Wormholes

(sorry for any grammar and spelling mistakes, you'll have to get used to that)
re: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=372470&find=unread

First of all, I would like to point out that this whole development from my point of view happened very suddently. I got word about it about 24 hours before the forum announcement from Leeloo. I did not anticipate anything like this happening after the official elections have finished. This is without precedence, as far as I know. The reason for that is mostly timing. This is of course my opinion entirely - due to the fact that one of the members resigned, they had a seat vacant. Now the usual SOP would be to leave it empty, however it is still early in CSM9 term. The summits haven't happened yet. Bringing a a replacement means that he (me) would have not missed as much of what has been said and done thus far, would still have the ability to participate in both summits, and on top of that CCP has introduced a new release schedule, so instead of a huge amount of work from both CSM and CCP that was previously put in in order to get the 2 huge expansions a year, we now have multiple expansions (updates) that are more streamlined. Which means, even tho I join in late, I can still contribute. If the whole situation happened, say, 3 weeks from now, all that would not be possible, because the first summit would have already happened, and it's the most important one. So there, that's the reason I'm here.

Now let's adress the 'you have not been active on the forums omgusuck' thing. Yes, I have not been posting much at all since the elections. As far as I was concerned, it was over when it comes to my CSM adventure, came in 15th, nothing to see here, move along. I was still reading the forums now and then, mostly the stuff that I was personally interested in, and to keep fairly up to date on all the changes happening.If you remember, the wormholes forum doesn't have a good history of mental health (lol), at the time there was a lot of spamming, arguing, trolling, and while all of that is entertaining, it's not something I wanted to get involved with, because I simply don't enjoy it as much as some of the people here. You can literally count on one hand the number of posts I made since the election, and none of them were serious in nature. Everytime I read the forums, was with a bag of popcorn. I wasn't representing anybody except myself, I had no plans of getting involved more then I usualy did in the past at that point. You can interpret that however you like, I just chose not to participate in, what i have seen it as, the circlejerk that was happening here. I don't mean to offend anybody, that's just how I've seen it. While getting up to speed these past (I can't even say) days, I've noticed things have calmed down somewhat, which I am happy about and it's encouraging.

Fast forward to yestarday. I am now on CSM. While I was getting set up with all the communication means, various forum/skype/what have you access, trying to deal with a whole lot of stress - Witch hunt begins. I can't say i'm surprised, but cut me some slack here. Like I said, I didn't anticipate this, there is no way I could have had prepared for this. I am however trying my best to deal with the situation in an organized manner. I am getting up to speed with CSM things. For the past 48 hours I have been doing nothing but reading (and you can't even imagine how much there is of that), setting up, and generally trying to wrap my brain around this whole situation. The summit is going to take place next week and I need to do everything I can to prepare for it best I can. I am very happy to say that other CSM members are incredibly helpful, providing me with everything I need in order to do so and I am taking advantage of any help I can get at this point. Corbexx and I already clocked hours of skype calls, getting up to speed, and he's been nothing but amazing so far. It's going to take a while, but I will try to start contributing as soon as I can, beginning with things I know best.

Which brings us to the reason why-are-you-even-reading-this. Wormhole things. It has been a while since you have heard from me on anything wormhole related, see reasons above, and there is a lot to talk about. I will try to cover the most important things first, and I will probably leave out a lot of issues at this time, because there's still a ton I need to read about, and form an opinion of my own. I literally just got access to some of the resources CSM has on the topic so bare with me for now.

But let's start with the most recent thing, which is the hyperion expansion.
When I first heard about it, I was excited. I've been living in w-space for a long time, and the changes proposed were the changes I expected to shake up the landscape, which I think was much needed. W-Space was kinda stale when it comes to actual mechanics.

Effects change - good thing in general. There was a need for it, especially iterating on Black Holes. I think this change introduced some interesting gameplay while still not changing dramatically how people operate under certain circumstances. It's certainly interesting to watch how people adapt and hopefully introcuce some fresh doctrines and fittings.

continued in post below.

