Exploration is already not bad income. This idea isn’t about significantly inflating the Isk/hour of it. I would add to that potential just a little but focus it all into different tiers of lucky finds.
Already the system basically has the basis of this, it just doesn’t reach as high as I would like to with “luck”. I love lucky loot systems, especially when there’s a potential - however rare - for a big payday. I want there to be a chance for people to find their fortune exploring, finding a jackpot, and an inevitably that a few people will find a decent fortune here and there. Lucky people who strike it rich in a way that keeps the overall economy still in balance.
Let’s define the baseline current loot amount as 1.0 for mathematical purposes. If we wanted to keep this exactly consistent and not inflate the economy via exploration at all we could remove .1 (10%) from the overall loot table in sheer quantity and then concentrate that into the new tiers of rare finds. Or we can just add extra equating to about 5% or 10% overall and keep the current baseline the same while only injecting 5% 10% more value into the overall economy of exploration. But by playing with the probabilities vs reward we can create the potential for lucky people to randomly get more than usual, potentially a lot more.
I propose increasing tiers of rarity, without potential limit to the number of tiers, balanced by its proportionally increasing level of rarity.
These rare relic and data sites which drop extra loot could spawn once for every ten normal sites. Among those 90% of them would be worth about 10x more than normal (with some variation say between 7x and 15x). 9% of the time they would be worth ~100x more than normal. .9% of the time they would be worth ~1000 more than normal. .09% of the time they would be worth 10,000x more than normal (this would be roughly 1/10000 spawns overall, keeping the balance at every increase in order of magnitude).
Theoretically there doesn’t need to be a limit on how rich some anomaly sites could be. I would keep going up to being a million or even a billion times more valuable relic sites out there to be found potentially, if someone gets lucky enough. A one in a billion payday, even a one in a trillion one. The potential to make a random trillionaire or even quadrillionaire. But rare enough to not upset the overall economy. Making the whole system only add roughly 10% or whatever overall.
The numbers can be tweaked to either keep the overall isk/hour stable or only increase it by 5% or 10% but I believe the concept would add a lot of fun to exploration and give people a reason to grind it out looking to potentially get lucky and strike it rich, and the regular extra loot will feel nice as everyone will at least hit those 1/10ish ones routinely.