I will stop this conversation here.
Mostly for time sake, but I hate to repeat myself over and over again.
No, you do not “realize” that your drones are not on target.
Not only that there is icon for drones STILL on target you left both of them, not only that you fly ship manually, not only that there are multiple ships on your ass, BUT ALSO the ship other drone is shooting at is not aimed by you, so you do not understand that it is shooting something else.
Also, just because you can not multitask, that does not mean a thing.
Not a god damn thing.
I regularly doing that, in my life as in my games.
After a while it is as easy as pie.
“Yes, if” means “not every time”. Which explains some loot missing. Of course the loot in the side containers isn’t as good as the loot in the bio cache but it’s still 5-20 million ISK (randomly) in T5s. And even if we “only” estimate that you miss one side container per pocket (3 pockets) and one is “only” worth 5M, thats 15M missing per Filament you use.
Also you have another problem: In your Gila you can’t loot all the distant containers while fighting the enemies (because you can’t afford to send both of your drones to side-containers that are 60km away), it will cost you additional time, which ruins your efficiency. In the Sacri the I have 84km Drone Range and the first thing I do is locking 2-3 side containers and let my drones open them while fly my combat ship where I want it and begin to shoot the NPCs down. As soon as the first conainer is open I drop an MTU around halfway on route to the next gate and that usually leads to the scenario that I have looted the whole pocket faster than the NPCs are down with the missiles. So in the End I can just scoop the Loot, scoop the MTU and go to the next pocket with all containers looted. This way I can finish T5 Firestorms in 15-17min with all containers looted, even despite the NPCs all having +50% Armor. For Electricals, Exotics, Gammas or Darks I even only need 10-12 minutes because the NPCs have much less HP. Sure, the Filaments are more expensive but I can conveniently run 4 of them in an hour, while I usually stick to 3 when running Firestorms.
Not getting all containers every time would at least explain why you get less loot value than you expect, because most runners try to optimize their runs so they can grab all the loot and that obviously reflects in the AbyssTracker values.
It is not that people sleep on it, as much is “Ah sht, I need 400 days to skill it up”.
It took me one and a half years to get into gila mastery 4.
No way I am dropping that ship now.
And there is other skilling that needs to be done…This game is pay to win, but hard core version.
Well, the Sacrilege is the only ship that can run all Abyssals from T0 to T6 in all weathers with the same rigs and clone. But it’s expensive as hell, requires almost perfect knowledge how to approach each spawn and definitely test your skills when bad spawns with nasty cloud localization combine.
However I do admit I don’t run T6 Firestorms and Gammas in it, the HP Bonus of the NPCs makes it really hard to stay under the time limit. I did test it a few times, but if certain high-HP spawns chain and you need to overheat everything to 90% red, eating Pyro9s and needing a close to perfect flight path… is a bit too much adrenaline for me. But all the T6 where the NPCs don’t get a HP buff, piece of cake.
No problem, I don’t say you should use another. Point is, many people are doing what you do, because it flies so easy. So you will have to live with it’s downsides, that means high prices for the filaments, lower value of the loot and not getting maxloot in every pocket. Every decision has consequences.
Btw. I have never paid anything more than 10bucks a month for this game, which is absolutely worth it. If anyone pays for PLEX or SP or whatever, his own fault. It’s a game. Not a second job. Treat it like that.
The thing that hurts the most (apart from dying) is not optimising your income per run, and filament cost. You can run sites faster which will increase your income but you will have increased costs because of it, you also have the risk of being popped after leaving the abyss more often because of it.
So ideally, choose a weather where the filament is much cheaper than the other options, so for T5 you want to do Firestorm sites or if that’s not an option then Dark sites. Then find a ship that works really well for it so you can loot everything while still being fast enough, not costing a ton and suits your skills. A Gila can do it if you optimise your play style more, a Cerberus is quite good these days and will clear faster (giving you more time to loot everything) BUT it’s a more active play style.
If you use the Gila right it works just fine but it’ll never clear as fast as more active play style ships. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s all choices and consequences to those choices. Optimise your gameplay where it requires more active piloting, swap out one launcher for HML so you can pop the far away caches and use an MTU.
It depends if the 50% is of the number of items, or of their value. If the former then the actual loot drop value could vary widely.
In which case If a person is hauling 4 items and 3 of them are worth 10m ISK and one is worth 500m ISK, then half the time you will only make 20m and the other half you will make 510m. You’d need a lot of such incidents to average 255m ISK.
I saw some points that people raised and I got interested, so I did some killing and this is the result. I failed to count item drops so I tried again.
I did some ganking in Jita and some murdering in surrounding low sec.
14 kills.
3867 items
17,9 Bil all together value of items( data from cargo scanners):
Dropped:
1089 items
Loot value:
2,4 bil
For these 14 kills, I got policed 7 times( HS ganking).
Lost ships are worth 1,2bil, standings correction cost 200mil.
All of that for 1bil loot.
Making content, time spend, doing PVP in low sec against other players, risking it all- just to get 1 bil of loot, from possible 18bil.
Great thing.
Also, I just checked z-kill, number of huge kills with low payout is very visible.
I do not see how can anyone say it is not.
But hey, it is what it is.
Eve online is second monitor game, and now I see why.