Wormholes

Hey everyone! This thread is for all of your feedback and discussion surrounding the changes to wormhole jump spawn distance that we proposed in our recently released dev blog.

I want to remind people that the best way to have your views heard is to state your case calmly, politely and with logical reasoning.

Whether you like this idea or don't like this idea, make sure to let us know exactly why you hold your opinion, with as much detail as possible.

:Edit: Update on August 16th:

Hey everyone. I want to thank you for all the reasoned feedback posted here, in your third party blogs, and passed along to the CSM.

We've made some changes to the plan and updated the dev blog with the new version (It may take a few minutes to apply).

The goal with this set of tweaks is to make the time required to return to the wormhole (or to get within refit range of your friends) for average jumps shorter, while keeping a significant element of risk.
To reach these goals, we're pulling the base spawn distance for large ships in significantly, to below 14km.
At the same time we'll be adding a new mechanic that modulates the randomness of your jump based on how close a wormhole is to collapse. For a fresh wormhole with none of its mass limit used, the deviation from the base distance will be a maximum of 2km. For a jump that collapses the wormhole, the maximum deviation (which can send you even closer to the wormhole or farther away) will be a maximum of 5km.

This brings the average jump distance down significantly while preventing complete safety and giving players a new element to consider in their strategic decision making.

This is the worst change. See the other massive thread for reasons why from virtually all wormhole groups.

20km or 40km, the time it takes a dread to warp off a hole and back to the hole remains the same. All the issues that we've brought up previously are still problematic, so I'll bring them up again on behalf of the community:

1) Rage rolling becomes much more annoying for large groups. This limits their ability to find content that they can take, whether it be site-runners to kill (which you *have* to rage-roll for, incidentally) or other large groups. The proposed change slows down chain-rolling, slowing down the speed at which content can be found. This also has the side effect of making farming safer, because the probability being rolled into whilst running sites comes down to how many holes can be opened whilst your caps are not in their POS. Less holes=less chance of dying to everyone else.

2) Rage rolling becomes essentially impossible for small groups. They also have to find content, and rolling the chain is often the only way to reliably find content of interest - whether that be PvP or PvE or anything else. The proposed changes stop you from being able to do this without fighting the larger groups... which you can't do because numbers are important in every case. Small groups can no longer rage-roll consistently, especially given that most larger groups will seed scouts into their chain.

3) Committing capitals to wormholes outside of home systems requires winning the fight or losing the cap... which in turn means that it won't be committed by anyone that hasn't already got the forces on-grid to win it. The proposed change ensures that capitals shoved into another wormhole can't get back into home system. Whereas we currently see Triage used to balance out fights against bigger entities, smaller entities can't afford to lose the triage carrier every time, so they'll just stop bringing them. Less fights is bad for everyone.

4) Using our capitals in nullsec (and arguably losec) means losing them. We're not stupid. The proposed change would strand our capitals 15-20km away from the hole. The fight would become a race against time: will they be able to form up capitals/supercapitals to kill our triage archon before we get it back into the hole? In most cases, the answer will be no. Power projection means that we can no longer commit capitals. It's bad enough at present, without increasing the scope of the problem. Once again, less fights is bad for everyone.

5) Sub-capital wormholes also suffer from the problem because orcas land far away too. The major difference between rolling C4 wormholes and C5 wormholes is that C4 wormholes use Orcas. If those orcas are guaranteed to be in danger, they're also guaranteed to die. We'll take orca kills any time of the day. So will other groups. This means that C4 groups also need to be fielding support fleets for their orca if they don't fancy losing them daily. Bad for small groups, which means they'll leave, which means we lose more groups and hence, lose content.


The error here is the belief that all groups can afford to field support groups. We can't. We aren't 10000 man coalitions, because wormholes can't support that kind of lifestyle. There is a maximum limit to how many people can fit into a wormhole, and unless we're now expecting all pilots to be on all of the time, that means that this change will make smaller groups increasingly unfeasible.

I originally made most of these points on a reddit post here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/2cro9k/where_are_the_devblogs/cjihkl9. Some inital discussion over it can also be found.


EDIT: A better solution would be to invert the numbers: have distance landed be proportional to a function of mass and speed, making it so that lighter and faster ships landing further away from the hole. This would allow us to use kiting HACs as well as brawling T3s.

EDIT 2: In the interest of clarifying my suggested change, I propose that distance landed from the hole should be inversely proportional to mass (higher mass=close) and directly proportional to maximum speed (higher maximum speed = further away).

There will be far fewer incoming connections from k-space, as more people will warp the wormhole, look at what space is on the other side, and choose not to jump through.

This will reduce the connectedness of w-space more generally.

12.9 km to 16.9 km is still too much.

maybe instead of having large mass ships appear far from the wormhole, SMALL mass ships should instead

I think everything but the distance spawned from WH bit is p cool.

A key element of overcoming someone else's home system advantage is to be able to reliably refit the capitals we commit (i.e. dreads next to carriers). When capitals have the potential of spawning >30 km from each other, that advantage is nullified. To add insult to injury, the home defenders can still decide where their capitals land, while the attackers are at the mercy of the RNG Gods.

You push this change through, and no one will commit capitals into someone else's system ever again. The odds are already stacked heavily in favour of home defenders, why make it even more lopsided?

I agree with almost every point made by Traiori, especially with fielding capitals into a hostile hole, ie it wont happen anymore.

Whose going to jump capitals into a hole where the enemy fleet is already prepared? Any other capitals will be outside of refit range of your Triage.

In the interests of providing the devs with information that they don't appear to have, how often do you commit multiple capitals into a hostile system during a fight?

I'm not trying to flame anyone here, but I feel it is my duty to correct some erroneous perceptions, and level a howitzer at your spin control.


That is false. Consternation was caused among all parts of the wormhole community. C1 through C6.

If you are allowed to draw the conclusion that it was one segment, then you can also allow yourself to marginalize that segment. But your statement was simply false. Some small few did like the idea, but the vast majority of players, in all areas of J-space, did not.