Wormholes

Then stront check their towers. Shoot their POCO's. If they're not fighting with you, why aren't you taking things that they care about? Why aren't you forcing fights? Are you capable of generating content yourself, or do you imagine that rolling into a new hole is just like queuing into an arena in another nameless fantasy MMO, and that you should be automatically served good fights? Go earn your good fights with some hard work.

You're assuming all the large entities haven't already been in your place and lived in the lowend. Hard Knocks wasn't born into C5 space, we started out in lowend just like yourself. We paid our dues and we've earned everything we have, you want large systems to live in then you need to make that happen for yourself. No one is forcing you to live in lowend space.

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: 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!

I can get on board with most of the changes, but the mass-based spawn just isn't a good idea. This isn't the kind of attention wspace needs. It doesn't provide any new content and adds frustration to an already annoying process. Cue pos-spinning instead of ninja-rolling for small corps. (At least if you're going to make a change like that, sweeten the pot and give us T3 frigate to jump through those tiny new wormholes!)