Wormholes

There has to be a balance between risk and reward for PVE, and between PVP and PVE.

Risks for competent carebears who have decent probe alts and a basic grasp of maths is, prior to Hyperion, about zero. prior to the removal of API kill logs from wormholes, there was always a risk of Blood union doing a logoff trap and scuttling your escalation bear quad. Now, almost zero chance as long as you don't religiously sign on every day at the same time for 3 weeks in a row and are coincidentally on someone's watch list.

The supporters of this change are, in my opinion, not thinking this through in depth. Proximally, yes, this does increase risk in jumping a wormhole, all the way from C1 through C6 space, as only frigs get to spawn more than 0% of the time in jump range.

lets be honest, fighting on highsec is dull. people just jump in, tank a bit, and jump out. Hyperion will discourage this in high-mass ships because you may well get webbed down off the hole (Vigilants online, srsly) and popped. By high-mass i mean anything with a 1600 plate running a prop mod. So, yes, this is good and i support anything that prevents dull cowardly highsec games.

However, by the time you get mass up to Orca levels, the risk level has just got to be murderous as this change is proposed. While I think this will result in more juicy whale meat and i like my whale meat, this won't last. Soon the whales will be endangered and rarely seen, and you'll have Greenpeace up in your junk. Again, proximally, this looks like a great idea. Even moreso with capitals.

Dig a bit deeper.

As jack and others with a tenth of a brain have been saying, the harder it is to rage roll, the harder it is to generate content. W-space is dead enough as it is. I regularly scan for 5 hours, generate 20 wormholes and clog siggy with empty holes. Then the choice is, a) just deal with it and log off, b) respawn and roll again.

If it is slower or functionally nearly impossible to respawn and roll again, this strands you with whatever you have, for hours.

CCP has been slowly trying to make the production of ISK and items in-game a less bot-oriented, less vending machine, more interactive (click button, get candy) process. Wormhole ISk generation is about as intensive a click and chore fest as it gets - far easier to put up with the neckbearded prats in Incursions for 100-125M ISK per hour, than spend 2 hours securing your hole (for no return) and then going through the motions. Comms are more pleasant, but you need alts, mates, or to roll yourself inside the hole.

The tension in wormholes is between farmers, and farmer farmers. Right now the balance is heavily in favour of the farmer, with insta-closing C5 holes. In a way the change is perhaps Fozzie realising the removal of API kill logs is a bit too far, I don't know, but it is arguable you shouldn't be able to do it...but lets be honest, people will find a way.

The point is not whether this throws the risk/reward balance out, but whether this prevents people rolling holes to create content. What's the point, baldly speaking, of putting 20 hours worth of ship on the line, and spend 2 hours safely rolling, to roll a hole to create yourself another 4 hours of work finding nothing.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read this comment.

1. Its not easy. It takes numbers of hours of skill training and a nearly 1+bil ship. You can't get some beginner pilot to be roll a hole. This doesn't mean its a good idea to junk the whole idea of having mass restrictions. Mass restrictions make the pvp and the pve great.

2. Every system I warp into in k-space nearly has a wormhole that one can go explore. The enticing idea is that this is a "hidden" space under normal space and there should be some tricks to getting there. Otherwise we reduce this to just another lowsec want-to-be.

3. There's plenty of danger in wormholes today. Ask any new player, or maybe just any player in general and they won't tell you that WH space is safe. Make it more dangerous and no one will want to be there.

4. With all the danger, what's the point of running sites? That is, unless you crave hot drops.

One of the key factors that separates k-space from wormhole is the very ability to control the space unlike the rest of the entire game. The current system allows for a whole other dynamic in wormholes not found anywhere else. Its used by pvpers and carebears alike for different purposes and has a really nice balance as it is. By flattening this out, you remove a key part of how wormholes are differentiated from k-space.

It seems to me that the whole idea was a knee jerk reaction to "RageRolling" rather than a feature that benefits the community. The statement says it all, and I quote:



There are other reasons people roll holes other than ragerolling. Ragerolling itself provides content and additional experiences so I don't see the problem. Closing a hole temporarily to have a temporary safe harbor to gather resources and run sites is not a negative thing. By removing this, you cause an imbalance and make it incredibly dangerous and pretty much useless for smaller corps. So in essence you make it hard for people to move into wormholes in the first place. Rolling a hole is by no means child's play and is not an exploit as it seems to be the connotation.

In short, please oh please don't do the following:

1. Make wormhole space into another lowsec
2. Make wormhole space into another nullsec

Be creative and keep wormhole space unique.

So do you think it is okay for a 5 to 10 toon corporation to live in that space and close anything threatening risk free if scouted correctly?

Risk free? :D cool, but not real. There is no such thing. Not much mass needed for small T3 gang to ruin your day. Plus they can go in cloaked.

Well devblog for Hyperion is up and this change is still included. No dev posts in here either. So if you're a small corp, get ready that log-off in the POS button. You'll be using it more. A lot more.

Has Fozzie actually replied in this thread at all after dropping this bombshell of an idea on us?

He is probably sitting under his desk hyperventilating into a brown paper bag wondering how to extract himself from this mess

All this will do is make small scale ventures almost impossible while making the huge 0.0 type alliances the only way to secure this kind of space, which will be pointless due to lack of value per player in there been diluted to nothing per player if they did. It would also make these 0.0 alliances considering adding even more of this space to their empires as it will be more viable to their large groups than before. A Lot of players who live in wormholes do so because they are fed up of how 0.0 is controlled and fought over, or because they want a break from their wars there, its not just about the revenue made.

The choice of making K162 holes not show until jumped through will be a nightmare for small scale ventures, great for pew pew addicts though, still a bad call imho.

CCP you are listening too much to the wrong people who are complaining to get more pew pew chances. Active subscriptions are already down due to the plex issue and Industry changes being a bad call, now this, I already know of 6 players who are looking at closing their accs and not bothering with game (2 of which have been playing since beta). How many more will you push out? Start listening to the community it effects fully like Traiori's post, not the people who just want more space in their pockets or easier kills.

These changes for the most part are bad choices by CCP, I hope you reconsider your choices here CCP.

Can you please show me where I said efficient in my post?

There's nothing wrong with people farming in small groups to min/max their income (and i do it myself).

The problem I have is with those same groups who have chosen to min/max their income (we're talking 5/6 space here) then being able to close any threat to their operations with minimum risk providing they're scouting correctly.

Here's a quick bit of math for you. Assuming you run 6 sites split 4 ways with full escalations. (that's 10 mins a site on average in an hour which is achievable if everyone knows what they're doing) each site on average will pay 700 mil (being conservative here) that's 4.2B roughly for an hours work.

Split that 4 ways it's just over 1B each split.

I'm sorry but pulling in that sort of income you really do need an element of risk to it and closing connections and the delayed signatures are completely okay with me when you can potentially make that sort of isk in an hour

Trouble is, this change affects every single wormhole connection, not just the C5's and 6's and their content. Those entities that run cap escalations have the numbers to just field a 20 man BS hole rolling doctrine and its back to business as usual.

Small corps take it up the a$$ as usual. Its already dangerous to try and roll a connection to an entity that outnumbers and outguns you. With Hyperion it'll be suicide. You will lose Orcas, for sure. Fozzie thinks we should field support fleets to protect our Orcas, which is bollocks. Small corps can't field a support fleet. Even if a couple ships can be mustered its just more killmail fodder if you're connected to the wrong entity. So this change sucks hard because, for the 16-24 hour lifetime of that connection you can't run any sites and you can't go hunting for fights you can actually take because its not worth the risk to try and roll it. So nothin' to do but logoff at the POS.