Low sec: A money maker ripe for the picking
My last couple of trips to low sec didn't exactly go well. The first where I got shot at by the only other person in local but escaped and the second being blown up by a POS defence system that I didn't realise could shoot that far. Third time lucky right?
From my last excursion into null I'd left some stuff in random stations and I ended up using one of these as my home base. It turns out it's a good system to begin exploration from as there's a couple of different "round trip" paths I can use depending on the day and how many people are in the area. There's also a lot of low sec systems in the area and it's these I was going to explore today.
Off I go then. It's worth pointing out that my sleep pattern is pretty messed up mostly due to work so I play at really odd times, again it was fairly early morning and on a Tuesday so there were maybe 16-17000 people online. Quiet then. Most of the systems I hit were completely devoid of people so I scanned and looted all the sites I came across. After 20 minutes I was up to 20 million in cargo. Awesome.
4 or 5 systems in and someone pops into local while I'm scanning. I warily continued and found a data site and began with the first can. Just as I cracked it a ship warps in. Crap. I warped out immediately (managed to grab the loot first) but saw as I was leaving that it was only a Probe. Not so scary. Still, better to be safe than dead and frozen floating in space right?
There was a Relic site in that system too which I'd already scanned down. By this stage of my playing "career" I was pretty proficient at multitasking so usually when I'm in a site I'm already scanning down the next anomaly. This speeds up the process hugely and it's pretty safe to do as long as you keep an eye on local and your overview. So I warped to the relic site and began cracking cans assuming that the probe would appear in a couple of minutes. There were 2 cans left in the previous site plus I assumed the guy was fairly new to scanning so wouldn't be scanning while hacking.
There were 5 cans in this site and I'd hit 3 of them before the guy warped in. This time I didn't bother warping out and he went for one can while I cleaned out the other. After that I already knew the remaining anomalies were combat sites so I jumped to the next system. As I'm in the first relic site I find, the same guy jumps into the system. This is going to turn into a race. I cleared out the site leaving one "carbon can" so the site remained on his scanner and warped over to the next one. Cleaned it out and jumped to the next system.
A minute later and he's there too. I hope he liked the gift I left him. I'd already established by the time he jumped that of the 3 anomalies there were no hacking sites. Next system. He obviously put 2 and 2 together at this point and realised I'd either cleaned out the good stuff or there were no sites because he jumped almost immediately after me. Again, I scanned down and got to each site before he could, leaving the empties and collecting the good stuff.
Unfortunately after that system we parted ways. I went right and he must have gone left (or back) and so my fun was over for the time being. I carried on through another 8 or 9 systems, none of them with hacking sites, before finding a nice juicy system with 4 sites. Yum. Just those 4 sites were another 20 million. My round trip was coming to an end and I was back in high sec by this point. I got back to my home station with 80 million in my cargo hold. Better than null and without the stupid gate camps to boot.
I quickly checked prices online and carted all the loot over to Jita via Amarr. I'm starting to love low sec!
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