So ... what's the point in Exploration?

I mustve gone through 20+ Null systems looking for relic sites, and over an hour of gameplay.

Not a single one found.

Could someone explain the reason behind this total waste of time, and why I’d rather be looting T5 abyssals than this sh!t ?

Because you aren’t the only one doing exploration…

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I know right

Even with a low population, it’s an utter waste of time

And Im up in Tenal, of all places …

Thats mad. where are you exploring? what ship you in? what skills do you have?

Tenal, Astero, max skills

Explore in wormholes or low sec. There’s plenty of sytems out there for exploration. You checked 20 out of about 6,000…

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Nah, tbf you are exploring the arse end of nowhere, there should be one or two… im down south, plenty of ghosties, sleepers, people are lazy af around here.

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what I thought too …

Someone has already been cleaning them out.

Its pretty simple :smiley:

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The point is to provide content (aka. targets) for other players.

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Of course, but the respawn rate could do with a little work I find…

In any case, I went screw this and found a wormhole, much better in there.

A lot of C1-3 are abandoned

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yeah the one I found wasnt, but they were out in vargurs and didnt seem to care my presence ^^

Aren’t they respawning immediately somewhere else in region when completed/despawned?

I believe that op is exaggerating up to straight up lying, in 20 nullsec systems there must have been at least one, that is not possible.

Yes, the signatures in null aren’t plenty usually, but last time I was doing exploration as a main income activity (which was in 2018 I admit) I was able to get about 1b to 2b after few days of exploration in single region.

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It can happen. Just depends how busy the region is.

Nope, not lying.

Ok weird.

Wait, I think there are regions without relic sites, drone lands, were you exploring there perhaps?

I did that too in 2022, out of curiosity, I found nothing and it was empty of people.

But in whs is kinda random, completely random, too much scanning… too many sites with rats if you are in an exploration frigate that’s a problem.

Low sec and high sec were almost the ame ISK to my surprise, because surprisingly I found less sites in low sec.

I got many T3 bpcs in whs, when I couldn’t clear the sites then corpies and friends cleared for me.

I would recommend always carrying a handful of Noise Filaments in case you don’t like where you are for whatever reason.

It sounds like you were in someone else’s shadow. Explo is all a numbers game. Sometimes you get unlucky, but on average it is very good.

One other thing you can do, since sites respawn throughout the Region (citation needed) you can go through and scan all the sigs you see. Now when you go back through it you will quickly catch any new sites. (Just don’t log out and/or have your client crash)

Admittedly this is more for things like events sites, but there you go.

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I would like to say that i am a returning player. I played for about 50 million skill points starting in 2014 and quit for about 3 or 4 years. I have maxed out scanning skills and a level 5 covert ops frigate. I had enough isk to buy a plex so i thought i’d see how things have changed.

exploration is boring. I scanned into Thera from hisec using the pathfinder website data. from thera, i scanned 3 anomalies, jumped into a c3 found by visual identification, then scanned 7 more anomalies. i was so bored by this tedious task that i really just want to give my account away and never play again.

i spent so much time scanning (finding 5 wormholes and a bunch of sleeper data and relic sites that i can’t explore in covops at all in any way), but i decide to take a wormhole back into k-space. pops me out in low sec 3 jumps from jita where i originally started. i scan the only unknown anomaly to find a data site that i can explore. warp to the AEGIS Capital Ship Security Facility and get blown up by some dumb mine that wasn’t on the overview panel within a few minutes.

this exploration gameplay has no mystery. no objective. no puzzle. no story. no challenge. it’s just tediously traveling a lot to get to a minigame. for a solo player this tediousness is compounded because solo players are in competition with whole orgs that split up the tedious mapping to get to the soloable relics/data sites way faster. so solo players have to map even longer to get lucky enough to beat the orgs to a suitable site.

I’m definitely ready to put this game back away, but here is some positive feedback:

  1. make scanning fun. after scanning 7-10 anomalies with max skills, im bored.
    a) reveal a story line or clues by scanning. following clues to specific areas and solving puzzles along the way would be entertaining and a way to explore the lore. I still have no idea what amarr or sleepers or pirate factions are all about. what is AEGIS?
    b) balance solo scanning against group scanning by adding add a key or craft to open a gate that gives solo players a leg up against groups. why not add a non-guarded information only hackable to a C6 wormhole that provides entertainment to a solo player that a group org wouldn’t find time for?
    c) update the scanning mechanic to something more challenging. moving a ball around in 3d space is not challenging, it’s tedious. i think it’s odd that there is no probe scan history. these 8 probes scan an area, readjust and totally drop all information about the previous scan. maybe make the scanning less time consuming and make the destination more important.

Id be cool to mix combat and hacking in hisec. sorta wondering what use i have for a stratios. I just dont ever want to spend 3 hours scanning ever again.

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