Wormholes

The sensor overlay is terrible.

1. If I'm scouting and jump into a camped system then I want to use my precious gate cloak seconds to check the configuration of the gate camp. Having a full screen animation blatted across the top of everything with signature markers animating all over the place is infuriating.

2. Encouraging players to access exploration content in low and null sec is not helped by the fact that pirates jumping into a system now get an instant view of all signatures in system which they can direction scan in moments without needing to launch probes.

Creating a discrepancy between the sigs that are present and the sigs displayed by the sensor overlay is only going to make what is already a horrible mechanic even worse through adding inconsistency.

Get rid of the sensor overlay please. It was a horrible idea in the first place. But you tried it. It's still horrible. Please just do us a favour and kill it.

At the very least for the love of all that's good in the world let us turn it off.

People in here suggesting operating in wspace is currently zero risk are imo being deliberately disingenuous.

ccp must decide If they want to have big blocks like in nullsec plus all the negative effects like blueballing. and people who say theres no blueballing in w-space are all liars. its already nullsec 0.5 without local and mass restrictions.

its important to give corps the opportunity to progress from -c4s to c5s+, its the only way to get more people into w-space and more people in w-space imply more to shoot at.

by give the aggressor too much power you force them into big blocks or they leave w-space. -c4s are already bad profit wise, every 0.0 renter can make more ISK relatively safe, if you make the -c4 life too risky, they will move out of the already empty w-space.

look at brave newbies, they started in lowsec and sovless npc 0.0 and now progressing. it was possible because they lived relatively safe and they had the time to grow to what they are now. by making the gankers life too easy newbros avoid joining w-space.

if you dont like PVE in W-Space then lets remove it completly and W-Space will be Elite PVP Land you all want... not

Nothing wrong with it from our perspective, sure, but Fozzie said they wanted a design which wouldn't encourage probe spam, and anything which reduces RSI and doesn't eat into the lifespan of my left-click is welcome

Besides, with good D-scanning it's hard for, say, a gang of cloaky ambush tech3s to sneak through a K162 unnoticed anyway. Only marginally less so than if you have eyes on it. So I don't really see that the inability of the "defending" side to pick it up instantly would make that big an impact on their odds of getting caught and ganked.

In any case, as things stand there's a minimum time between when the wormhole spawns and when anybody can scan it down anyway, so if you only spawn it when you've got a fleet ready to blitz through...

I don't see that it would change much, is my point. Good and disciplined corps would just adapt, find a new way to gather the same intel and all that the development effort would accomplish is forcing the players to do more clicking to get more or less the same result. And the guys who aren't smart enough to adapt like that are already getting caught with their pants down anyway.

Now if you want to propose that both the K162 AND any ships that come through it should be invisible to both probes and D-scan for, say, twenty minutes and one minute (during that 20 minutes) respectively, then that might genuinely increase the amount of uncertainty and fog-of-war in W-space. Newly-spawned K162s might in that case pose a genuine threat to the security of anything in that system regardless of how vigilant they're being. The proposal as floated without the ships also inheriting some kind of invisibility still leaves open loopholes that would cause nothing to really change.

I fully support delayed appearance of K162 wormholes on the discovery scanner and via probes. If it needs to be mass-triggered or number-of-ships-triggered to prevent totally stealth capital seeding, fine. The key is that there needs to be time for the solo or small gang hunter to at least have a chance to see if there is a target before there isn't one anymore.

+1

bleh, thumbs down.
To me, the only time this seems like a decent mechanic is when you have a WH with no non-static connections and static connections that haven't been opened yet (the mark of a PVE WH, collapse everything and don't open new static). And while I can appreciate what you're trying to accomplish with the additional risk factor, the fact is that WHs are dangerous enough as it is for the solo/small entity and this would disproportionately affect that group. Speaking within the timeframe of that invisible K162, by most measures, the one/two people in Tengus will be exponentially easier to trap and kill than the say 1-2 carriers/2-3 dreads + support(eg. typical C3 vs. C5 ratting). Yeah, maybe someone gets a good look at your C5 bear fleet, but what are the odds that someone has enough subcaps to attack the C5 group vs. the odds that they have enough to tackle one/two t3s? Not wildly in favor of the small guys and like I said WHs are uninviting enough to the single guy/small group.

If you really want to shake things up, make cap escalations in PVE sites trigger a WH opening.

So basically you're saying WH PVP is more profitable than WH PVE. Which would back up my experiences at this point. This begs the question of why the PVP side needs to be buffed. Or at least buffed at the expense of PVE. WH dwellers need to be able to have some sense of security or else all the small gangs of dwellers will likely end up leaving. Part of WH life is the utter randomness of it all, sometimes I can go a day or two without seeing any WH besides my static. And then other times I log in to 7 WH's, with 3 more popping up as I'm trying to roll them all. I'm currently out of rolling battleships due to too many ******* cloakies showing up out of nowhere outside what all the information I had on them suggested was their TZ.


