Salvage Upgrades/Changes

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

I personally love Salvaging/Scanning and by definition in game they run under similar paths. So why not make them reflect as such?

Changes on Wrecks:
All Wrecks now Last 3 hours, At the 2 hour marker one of the two events happen:

1 - The Wrecks “Auto Abandon” allowing anyone to loot them and drones to salvage them automatically

Add Salvage Probes:
These Probes can be fitted into Expanded Probe Launchers or Salvage Probe Launchers.
Base Strength 30. Salvage Probe Launchers give a 2x bonus to Salvage Probes Only.
Probes Scan down Wrecks left by NPCs or Players. Can be ONLY scan “Abandoned Wrecks” or “Player” only. It can not scanned flagged wrecks, this is to help balance and prevent a cheaper way to scan players down.

Salvage Probe Launchers - High CPU Usage like Cloaking unless on designated ship (ALL BELOW Salvage Ships).

OR!!

Add a Medium Slot or High Slot that Changes DSCAN that when you scan wrecks down to 5% it will than allow you to warp to them or within 100km to them. (Does NOT allow warping to players, only abandoned/non flagged wrecks/player wrecks) This is and should not be used as a way to Dscan players, I just cant think of ways to prevent that off hand

2 - They are harvested by rogue drones (Despawn)

After multiple wrecks are “harvested” by the rogue drones within a random amount of time. it will than cause one sites below to spawn, based on size and type of wrecks harvested during that time.

Rogue Salvage Sites (Cosmic Signature → Drone Beacon → Site Type)
A Beacon that Rogue Drone use to mark wreck sites for later use or their salvage yards.

These sites are just drone clean up sites with Wrecks
<Small/Medium/Large> Battlefield - Small/Medium/Large Wrecks Scattered in a 50km/100km range. No Threat. Drones may warp in but not aggressive.
<Small/Medium/Large) Junkyard - Small/Medium/Large Wrecks Scattered in 50km Range. Rogue Drones Threat (Possible T2 Wreck from Rogue Drone)
<Large/Massive> Deconstruction Site - Medium/Large Wrecks within 30km Range. Large Rogue Drone Threat. Rogue Drone structure with Salvage and possibility of T2 Salvage. (Can Lead to Escalation of a Drone Construction Site)
Drone Construction Facility - Small/Medium Wrecks within 20km Range. Large Rogue Drone Threat. Destroyable Building with Salvage

Skills Changes:

Material Reclamation: New Skill
Skill at maximizing the chance of obtaining more salvage when using Salvagers
10% Chance per Level to obtain 50% more Salvage.

-This skill will work like Mining Critical Bonus. Where at max skill you have a 1% chance by default, than below ships will increase that chance

Ore Hauler name change to Ore Support Ships (Since Noctis/Salvaging aren’t haulers)
Ore Hauler → 1 = Frigate Noctis (Mentioned Below)
Ore Hauler → 2 = Destroyer Noctis (Mentioned Below)
Ore Hauler → 3 = Noctis / Frigate Covert Noctis (Mentioned Below)
Ore Hauler → 4 = Battleship Noctis (Mentioned Below)
Ore Hauler → 5 = Noctis T2

New Ships (ORE)
All Salvage Ships with the exception of the Battleship Noctis, get the following Salvage ROLE:

50% Bonus to chance to Salvage amount
(So again similar to mining crit you get up to about 2.25% with just skill and ship)
37.5% Probe Strength for SALVAGE probes

–
Frigate Salvage Ship (Normal)
-Venture Design
-Ore Hauler Skill

-Frigate Size
-3 High
-4 Medium
-3 Low

Traits:
Ore Hauler Bonus (per skill level):
5% Reduction in Salvager duration (25% max)
10% Salvager Range (7.5k for T1, 9k for T2)
30% Tractor Beam Range and Velocity

Role Bonus:
5% Bonus to Salvage Difficulty

Drone Capacity/Drone Bandwidth - 15m3 Salvage Drones

–
Frigate Salvage Ship (Covert)
-Venture Design
-Ore Hauler Skill / Covert Ops Skill

-Frigate Size
-3 High
-4 Medium
-3 Low

Traits:
Ore Hauler Bonus (Per Skill level):
5% reduction in Salvager Duration
5% Reduction to Core and Combat Scanner Probe Deviation

