Because I spent the last couple of weeks exploring in high and low sec, I got a little tired of scanning and decided to try another more PVP focused activity. During that time last month’s Rogue Swarm Alert event was in full swing. I had heard before, that this event has some good opportunities to not only make ISK, but also get into fights against other players.

Suspect Mechanics

The idea to get into a fight in a rogue swarm sites is to acquire a suspect flag and provoke another player to attack you in his PVE fit. Once he aggresses you, you can legally shoot back and kill him in your PVP fit. This tactics is also commonly known as suspect baiting and is also often applied on mission runners.

The suspect timer is part of the crimewatch mechanics which defines the rules of engagement in high and low security space. The crimewatch rules are rather complicated and I only want to explain the part that is used for suspect baiting.

The main mechanics used for baiting in high sec is to acquire this said Suspect Timer. Within this timer, any player can shoot you without Concord interfering the fight. As soon as a player engages another player with a suspect timer, the suspect player can fight back without a reaction from Concord.

Once a player attacks another suspect player a five minute Limited Engagement Timer is started. As long as this timer is active, both player can fight each other even if the suspect timer runs out. As long as the fight continues, the engagement timer automatically resets with each attack. Only if both sides disengage, the engagement timer will start to run down.

But how to become a suspect? The easiest way is to steal from a NPC wreck that is owned by another player. These usually show up as yellow wrecks on the overview, opposed to the grey wrecks that are owned by yourself. Stealing any item from a wreck will start a 15 minute suspect timer on the offending player.

Another way is to repair another ship with a logistics ship in high sec. Whenever a ship starts to repair any player (suspect or not) the ship’s pilot will become suspect for 15 minutes. This timer only will count down when the logi player stops repping.

This are the two main mechanics that I used to get into fights in drone event sites. Next I will explain the layout and rewards of the sites and how to get into a engagement with another player.

The Rogue Swarm Alert Site

The rogue drone event sites simply show up on your overview in all high sec system and you do not need to scan them down in order to warp to the site. These sites respawn every couple of minutes and there are usually plenty of them available.

The design of all sites is the same and very simple. It consists of one single room without any acceleration gates. The room contains one hackable container in the middle and will spawn several waves of rogue drone NPCs to protect it. The NPCs are rather weak and you should be able to deal with them in any PVE fitted destroyer or cruiser.

To get to the sites rewards, you need to hack the container with a Data Analyzer. The hacking mini-game is rather difficult for high sec standards and is more like a typical low sec data site. Once you hack it, a rogue drone battleship appears which will drop the event loot once killed. The battleship is a little tougher than the previous NPCs, but with a well fitted cruiser it shouldn’t be a problem. The battleship can drop cerebral accelerators, drone blueprint copies and agency boosters of various types and values.

different items dropped in the event sites

This wreck is now the crucial part of the PVP aspect of the event. Since everybody can warp into the site, you can simply steal other players loot out of the battleship wreck once they kill the battleship. This will give you a suspect timer and enables other players in the site to shoot you.

Next, you will need to wait for the other player in the site to shoot you, before you can engage. Many players get quite angry when you steal their hard-earned loot and attack you shortly after, which usually is quickly followed by the loss of their PVE boat.

Alternatively, you can kill the battleship yourself and wait for another player to steal your loot and become suspect. This does not happen very often, but still sometimes players think they can just quickly rob you and get away. Of course in this case you point the poor guys ship with your Warp Scrambler II and start to shoot him. Sometimes in this scenario you will even get support by other players in the site, who of course can also attack your now suspect flagged opponent.

Both scenarios might of course not happen. That’s when you simple look for another site that is taken by a player and start again. In my experience it doesn’t take more than 3-4 sites before you get into a fight.

Finally, you will also get points for finishing certain objectives in the event sites from the agency. If you acquire enough points (1100 in total) you will get four different battleship skins and finally a crate which contains a fancy drone blueprint that is worth quite a penny.

