The recent changes with detected sites have completely destroyed exploration – and wormhole exploration in particular.
Let’s be honest: exploration itself was never great because of the hacking or scanning minigames. The real thrill came from the hunt – the moment you hit that jackpot site and felt the excitement of striking gold. That feeling is now completely gone. Sites are practically worthless, especially in wormholes. Rewards feel like 10% of what they used to be, and with that, many explorers have disappeared as well. Fewer explorers means fewer potential targets, so wormholes have lost both content and danger. What’s left is just another bland nullsec-style grind.
On top of that, the new system encourages cherry-picking, which only adds to the sense of disappointment. Exploration used to be unpredictable and exciting – now it’s the complete opposite.
I know this topic will attract the usual apologists – the ones who happily repeat marketing lines like “ever-evolving universe” or “more predictable gameplay.” But the bottom line is simple: these changes gutted exploration, and definitely not for the better.
On the contrary, the new system is the first time exploration rewards explorers for completely finishing a site with the chance of an escalation.
That aside I agree that the exploration sov hub upgrades may be too much. It both devalues exploration sites throughout new eden and removes the sense of ‘exploring space’ when all you do is check the dozens of sites that spawned in your home cobstellation.
Have they changed anything in the loot? I did hack some low-class pirate sites just a few days ago and got out with like 95 Million ISK in like 15 minutes. I won’t consider that “worthless”, given the extremly low risk and skill requirements involved.
Have you checked the market? A 120 mill container on intact armour plates is now worth a third. The est. price ingame is not up-to-date. It’s being flooded by respawning detected sites to drop the prices of capital production.
So the price for intact armor plates dropped? I see. Yeah that hurts exploration, sure. Not sure if it really “kills” it… I personally leave most of the hacking sites in WHs to our newbros who can always use easy money, even if it’s less than before.
On the other hand, the change benefits all those players who regulary use T2 Armor Rigs, which were absolutely imbalanced expensive compared to shield-rigs in the past. So, seeing the bigger picture here, I think it’s still a good change. No idea how the price drop could be offset, maybe adding some other valuable items to the loot tables of hacking containers… I mean, the data-sites (sleeper ones) aren’t worth hacking for years now, since there is hardly anything of value to gain at all. Still it hasn’t been fixed ever…
Out of all your impotent rage posts, have you once gotten a result you wanted, or do you just like playing games you seem to do nothing but complain about?
The average payout may have gone down, but people who were willing to cherrypick and skip below-average cans will still skip below-average cans like before.
I don’t see how that change increased the amount of cherrypickers.
If anything exploration escalations reduced the amount of cherrypickers.
Cherrypicking is not the issue anymore. Shub upgrades made even that pointless because running explo sites is worthless.
EVE Tycoon Guristas Ward Consoles EVE Tycoon Sansha Intact Armor Plates EVE Tycoon (that one is funny because it’s the Serpentis equivalent to the above but since Serp explo has been worthless since time immemorial, it’s already near the value bottom. EVE Tycoon Angel SCrys I-Beam EVE Tycoon Blood Cap Console
but even already low value orange loot goes down hard if it had any value before: EVE Tycoon Smashed Trigger EVE Tycoon Cont Nanites
These Shub upgrades kill it. They turn an activity where you only had to run a few sites per play session to get some value (even when encountering cherrypicked sites) into a ridiculous chore where you have to run dozens of sites to come close to the value of one or two sites from before these upgrades. And that’s just Relics. I have not yet looked at Datas because their value has been garbage ever since.
However, even Ghost sites are now far less appealing because the big money-makers are now worthless by comparison, for instance:
Adding something else to any loot table of a site that are being spammed by the hundreds per region will not help in any way.
Yes, and because the sites don’t respawn in wormhole space and there are fewer you don’t have the option to even compensate. So it’s completely killed. Thanks for diving into it better then I did I speak more from an emotional point.
I’ll ask around among our explorers in the next days if they see a significant drop in value from their trips. And probably do some runs for myself.
In the end, it is a long-term adjustment: more sites + easier fo find (from the Hub Upgrades) leads to higher numbers of items that are thrown at the market → prices plummet (what we see currently). This again will lead (over time) to two other effects. a) less people willing to spend their time with exploration because it pays so badly → less supply, prices will adjust upwards again. and b) the rigs built from those mats will get cheaper, more people will using them → higher demand, prices will also go up again.
