Following a GM suggestion from my support ticket, I am moving this discussion to the forums to highlight how broken the escalation pool currently is for solo sub-capital pilots running Null-Sec anomalies.
Current Situation: I am actively running Sansha Havens in a Paladin (Marauder). Out of my last 6 generated escalations, my Agency journal currently looks like this:
4x Sansha Capital Staging
2x Sansha Shielded Starbase
0x Sansha 10/10 DED Sites (0%)
The Core Problem: 100% of my active escalations require either a heavy fleet, a Capital ship, or offer virtually zero meaningful engagement/rewards for a Marauder. Standard sub-capital content (like 10/10 DEDs) has been heavily diluted by these spawns, effectively locking solo pilots out of escalation gameplay entirely.
To demonstrate how dead this content is: I offered all 6 of these escalations for FREE on our alliance Discord, and not a single pilot claimed them. The community universally ignores Capital Stagings and Starbases due to their broken effort-to-reward ratio.
Suggested Fix: Please review and rebalance the spawn weightings in Null-Sec Havens, or separate Capital/Starbase spawns into a different mechanic so sub-capital journals aren’t permanently bricked with dead content.
This is also my first question about the situation.
Do the capital escalations even affect the number of subcapital escalations you get?
I’ve been looking for sources that point towards one or the other option, but all I found is old threads where people ask the same valid question from people who make the unfounded assumption that the escalation pool is diluted.
In my experience the capital escalations happen at a higher rate, which to me suggests a separate trigger with a higher chance. The OPs experience shows the same thing, as the majority of their escalations are capital escalations rather than subcapital.
And as long as we don’t know if the escalation pool is even diluted, complaining as if it is is a bit strange.
The only real problem that I see is that the OP does not like that there are escalations in their UI that they don’t want to run and cannot sell.
I don’t have that issue, I don’t mind ignoring an escalation I don’t want to run. And on top of that I also have no trouble selling most of the escalations I don’t want to run myself to my alliance, capital or otherwise.
To demonstrate I can provide a counterexample: the vast majority of the escalations I put up for sale (30M usually for capital escalations) in my alliance in the last few months that I’ve been ratting are sold within the first hour.
Maybe the content isn’t dead, it’s just dead in your alliance.
The only remaining problem then is:
RNG is random
This is not so much a problem, but unreasonable expectations of RNG mechanics like “to farm 10/10s reliably” is inevitably going to result in disappointing players who have a luck streak that’s below average.