Fighting the Carebears

So I simply grabbed one of my more or less PVP fitted Stratioses from my hangar, half heartedly fitted it with some additional modules, and off I went to find some sites. Finding them is really easy and there are plenty of other players that run them. I simply waited until the final battleship NPC got killed and stole the loot from the wreck, that btw always appears at the same spot and you can simply sit there and wait for the other player to destroy it. Getting these other guys to aggress me was not that easy. Apparently a Stratios is quite scary and none of the other guys wanted to attack me. So I got a little cheeky and finally stole the loot from a player in a Nightmare faction battleship. That didn’t end so well. The Nightmare simply volleyed through my amour reps and even with a Mid-Grade Crystal Implant set, small signature radius and a Standard Exile booster, my reps weren’t enough. So back to the drawing board to come up with a better fit.

I fitted another Stratios, this time with less blingy gear and additionally bought two Exequror armor logistic ships for my other two accounts to repair me if I got into serious trouble. The idea is to warp the logistic ships on me when there was too much firepower on the field for my little Stratios to handle it. This time it went much smoother. After a couple of sites, I got my first Stabber kill, shortly followed by a naughty Phantasm. A bit later the next Phantasm followed, after it aggressed my in the site, warped off to a Citadel and couldn’t dock there because of his aggression timer.

For the following couple of days, I decided to switch from my Stratios to a Gnosis, which seems to be a lot less scary than a Stratios to most players and is a lot less costly if things go the wrong way. Baiting went quite well for the rest of the week, with the highlights being a Cerberus that landed right on top of me in a site with a suspect flag, a quite tanky Phantasm, and a shield buffer fit Gila that took forever to kill.

But of course there were also a Gnosis loss, when I tried to bait another Nightmare, and a second Gnosis when simply too many other players entered the site that also engaged in a fight.

The Final Bill

So what are the numbers after all this? I spent about 14 hours running sites and baiting. In this time I managed to get on 12 killmails worth around 1,4 billion ISK. During the same time I lost 5 ships ( 2 Exequors + 2 Gnosis + 1 Stratios) worth 670 million ISK. If I hadn’t foolishly tried to bait battleships in my blingy Stratios, the bill would have been much smaller with only 220 million in losses, but I will know better next time.

From the 12 kills, I looted around 190 million ISK in modules. This excludes any event loot that I got out of their ships.

Next to the event loot. I didn’t keep track how much loot I got from the wrecks compared to the loot I managed to steal or loot from sites. However, the loot containing blueprints, boosters, cerebral accelerators and skins came to around 1 billion ISK, which more than covered my losses.

This is actually a very good pay out from the sites considering that this was more a PVP than PVE activity.

Event site PVP is quite engaging and a lot more fun than simply run this very repetitive event sites. With an income of 85 million ISK / h running them, this was also a quite lucrative activity if you don’t consider my losses.

In this last part of my exploration guide I am going to write about my personal experiences exploring in high and low security space running Data and Relic Sites. If you want to learn more about how to find and hack these sites, check out the previous two parts of the guide.

The Ship

First thing to do was to come up with a proper fit for my exploration boat that shouldn’t be too skill point intensive and expensive. The fit should be somehow comparable to what a new player could afford to start his exploration career.

After some fiddling around in Pyfa, I came up with the following Heron fit:

The fit is designed to run Relic and Data Sites in low and high sec, which don’t contain any hostile NPCs. I picked the Heron hull because it has the most mid slots of all T1 exploration frigates, which is great to fit scanning and hacking related modules which are all mostly mid slot modules.

In the high slots we need of course a Core Probe Launcher I to scan down the sites. If you also want to explore in low sec, an Improved Cloaking Device II comes in handy but any other cloaking device will do the job too..

The mid slots contain a Scan Rangefinding Array I and a Scan Acquisition Array I to increase scan strength and reduce deviation of the scanner probes, a 5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive to move faster inside the hacking sites and of course a Data or Relic Analyser. I only ever fit one of them and refit to the other one that is in cargo if required. Since I only explored in high and low sec, refitting in system was never a problem. Finally, we need a Cargo Scanner II to scan and evaluate the contents of the site’s containers.

In the rig slots I fitted a Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II to increase scan strength and Small Signal Focusing Kit II to decrease scanning time..

The low slots can contain either Warp Core Stabilizers I if you want to go to low sec or just Inertia Stabilizers II to align and get into warp faster for high sec exploration.