Covert Ops Bonus (Per skill level):
20% Reduction in Cloaking Devices CPU requirement
10% bonus to Core and Combat Scanner Probe Strength
1% Reduction to Probe Scan Speed

Role Bonus:
2+ Bonus to ship warp core strength
No Targeting Delay of Wrecks After Cloaking Device Deactivation
-Can Fit Covert Ops Cloaking Device

No Drones

–
Destroyer Size Salvage Ship
-Smaller than Noctis(Allows in more Warp Gates)
-Dedicated Salvage Skills
-Outrider Design
-Ore Hauler Skill

-8 High
-3 Medium
-3 Low

Traits:
Ore Hauler Bonus (Per Skill Level):
5% Reduction to Salvager Duration
30% Tractor Beam Range and Velocity
5% Tractor Beam Duration

Role Bonus:
5% Salvage difficulty reduction

Capable of Carrying and using 25m3 Drone Bit

–Everyone says “Use a destroyer”, this ship is designed to have tractor bonuses to allow easier and faster pulling of wrecks to the player. It’s made to allow a more efficient salvager that can go into those spaces Noctis can’t. Also would allow more agile salvagers to travel since Noctis are slow (BUT do carry alot of space)

–
Battleship Size
A ship designed to support massive salvage operations and for the nomad salvage fleets. The biggest benefit is it has a fleet hangar so for the nomads you can fly this with your ships to go place to place. Also can act as a Repair Platform to support the operations. Has no Weapon Hard points so only defense it has is Drones.

-The Orca of Salvaging
-Fleet Hangar Bay + Ship Maintenance Bay
-High Natural EHP (Like the Orca)

-8 High
-5 Medium
-4 High

Trait:
Ore Hauler Bonus (Per Level):
5% bonus to Ship Cargo
20% bonus to Remote Armor/Shield Booster Repairer (100% Max)
60% Remote Armor Repairer/Shield Booster Optical Range and Fall off (300% Max)
10% Bonus to armor Plate (50% Max)
10% Bonus to Drone HP and Damage (50% Max)

Role Bonus:
50% Salvage drone Range and Speed increase
200% Salvage Range Increase
250% Tractor Beam Range Increase
100% Bonus to Tractor Beam Velocity
90% Reduction to Effective Distance traveled for jump fatigue
-Can fit 3 Command Burst Module
50% bonus to Command Burst Area of Effect Range

T2 Noctis
-Noctis got a small upgrade to support Deeper more Covert Salvage missions, mainly recommended for those deep space that you want to discreetly move in salvage the wrecks and leave.

OR

-Noctis Upgrade for Fleet Support while salvaging.

-Higher EHP (2x Noctis T1 EHP)
-Cloak? or Fleet Hangar Bay

-8 High Slots
-4 Mid Slots
-3 Low Slots

Traits:
Ore Hauler Bonus (Per Level):
10% Reduction to Tractor Beam Duration (Max 50%)
100% bonus to Tractor Beam Range and Velocity (Max 500%)
10% reduction in Salvage Duration (Max 50%)
5% bonus to Salvage Drone HP and Speed
5% Bonus to Salvage Drone Range (100km Max)
20% Salvage Range Increase (12km Max)

Role:
90% Reduction to Effective distance Traveled for Jump Fatigue

1 Like
2

I am not about to flag 200 wrecks as I wipe out an L4. Even if you could probe them down you couldn’t warp to them anyway if there were still in an active mission. You’d have to take the mission gates just like everyone else. And if that mission gate required a key, item, or had ship restrictions, you still couldn’t.

4

Ok let me try this again.. thing glitched out last post..

Flagged for the purpose of this post is “Non Abandoned Wrecks”.

As for mission gates, they disappear the wrecks will stay there.

5

Yes they do, AFTER the mission has been turned in. If a player is still running the mission or doesn’t turn it in for a while, the gates will still be there.

6

Yeah, that is what I meant. I think we are having a communication issue here…

I am now unsure what your original post was about.

7

Long story short, as with anything else in EVE, it would be abused and exploited in ways you haven’t even thought of yet.

8

I am aware and I tried to think of most ways to prevent it.