And now for the big finish - Wormhole jump mechanic/spawn distance.
This is something I have mixed feeling about to say the least. It was supposed to introduce interesting gameplay. It didn't. It was supposed to shake up things. It did, but a bit too much for my taste. I think the idea itself isn't bad but the actual mechanic is wrong. I would much rather see it reversed. I would much rather see it give you some sort of controll over how you spawn and where on the other side instead of it being somewhat random.
It also gives a strong advantage to large groups vs small groups. Being in, what is considered a small group in C5 space, I can clearly see how it's bad. In the scenario where a wormhole opens up and the fleet on the other side outnumbers yours greatly, you used to be able to counter that by collapsing the wormhole by so called rage-rolling of flash crashing as I like to call it. Even if the hostile party took means to prevent that from happening, you still could, in some situations counter that (HIC - neuts). The people that watched my youtube videos of our engagements surely noticed we used the tactic more than once to deal with larger scale fleets. I consider it a valic tactic personally.
Now, after the change the option is simply gone. You can argue that you can still flash-crash wormholes, but you would be suiciding expensive ships doing so and there is barely any workdaround. There is almost nothing to stop the larger group from getting your [insert expensive crashing ship here]. I think that is bad gameplay. There should always be a counter mechanic avaliable to people. Just like with almost anything else in EVE. People need to have the option of dealing with threats in a clear fashion, even in w-space, the land of randomness. The option has been taken away from us.
I have been reading up on this issue, going through all of the material CSM has on it and I have also spoken extensively to Corbexx about this. Data and statistics is still being gathered.


Corbexx and I
The moment I officialy joined the CSM Corbexx immediately reached out and started helping me getting accustomed to the CSM ways. We have been in constant contact so far and we even took the time to discuss quite many ideas. We seem to be in agreedment on most issues, too. He is very open minded and so am I, and so far I haven't be able to identify any issues we might have working together. Of course time will tell, and I don't know what his opinion of me might be, but I think we're off to a great start and I am looking forward to what comes next. Keep in mind that many of the major changes that were requested over the years, changes that are most needed, take usualy a lot of time to implement in the actual code, and as with everything game-design related, many things have to be done first in order for some things to even become possible. We also had a chat about that and how it would affect us in pushing for stuff for CCP to do, and there's a long way ahead of not only us, but future CSM members representing Wormhole space as well. This is something to think about for everyone here, because even now things that were requested, say, 2 years ago, only became possible in the recent past and are only now reaching development stage.

I think that's about it for now, I covered all the things I can at this point, and I still have TONS of catching up to do, and I will keep you guys updated.
If there's something you feel I left out (I'm sure there is) or if you have any more concerns regarding me, my views, the CSM, wormholes etc. I am avaliable for discussion. You can poke me on twitter @Asayanami, EVE Mail me, email me asayanami(at)gmail.com, reach out in game. I'm sure there are going to be people that are still not happy but there's no way out of that. While I can't make everyone happy, I will try to represent this community the best to my ability.

I do really look forward to being proven wrong about you.

2 Quick questions: Do you think that the mass regeneration on the frigate holes, leading to them being an uncloseable PITA for 16hrs, is a good/bad thing? Do you think we could see a trend of more mass regenerating holes?

The second question might not be something you can answer yet, seeing as you're still warming up your CSM seat but I figured I would pose the question anyway.

Hopefully you can help convince CCP that the mass spawn changes are bad. Would love to go back into wh space, but only if they change the distance spawn. Finding a corp is another challenge :)

First off, congrats on getting on the CSM Asay. I voted for you and was very sad when you fell 1 spot short. I read the whole wall of text and I like your openness on your thoughts and I am in agreement with pretty much everything you said. I am very happy to see you get a spot on the CSM and I am glad to see you working so hard to catch up right at the get go.

Second, I would like to ask. What changes, at this point, do you believe you will push for during your term at CSM? Also, will you try and push for a rollback on mass-spawn distance change, or push for an alternative form of the mechanic (or leave it as is, though based on your opinion of the mechanic I assume you want something about it to change)?

Third, can't help myself from asking. Do you believe your video posting will be extremely hampered by your position as a CSM member, or can we expect regular released of videos (Not as often as before obviously)?

Good luck as a member of the CSM, once again congrats on getting the position.

Thanks for the reply. I was just looking to see which stance you took.

I will say that I too am a firm believer in grouping up, but I also enjoy my solo PvP hunting.

Saying that. If somoe wants to run C2 sites solo to get rich, they are not doing the right thing to achieve their goal haha. I would definitly suggest for you to go into the test server (or find a C2 on TQ and run a few sites and see for yourself just how bad the income is per site.

It might be simply the case of scaling up the number of drops for lower class systems. Assuming all of W-Space has the same drop chance per sleeper, and lower class systems have smaller amount of sleepers per site, balancing out the random number generator on the drops (increasing it by a small percantage) to accomodate for it. That and salvage price has been hitting rock bottom for a while now.
There is research going on right now on this, so stay tuned.

I look forward to you being proven wrong as well...

Really glad Asay got in - he's smart and he has the ability to "cut the Gordian knot".

Congrats again!

You're full of ****. I've been copying bookmarks since 2009. It used to be 5 now it's 10, maybe you're doing something wrong. The interval between copy operations hasn't changed significantly for me, and it's short on my end. and time to propagate is slightly quicker on my end, there is a limit to it for a reason, read up on it (various threads from the time corp bookamrks were introduced).
It's the first step on the road to alliance bookmarks so you should be happy about that not bitching.