Wormholes

I've spent a lot of time in wormholes, and been a massive carebear for almost all of that time (It's not that I don't like PvP, I just don't like looking for it). I've seen several inventive ways of getting the loot from the sleepers, and most of them involve exploiting stupid sleepers and/or game mechanics to do it. I've also seen many mistakes made in various sites that have not been punished.

I'd like to change this, and make w-space less forgiving of mistakes and more annoying to farm, but not neccessarily harder. With that in mind, I have a few changes I'd like to see.

1. Ore and gas sites have random reinforcement waves.
Gas sites are currently the only site that you can farm without ever having to fight the sleepers at all. Or, if you don't have enough alts/corp members to jew the whole cloud before the sleepers show up, you can simply kill one wave and then AFK on the cloud until it is gone. Adding random spawns of appropriate sleepers means that now you have to pay attention while you're huffing your gas or mining your rocks.

Said random spawns will not have blue loot or salvage either. This change is not intended to become just another AFK farm.

2. Data and Relic site cans are not hackable while sleepers are present.
This one will make a lot of bears mad. Good. One of the best/easiest (non-escalated) ways of making ISK in high-end wormholes is to clear the frst wave of a relic/data site but leave the trigger ship alive. Then you simply tank that one ship while you hack all the cans (or just the Talocan ship) with a stabbed ship and then leave. This change would remove this ability. If you want the cans, run the site.

3. Sleepless Guardian agro changes. Part 1
I wrote a thing and Jack wrote a thing about escalations. Mine was somewhat trolly (damage rigs on capitals? lol!) but if you read between the lines, it's a good how-to for making stupid levels of ISK quite safely. I don't want to suggest changing this. What I want to talk about is the Sleepless Guardian's agro changes. Their unwillingness to finish off capitals that are dead in the water. I personally should have lost 3 Dreadnaughts and a Carrier to the sleepers due to screw ups in how the sites were ran. Either I was running my repper while I shouldn't have been and capped myself out, or someone accidentally went full manly on us (all 4 waves at once) or someone disconnected while tanking the room and didn't have their repper running. Whatever the reason, I've been in deep hull with no capacitor left several times, resigning myself to losing an expensive ship and then the sleepers simply decide to go shoot something else. Mistakes should be punished.

If a ship is armour tanked, sleepers should not swap targets if that ship has less than 10% armour.
If a ship is shield tanked, sleepers should not swap targets if that ship has less than 10% shields.
If a ship is Triaged or Sieged and has less than 10% capacitor the sleepers should not swap targets.

4. Sleeper agro changes. Part 2
One popular method I've seen to make capital escalations mind-numbingly safe is to warp in a brick-tanked battleship with a full rack of ECM in its mids. The sleepers will almost exclusively shoot said battleship and only rarely (and not for very long) swap off. I'd like to think that the sleepers would be a little smarter than this. We can make them harder, better (faster, stronger).

If the sleepers are shooting a ship that is receiving RR and it doesn't die within 2 minutes, change targets and ignore that target for the next 3 minutes.

5. Ore sites should be signatures and not anomolies.
You have to scan down gas sites. You have to scan down relic sites. You have to scan down data sites. Ore sites just show up on your scanner. Probes not required. This needs to change.

Making these sites require probes to find would do a few things. It would firstly fix an issue with consistency which bothers me. Second it would encourage mining in wormholes. At present, you'd have to be a little bit silly to actually mine in a wormhole. Requiring probes to get into the sites would provide somewhat of a safety blanket for those people who want to mine, but don't like the idea that they can be found so easily. Miners who aren't in the sites can't be pewed.

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If anyone else has any other changes that should be made along these lines please suggest them below.

You may now call me names and tell me I'm dumb.

I agree with the afk changes and possibly the AI changes.
I think the intention was to make ore sites easier to find for new players as well as add some risk to mining outside of belts. If you were paying attention when they were gravs there was very very little risk in mining in one.

Is this the new Features & Ideas subforum?

I don't understand making something tedious just for the sake of it. People still mess up when they aren't AFK and lose caps, I've seen it happen(lol scarecrow you scrub). Especially the gas site is solely to make it more tedious because they don't drop loot. I don't think there're any sleeper NPCs that don't drop loot, so why should these be any different? If you want to make things more difficult, then I think you have to increase the reward as well.

A slight problem with punishing mistakes to harshly is that it would increase the barrier of entry to escalation sites. In their current state, a group of new players who've never run escalations before are able to survive and run them without the help of someone who has done it before. Yes there're guides, but there's a difference between reading a guide and actually doing. If you make it more difficult, then it becomes much harder for newer players who're either just coming into WHs or who're moving up classes to make isk.



While people enjoying PvE is fine and dandy, the majority of people are looking for more fights. CCP has already introduced changes that make bearing safer. If you want PvE to be more difficult, then add back in the API hooks so that people can see when you're farming. Promotes a more difficult PvE environment and increases player interaction.

I don't really see a change that would make them less routine and hold up over time. Eventually they will get figured out and will go back to being routine.

Eh, I really don't buy the increased barrier to entry. This isn't rocket science. There are guides that almost literally hold your hand through your first escalation, and if you do it slowly, a single wave simply cannot kill a capital unless you screw up something big. Newer groups are going to start slowly because they aren't familiar with how things work. My first escalations were done with SYJ, and we were using a Rorqual and Tengu blob to clear out the first spawn, then we warped capitals in one at a time. It was horribly slow, but it worked and was relatively safe-ish.

It's the more established groups that this change will affect most, because they are the ones spawning 3 or 4 waves at once to burn through it faster.

But this doesn't make the sites harder, all you have to do is pay attention and not allow your cap/armour/shields to get too low. This might even spawn new tactics of having one capitals TRY to stay below 10% armour or whatever. This simply ensures that anyone who should die, does.

No to the second one. Doing some ninja is a good way of making isk for the C5 dwellers that cannot do cap scalations.