Wormholes

So let me ask: Is it really a bad thing if people stop using capitals to roll wormholes? How is forcing people to use battleships a big negative? Maybe you can't field ten players or ten battleships? Well, use five. You may get caught while waiting for the second pass, but a few minutes is acceptable. You should not be able to instantly and safely roll holes with them. It doesn't matter why you're rolling. You could be NOHO wanting a cap fight, or you could be a group of VOC alts running a three man expo system. Neither group should get risk free rolling. If you can't live without risk free rolling, you don't belong in WH space.

So despite pages of replies across 2 threads.

This comment only proves you are not listening at all to the player feedback you requested as you are still spending more development time on this.

Honestly, as someone said earlier;

Pull this one part of Hyperion and wormholers will hail this the best update ever.

Some amazing stuff in the dev blog, please don't ruin it. Please.

hm.. funny -- i dont see anything about allowing clone swaps in wormholes -- did that get missed? why do we have this garbage change instead? Can we trade in this proposed change for the clone pods in POS?

As a wormhole resident, I don't like this idea at all. Rolling our c5 static is already a nail-biting process when we know that someone is active on the other side. Forcing a carrier to slowboat potentially 16km means that it's sitting there basically defenseless until it gets back, since we've already reduced the hole mass by more than half (assuming we jump a few battleships through with it). You're also welcoming hostiles to close the hole before you can make it back through by jumping their own battleships through and back.

Your solution is to use battleships instead, and get through and back quicker? I dunno. Seems pretty simple.

Because this means rage rolling will take SOO much longer. If you can't field the requisite number of battleships.

Also means all those battleship pilots will have to reship if something is found in the next wormhole.

As a QA analyst, I'm here to speak about the functionality of the feature, not its merits, and to make sure its as close to our designers vision as possible upon release.

EDIT: After rereading my post I feel I should clarify, considering the impact of a feature on gameplay and user experience is also part of being a QA analyst, its just not my place to comment on that on the forums!

First off, the majority of changes for hyperion? AWESOME

this change? I have some significant concerns.

on face value I can see the intention behind this change. the increase of risk related to activities is always to be encouraged in my mind and that CCP is persuing this concept is most gratifying.

however there are issues here I feel i need to bring up into how this change could potentially seriously affect the nonlinear strategies which are part of what gives wormhole space it's charm.

firstly: wormhole space represents a unique area in eve where thanks to existing wormhole mechanics it's possible for smaller entities to successfully combat and defend against larger entities. a lot of this is due to the nature of wormholes and their mass and time mechanics. this additional "victory condition" creates a scenario where gurilla tactics are entirely viable and small well equipped strikes can engage a numerically superior force and thanks to the "choke-point" of a wormhole engineer a situation where they can emerge victorious. one of the reasons for this situation is that wormholes almost create a "point buy" mechanism within eve. where a smaller number of players can make use of larger ships (in this case battleships and capitals) in order to overcome the lack of individual player numbers. conversely, larger groups have to decide if they want to deploy the larger, more powerful ships, or leverage their numerical superiority with a bigger group of smaller vessels.

now the big issue I worry about here is that this change would punish the players who choose to deploy the smaller force. while the ships are individually more powerful (and as a result more expensive) they suffer from the tactical limitations of having less players behind each ship. capitals for example are very vulnerable to a dedicated T3 force within wormhole space and due to mass restrictions and mass amounts will often only be lightly escorted within the target wormhole for fear of being counter jumped and trapped within. is this a risk? most certainly and it's one that many wormhole corporations ALREADY take extremely seriously.

so how do i see this change as potentially negative? primarily my worry is that this change heavily favors the force which can deploy more pilots. larger entities can field significantly more "expendable" hulls for the task (plated battleships would be the obvious option) and would, no doubt, overcome this change by the simple application of more pilots to negate the wormhole polarization mechanic.

much in the same way that null-sec suffers from disproportionately large groups and alliances I would fear that this change would force serious wormhole entities to follow the same methodology lest they find them selves at a significant disadvantage. quite simply larger groups will negate this change through the application of numbers leaving only the smaller entities to actually be affected.

secondly: I am also somewhat concerned in regards to how this change somewhat conflicts with the overall theme of the rest of hyperion. most of the changes have quite clearly been designed in such a way to encourage movement between wormholes. the introductions of secondary statics for C4's being an excellent example. similarly the new frigate microholes are an excellent way to encourage people to move quickly and more often between spaces.

this change however, with the intention of slowing down "rage rolling" seems contradictory in my mind. on one hand the majority of changes encourage activity and connectivity within wormhole space. while this second change would necessitate players expending significantly more effort in creating new connections. slowing down exploration for the higher end wormhole entities without the numbers to reliably chain collapse (something I don't Believe larger groups won't have an issue with as previously mentioned).

more thoughts later on as the conversation develops :)

Can you tell the dudes sitting in your building that this is a bad change and we don't want it. or better yet -- ask him/her to start reading this thread to understand the public sentiment behind this and that we think he/she has a bad vision?

Nice spin.