Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Wormhole space is about stealth, stalking, hunting, and being hunted. It's about taking what you can while either trying to stay away from the wolves, or it's about taking what you can while being a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's about waking up each day with a completely new destination, a completely new starmap to look at and explore, and different (sometimes new) people to interact with.

You can't just brazenly waltz into a system with a brick tank, engage and light a cyno, and have 1000 of your closest friends jump in from across the EVE universe to help you kill that Drake in an anomaly. What you have is what you brought with you. You can't just dock up when you are out numbered: if you are caught outside of safety, you will die. If you poke your nose out of your POS forcefield, the skilled player can bump you just right to knock you completely out and you will die. There are no docking games, station games here. (Yet). Absolutely anything in your wormhole can be destroyed; no invulnerable stations to hide your stuff in. (Again, yet).

You have no free intel data in the form of Local. Dscan is the life blood of W-space. Those who are good at using dscan do well, if you don't use it, or are poor at using it, you will die.

The largest aspect of W-space is that if you can put forth diligent effort, you can be safe. If you can put forth diligent effort, you can catch targets. Through working and preparing, you can be the victor, whether you are hunting or you are the hunted. This is what we prized the most in W-space.

At real issue is the increasing safety that CCP is affording those who wish to avoid non-consensual PvP. Through multiple changes, CCP has completely flipped the balance on hunter vs hunted in a way that seems opposite to their actions in other regions of space. The conspiracy theory is that CCP players, or their Nullbear pets, encountered an environment that was too dangerous to bear in the near-absolute safety found in the blue Null doughnut. The real reason is probably that CCP has no clue about W-space. The largest of these imbalances centers around instant sig intel data.

Previously, you wouldn't know what non-celestials were in your system until you dropped probes and actively sought out this information. The act of dropping probes would make you visible, and often vulnerable if you weren't smart about making an intermediate safe spot. Anyone scouting the system would see your probes and know there was activity.

If a new wormhole opened up into your system, you wouldn't know this until you scanned and saw the list of signatures change. This means that hunters had a window of opportunity to pounce on their prey. The size of the window depended strictly on the diligence of the prey: if you had an active scanner continually refreshing the scanner, you would know within a few seconds and could warn your fleet. It was easy enough to be safe, but it required diligence and preparation.

If CCP had changed nothing else, but removed the kill API data, it would have been acceptable. To the majority of the hunters, this information was mildly useful at best. Unless your targets were careful, you would catch them with or without this information. And if they were careful, they deserved to get away.

But CCP gave the hunted a free tool: you know instantly when someone new opens a connection in your system. As soon as the person in the connecting system initiates warp, the sig spawns in the other system and appears in the scanner window, before the hunter even exits warp in the connecting system. Bears in PvE sites can immediately see the sig and warp out. They even have time to shoot anything that scrams. Even if you, the hunter, are diligent and as efficient as you can possibly be, and have all the luck in the game on your side, your target has to be braindead to fall prey to you.

Sigs should not show up in W-space unless scanned with probes.

The only remaining risk of non-consensual PvP was the logoff trap, which often used the kill API data. Because of other changes, the presence of this free intel balanced and offset the availability of the free sig intel.

The removal of the kill API data means the dynamic in wormholes for PvE fleets will drastically change. You already did not need a dedicated scout, especially if you close all existing holes and do not warp to the new static (meaning the other side doesn't spawn). Now you no longer will need to constantly twitch-mash dscan to watch for hostiles, since groups will be less likely to seed into a non-home system without knowing it is active.

You can't just roll into any system you want whenever you want. If you put a scout in a system, it may be difficult to get back into that system, especially if you want to seed capitals.

It's like Joe Mission Runner who is in the third room of his mission being told that John the Ganker has just initiated warp to his mission's gate. There isn't a blessed thing John the Ganker can do to avoid alerting Joe Mission Runner that he is on the way.

Remember, there is no Local in W-space unless you speak up. No one is supposed to know you're there.

In reality, this data indeed shouldn't be available as it was. But it enabled the last major unknown threat to PvE activity in W-space, so in that alone it was balanced.

(Sorry for the length)

That's odd, there's been a large thread over on the WH forum about how Goonswarm had put up a fight. Maybe you should look more closely? (I'll also accept you posting on your main instead.)

I don't mind the removal of NPC kills. But removal of player kills is simply ********, since killboards still pull them,

There is no balance with this change none what so ever.

Speaking as someone who has done his fair share of the farming thing, let me tell you what this change will actually do to your ability to gank me.

Nothing.

Typically when I run home sites, I will close all the holes in the system. So your API-pulling tools that tell you I'm running sites, all they tell you is that 10 minutes ago, I closed your connection. You knew that I was running sites, and you couldn't get at me. The only way you were going to gank me is if you rolled into me while I was mid seige cycle and I couldn't get out in time. The easiest way to know if somone is running sites is to use D-scan and check for wrecks.

After the change, I still close all the connections. The best way to tell if I'm running sites is still to D-scan for wrecks.

What has changed? You don't know that I'm running sites behind a connection that isn't there anymore. You also can't now sit logged off in my system and use out-of-game tools to tell you when I've started running sites. You have to log a scout in now and wait. The humanity! The other thing you can't do anymore is seed my wormhole while everyone is logged off, knowing that in 4 hours I normally run sites. Now you have to be present when it happens to know that it happens at all.

Having said all that, I 100% support removing the auto-updating sig list from wormholes. If you want information about wormholes, then you should be required to scan for it. With probes. I'd even like anomolies to require probes in wormholes. Want to go there? Probes. Want to know that 'there' exists? Probes.

Don't have probes? Self destruct and tell me how much you lost. CCP has removed one form of free intel, now lets make sure they remove the other forms. No more instant updating sig lists.

Only 2 years or so. You got something to say about my post, or was that smug condescension all you had?