Wormholes

At a minimum? You're completely wrong about that, the initial proposal is to have PHYSICALLY NO WAY of detecting that signature until the time is passed. I suppose you could combat scan decloaked ships sitting on the wormhole, but fozzie is suggesting that PROBES WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FIND THE K162. Is that clear enough? You seem to have missed the fact that having it not available without probes, but available with them, is something that's been suggested as a compromise, rather than what Fozzie was suggesting in the first place. If you read the original post properly, you'll see this is what it says (emphasis mine):



I should point out this would also stop a fleet who do want to PvP with whoever rolled into them, be that a group that are about to use caps to close their static or one with fifty T3s ready to rock, from finding that hole and getting their own scout onto or through it without using combat probes and relying on a ship sitting decloaked on the hole. This is going to have the effect of reducing a lot of kinds of non-ganking PvP.

as to the rest of your post, the "Big risk" is at least partially offered by the fact that there are billions of isk in capital ships, fixed in place, for the entire time you are doing your PvE. No other PvE activity has that requirement. Then there's the player and character skill involved.

This is literally the only sensible post I've seen on here. Fixing the k162 spawn would in fact make it easier for a rolling fleet to get a gank/fight. I'm pretty sure this would also require less effort than building a whole new mechanic around it with delayed intel and what-not.

On the other hand, you could also make it so that your static wormhole is always open, which would make more sense from a physics perspective (I think, cus when did bob decide a natural occurence was going to bend to your will?)

I think that changing mechanics like this too much and too fast will lead to some people giving up w-space. And that would be a shame, there are so few of us already.

I can see an argument from the physics perspective for your ship triggering the spawning of the other end of the wormhole by entering it. Far more than I can from just warping.

You are dead wrong. This will not reduce PvP opportunities at all, if a corp is ready for a fight the two or three minute timer is not going to stop them.

This is so amusing, don't stop. Please.

"The potential change would be to delay the appearance of the signature beacon when K162 dungeons spawn. This would prevent the dungeon from appearing on probe scans or the Sensor Overlay for up to a few minutes."

This is not a good idea. Disclaimer, I dive wormholes for pew and ganks. I do not farm them for pve. I do not argue for a "safer environment". I do however think that just making a blanket change like this will not fix wormholes the way you intend them to be fixed.

This proposed mechanic above would undeniably increase risk for those who are vigilant which I find annoying. If you are paying attention, you should not be rewarded with a loss mail due to a game mechanic the game designers think would be great to capture an essence of danger. On the receiving side of getting a loss, this would just be infuriating since my intel is faulty. This change is really giving an unfair advantage to lazy gankers. As a ganker, I want to work and hunt my prey. I could spend days in a wormhole watching prey and their habits to hit them for the biggest kill mail possible. This is how it should be. It's already extremely easy to catch a solo drake or a poorly fit megathron running a site. This change would give sub par pvpers bragging rights to kills they may have not deserved due to intel that was impossible for vigilant people to get because of game mechanics. It's like poisoning the bull before the matador even steps in the arena. The chessboard should not be tilted one way over another just to "shake things up". It will probably cause more problems down the road, like how implementing an overlay that gives all intel away really easily did.

If you must make a change to how scanning and overlays should work, I would recommend having sigs only appear that are within your 14.3 AU scan radius. This would be beneficial in a few ways.

1) It adds a sense danger since a single pilot cannot cover most of the systems that exist in eve all at once.

2) It makes system size a decision factor when moving into or camping a wormhole. It sort of is now, but not really. Large systems are more of an inconvenience than anything else, but there is no real added danger at the moment since all ships can detect sigs to pretty much infinity. You could also add a mechanic to make the pve extremely more rewarding in larger systems and nerf smaller systems. I do not want to see large systems vacant. Making players have more decisions and plotting out their livelihood is good in EVE.

3) It encourages teamwork. Or at the very least more alts. Larger systems would require more players to properly watch and keep locked down. More alt subs are good no?

4) It adds the ability to later redesign or introduce new ships/modules that are capable of scanning out further than 14.3 au giving further specialization and utility options for pilots who specialize. I'd throw this in the 'Decision making is good' category.

5) This does not break a cardinal rule here. I can't think of one mechanic in eve where intel is delayed. Do Cynos show up 2 minutes after they are lit? Do hostiles show up in local 2 minutes after entering a system? I'm not sure why sigs should be different? How does breaking this reliable intel system in EVE add that sense of wonder wormholes held many years ago?

