Wormholes

I disagree it's worth it, some of those things are extremely important. Indentification of people reshipping in their POS is so key to how w-space operates at the moment I can't imagine how things would change without this feature.

Imagine not being able to see people moving in their POS reshipping to run escalations? Imagine not being able to sit a fleet on someone's static and watch to see if they're reshipping to come give you a fight? It removes the entire intel based game of w-space. Getting eyes in an enemy system without them being aware can completely win a fight for you at the moment. If this was removed it would kill a huge part of what w-space is about.

Don't let that go through without a replacement feature.

Just wanted to comment on this (and many posts like it). First of all, I don't just present my personal opinions to CCP. I read threads like this, and try to present as many of the opinions I can. For example, I don't care at all about refitting T3s at a POS, but I regularly bug CCP about fixing it.

Secondly, a *lot* of CCPers are in w-space. From CCP Soundwave on down, w-space is very popular with CCPers, for the same reason it is popular with all of us.

Amarr Empire is wormhole space now?

Get off the guy's back, he's clearly reading the thread, let's be constructive and not a bunch of forum shitposters.

That's good (and surprising) to hear. I hope they aren't all solo carebears who get ganked in their pve tengus all the time and are now going to punish us with their nerfbat ;)

If the people who will decide this are living in w-space, they cannot seriously consider removing forcefields without giving us something else that provides the same sort of protection and intel value (for both sides).

Still, all we got for now is the CSM minutes and they gave us reason to be alarmed, so we'll probably remain a little wary...

I seriously hope you are not so far detached from the community you are seated to represent as to genuinely mean this.




If this is in fact that CCP is unwilling to put the time and effort into developing two seperate UIs, one for docking and one for nPOS hangar functionality (which would be a true POS re-work, as we have now been promised for ages) then I neither find it reasonable as an argument or reasonable to NDA it; we should have the right to know if this boils down to a lack of willingness to commit resources to spaceships in space by CCP.

I think it's ok to make a docking module, but it should be like 0.0 only and require sov to anchor/online. Mooring should be enough for w-space.

This just reminded me: one of the ideas tossed around was restricting the power cores or what-have-you for the largest class of tower so that they could only be moved by freighter. I would shed a nostalgic tear if this came to pass. People in lower class wormholes are people too.

oh hey you ninjapoasted, I do have responses to that too



2) So...why should we introduce that to w-space at all? What's the benefit to altering the geography like that? Are some services only going to be available while docked and that's why we should want it?

4) I have had way more fun with force field games than I have ever had with docking games. We've gotten some great stories about really wacky things involving force fields that simply could not have happened with docking. With force fields, you can see when they're approaching the shield and respond accordingly. You don't have that warning with docking. Again, it's all about the transparency we're all used to.

You don't care about refitting t3s, but do like the idea of station games

you are a crazy person

as for


lmao. Really? What happens when a fleet decides to knock over a tower? Anyone who is docked at the time is at a massive disadvantage. Even if you undock three times as many people you're going to get torn to pieces on the undock. At least with a forcefield you have a way to properly form up / fall back to a different location.

I also see similar problems with the stuff mentioned about mooring and ships that are moored having personal little forcefields or whatever. An enemy fleet could sit itself at point blank range on moored ships, and the second their mini-fields drop they're in a world of ****. The size of current forcefields provides a nice 'buffer' to prevent that kind of crap, and while there may be good reasons to get rid of forcefields, that kind of functionality must remain imo.

Let me put my main concern up front: I'm worried that introducing docking to w-space would reduce all interactions between w-space corps to two ships passing in the night, completely unaware of each others' presence. Docking games etc. would just be a tremendous annoyance on top of that.

There are three conditions under which I would say docking in w-space is in any way acceptable:

1. Docking at 0 only.

The docking radius on a station is invisible. Half the source of all docking games is how you can engage without getting out of that invisible docking radius, and then disengage and redock within a minute. FFs have an unambiguous boundary. You're in or you're out. If docking were implemented in w-space, this would be one half of what is required to prevent the addition of docking from also adding docking games.

