Nothing in Eve rewards based on skill and intelligence that isn't emergent. That's why exploration has sucked for so long. There is no way to do exploration better because it isn't player driven. There is no way to optimize.

The minigame is just another such closed system. Game design FAIL.

Minigames don't reflect the character and capability of people who actually are interested in space exploration. Remember, people who do exploration also do DED sites and follow escalations into unknown and dangerous places.

They aren't your usual highsec pubbies who don't fit a tank or prop mod. They aren't people who think having 10 mining alts is WINNING.

Dumbing down what should be the most interesting and emergent part of the game down is sad but not totally unexpected from people who think the problem is the spreadsheets (tax returns SNARF) not the nature of the element itself.

I get it, you need these crappy games to validate moving to some mobile content. But my god, it's horrible. HORRIBLE.

Thank you for the answer. So you had thought about it, just as I expected (even though I feared otherwise).

Couple of thoughts. I'm all for making hacking/arch more multi-player friendly. My issues are that scanning really isn't. There's no good way to share information with your fleet or corp. Bookmarks make a poor usage since these things disappear after a short period of time. Additionally multiple people scanning a single system is annoying since you end up covering the same ground and if you do different systems then you often end up multiple systems apart and someone ends up having to warp around for what may end up being a poor payout or an already in-progress site.

Exploration should naturally send you places you don't normally go. If you're in hi-sec you should just wander around until you find yourself 15 jumps from home because you kept searching. If I have to go back and get my ship it sucks because I feel tethered to my home base. You've mostly fixed that thankfully. I think exploration will be most successful when the mechanics of it are married with the thematic of wanderlust. I think thematically it will be worst if you just end up making the same circuit twenty times around your home base.

And lastly my biggest issue with exploration as it stands now as a hi-sec profession is that it simply takes too long to find anything even if it's not rewarding. I scan down many times more combat, wormhole and empty ladar sites than I do radar or magnetometric. When I'm in my cov ops looking for exploration sites, even in 0.5, it's rare to find anything worth while which leads to a lot of frustration. You have this new interesting shiny. Please make is so that it doesn't take 3 hours of searching to find a single site worth doing.

I was hesitant about banging my head against yet another door, but here it goes.

This whole hacking mini game would be a much more sensible and soloable feature if the stuff being hacked was being held inside a sealed container which could be hauled, sold, bought, jettisoned, et cetera, and could be hacked once the ship was safely cloaked/docked.

Of course, "sensible" and "soloable" gameplay is not what EVE is about, but I just had to point out the obvious.

The new mini game will take longer and thus will keep the explorer ship exposed for longer.

As i said, "sensible" and "soloable" are not a part of EVE gameplay design.

How exactly is this comment helpful? After the poster has a point that is recognized by many.

Wrong. I did exploring, and in fact the ability to explore is what got me back to the game after an aborted try way before. However, I soon realized it was basically the same ratting combat as everything else, with the added thrill of waiting for a dice-roll to pop the loot -- which is why I didnGÇÖt stick with it. Apparently CCPGÇÖs own metrics showed the same -- that few people were doing exploring despite its inherently interesting potential. I will be getting back into exploring after Odyssey.

I actually hope Odyssey goes further, as my main criticism would be that the changes are too incremental. However, I'm taking their word on it that the 'new' CCP will actually iterate on their initial releases versus abandoning them. For now.

Although there are possible better ways to handle it, I think the loot pinata thing is at least one needed solution in that it gives extra GÇ£utility" and "activity" to a living, breathing partner who isnGÇÖt just a dual-box puppet and is a way to "scale" the reward if more than one person participates, because more people = more cans grabbed. Having a dual person hack probably won't address the goal, since then you now have TWO people with reduced situational awareness instead of a hacker and a lookout. Particularly in lowsec/null.

I always find it odd, the number of people whose main objection is that:

(a) Change will mean the reward is coupled with risk [welcome to EVE?] and/or GÇ¿

(b) That a change means they have to PLAY the game and canGÇÖt just do something else while GÇ£doingGÇ¥ the activity and collect ISK. Taken to the logical conclusion, why not just have full automation so it can give you ISK and you never have to log in at all? Being facetious, but it really is puzzling why someone wants the end result currency without playing the game, when the only logical reason anyone would want the currency is because its the means of exchange in a game they enjoy enough to want to play.

This isn't directly based on the above quote, but I've seen that sentiment coupled with the above attitude pretty frequently.