, I had the whole route to myself. So people can’t give me any of this “it’s because people ignore the Tetrimon sites” stuff. I compete with people for even Tetrimon sites in the more populated areas all the time. I do not see anyone ignoring them. They simply have a higher spawn rate.
Same. I got one crimson at the start of the day. And then nothing all day. EVERYTHING was Tetrimon. I though CCP finally just disabled Crimson data sites completely. So I gave up logged out. Then later in the day I got a impulse telling me now is the time, to search to Alakgur and the surrounding systems. I undocked in Frarn and found one. Then got another Crimson in neighboring Rens. Both of these are populated systems. Then the final feeling told me to go back to Frarn where I snatched my last one from the Vedmak. True story.
I ended up with 3 billion in loot. Got Deathglow Raven and Typhoon. Got a Merlin Headhunter instead of Tristan. How much does that Archon Cold Iron go for? I got 2x Prophecy Imperial Navy SKINS. Would have preferred that Maller SKIN. But I got 2x Cold Iron Devoters (T2 Maller), 2x Paladins, 2x Omen Navy Issue, a Redeemer, an Oracle, 2x Bestower, a Coercer, a Crucifier, a Purifier, a Guardian and the best one of all: the mighty Impairor. I got a 7 of training accelerators. One of them, the ‘potent’ version, has a +8 to everything. I guess I’ll use them to get my hacking skills to level 5. It’s 2 months training for the three core skills.
I’ve been told Tech 2 modules make the difference. And there is some very powerful virus STR implant too someone linked me. The hacks weren’t so much hard, as impossible at times. And it feels like it’s not random. Like its literally just generating whatever is required to stop me. To the point where I felt it decided if I won or lost at the start and I ultimately had to get a roll where it let me win. I’d have situations where a single anti-virus variant, even with a full tray of shields and wrenches, could single-handedly deplete me. And they’d be at bottleneck points I had to go thru making the site veritably impossible to defeat from the start. So I just started randomly speeding thru them over and over until it let me win. If these didn’t have infinite tries I think many would have ignored the event after the first couple days. They seemed to get more impossible as time passed. The first couple of days I never failed a single one. I didn’t even know they were infinite tries until around day 3 when I failed one twice. Then they were just more difficult for another couple days and then impossible save for the game letting me win.
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completely agree. I found this event to be super fun and extremely profitable.
The l4 sites i didnt think were that diffcult. Most of them seemed to offset the stronger nodes with a open board with lots of rule of 6 safe spots. As a result it wasnt uncommon to run the board straight to the core with no other hostile nodes showing up. But i really liked that the boundaries on hacking were pushed a little and we were given something we hadnt seen before in that regard. Although i did stumble across a poor guy in heron and a t1 data analyser trying to hack one of these. After 5 minutes i offered to do it for him and split the loot as it was only a matter of time before someone not as nice as me turned up and popped him.
i was only just finding my feet last year so didnt do much of the event. So super looking forward to this years one.
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Didnt get near a single site completion, lost 70m in aggregate and scored 30 points.
ill just use this as an opportunity to brag about my 1700points and 6bill of loot
Yeah, it’s long time that I did hacking as profession, and through normal sites I just rush through without much thinking, which was definitely not possible here, annoying and refreshing :). I have some suspicion we will see this type more often in future …
Yeah, I believe CCP was constantly messing around with the event, drops definitely got stealth nerfed within the first couple days and also towards the end. The spawn rate was also getting messed with. Eventually the spawn rate between the two types of sites ended up being skewed heavily with Tetrimon sites, it was definitely due to more than just lot’s of competition.
Nice… I should have done more sites in the first few days myself when it was plentiful. Right at the start I had set a daily quota of gaining 100 points each day. I forgot to include the fact that CCP always tweaks and nerfs everything, next time I’ll just go hog wild crazy and pull all-nighter for the first 48 hrs of event.
Eve Marketer shows lowest sell price is 10 mil ISK in Jita.
Nice that you got a Minmatar skin, I would have preferred Minmatar skins instead of what I got.
As for the Cerebral Accelerators, I didn’t think they were going to be a frequent drop so I injected 2 of the first ones I found, a Basic one and an Extended one.
I agree, the difficulty level of hacking was definitely high. I ended up doing multiple hacking attempts on most of the cans.
At least this event gave 10 points per completed site compared to the last event which only gave 1 to 2 points per site. Now if CCP lowered the Agency point spread and removed the soulbound rewards, they’d have a good event.
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I think you get fooled by RNG and people cherry-picking. During the weekend I was able to “own” a lowsec constellation for some time, and the site distribution were roughly 50:50 and I cleared all.
Also estimated price of stuff goes down sharply over the course of the event because the skin drops were recycled skins from previous events. Same with boosters, they will go up in price again over the next weeks after supply ends as usual.
The only stable ISK like rewards were the war clones (Tetrimon) and overseer (Blood) drops.
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Not sure what you mean by people cherry-picking, there’s only one can in the site.
As for RNG, I don’t accept that. In the past CCP has stated a few times that they keep watch on both spawn rate and loot drops, both of which they will adjust as they see fit.
I saw a big difference in spawn rates while covering the same travel route of systems day in and day out for hours and hours on end, and I was completing both Tetrimon and Crimson Hacking sites for a large segment of the time. Sure it could be due to competition. Course this is just a theory but CCP could also possibly adjust the spawn rate in more active areas in order to promote more conflict.
However what I do know for a fact is that there was a definite noticeable difference in loot drops of when the event started compared to when it ended.
As for the estimated price on items in-game, I don’t place much stock on that price since it’s usually incorrect and lower than actual sell price.
However you are right about the price being stable for OPE’s and War Clones. Those NPC buy orders don’t change no matter how many items are turned in.
People were focusing on one type based on their side choice.
I’m running events extensively for years and not seen evidence for “stealth nerfs”. You overestimate the effort CCP putting into operating those events. After all signs it’s fire and forget unless breaking bugs.
I’ve been playing this game for over 13 years and almost always run the events whenever they’re available.
CCP has stated on multiple occasions that they monitor both loot drops and spawn rates and will adjust them whenever they think it’s necessary.
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Sure, but they publish it in the patch notes.
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