Apart from the warp to belt shoot the rats I am more interested in any subtle tips.
So far I noticed a system with a decent number of belts won’t have all belts populated by rats.
Rats seem to land in the belt same time as me alot of cases after a previous spawn in same belt died.
I know there’s 4 versions commander hauler capital and officer.
I seem to find way way more capital spawns than anything else.
Dangerous npc like capitals like to spawn in ore anomalies and shoot excavators-if you look on zkill excavator loses officers do this alot too especialy in delve where is alot of minng-so does mining atract them?
Rats warp off sometimes-if you kill the suport ships as in frigates first battleships can run away from you,if you kill an officers battleship escort he can run away too same aplies to hauler spawns.Sometimes normal spawns that run away return with reinforcements even capitals.Some runaway spawns will appear in another belt.
I want to improve my odds at finding good spawns any ideas?
Afaik, the only way to improve odds is just do more belts. I’ve belt ratted a bunch and it seems to be random RNG at work.
And yet something triggers npcs to warp off/retreat and return with more powerful npcs like I said above killing escort ships helps alot to trigger this but not always I’ve seen half killed spawns with 1-2 frigates and a battleship retreat few times.
Is it how fast the rats are defeated across the entire sum of belts that causes or triggers this retreat?
Really old but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t changed since 2003.
But that’s chaining I know about that I was looking for answers on how to more efficiently trigger rarer spawns
Oh… You mean for like “big game hunting”, capital spawns, commanders, officers etc. I’ve looked into this a lot because it’s something I’d like to do as well. It would seem as though the answer is not known, however the consensus that I’ve found is that you stick within a constellation and clear belts. This should eventually get you some capital spawns. Regular belt clearing should get you commanders.
As for officers I don’t think anyone really knows. Some players have suggested the region you do it in matters. I’ve heard some folks say they don’t spawn in NPC null, but others have refuted this. I’d suggest using zkillboard to look at where people died to officers to get some idea. Here’s one example:
I know officers have higher chance in home regions like delve fountain malpais etc.Thus far I’m fixated on the retreat behaviour spawns have which most often signals a rare spawn being generated.
I’ve also been told a system with under 10 belt but no less than 6 is very lucrative I got very good results experimenting on a 8 belt system lots of capital spawns and haulers and nothing else.
On another 19 belt system get worse results unless I run 2 characters at once essential splitting the kill time for entire run through all belts to half.
The game seems to store rare spawns even over 12 hours I’ve returned t ratting 12 hours later to find a rare spawn even tho I knew for sure no one had belt ratted.
Honestly sounds like you know more than me. I’m going to try this myself.
How do you know this though? Zkillboard?
Edit: NVM, had a look at zkillboard. It’s pretty obvious.
Zkillboard gives a biased view though, it shows where people died to officers. Even if officer spawn rate would be the same everywhere (hypothetically, no idea if true), Zkillboard would still show more occurrences of people dying to officers in populated areas, just because there are more people in populated areas.
I have no idea what the actual spawn rates are, but just keep the above in mind.
For sure, but any data on officer spawns is really limited so we have to work with whats available. Outside of zkillboard all we have is anecdotes and rumors.
I can refute this too. An alliance buddy came from a break and said, he wanted to belt rat a little to get into EVE again.
We lived in Stain at the time and he warps to a belt, kills things and the next belt he finds Chelm and loots 23 billion - lucky dude.
Haha that’s amazing. And yeah, after examining zkill I quickly saw that they seem to spawn in NPC null pretty often.
You do realize, that in NPC null players do belt ratting more often as well? Cause not so many anomalies to work on.
Yup…
It’s been a long time since I ratted in nul (Sov&NPC)
There used to be 2 theories on “best practice”
#1 - Clear each belt asap for chance of rare spawns
#2 - Only kill the BS sized rats
#2 - If no BS sized rats at a particular belt clear only that belt
Either should still get you a decent tick-rate income
though tbh anomalies are probably a better option in sov
I know those 2 aproaches to belt ratting my question was how to better increase the odds of rare spawns other than just kill them all.Kill them in an order? Kill them within 1 tick?
How long is a piece of string?
option #1 was the best chance to get a rare spawn
whether that spawn was a mining op or a faction/named spawn was impossible to predict
#rng is #rng
It’s not as random as you believe
I was just belt ratting after a long break. I came across 4 x True Power Retrivers so I rub my hands thinking …ahhh some minerals!! I proceed to dealing them damage then suddenly 4 x True Power Nightmares and about 3/4 True power Succubus warp in. I was able to warp out on 50% hull. LOL be careful out there!!!
I’d say get a couple of guys and keep clearing belts, Officer and other good spawns seem to get attracted to systems that have had lots of NPC’s killed in them. I think the truesec value applies, so if i call up Dotlan Eve maps and view the Stain Region I can see there are system which are -0.37 and -0.02. The -0.37 systems are great to rat in with much better spawns and loot.
I once lived in a -1.0 system where I found a 6 billion isk NPC Officer loot drop while belt ratting.
One corp mate spawned an officer after LONG time daily belt ratting (clearing all rats) but this was -0.87 system and when he killed the officer no purple loot dropped, just some faction and a tag. He opened a ticket to support and CCP said that the security should be truesec so either in some system which is very close to -1.0 like -0.97 or the rats home systems which are considered truesec but you might have competition there, as there are only 5-6 systems for example on Blood Raiders and Serpentis. For Guristas is better as they have many systems in Venal.