2. No timers.

The other half of preventing docking games. There are only two timers in all of w-space: session change and polarity. These set w-space apart from the rest of EVE. It's more transparent, because you can always duck back inside your FF (if you are close enough) or jump through a hole (if you aren't polarized). When I PvP in K-space, gate and docking timers are almost always the death of me, simply because they are invisible and I don't normally have to deal with them. Furthermore, they make w-space more dangerous and exciting. You can run and gun in ways that k-space does not allow, and it comes down to your reflexes rather than some arbitrary timer whether you can escape a bad situation (unless you get yourself polarized, but that's your own damn fault). Whether or not you could defend your 'undock', without timers and with a 0m docking radius, the new "docking" module merely becomes a more localized FF.

3. Transparency

As many people have said, it is absolutely essential to be able to see how many people are online in a POS. Fights in w-space almost invariably go to the party with superior information. While being able to see what's outside while in your POS is important for defensive purposes, I would say it's even more important to be able to see who's inside a POS from the outside. I can't see any way of doing this that would inform what ship they were docked in (as I understand the technical mechanics of docking, when you are docked you aren't really in a ship at all), but at a minimum a list or count of docked players visible from the outside or on d-scan would be essential.

Alternative proposal:

What benefit would docking have for w-space at all? The only good thing I can think of offhand is the ability to refit T3s. I don't want to see entire corps just docked up and doing nothing. If I wanted that, I'd go to lowsec or nullsec. However, if docking allows you to do some specific things that "mooring" does not, then make docking a module in the same way your guns are a module. Give it a 5-minute or so cycle time that burns up a lot of fuel or some other consumable resource. Do not allow permanent docking, only docking as long as is required to complete whatever operation docking allows that mooring does not.

Alternative proposal 2:

I quite understand that nullsec wants docking modules on their POSes and I say more power to them. Thanks to local, there's no guesswork about how many people are online in a system, even if they're docked up. They also get jump bridges, cyno beacons/jammers, and moon mining modules. In other words, just make it so you can't put up docking modules in w-space. There's no need to eliminate them from the game altogether, but the ability to dock (under current docking mechanics) would take away a huge part of what makes w-space unique and wonderful. It would render both hunters and hunted deaf, dumb, and blind.

Also, while docking modules may be costly fuel-wise and/or restricted to higher-class WHs, don't think for a second that will make them uncommon in any way. CCP learned long ago that sheer expense is no obstacle to players. Needing a freighter to get such a module in and a lot of fuel to keep it going would be no obstacle to any corp that lives in a C5 or C6.

Things you get from docking: (off the top of my head, and in no particular order)
1) Markets
2) Contracts
3) Secure Trade
4) Ship spinning
5) Captains Quarters/Whatever other Incarna stuff shows up
6) Assemble/refit T3s
7) Fit from saved fittings
8) Access to personal and shared storage
9) Repackaging, repairing, refining
10) Real container access
11) Real access rights, including the different corp hangar access for "based at" vs "other" stations
12) Possibly in the future, the ability to switch clones (not jump clone into and out of w-space, but switch implant sets)

The main point with docking is that we can see from the current system that CCP is bad at maintaining 2 separate systems for how players interact with hangars and storage. Getting docking means that whatever features and improvements CCP makes to the station interface comes for free for wormhole people.

Clearly I need to write up another blog post about this, because I think folks are missing the point here. I fully agree that docking would change things, but I also think some change is really good for folks.

I also wanted to respond to one specific point from Chitsa and Rroff:


I think this is 100% wrong. W-space is about lack of information, and making people work hard just to survive there. The exact mechanics of a forcefield or no forcefield has nothing at all to do with the reason people enjoy living in w-space. I'd challenge *anyone* to ask people for their top 10 reasons they like w-space and see POSes *anywhere* on that list. POSes (in their current form) are something we all *suffer* through in order to live in w-space, not the reason w-space is good. People like w-space because of the small gang fights, or because there is no local, or because the PVE is harder than most k-space, they don't love bouncing off POS mods when trying to warp or having to enter a POS password every single time you want to pick up some ammo.