Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The only thing this change does is make it easier to PvE. EVE has always maintained a balance between risk and reward, with WHs being the best ISK in the game, why are you decreasing risk? As it stands, it's too safe in W-Space already, now it's going to be even safer? As it stands, WHs are dead empty. There's a limited number of people who want to live in wormholes. Removing the ability to tell when a wormhole is active will make them even more empty.

Are you suggesting arranged fights? If you are, I would say you missed the entire point of being in wormhole space.

Can't wait to be completely safe in my C5

More iskies for my toonies

CCPFoxFour,

Let me just clarify a few things as to why us WH pvp entities have a problem with this.

Most of the time, when we've had our static open for a while, we end up with quite a "chain" (basically a long line of WHs connected to each other) that is somewhat difficult to constantly monitor. While this nerf would make that an issue, that isn't our main problem.

The problem we have is, at present, carebearing in wspace is far too safe/secure. Right now, it's almost impossible to actually catch carebears by rolling into their system. The second you initiate warp to your side of the WH, a new anom pops up on their (slightly overpowered auto dscan tool). This alerts them that it's time to leave the site. All capitals immediately cancel whatever siege or triage they're involved in, and promptly refit to stabs to warp back to the "safety" of their POS.

Unless you happen to roll into someone who just started their siege cycle, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to land tackle. When we go to jump into a WH, we DON'T know if anyone is in there, we DON'T know if the residents are even running sites (should they exist), and we DON'T know where they are even if they do happen to be running sites.

I understand that you have a problem with us having real-time info, or that our internally developed tools are too powerful, and perhaps that does give us a slight advantage. The problem we have is that is our ONLY advantage at present.

The only truly consistent way of being able to kill competent WH bearing groups is through login trap mechanics - aka by taking the time and effort to actually move capitals and subcaps in, log them off, and then patiently wait for said groups to begin running sites. Currently, there is only one way to determine if a WH is worth seeding/active, and that is by checking the HISTORY of NPC kills through the API, aka seeing "oh these guys ran sites 18 hours ago" - this information allows us to make a somewhat informed decision on whether we want to seed the WH or not. Without this, the only way we can possibly seed a WH is by making a complete shot in the dark.

Removing the API npc kill data completely stacks the odds in favor of the WH NPCers - the npc kill data was our best, last, and ONLY advantage over someone PVEing in wspace.

From reading your posts, I assume the problem you have is us being able to passively gather intel on our chain while not having pilots in space doing the work - would you feel that adding in a delayed API would be a better choice?

Perhaps write it in so the API gives us the NPC kill history of a system - but it's delayed by 8-12 hours? This way, we cannot get "live" intel on systems easily, but we can see some trends of NPC kills in order to determine if there is even anyone active in that WH (online POS mean nothing in terms of activity).

Additionally, I would politely suggest/ask that you implement a modified version of the "delayed k162 spawn" suggestion discussed earlier. I feel that Wspace PVEers are given too much free instant intel through absolutely no effort of their own, making them far too safe. I don't want to punish someone willing to do active intel, so I would hope this wouldn't extend to probes, but delaying the built-in passive dscanner from picking up a new sig by at least a minute would go a long way towards leveling the playing field in terms of wspace pvp groups being able to catch PVEers.

One of your stated design goals of wspace is that lack of intel, or a local chat - right now, being able to see new sigs pop up instantly acts in exactly the same manner as local does for most nullsec PVE residents, and I would assume THIS goes against your stated design goals.

Please give some consideration to my thoughts, and try to keep things balanced for both sides, rather than handing all the advantages to one side.

Appreciated,

Servant's Lord, Disavowed

The gist of the change is that we would like to remove information about NPC kills for wormhole systems in the API.

Thank you VERY much! This is a very well put together post that has good points and reasons behind those points. I will bring much of this up when I take the discussion back to the rest of the design team.

Just to be clear, this is only for NPC kills and not ship/pod kills?

Most likely, it was brought to their attention after the roundtables had occurred, perhaps during a pub crawl or other social event. Or, perhaps, it was just reading the forums. Does it matter?

I like how in the 4 pages of this thread, and about 10 pages of the other thread, the only advocates of this change being carried out are generally by people who don't live in wormholes.

From what I read, the majority of people who live in wormhole space, and use this data have appealed for CCP to not put this change in place, and of those people, a very large proportion of the bigger WH entities and a good number of the smaller ones are represented.

You've [CCP] found some thing in your API that you hadn't considered and now want to essentially "hide" your mistake by eliminating it completely. All of the Dev posts so far haven't actually stated any reasons other than "it shouldn't have been there in the first place"., which in my opinion (and apparently in the opinion of a pretty big chunk of the WH community) isn't a very good reason to make a change. At least when other changes are made, we get more reasons than "it wasn't meant to be there in the first place, sorry about that".

My opinion, considering you've asked for it (despite saying it's not going to change your mind), is that you should go back to the drawing board with this one and look at it from some other perspectives. Perhaps even talk to some of the people in game design?

Having access to NPC data allows people who live in WH space to create content. Whether that be through log off traps, through gathering intel (by both attacker and defender), through noticing that a system in the chain is now showing NPC kills and going to scout out what, who and why. There are lots of ways this data is used to create content. The key words being "create" and "content".

Removing this data is literally just removing a players ability to create content in a sandbox game.