Descalation

I tried clearing some highsec anomalies to see how often the escalations and faction spawns occur. So far that they did not happen even once, after about ten or so. So that is essentially useless for anyone. At least I played around with a destroyer, but seriously, what is even the point? Doing anomalies in highsec makes few hundred thousand per hour at most, which is less that L1/L2 missions. And unlike missions anomalies are a limited resource, in that they spawn on their own time are there are rarely more than one per system. And so far there was no mention of anything getting done with highsec anomalies in Odyssey. Which is a pity, because anomalies paying better than missions would encourage travelling around, rather that sitting on a single agent.

I also found an unrated complex and followed an Angel Kickbacks escalation. In a destroyer, which might be reason why this took two hours or so. Unfortunately, no rare drops. The final overseer did not, in fact, drop anything at all, and I got a single piece of T2 salvage from the whole chain. I wonder how unlucky that is. The bounties were marginal, but I suppose it would be fine for a starting player. Although with a two months character I am a starting player by EVE standard.

I get the impression that the combination of low drop rate and high value damages the balance here. Judging by difficulty, highsec escalations are supposed to be early game content, but unless they immediately focus on exploration most players will outgrow the difficulty of these things before they see even a single actually worthwhile drop. So most people, if they do them at all, will do them with zero risk.

The fact that lowsec is not low security but essentially no security, doesn't help, since it puts a cliff for progression, especially if someone doesn't want to multibox a second account as a scout. I wrote about that last time, the rewards do not scale nowhere close with the risk of losing the ship. Actually, the problem might be that the risks are not granular enough, it's either no loss, or loss of the entire ship, its fit and maybe implants. Insurance doesn't really help that much. I suppose the solution here it to make enough ISK so that losing a ship becomes a granular loss. But PvE ships are relatively expensive compared to the money you can make from PvE. And are useless for PvP.