EVE-Online: Gniess going!

Right, Exploration as a profession arrived in EVE with the Revelations patch a while back. It's a system that spawns useful sites in hidden places, and with a certain set of skills and equipment, you can find them.

I heard that you could find better rocks in hidden asteroid belts than are normally present at a given security level. But the way to find them is by using scan probes, which have a default scan time of 10 minutes. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, except the scan system takes many, many scans. First, you scan with a multispectral probe, which tells you with 100% accuracy if there's anything in a solar system to hunt for. We know that any site will be no more than 4 AU (astronomical unit = distance from earth to sun) from any planet or moon. The probes with the largest range (and weakest strength) have a range of 4 AU. So you plant these probes around the solar system, attempting to cover as much volume as possible, since you can't have a probe within the scan range of another. Then you scan with those. If you don't find anything, scan again. If you find something, it will have a reported accuracy. You warp to the blip and plant a the probe with the smallest range that still covers the deviation reported (there are probes with ranges of 4, 2, 1, and 0.5 AU, each one stronger than the last). Scan again. If you find nothing, scan again. Eventually, you scan with the 0.5 AU probe, and it tells you where the site is.

This could take upward of 25 scans for a weak signal. That's just not acceptable at 10 minutes per scan. So you have to train skills and get equipment to reduce the time. After almost 2 months of training, I had the time down to 240 seconds, which is much better than 600. But then I found out these site are not instances; anyone can find them. So if you find a nice roid belt out in low-sec, anyone else can still scan for you and come smak you. In fact, once you're there mining, I suspect it's easier for them to find you since they can scan for your ship instead of the roids. So I lost interest.

A few months later, a member of our alliance found a monstrous Gniess belt with 1.2 million cubic meters of ore. It was worth around 400 million ISK, which is a lot. It took 7-8 people 3 4-hour long ops to get it all. Then I hauled it in our freighter (2 trips) to a place where it could be refined without loss. Big team effort, lots of money, good fun. So I regained interest, as he left the alliance to head out to 0.0.

My first attempt to find something failed. Partially because I didn't have time to keep trying. Then I tried again today, with two rigs added to reduce my time further to 191 seconds. After 2 hours of scanning, I found another monstrous Gniess belt, which I am currently mining in another window. These site disappear after 72 hours of being entered, so we don't have much time. So I've called in the alliance, and any alliance member can come mine; I just ask a 5% contribution to my corp as a finder's fee.

Then I found out there's a probe launcher with a base time of 450 seconds instead of 600; so I bought one for 42 million ISK. For me, that's a small price to pay to save 55 seconds per scan, which might have saved me 20 minutes today. That will add up if I continue to do exploration; I could also sell it again if I decide to.

I find exploration irritating, but if the designers are going to make the sites special in some way, they have to be hard to find. And since EVE is not dexterity based, that means making it require patience and equipment. The nice part is that the magnitude of what you can find is beyond what a single player can deal with. Again, EVE's attraction comes down to the necessity of working in groups. There aren't more than 2 or 3 people in the whole alliance equipped to explore, so it's a nice feeling to be the one who found this site for everyone.