“Flagging” in the purpose of this was “Owned Wrecks” so until they are abandoned or auto abandoned you cant scan them down in this manner.

So unless you abandon your wrecks in a mission or there is a glitch they cant scan you down via that.

As for Player wrecks.. I’d say that one could be but would need a balance tweek.

9

I’m all for expanding salvaging…

11

I would love to see some better salvage gameplay, value and ships!

I just don’t think salvaging random other player’s salvage is such a good idea.

For a big reason: despawn mechanics and inconsistent and unfun timer-based gameplay.

Let me explain:
Despawn mechanics are a necessary evil in games that ideally only happen when players do not notice, because it feels awful, jarring (and not to say ‘unimmersive’) to have a site you’re doing disappear into thin air.

Games should totally avoid having relevant objects despawn while players want to interact with it, in my opinion.

Sadly despawns are needed because for example our wrecks cannot linger in space forever.

Luckily right now salvagers have minimal impact from despawn mechanisms, because we mainly have access to ‘fresh’ wrecks only when you create your own wrecks or cooperate with a friend who makes wrecks for you.

This means players can salvage it (and havea full two hours to do so) or ignore it in which case these wrecks become irrelevant to the game.

Those leftover wrecks are then in space until their despawn timer after which they disappear, but they most of the time have become inaccessible and thus irrelevant far before then. Impact of despawns on players is thus minimal.

Your suggestion is to make these ‘about to despawn’ objects relevant to the game by allowing players to warp to them.

This means noticed and annoying despawns of valuable resources will occur much more frequently.

And not just that, you also want to have an arbitrary time limit before players can warp to those wrecks that used to be largely irrelevant but are to be made relevant now.

Let me go through a few scenarios I’d encounter as salvager:

  1. I see a bunch of wrecks and want to salvage. I reship into my salvaging ship, fly back and the wrecks despawn right before I get there and feel bad.
  2. I get to the wrecks and start looting/salvaginf but they despawn as I do that and feel awful.
  3. I see a bunch of wrecks but for some arbitrary reason my special wreck probes cannot lock on to them because the wrecks are ‘not old enough’ whatever that means, and am disappointed → this happens 66% of the time with your proposed delay of 2 hours and 3 hours before despawn

Inconsistent and disappointing gameplay involving frequent despawns and frequent disappointed gameplay is what is introduced by the ability to ‘probe wrecks’.

And if you ask me probing wrecks is not even needed to get wrecks!

Currently to find wrecks we can:

  • create our own wrecks
  • cooperate and ask a friend or corp member to bookmark wrecks they create
  • bookmark sites that are ran by others to salvage their wrecks without their permission
  • combat probe player ships and MTUs to get locations of sites to salvage

And the best part?

Most of these existing methods result in freshly created wrecks that are guaranteed not about to despawn just as you get your salvager to the site, unlike random wreck fields you saw somewhere on dscan and might have been generated hours ago.

My own favourite wrecks aren’t any of these though, but are the remains of player skirmishes involving fleets of T2 ships. The blue salvage of those wrecks is worth tens of millions of ISK, if not a hundred for a 5-15 minute salvage job.

This brings me to my main concern about salvage gameplay:

Salvage is usually not worth it.

New ships for salvage, new skills for salvage, new ways to get to the tempting wrecks you see on your directional scanner… it is all pointless when I spend a lot of time earning less than I’d get mining ore in HS in a Venture.

Yellow salvage is not worth much. And ever since the exploration sov upgrades made more salvage enter the game than before the price of salvage has been dropping even further.

I love the Noctis, it’s a great ship for it’s role.

I sold mine because it’s role is pointless in the current salvage economy.

The Noctis doesn’t need a fix and we don’t need new salvage ships; it’s the salvage economy that needs attention to make salvaging a viable playstyle again.

The main salvage problem is that it’s value is directly coupled to the loot table of one of my other favourite activities: relic exploration.

As long as relic sites keep injecting the same salvage into the game economy as salvagers I don’t think the act of salvaging can ever become valuable again, unless it is changed to produce so much salvage that relic exploration stops being valuable, which is equally problematic.

My own suggestion to fix salvaging therefore is to decouple the relic and salvage loot table.

