Of course I care about the loot! It’s also the real reason for the timer (you implied this yourself) as there is nothing stopping your from continuing to free slaves after the timer ends but presumably no more slavers will spawn. The whole point of this discussion was their strange warping behaviour. I think you’re just arguing for the sake of it now…
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Thanks for the reply, @CCP_dragon Following up on a couple of points:
Agreed. This was totally fine, and fit with the event. No problem with the theory, but there were some issues with the actual gameplay.
Unfortunately, this was not my experience. I would say that on average, 40% of my sites didn’t generate a spawn until the last couple of cans (and I wound up at around 2400 points, so I did a pretty large number of them), if at all.
I did this on pretty much every site. But, given the cargo size of the slaves, the fact that only 400 were needed, and that each can averaged 100 or so slaves, that meant that a ton of them were left behind. There simply wasn’t any reason to bother with them after the first 400 for the next site other than event points. But, once you’ve hit the last milestone, there is no reason to care about points, so I left them to wither. This is one reason some of us like the idea of going to a LP model instead of a milestone model for the event rewards. It gives us a reason to keep caring and going beyond hoping for a good drop on the next one.
Agreed, but this one was a lot different because there was more in play than just the loot table. The amount of hacking and spawn generation compounded things.
In other events, the loot table would be random (as this one was), but I generally knew how much time I would spend at each site. The issue here was that the time and effort was variable as well. This means that I had a run of 3 sites that generated a BS spawn on the 3rd or 4th can and dropped some skins and accelerators. That was great. But then it would be followed up by a run of a few sites that was not nearly as good. I ran three in a row where I either didn’t get a BS spawn at all or got it on the last can and it didn’t drop anything other than a tier 1 booster. That was less than great 
This was really frustrating because it felt like we were not only getting hit by a bad run of drops, but we were spending a LOT more time at each site. So, when I hit a “bad streak”, it felt frustrating for 3 different reasons:
- Bummer, no drop (just like any other event- no issue there). But…
- Holy cow, I spent a really long time here and have nothing to show for it. And…
- Holy cow, I clicked on a LOT of things, and nothing to show for it.
In other words, it felt like you had to work a lot harder and spend a lot more time to wind up with nothing than in previous events. That’s where my feeling of imbalance came from.
Again, I’m offering these comments as hopefully constructive input on how this came together. You all did a good job putting this together, and I appreciate the effort in mixing things up.
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After getting to 800 points, the ONLY point was for the loot.
Also, if the site stopped after 15-20 mins then why were 10 points still being awarded for releasing 250 slaves, because they were.
Yeah sorry but I think you’re exaggerating, especially if doing it in an unbonused slow-ass Battleship. There’s 9 cans that need to be hacked with random Battle Groups spawning that need to be destroyed and checked for loot, plus filling up the Hauler with slaves…
Going by your time estimate of 8 minutes per site, that would mean you’re completing the mini hacking game in less than 1 minute for each can, plus destroying and looting NPC’s while filling up the hauler with freed slaves all at the same time.
Yeah not buying it. With max Hacking skills and using a T3 Cruiser with a Zeugma Integrated Analyzer (has much higher coherence level than normal analyzers), it took longer than 1 minute to complete most of the hacks, let alone destroy and loot the NPC’s.
Filling up the hauler with slaves within the time limit was just extra points to be made. After loading up munitions, I had enough room in my T3 Cruiser’s hold to carry about 360 slaves for each new site. After warping in I’d load the Hauler, then hack one can to get the remaining slaves to send the hauler on it’s way, then it was all about going from can to can.
It definitely takes longer than 8 minutes to complete each site. I’m talking about hacking all 9 cans and destroying / looting all Battle group spawns along with filling the hauler with slaves.
What he was talking about was how sometimes the Battle group would spawn and then immediately start warping out, all weapons lose target lock and the NPC’s become invulnerable for up to 5 minutes. Meanwhile my 5 Light Drones are still attacking. Unfortunately they don’t do enough damage to the NPC Battleship that’s taking over 5 minutes to warp out.
By the way, some of the Hacking grids were actually quite tough to complete and other hacking grids were real easy to complete, Hell, every once in a while I’d even fail a hack.
That’s just the RNG aspect. They were all the easiest level of the hacking minigame, it’s just that the RNG of firewall placements and such will occasionally fucker your attempt and sometimes you’ll get the Core in the first click.
I have to say I agree with Tipa to be honest. A minute per can is reasonable. Travel time is short with an MWD, unbonused T1 analyzer will clear the hack really fast if you’re not very unlucky and unless you have competition in the site/system you can practically ignore the rats or just fight them while hacking more cans. Or let drones deal with them.
