Odyssey Odds And Ends

We're heading into the first weekend of Odyssey and I thought I'd just jot down a few odds and ends I'm thinking about going based on my experiences so far.

Exploration - I ran another relic site last night for 6.3 million.  Two of the eight spawns were bugged though.  I don't know if that was because the system cores were 50/10.  The cans whose cores were rated 70/10 worked fine.  Of course, I heard reports of instability on TQ around the same time, so who knows what actually happened.  For those interested, I spent 25 minutes running the site.  I'm at the point with the new probe system that I can scan down a site in less than 3 minutes.  The system still feels awkward when I'm resizing the probe ranges so I expect to improve on that performance in the future.

Jonny Pew has videos up on his first impressions of relic and data sites in low sec.  I watched the one on data sites and it was pretty good.  Then again, I like Jonny's work in general.

Low sec sales - After a pause at the beginning of the week I'm starting to see sales again.  I'm looking to expand my product line to include liquid oxygen.  I hear that's pretty popular.

Datacores - I'm currently deciding which agents to deal with.  I know that I'll have to sell the datacores in high sec, but for purposes of the low sec experiment as long as the agents are based in low sec systems that will count.  That does eliminate a level 4 agent, but since I set the rules on this experiment, I'd just cheat myself if I broke them.  I'll just have to keep track of the ones obtained from the datacore farming from the ones obtained through exploration.  Hopefully I'll have the operation up and running sometime this weekend.

Ice Mining - I've gone out ice mining twice this week, piling up 31,000 m³ of ice.  The first location of the anomaly was nice, 24+ AU from the star gates.  By this time the ore site should have respawned.  I wonder if the location is static or if the site moves around the system.

Even at my minimum level mining I have a lot of product to move.  I'll try to sell the liquid oxygen in Molden Heath.  The other products I may package together with the datacores and sell in Rens.

Concurrent users - For the first time I'm witnessing daily PCU numbers over 50,000 on non-holiday weekdays when I visit Eve-Offline.  So far each day's PCU since the expansion has exceeded 53,000.  Before the expansion, 50,000 was only exceeded on the weekends.  Is that bots, an influx of multiboxers from WoW, or could Odyssey rival the success of Retribution?  Looks like the subject for a post in a couple of weeks after the numbers firm up a bit.

Bots - Since I'm known for my coverage of the War on Bots, I have some sad news.  No tears.  I didn't really expect any, but I think a lot of people were hoping.  While I don't have access to the forum, I'm sure all the Red Guard users got hit with a $25 upgrade fee.  And I wonder if some of the changes in PvE combat are affecting some ratting bots.  I'll look more over the weekend but I didn't see any unified inventory sized event hit the botting forums this year.