A couple of ideas to do that:

  • split the salvage loot table in half, one comes from salvage, the other from relics
  • similar, but with also a number of them dropping from both, where the unique ones will become valuable bottlenecks making both activities valuable

Making salvaging worth it would be my first prio when it comes to salvage updates.

Besides that I would not say no to new salvaging ships, especially a new T2 salvage frigate as an upgrade to my own salvage Inicus would be very welcome.

I just do not think the idea of being able to probe leftover wrecks of others is a good idea.

I’d love to get salvage changes though!

12

They could buff the loot tables for all NPCs - especially drones.

13

I think loot value is fine to be honest, especially as looting usually just means deploying an MTU and grabbing it and the loot at a later time for some easily extra millions per site.

It’s the act of salvaging that suffers from a lack of value. I’d still loot sites, just not spend time salvaging them.

14

Salvaging was wrecked (pun intended) when they started putting rig materials in Data/Relic sites.

But it made Data/Relic sites worth doing and rigs got a lot cheaper, both of which are probably good things.

1 Like
15

Fair enough.

I am a little confused though you said “No new salvage ships” but then said a new T2 Salvage as a upgrade would be very welcome. am I misreading this? do you want one or not lol.

As for probe, it was one of 2 options. the other was making scan sites as a clean up.

As for your scanning wrecks, you wouldnt even know the wrecks are there till they become abandoned, so unless a player manually abandons or it auto does it you wouldnt see them. I do understand that could be frustrating you warp in and they are despawning cause you caught them last few minutes. I was also thinking it could be used as bait to lure people because someone salvaging like that warps in and bam jumped. I mean it was a double bladed edge, I contemplated wrecks there for 3 hours, during that final hour if another player is near it suspended despawn till they warp away. I am just unsure how the back door code would even handle that.

As for the drops from salvage.. possible could look at it RNG gives random ore it takes to make ships so it gives a little more to the worth of it.

16

How so?

We already see wrecks on dscan, we just cannot warp to them if there’s nothing else like a site, ship or bookmark to lock on to, which is what I assume triggered the request for salvage probes: unreachable wrecks.

Those wrecks will still be there, visible and unreachable on the directional scanner for hours until an arbitrary timer says you may now warp to them.

I often see wrecks on dscan and use those to tell for example in which site the Ishtar that is on tether now was ratting just a minute before I entered system, or which belt the miner was at.

Seeing wrecks on dscan can be valuable information even if you cannot salvage them.

And your suggestion doesn’t change that a lot, you will still not be able to scan the majority of the wrecks you find as they are ‘not old enough’.

17

Maybe change or create loot specific to relics, so it wont mess with salvaging

18

There was relic loot but it was useless, so not worth anything. So the relic loot needs to be used to manufacture something so that it has value.
Also salvaging is tedious so no-one did it so when ninja salvaging was a lucrative trade, because salvage was expensive rigs were also expensive.

I don’t think we want to go back to relics being worthless and rigs being expensive, so if you want to make salvage worth doing then it needs to either drop a lot more materials or materials for some other part of the manufacturing chain which are rare enough to make it worth doing but not useful enough to balloon the cost of something which most capsuleers think is essential.

It’s not an easy balance to find.

19

I very much like the idea of abandoned wrecks contributing to the spawning of rogue drone sites. That gets a huge thumbs up from me

1 Like
20

I was thinking probe scanning not DSCAN when i said wont effect much or see them but I did put both on my original so I will have to rethink that one.

1 Like
21

I mean I say it just increases chance of how many materials and quite possibly what i mentioned earlier.. Change the “Metal Scraps” to be RNG on extra ore or materials when refined to give a chance of random extra useful things. Ship is made of Iso why not get some iso back or other material instead of just Titanium.

1 Like
22

Id like to see more use of Scrapmetal reprocessing. Be wonderful if we can reprocess salvage (not just modules) down into even more base components. I use it round out any missing minerals I need. Altho, I imagine module reprocessing makes a bulk of minerals for null-sec.

Additionally if systems has alot of destruction happening in system, especially NPCs. It could spawn “Wreck sites” or “Debris Field” of a variety of ship hulls.

Then again there is always ninja salvaging or getting contracts from mission runners to salvage on their behalf.

2 Likes
New ship type