Wormholes

Sorry this is such a long post but Fozzie please read it!!

I really don't post much because i'm bad at writing but this thread needs some constructive comments.

The main issues I see with this are (in order of importance):

1. Rage rolling is much slower. Landing ~15k out of jump range in a dread and then burning back at 80m/s is a real pain. You could fit some kind of nano dread/carrier and do it a little faster (still not that fast). If one of these "rolling caps" get tackled we suddenly have a **** fit cap stuck on the other side of the wh with no way of refitting. We then have a small amount of mass left on the wh to work with when trying to save this cap. As a result this wont create a fight. Just a cheap fit carrier getting ganked... meh.

The net result of all this is people will just stop rolling. I know this is just speculation but im the kind of guy that logs in to coms and says "you guys are doing nothing, lets roll!". I will stop doing this I think because its not worth risking a cap dying to roll holes slower than I could before. If people stop chain rolling or even just rolling for a new chain to find something to do; wh space will become really bad.

2. I think one of the big things that stops people from taking fights in wh space is the fact that jumping 3 caps and 20 t3s through a wormhole and closing it behind you is really scary. You are jumping ~40b (2 super carriers in value) through a hole in to someones home system where they can just cap blob you with like 10 dreads if they have the pilots, yes there are groups that can do this to you. After doing this you have no means of quickly extracting. If you win you then have to sit there rolling holes (which is now more risky) looking for an exit completely naked with no means of posing up. If you lose you are in a world of hurt. You are stuck in someone else's system potentially being combat scanned. You have to wait out your 15 min timer and log, trapped until you get a sneaky exit which could be days later. (This is if the people you are fighting are total dicks, some people are total dicks). The people you are jumping in to on the other hand can just warp back to towers if **** goes good or bad.

Ok i'm getting to the point; Having your caps jump through the wormhole and then land out of refitting range and randomly spaced out makes it even harder to fight people in their home system. There is no way we would have taken this fight http://www.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=24659592 if our caps were going to land out of refitting range.

Also if your caps can land 40km apart then you only have to bump them for ~12km before they are out of archon cap transfer range. ~17 to be out of carrier rep range.

EVEN WORSE All the defenders have to do is make a warp-in for carriers/dreads 30 km away from your dread on the opposite side of the dread to your carrier. Suddenly all their caps are out of rep range of your carrier which is fine except for the fact that your sub-caps cant go close to them to do anything. To neut with a neut legion suddenly you have to be out of rep range and you WILL die. They can kill your dread and you WILL lose the fight. [...]

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).

Since i am no wh dweller, is it the rolling of interconnected holes that you guys are upset with, or also the connections to regular space, like null?

Cause from the null sec point as fc i hate when fights end with the jumping of caps and the level of security they do it with. If i go through a gate in null i risk everything at spawn distance, in the case of regional gates a ***** on logi with a damp on em.

Th rolling of interconnected whs i dont know thr pro s and cons, can wh people share some info on if its both?

.....

TL;DR

1. This will stop us from rolling

2. This will stop us from taking fights

3. This will stop us from killing rolling caps

4. This will stop people from doing stuff in general and this will make wh space a dark empty sad place :(

What Blackish said.

I think the point of contention may be this:

How easy should it actually be to roll a wormhole? It would seem to me as if the wormholes themselves were not designed with rolling in mind, they were designed for the mass limits to be spooky and mysterious and cut large fleets apart before they realized what was happening. Hole rolling is essentially a metagame phenomena, with no direct mechanical support.

There are two perspectives:
A) It should be easier, since hole rolling is done primarily as a way to seek content, not to escape it.
B) It should be harder, to make it more difficult for people to escape from a 'bad' situation.

Under option A, the players are the ultimate controlling force for the space. The players move their statics around, adjust the chains to suit their needs, and rage roll to force themselves into the chains of others. The wormhole is like the location changing door in Howl's Moving Castle. If this is what we want, if this is what we're going for, then you could hypothetically at that point start introducing structures that ****** with wormhole behaviour. This is the path for wormhole space that says 'the players want an environment they can manipulate the **** out of' and make the way everything behaves highly controlled, and turn it into the '0.0 that never was' I, as someone who enjoys the idea of construction, colonization, exploration, and expansion as directions for my gameplay, I can appreciate this path, but I do understand why it is definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

Under option B, the game controls the wormholes, and the players are forced to ride the twisting networks of wormhole connections, essentially at its mercy. The new, tiny, mass regening wormholes are the ultimate examples of this. In many ways completely uncontrollable, and could end up forming a 'second network' of frigate only corridors through space. If option B is what you want, then the change to spawn distance is also good, because it makes it harder and unsafer to roll a hole, taking the perspective that taking direct control of the wormhole network in that manner is Meddling In Forces Beyond Our Ken. If that's the direction you're taking it, then make all the holes mass regening, add the mass spawn thing, cut the lifetime of every hole in half, and sit back and see what we players do. Because trust me, we'd still figure out how to abuse the **** out of all of it.