Hats off to CCP

TLDR: I explain the greatest part of Oddyssey is the data/relic site rat removal, and blow CCP.

When a newbro jumps into EVE for the first time, he has basically 3 paths. You could call them carrier paths. These are tasks he does to acquire wealth to buy neat looking space rides.

Miner,  combat pilot or industrialist. That’s about it.

EVE to me is the ability to reinvent yourself, to do something different just cause. CCP knocked Odyssey out of the park because of one simple change.

Removing the rat spawns in Data(radar) and Relic (mag) sites.

This simple little change will bring and keep more players in this game than any other. Here is why.

I don’t know if rat removal was a stroke of genius or pure coincidence but its effects are already being seen by the player base.  I’m not talking about high sec, who cares about that place anyway. I’m talking about Null.

Previous to this expansion Null sec was a wasteland of hotdrops, ring kissing renters and swaths of unused systems. None of that has changed. Those dicks are still there, but now they happen to have content for every adventuring n00b in the game. Data and Relics sites.

I have personal experience with how it was in the past. My dream of flying around solo in the lawless regions of space was realized when I spent 5 months in Syndicate space. This space was 0.0 without SOV. Simply sending a small cloaking scout and exploring lead to no profit what so ever. The anoms and sigs I came across couldn’t be done in a solo little cloaking scout. I needed something much larger to take out the rats that guarded the data/relic sites. But the larger the ship, the harder it was to move from system to system.

Not only that, but I had to deviate the training of my character, away from scanning, hacking, cloaking, and my passion at the time invention. (hay I’m not proud, but we have all been there k?) This made me focus on combat skills instead of exploring skills, which was what I really wanted to do in the first place.

This left me with  a very lame and time consuming way of exploring. I had to find the sites with my little exploring ship then bookmark the site. Then travel back to wherever my larger combat vessel was stored, my case it was a Domi. Then somehow manage to move my larger combat vessel through some of the scariest gates in the game. Once I arrived on the data/relic site, I had to kill the rats. If that wasn’t challenge enough, I had to avoid the roving bands of pvpers who frequented syndicate space. A lone domi doing sites was sure to call attention of a cloaked hunter, and it did.

 My only recourse was to warp out of the data/relic site and cloak up.   Sometimes the hunter would get bored and wander off, other times he would just stay there and camp me. Worse sometimes the site would simply de-spawn. I then had to start the process over again, but still had to get my domi back to my staging system again. UGG!

The bitter vet in me says “EVE is HARD, it’s supposed to be hard!” but what fun is that for newbros?

Now comes along Odyssey. The rats are gone! The pain in the ass of moving my combat ship from system to system is gone. Now it’s just the glory of finding data/relic sites in strange places, and escaping with the loot. The need to train crazy amounts of ship skills, combat skills, and whatever other skills are needed to clear out Null rats.

Oddyssey brought us a new profession, the adventurer! A profession completely independent of combat skills or worse.. mining skills.

A newbro out the gate can take his scanning ship and head to parts unknown and return with treasure untold! The only real factors that fight against him now are his imagination and will to scan.  Sure he needs to focus his hacking/archeology skills, but he doesn’t need to fire a shot. This is exploring and being rewarded for it.

You have a new solo profession unreliant on his ability to fight off rats, master extensive market schemes , master cryptic financial systems or worse ring kiss his way into a Null blob. He is a man alone that can make his own way.

I envy how these kids have it so easy these days, but I’m happy to have something that will bring and retain new blood.

Nice work CCP.