And after some months, there will be a new equillibrium of supply and demand with some seasonal ups and downs. It might not become as lucrative again as before, but it won’t remain as unlucrative as right now.
And tbh, for an activity that requires - in comparison - so little investment, so few skills and has so little risk like exploration, I simply wouldn’t expect a triple-digit million payout per hour.
First off, there’s a big difference between exploration in nullsec and in wormhole space now. In nullsec you can at least try to compensate by grinding ten times longer. In wormholes that’s simply not possible. Right now, the value of a site feels like 10–20% of what it was just weeks ago. If you had loot stocked up, that value basically got cut in half overnight — as you can clearly see on Eve Tycoon. Personally, I lost several billion ISK in value.
But honestly, the ISK itself isn’t even the worst part. I have four characters with max exploration skills, and one of them was trained over the course of 2–3 years specifically for wormhole exploration. That’s a lot of time, effort, and real money invested — so yeah, I think I’m entitled to be pretty p.o.
You say exploration requires little investment and risk, but that’s just not true. It doesn’t scale: you can only really be active on one character at a time. It also demands more skill and patience than, say, spinning three Ishtars in nullsec or running multiple barges. And when you compare it to other triple-digit ISK activities, exploration comes out looking worse — because plenty of those are both easier and safer. The most lucrative of them all, station trading, can be done with a character that barely needs 5m SP (or less, if you just focus on a few high-value orders).
And all the time the massive spam of signatures remains a ridiculous annoyance, on top of which seasonal sig spam events like Crimson Harvest add even more annoyance. Atm I am trying to find a specific signature for my activity and I have to scan through 5-15 new sigs per system I visit.
It is also disingenuous to say, exploration was very low risk when it is one of the most risky activity out there because of all the traveling around. Ishtar spinning is low risk and pays about the same per hour.
Thats unfortunate, but that happens to everyone who stocks up and then a game change hits the server. Nothing you can really do about it other than follow the good old rule: Minimize Risk, Convert to ISK!
Not sure what you need years for to train an exploration char, I do it on a random alt I have avilable from time to time, and basically whover can fly a CovOps, has the Hacking/Scanning skills up and Cybernectics for some implants is good to go. I mean, thats a handful of weeks at most.
Your own fault. No mercy here. Nobody should ever pay a penny for this game except the monthly sub. And for that, you get only access, not success. “Investing RL money” entitles you to nothing.
Oh yeah it is, I can do it on a pretty fresh character with less than 50M initial investment and I will make profits from the getgo. Sure, has potential at the top end with shiny implants and whatnot, but really nessessary – no.
Thats a point I agree on. Signature spam is bad if the reward for doing them is so minimal, that most of them will just be ignored and a pain to exclude when searching for a wormhole connection or some that really offers content which is worth your time.
I am all for a nerf of semi-afk droneboatgrinding, count me in. But in reality, it is only “safe” because the groups owning/maintaining the space have made it safe by effort and intel-channels and having standing response fleets up that deter roamers. I do dislike the mechanics that allow all this semi-afk grinding, but I see no reason to compare other income sources with something I would like to see removed.
With “risk” I mean the possibility of losing a huge investment. And really, that isn’t the case. You won’t get caught 99% of the time if you know what you are doing. And if, even an (unnessessary) blingy Explorer will most likely only lose a few 100M. Someone losing his Ratting Marauder will lose 2B. A HighTier Abyssalrunner that gets ganked is easily 5B or even 10B. A ratting Capital or Super… even more. Sry, Exploration really is pretty safe and pretty low invest.
I haven’t run data sites in a long time, but if it really has got as bad as described in the original post – that the activity is so unprofitable and tedious, that it’s essentially been killed – then sooner or later CCP will take a look at it again and tweak it to make it more worthwhile. That is how these things usually go. It’s not really in CCP’s interest to keep an aspect of gameplay that nobody is interested in doing.
I know it’s of little solace in the meantime, but luckily this game has a lot of different activities you can partake in and maybe try something else till data sites get better.