You’ve just joined Eve and heard exploration is 100-200mil isk/hour effortless thing…awesome…not in Sansha, tho…you’ll end up with 100mill isk hourly losses.
But ftlog don’t go pvp’ing with your cargo scanner and lvl III scanning/hacking skills by …cherry picking sites because it’s a form of pvp in your null corp territory,after they’ve agreed to take you in , failing 50% of the red/orange cans anyway. Completed site=instantly respawned site on your potential route, if you do exploration sessions for more than half an hour, in a loop around an area, it helps not leaving a trail of incomplete sites preventing other to respawn in your route.
If you want to make 100mil isk/hour in explo, you gotta do exploration…and hacking, not spending 30% time of doing a site by scanning cans and deciding which is worth and which is not, drolling over all the people behind that’s gonna waste time on your cherry picked sites. Hack every can because what you want is to learn hacking faster and faster, think of 1carbon piece red hack cans to be extra practice. Cargo scanner pvp will have you fail hacks even when you get to lvl V skills and your blackglass implant, cause you’re still trash at hacking reds and spending 1.5 minute in a covert research site for cargo scanning that single magpie can then dying to rats or blowing up , whilst someone who actually learned to hack, will hack a red can in under 15 seconds.
Cherry picking is a form of PVP and I came to like it to make other people and bots in the area I operate in frequent my part of that space less. More sites for me and less income for bots and competition. That’s always good.
It does keep the loot price above sea level, am not against it totally, if there were mechanics in place to prevent it, the market would get flooded in a week. If you dive in with maxed skills and experience, in places like Sansha, sure, every other system is a bubble or a gank waiting, you wanna maximize your time spent there whilst making it harder for others.
From my pov, the more cans you hack at begining, the faster you learn to chew through the hack…in the long term you’ll end up doing red hacks in 5-15 seconds, dive into covert research facilities and do 2-3 cans with your t2 frig ,instead of still struggling or needing a stratios to tank . Scanning cans is the easy part that doesn’t involve any progression.
And bots be bots…at least they clear the lvl 1 data/relic sites that nobody wastes time on and build up everywhere. Not blaming people, the sites themselves are stupid, warp at 150km off the cans then 40km or so between them…even a day1 rookie would skip it for good reasons.
Unfinished site takes hours to respawn and it hurts not your competition but your possible income. Unless you sweep region once and don’t come back.
I made billions despawning cheery picked sites and going back just to hack fresh sites. It takes 20s to pop useless can. Not a lot of effort for a possibility of new. juicy site spawning ahead of you. There is no single reason to cheery pick hacking sites. Unless you want to limit own income.
Not so important in wh, but matters a lot in k-space, where regions and constellations are tiny.
I scan 1 single constellation every day and get several relic sites. I do not care about the rest of the constellation. All that matters to me is that one constellation and it’s always filling up with new Relics.
Site despawn doesn’t take hours either. It’s at most 1 hour.
They must have changed it, a year ago when I was playing, it was about 12 hours. Perhaps thats why last month when I omega`ed again , I found relic loot to be worth 2x less across the board.
It has been 1 or 2 hours for a very long time, not just a year. I have been doing what I am doing for far longer than just a year and sites have always disappeared after an hour or so in that time.
In the games code, somewhere, there’s probably something along the lines of
active_cosmicanomalies = n (+/-) per system\constelation\region
So if I find a nice quiet dead end pipe and go from one end to the other completing every site I can, I’m more likely to get more sites (which I’ve observed when comparing a place I explorer from times when it’s just me and times when there’s a cherry picker around).
Because new sites will spawn.
so my over all money per hour will be greater than if I just run through a pipe and leave sites active, as they won’t respawn as quickly (the despawn after an amount of time but it takes hours, from my observations).
None of this matters if you’re just going to needlejack all over the place though