BB 42 – Eve In Review – Exploration

From the Freebooted BB 42 initial post:

“A gaming universe as vast and unique as EVE Online is constantly evolving and the experience is different for every participant. Conventional games review techniques cannot possibly hope to provide an accurate measure of every aspect of EVE’s gameplay. However, with a community initiative like the Blog Banters, we have the resources to deliver the most thorough and up-to-date review ever.

By combining the experiences of contributors from across the EVE metasphere, we get a wealth of opinions from veterans and rookies alike. We’ll be able to combine input from faction warfare specialists, wormhole residents, null-sec warriors, missioners, pirates, industrialists, roleplayers, politicians and more to paint a complete picture of the health and progress of EVE Online in its current Retribution incarnation.

Who better to review EVE Online than those who know it best?”

For this review I’ll be focusing on one of my favorite aspects of Eve: Exploration. By any means would I consider myself an expert on the subject, but it’s something I got a lot of experience in, especially the last six months or so when I moved into a C2 wormhole. This is by no means a tutorial, but a review of sorts of this fascinating side of Eve.

What is exploration

From the Eve Wiki : Exploration is the art of scanning a solar system for Deadspace signatures that do not normally appear on a ship’s scanners or overview. These Deadspace zones are designed to reward players for the additional work required to reveal them.

An explorer searches for sites in space, these can be gas clouds, archeology sites, a hidden belt filled with valuable ore, waiting to be mined, or a combat site. They all need different tools to be exploited, so an explorer needs quite a few skills (in game as real life) needs to be diverse. All sites need some combat skills, the lower you get in security status (not your own, but the system’s sec stat), the harder these sites and the ‘rats’ in them become. And since Retribution the enhanced AI also applies to complexes found with exploration.

Continue reading BB 42 – Eve In Review – Exploration

Scanning Tutorial

This links is a link to a post by Tigerears from November 2011, and early this week I somehow came across this excellent tutorial. I feel a bit noobish that I didn’t know about the ALT key earlier ! Tried it out last night and it saves so much time ! So here we go :

http://www.tigerears.org/2011/11/28/how-to-scan-the-penny-ibramovic-way/

Exploration Luck

This past week I finally found a few useful radar sites. The magnometric ones are very crappy. If you’re lucky you get 50k of bounties and a few salvage bits and pieces. The radar ones are handy though, you get the invention decryptors that you can either sell, or use for your own invention jobs. The gravimetric ones can be nice, as long as it’s not a small belt, the rocks are so tiny in there, they pop with almost one hulk cycle.

hidden_serp

As you can see below on the somewhat spooky image, I also found a large kernite / omber belt that we mined clean ! And when I say large I am not kidding. The omber rocks were of the gold and silver variety and all had 30k omber in them. The kernite wasn’t too bad either.

kernite_site

Now with Apocrypha 1.1 though, scanning has become a bit of a chore. The new sphere graphics literally make my eyes hurt after a while :(. That’s a shame, because the other improvements, like the id tag, are very nice. I hope they reverse that decision. How that ever made it past Q&A is beyond me to be honest. Just use it for a while and you’ll see that it’s not exactly an improment. Same goes for the POS shields by the way…