With my not so great skills, this resulted in the following scanning and hacking stats:

scan strength, deviation and duration

With a cost of 18 mil for the fit, it doesn’t break the bank but still has quite good scanning stats. For low sec exploration the Heron is actually not ideal but I will get to that later.

The Heron in Action

I fitted my new Heron in Jita and off I went to do some serious scanning in high sec. I mostly scanned in the four Caldari high sec regions (Lonetrek, The Forge, Black Rise and The Citadel) with some short visits into Gallente space. Most systems contained between one and three Cosmic Signatures that I eagerly scanned down. And I scanned a lot of them. And some more. I quickly realized that there weren’t a lot of Data or Relic Sites available to discover in high sec. After scanning the cosmic signatures in about 50 systems, I only discovered 7 Relic and 3 Data Sites in total. What was even worse, was the fact that almost none of the Relic Sites contained any valuable loot. I pre-scanned all containers with my Cargo Scanner and only one of the seven Relics had around 1,6 million ISK in loot in it. The other six only contained loot worth less than half a million ISK in total. The Data Sites were a little better with an average of 1,5 million ISK per site in loot. The hacking of the containers is almost trivial in high sec and even with minimal skills you should be able to finish the hacking mini-game in no time.

After around two hours of exploration in high sec, I was able to gather 6 mill in loot out of my 10 sites, which comes to a staggering 3 mil ISK / h. This is very, very low compared to all other ISK making activities I tried so far for my posts.

Maybe there are too many people farming sites in high sec or I just had bad luck, but I decided that this is definitely not worth my time.

Exploration in Low Sec

So off to low sec I went. I mostly scanned in the northern parts of Lonetrek and The Forge and things got a lot better there. There are much more Cosmic Signatures available in almost every system and I hardly ever discover one the hadn’t either a Data or Relic Sites in it. The downside of low sec is, that other players can pretty much shoot and kill you whenever they have the chance and there were plenty of them in local in almost all low sec systems. The trick is to not give them one. I usually launch my probes on the gate and warp off immediately at range to a planet or asteroid belt. As soon as your ship comes out of warp cloak up with your cloaking device. If nobody followed you, you are now kind of save and can scan down the signatures in system. If you find a site uncloak and warp at range to it. Once out of warp lock the containers and run your Cargo Scanner on them. As soon as this is finished immediately cloak up again. Next you can evaluate the contents and identify the ones you want to hack. If you found a good one, decloak and use your MWD to get close to the container and start the hacking mini-game. While working on the container, don’t forget to use your directional scanner to check if a new ship comes up that might be in warp to you. I usually set the dscan range to 1 AU so that no other ship is visible on scan. If a new ship shows up, chances are high that is is in warp to your site. If this happens, close the mini-game and activate your cloak again. You can also activate your MWD for one cycle to pull range from the container.

Another critical moment is when you enter a system. If there is any ship on the other side of a gate that has fast enough lock time, it might just point you or even just kill you with one volley of their guns. That’s why you should fit Warp Core Stabilizers in the low slots to at least avoid getting pointed on a gate. This is actually where the Astero, Stratios or T2 exploration ships are much better for low sec exploration, because they can warp off the gate cloaked. If you have these available cloak up as soon as you break the gate cloak and warp off to any celestial. If you cloak immediately after breaking gate cloak, even an instalock ship cannot lock you fast enough.

In total I spent about 5 hours scanning and hacking 5 Data and 7 Relic Sites in low sec. The total amount of loot I got was 66 million ISK which comes to 13,2 mil ISK / h, which is a lot better than exploration in high sec. Again, Data sites were more profitable than Relic sites and some Relics didn’t contain any valuable loot. However, the average site contained 5,5 mil ISK worth of loot, which is not too bad.

I only had one occasion when a hostile player warped into my site, but I managed to warp off before I got pointed.

Exploration in low sec might be a good activity to make some ISK for a new player. It also teaches you how to avoid hostile players and dodge gate camps. However, you cannot multi box if you have several accounts and it is an activity that requires your full attention. If you just want to make some easy semi afk ISK, exploration might not be the right activity for you.

Exploration in high sec is a completely risk free but also an almost ISK free activity that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody, unless to practice scanning and hacking before heading into low sec.

Month: October 2018

Drone Event PVP