Yes, but the system is setup to purposefully draw out the time it takes to increase the said status.Uzique wrote:
How exactly does "ratting" help you gain sector status? You mean, killing local NPC pirates?
You get security gains for the highest bounty ship kill within the system every 15 minutes. IE killing a 650k bounty battleship is equivalent to a 0.16% security gain (i believe). It equates to about +.02 security status. You can circumvent the system by ratting in a circle of systems (5 or so systems should be enough, gives you ~.1 security status every 15min), gaining security status from each one. However it's much riskier (warping to/from gates), and your profits won't be great either.
I was -10 (-9.999 for you "pure" -10 bozos) about a month ago, and have since been trying to raise it. It's incredibly mind numbing. It's not easy for a pirate to raise it either, because BS rats aren't common in lowsec, and BC rats give you about half the security raise. It's also much more populated. Getting safe 0.0 as a pirate is rough, so ninja-ing is sometimes the only option. Personally I left my corp and joined some of my mates in a shallow 0.0 in order to whore some rats.
I'm at around -7.1 right now. I'm trying to get to -1.4(?) to get into 0.8 again and start missioning. The sad part is, I wouldn't have to do this stupid grind if profits were decent in low sec. 0.0 bullshittery doesn't interest me therefore Im not really tempted. Also, if the 0.0 profits were decently better, I might be able to stand the BS. However, as it stands, you can make 30-40m an hour per char in empire doing level 4s, something that you don't get very often ratting. Sure there's no exploration or wormholes etc, but you can hardly call those activities cost effective. They're certainly more entertaining, though.
Perhaps they're a bit better now that probing has been dumbed down. But that also means there will be more people probing, and regions will be crowded.