Wormholes

As a smallish C5 corporation trying to grow this change is quite difficult for us to deal with. We actively dscan/probe during site operations and generally (with the current system) if a competent group rolls into us we can be tackled before exiting siege. With this change, despite being actively looking for new signatures, we are given even less response time to deal with the impending threat.

On the flip side of this, for people running sites who are not locked in siege, its all too easy to just POS back up when a new signature appears.

I would advocate a return to the old system (as I'm sure quite a few others would support) but with a slight tweak to allow for signatures appearing in the scanner:

1. New K162 signatures appear when someone warps to the wormhole (as it currently does).
2. The delay before these appear is down to the pilot:
2a. If the pilot has probes launched and is scanning, the signature is picked up on the next cycle end.
2b. If the pilot is simply using the overlay with no probes, the signature is automatically detected after about a minute.

I believe this both rewards vigilance but at the same time isn't a significant nerf or buff.

The best part of this devblog is that we finally have, after all these years, confirmation from CCP that the K162 in the destination system spawns only when the originating side is warped to. Many suspected that was the case and 99.999% of the anecdotal evidence pointed to that being the case. But we never knew for sure, and even though many would have bet their lives that it was so, there was always some nimrod popping up now and then telling us we were wrong. This is my favorite devblog in a long long time

The immense danger this will cause for many higher sec wormhole residents may lead to more corps giving up their wormholes and then leaving the game altogether. When you have 80 billion or more of capitals in sites, all of which are running triage or siege modules, that brief moment when a new sig appears is where plans change suddenly and everyone has to rethink what they're doing to stay alive. It could be a lowsec explorer that found a sig and wanted to see what kind of wormhole was being lead to, or it could be a 30 man nullsec blob thirsting for WHer carcasses to adorn their captain's quarters back home. Even worse, it could be a C6 alliance with more guardians in their fleet than the defenders have capitals on field. Regardless, that moment of warning gives some small chance for a reaction, even if that reaction happens 5 minutes later due to timers. Robbing folks of even that much time means C5 corps that are not huge alliances will become chattel for the hordes of larger corps that are bored of making billions of ISK a site and want some PVP to go with their mountains of ISK.

Now, all that said, there is another potential I foresee from this. Wormholes are not jumped into very often once the stats for whats on the other side are hinted at, so this means a majority of W-space connections are going to never happen in the first place. C3s may only have 1-2 connections. C5s might never see a nullsec K162 as it's easier to find a highsec/lowsec connection in a lower class wormhole. End result, perhaps this will create less need to roll holes, but when new wormhole sigs do appear a great deal more danger will be perceived from them. A downside is that the ability to get players back into higher class wormholes is going to be greatly reduced without the access from K-space connections. Guess it's time to feel bad for those guys in the C5s and C6s cause once podded, it could be weeks to get a new entrance to bring that player back in.

Well I liked the old mechanic when signatures did not appear in dscan at all and we used deep space probes.

As a WH explorer I am rather concerned by the amount of interconnections that this new situation might sever.


Let me clarify:

As many explorers are aware, many scanned WHs turn out to be K162. This means that a large amount of wh connections are made by the exit points. While some of those exit points may have been created by people who actually jumped through the WH, I am fairly sure that many have been created by people who scanned the WH, warped to it, and then simply left seeing that it didn't suit his/her needs.

Suggestion: before pushing this change I strongly suggest to verify the portion of K162 that have been spawned by warps not followed by a jump. If a sizable portion of K162 haven't been spawned by ships who immediately jumped, this means that the change will effectively sever many WHs. Be wary of reducing WH interconnections.

Personally, I would just introduce some update lag (5/10 mins) into the scanner overlay. After all the scanner overlay has been introduced just to show people the goodies in their system. It won't hurt them to know about those goodies 5 mins later. As somebody else wrote above, let the vigilant ones (i.e. the guys who use probes instead of relying on the scanner overlay) prevail.

-1:
This is 100% anti-PVE, and will make it almost impossible to have any security at all in WHs.

Perhaps if you allowed players to warp to the WH and it didn't spawn K162, but then after a second, or third or fifth warp to the WH it would, that would make huge fleets less likely to gather up and then explode into a system, killing everybody.

Or allow it to not spawn for 5 minutes and/or 5 warps to the WH - if you want to scout it down, and see what type it is, you can. If you want to pop 50 ships through it to gank whoever is on the other side with 0 warning, you can't

PVPers will fight PVPers whenever they can, or at least when it looks fair.. but PVE players will just die in droves - driving them out of WHs where CCP has a terrible lack of interesting PVE content. This is yet another "get in a huge corp or die" patch, it seems

this is another great change for the upcoming nullsec patch. this will allow us to make better use of all the wormholes we get in our ratting system (from that wh spawning upgrade) for both killing farming wormholers while at the same time keeping our ratters safe if we don't want to pvp.

+1 from me.

also what is all these wh people doing commenting on a nullsec patch?

Why is this change being made? When scouting an unstable wormhole you warp to it, bookmark it while approaching and then jump. In a covert ops frig the reduced warning for the hunted parties from this change is a matter of seconds.

If the scouts are warping to the unstable wormhole, bookmarking it and then continuing to scout the current system rather than jumping through they're doing it wrong. They should bookmark the multiple unstable wormhole sigs (named differently so that nobody uses that bookmark for travel) then after scanning all sigs they should warp to the sig bookmark, remove the bookmark while in warp, upon landing bookmark the wormhole and jump through.

I don't see why this change is needed. Don't compensate for bad scouts with game mechanic changes.

I haven't read all the other post in this thread so sorry if someone has already said this, but I think we all like the W-space-> W-space delayed spawning it gives us more control on our Statics. We are definitely concerned about less K162 incoming Null sec wormholes for PvP and less High sec incoming WH's for our logistical needs.

Would it be possible to keep the delayed spawn on the W-space-> W-space and have either a delayed timed (5mins w/e) spawn for K-space-> W-space holes or keep the current instant spawn mechanics?

Thanks you for spending time on us wormhole people this Release! We really appreciate you guys.

+1 for setting a timer after someone warping to the hole.