Scanning For Blood in the Ether…

~or “100 Mil ISK for Just One of Them Huh? Hmmmm…”

I love exploration… just not in Empire space is all. You see grew up and I live in a space where 'exploration' really did used to be an absolute daily necessity of life. I say used-to-be ‘cause CCP in their infinitely (un?)wiseish ways felt it was for the Good of Th' Game to remove almost ALL o’ the Mystery of Space by forcing on us… umm, I mean gifting us with… the Discovery Scanner. IE very little is left that one has to actually work to FIND in space… All the Sekret and Misstearious Places out in the black now show up with Huge Flashing Multicolored Signs for all to see… and in most cases, warp directly to… what crap…   =\

Anyhoo… Scanning used to be necessary for all kinds of :stuff:. Locating the daily holes, your static and all of the up to 5 random holes that can spawn in any Anoikis system… and pinpointing your Combat sites, Ore sites, Gas Sites… ALL of them used to need to be meticulously scanned down to 100%, bookmarked and then, oh the horror, manually copied as physical ‘items’ to your cargo bay then dropped inna can or a POS mod in order to be shared with yer corpmates via even moar manual copying then re-deposited in cans or POS mods for the next guy… ah the good ol days huh?  =]

I know I know, the Discovery Scanner 'supposedly' made it easier for noobs to ‘see’ what all the fuss was about over Exploration… cause if you dunt know it could out there, how would you know to go look for it Hmm? Uh… I thought that was what the tutorials were for… to TEACH that there’s good stuff 'hidden' out there that you really should learn how to SEARCH for… I mean what a world it would be IRL if every deposit of gold or silver or OIL in the earth had had a big ol holographic burning bush of a SIGN rotating over it… just how fast would ALL of it been dug up? EONS ago?

OK rant over…  for now.

Anyhoo, so I never really got into Exploration in Empire Space because of the aforesaid moving into Anoikis early in my Evelife and washed my hands of the unwashed masses who inhabit the crowed noisy spaces outside of our mostly quiet, often hellishly dangerous, but always highly lucrative wormhole star systems… I did all my scanning there, and still do…

But I saw this Dev Blog, All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter - Data Sites, Expeditions and more by CCP RedDawn. In it he details some moar (!!!) of the coming changes in Phoebe… changes that affect Exploration and Expeditions (AKA Escalations).

Some nice stuff here too, one thing I really really like… all of the Agents have been taken out back and given a stern talking to about their talkative habits… IE they are much less chatty now… good. And stuff like lowering the amount of the most common (lowest value it is assumed) drops in sites in Hisec. The frequency of Faction POS BP and ‘Optimized’ items drops is increased and Faction Materials and Industrial Goods drops have been added… Hmm? Wait, what? New Drops have been added you say? What New Drops? Oh you mean these New Drops… here;

(click to embiggen)

Now, being the lets-get-down-to-brass-nanoribbins kinda guy I am I said to myself, “Self, I wonder what these New Drops are worth… you know, ISKwise.” So, I googled on over to EVE Central and did a quick chart, yes, the Excel Spreadsheet you see above (go figure).

So, what I determined was (1) that the Blood Raiders are the faction to scan for because, (2) three of the highest ISK value items are Blood Red… and even at a quick sell of potentially 66m/15m/13m ISK for these items it might just really worth the effort and time… remember this is in 1.0 to 0.5 space FFS!

Now add to this that CCP RedDawn says… 
“What this means is that the percentage chance of finding some lovely shimmery-like-things will be slightly higher.
Moreover, the volume decrease of the most commonly dropped items means that you’ll be making fewer return trips to offload your wares.” 

And, most intriguing of all for me... 
“We’ve also added all of the Data and Relic exploration sites found in Null Security space to Wormhole Class 1, 2 and 3 systems.”

So… beside the increased scanning I am sure we are going to be doing in any connecting C1,C2 & C3s we find… I might, I just might actually INTENTIONALLY spend some time in Hisec after Nov 4th, or at least pop out occasionally and if I perhaps to find myself in Blood Space, I just might pop a probe or 8… Yup, I just might at that.   =]

Fly Wreckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=