And people who say mining ships in W-space are doing it wrong..... The lore behind w-space ore sites would suggest that they're actually doing it RIGHT. Based on that, isn't Empire supposed to be relying on us for minerals somewhat? Not to mention you have to mine if you are in a C4 or lower and want capital ships, or else spend exhaustive amounts of time importing minerals. Personally, I enjoy the occasional mining fleet just as something different to do. And yes, I've lost a lot of mining ships that way. Oh well. I have fun ejecting, running back to the POS, then warping back at 30km and popping the mining ship AND the PVP jew who decided to try and capture it for his own use in his shiny pod.


And on a point CCP really can't do anything about.... What incentive is there for us to try and keep a stock of PVP ships when raiders ALWAYS pop the wrecks so we can't salvage anything from it to try and help pay for the next round of ships to whelp? When I first entered w-space, there seemed to be a bit of honor among PVPers. That has since appeared to vanish as the focus moved more from fun PVP and enjoyable conversations to people thinking ganking qualified as a "Good Fight" scenario. Congrats, you killed a 20 mil retriever. Good fight? What? If I didn't get my bomber back in time there wasn't any fight at all.

Fozzie, stop trolling.

signatures are a "dumb" mechanic. they're not broken... they're just 'dumb'. wormhole gameplay depends on scanning down signatures and suffers as a result.

from what I can tell, you have the relationship between the two switched, and are convinced that wormholes should get it in the bum bum.

as it is, signatures show up to everyone system-wide, immediately, and this needs to change. if you fix signature mechanics in wormholes, you fix them everywhere.

...and if you don't fix signature mechanics, you can make a cool UI like sensor overlay and a Dscan slider, but signatures will remain 'dumb'.

your proposed idea of delaying signatures is bad though, just to be clear. it's merely another layer of 'dumb' placed over a deeper level of 'dumb'

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some variables would allow you to balance signatures. a signature needs to do things like:

1. appear in on-board scans within a limited radius from itself, instead of automatically to everyone in system.
like ships currently do on dscan. while you're at it, make dscan care about the size of the detected object vs the scan res of the ship requesting the information about its surroundings. ('everything within a radius' is dumb' too)

the volume of a k162's detection sphere compared to the volume of spheres in a system in which signatures can spawn and players can fly = a reduction in instant awareness that you can measure. (instead of a 'dumb' solution like 2 minutes of blindness)

2. take into account the size of the k162
make some appear in a larger radius than others.
scaling the ease of gaining k162 intel based on the threat that could come through it sounds good, i think.

3. take into account the security level of the system (and in the case of wormholes, the class
this is accomplished currently, to a degree (with various levels of difficulty in probing them to 100%)

4. take into account a ship's scan resolution
another way to limit signature visability is take into account a ship's scan res
if the ship's scan res is not high enough, it will not detect a signature without probes.
or ship class.

as a baseline:

frigate ->on-board detects c1 to c1 k162 and bigger
destroyer -> ... c2 to c2 and bigger
cruiser -> ... c3 to c3 and bigger
battleship -> ... c4 to c4
capital -> ... c5 to c5



5. reduce the active time on scan probes to 10 mins (or something).
they never needed to live that long.

lastly, I'm disappointed to see you call scan probes a 'trick'. in my mind, tricks in EVE are things like mineral compression using guns, or self-destruct cynos.

so I wonder, what did you intend wormholes to be like, if spamming scan probes or the probe scan "show" button is a 'trick'.

wormholes are meant to be different, I get that. 'no-local' and 'no exits in overview by default' is proof that you intended for something else to happen in them, but I never thought signature watching was a 'trick'.

without local or system exits in overview, D-scan and probe scan are simply the next best thing available for situational awareness in wormholes.

tl;dr:

signature mechanics are flat and dumb

yeah you really don't need probes out to see new sigs, just hit 'show' at the bottom (the button that restores hidden sigs) and if there's a new sig present the list will refresh. It's basically the exact same thing as pumping d-scan. Literally.

It wouldnt. Sig would show only once the caps jumped through and the residents would need to: notice it, scan it, warp to it, scout it, put fleet together, jump through <- all that before the crashing capitals jump back through the K162 and close it behind them (which takes roughly 2 seconds). I dare say its not very likely.

But you are correct that the other issues would be alleviated somewhat. It would also force people to use covops for scouting fresh holes instead of T3s, which im not sure if its good or bad...

Either way it doesnt really address more fuddamental needs and all the other (much less controversial) suggestions which I summed up in my wall of text about the need for increased interaction instead of isolation.

No one said 5 minutes, there is no mention of 5 minutes anywhere. Right now we are talking about the delay in general, the details of the duration are not even being addressed. I think 2 minutes or less is still good enough of a change.