No matter what change you make, people will adapt, write guides and share ways to "safe up". People will make tools like the now defunct wormnav. People will always find a way to systematically take the risk out of their livelihoods. Instead of making blanket changes, take a holistic look on how you want EVE to be played. I would try to engineer mechanics that force decisions and actions. Not give or take away intel. That will fix nothing. I know the answer is that the old code will be impossible to make a change like this - but these are the types of solutions that are only beneficial for the longevity of EVE. Making a huge change like the creation of an overlay, then the subsequent ad hoc nerf of the overlay an expansion later has me scratching my head.

It would make it easier for someone to roll away their static without having any chance of getting forced into a fight. It also further pushes the intelligence offered towards one side - the incoming side can have their scouts wherever they want, while the other corp can't scan down the hole to put their own eyes through it. I don't know about you, but I don't know that many people that will bring a fleet out with absolutely no idea of what they're going into.

W-space has been continually getting riskier, less profitable, and flat out more frustrating in my experience. But I love it, so I've been keeping it up even as losses became more common, my favorite method of hauling stuff to and from the WH was rendered impotent (My orca sits in the POS collecting dust when I used to enjoy thumbing my nose at Marmite with it. Most fun I've ever had in EVE was leading them on a merry chase 5 jumps through highsec before making it to my WH route), and rolling WH's became far less certain of a thing. (Pushing 3.5 bil mass through a 3 bil hole and cursing the WH for still being there). And then the scatter containers. Thought drops were supposed to get better because of those? I flat out gave up hacking because I seldom got more than 10 mil worth of drops from them even when I had 3 people helping to catch every last can. Thank goodness the defenders weren't taken away like with Null's radar and mag sites.

T3's got nerfed to where a 1.5 bil T3 had the same tank a 600 mil one did before the nerf to resist bonuses. Ore sites showing up as anoms, T3 and T3 components prices dropping dramatically.... I can make more isk more safely running a 275 mil Ishtar in nullsec right now than I can in my C5 with a carrier, and without the cost of fuel and hundreds of millions of isk wrapped up in pos modules.

This idea has SOME merit, but in its unaltered form it will flat out ruin W-life for anyone who doesn't have a highly active large group and several SMA's worth of PVP ships.

Additionally, in my experience there is already a fairly significant delay in new signatures appearing in the scanner unless you are actively probing or cycling the Show Anomalies option. It does appear somewhat random, but I can have a sig scanned down on one alt and the others scanner won't even have the new sig up 5 minutes later if I don't use one of those tricks.




One possible solution I can think of for this to work "better" would be to have transiting ships come through the exit already decloaked with the WH disabling their cloaks for 15-30 seconds while the sig is on the no-show timer so that the residents could at least see a new ship signature if they have combat probes out and are cycling them constantly. If the raider was in any sub-cap they would have to be exceedingly lucky to be able to scan down before the raiding ship finished its timer and cloaked, but would be able to tell they had interlopers if, like I said, they were spamming combat probes constantly. The 15-30 second window would require a ridiculously dedicated scanning pilot.... But at least they'd have a chance. And the scanning pilots would have nearly constant migraines, but meh.



TL:DR, keep giving pirates more tools and ruin those that are used by the more honest folks and the pirates will soon have no one to prey on but themselves.

Such is the difficulty of a 10 page threadnaught. It is hard enough to cross compile every post made by any one person and tie them back together. As such if my reply came across as knee jerk I do apologize.

I do agree that no WH's need to be any safer. I agree that the discovery scanner is BS and should be removed. Honestly IMO it is a noob mechanic designed to show players that this world of exploration exists and has little use beyond that. So I think it could go completely and the game would not suffer.




"ghost town" may have been an improper description. I have been doing far more roaming through our chain of late and yes I would say the majority (even C4's) I encounter are technically occupied. But most nights I can roam through chains 10+ systems long, with a mix of C4 down to C1 (and sometimes C5) where I can find nobody even seemingly logged in. I don't see a delayed k162 mechanic helping that situation.

IMO, the best option is to get rid of the discovery scanner. Just turn it off for W space at a minimum. Then after awhile with that change we can come back and talk.

But the defender already has an advantage in the sig showing up when warp is initiated. They have how long it takes me to align, warp, land, power to the wh, jump, load system and dscan to warp away.

If you want fair, then don't show the K162 until someone jumps the WH, or failing that due to a technical issue or some such, add a delay to when it's shown K162 side that's vaguely based off an average of how long all of what I listed above takes, kind of like whats being proposed by CCP Fozzie...