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Which is the reason to stay there and hack every single can in the site in order to get as many Battle group spawns as possible.
Yeah sorry but gotta call BS on that.
Most cans I completed in less than 30s, going straight for the core on “the other side”, just clicking through as fast as possible*. When a spawn happens, my drones kill the frigs, and while traveling to the next can, I snipe the cruisers with my ACs. No delay in hacking. Once the battleship arrives I stop hacking and kill it (4-5 shots), loot, warp out. OK, it would take longer with killing all NPCs.
EDIT: *Hacking bonus makes no difference as you can straight kill 4 firewalls without running out of coherence with a T2 and max skills.
EDIT2: The Zeugma has a worse coherence than T2, so is a bad choice for that mini-game.
Well, your call. Maybe just don’t be terrible at hacking?
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Ok, so in other words you weren’t actually completing each site, you were blitzing and cherry picking.
How about you not being so terrible at reading comprehension?
Sometimes the BS spawned only after the last or prior to last hack, maybe every fifth sites. But in general you are right, my strategy was to get as many BS spawns as possible per time spend. In the beginning I did some full clears (without ever running into timing issues) to check the loot, but figured the loot of the other rats is not worth the extra time.
Yeah, my goal was to also get Battleship spawns for Cerebral Accelerators too, however after a while that turned into looking more for Bestower spawns to get Fireworks.
Eventually I realized that I could get on average about 4 Battle group spawns happening per site when I stayed and hacked every can. Since 50% of the Frigates and Cruisers dropped Boosters, I ended up doing full complete clears at each site. Also close to half of the spawn groups were rather large, I’m talking like 15 to 20 ships.
As for the Analyzer I used, it worked fine and probably about half of the Hacking Grids I encountered were completed quickly and easily. The other half seemed to have a large amount of firewalls which obviously made it take longer, every once in a while causing me to fail the hack. Course due to the amount of hacking being done at each site, I got pretty good at reading the Hacking Grid and most of the time I could quickly figure out where the Core was located.
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Another speed-up technique: not even an ‘exploit’ 
This was a nice ‘trick’ to set up, but, it removed casual “player interaction” except by use of combat probes, because the beacon would disappear. I enjoyed having no contest for site loot in highsec, once I figured it out. In a light traffic area, “finishing” the site by loading the hauler as a first step, would start the countdown for the next site in the same system right away, sometimes the next beacon would appear as I was finishing one.
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Sadly no fun for me. Too far from Amarr/surrounding.
Will there be something similar for those who are not nearby and moving is problematic?
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Why are you telling/asking me this?
Your reply is better addressed to Tipa…
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I think this event was great.
Quite fast paced, with a bit of variation. Love the fact that it included hacking. Although there wasn’t much variation to the hacking itself (though I suppose this is intended as a way to get those not used to hacking to still be able to get into it).
Spawns were varied, with double spawn happening occasionally, increasing risk and challenge.
The rewards were also on point, and I do believe it was a good thing that it was exclusive to Amarr space, effectively making people move out of their normal geographical comfort zone, and also adding content and activity to systems which usually don’t see much action.
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Yeah, this event was Triple A = Amarr, Ammatar & Angel
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I brought 400 to the next site every site and I still had plenty of other people warping to my site before the beacon went down. Even in not super-busy systems, sometimes a slow BS initiated warp before I even warped to the beacon in my HACs and by the time I dropped the 400 in and the ship warped off and the beacon disappeared… a few seconds later, finally his 2.00 AU/s warping BS is landing.
Anyway, not everyone was doing it that way. Ashab was filled with contests and suspect baiting in the contests day in and day out.
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The one with the drifter cruiser boss that loved to kite? You only got all those fireworks if you killed dozens upon dozens of the frigates. if you just went straight for the cruiser, killed it, looted it, and moved on… your cargo wasn’t filling up quite so fast.
All my loot went to Amarr itself, so I didn’t have that problem. Amarr trade hub best trade hub.
I ended up at 2200, 2200, and 1560 points… after doing the event up to around 1000x3 with 3 Ishtars, I ended up swapping my 3rd toon into a DST and tagging along with the other two still in Ishtars. Instead of 3 cans to hack per toon, now I had 5/4 or 4/5 which was meh, but… now I could dump all the slaves and everything else into my cargo ship and not have to make so many loot dump stops, which was excellent!
And since I was already past the 800 points on all 3 toons, it’s not like I had to worry about the DST pilot not earning any more gifts, so… it worked out.
I ended up with ~75 skins, 24 basic accels, 9 improved accels, and 12 advanced accels from ~100 sites total full cleared (all 9 cans hacked each and every time unless I was contested and some cans were hacked by the other person/people).
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