Wormholes

FOZZIE, I tried to put this across on the town hall but did a bad job of trying to explain a complex idea in a few words.

The issue is not that Eve does not have elements of luck, It is that with this mechanic It is a matter of whether one jumps through and by pure luck lands in an unfortunate or fortunate part of the sphere of exit.

With this change There is nothing one can do to influence the chance of you living or dying, It is pure luck.
You have removed the opportunity for players to influence their environment.

Now it can be argued that that is exactly what happens with a known space gate.

And it is the freedom of these random chances to live or die that is and has always been a major part of the mechanics of wormhole space.

Closing and rolling holes currently is NOT risk free, skill and knowledge and experience can reduce that risk however.

But now.
Nothing one can do. A bad landing due to luck and it is all over.

Is it surprising that when skill ability and tactics are no help other than for the choice to jump or not, and one is a slave to just blind luck that people are somewhat upset?

The corollary to this is that it achieves the diametric opposite to your stated goals, and just takes people out of space and into their pos shields or log off waiting for better "luck" the next time they play.

For large corps it will be more of a pain, the risk and chance can be mitigated with numbers and support ships.

For medium and small corps, you have just made them victims to chance, and they will not take those odds.
Reduce the odds, and it is still just a misplaced and ineffective concept that improves nothing, and will fail in its stated goals.

This is NOT about players resisting change, It is about players advising you that you are implementing a BAD change.

Give us a mechanic that encourages fights on or off the hole, where skill tactics and training influence the outcome, and we will love you for it as that would be GOOD change.

Please, please put this idea aside and reach out to the community for how this could be achieved, most of us wish for greater opportunities for skilful combat, even if we lose horribly.
Even If it slips Hyperion, it is not a loss, we will have dodged a bullet, and will be grateful for a good replacement.
Theres lots of good and interesting stuff, we will not miss this.

I actually like what was discussed when CCP left the field:

Make the distance and direction and speed you spawn at the other side of a WH based on speed and direction you enter the WH.

This opens a broad spectrum of new tactics and gives the players control over their actions.

It was going to be the best expansion in years
If not for this tiny detail
:~~\

Good changes Fozzie. Stick to your guns

So as a chef you never put new things on the menu just because a few rich old and bitter neckbeards say it will taste ****?

Maybe you would be a better chef if like CCP you tried out a few new dishes and see if the other less vocal people end up really loving them, you never know it could be a real hit and if its not you can always go back to the same boring meal you have been dishing up for years.

It's been far more then just a few bitter rich neck beards against these changes.

Is the analogy I used perfect? No. None are but the valid point stands.

If you want a further comparison. No fine dining restaurant of any caliber worth eating ever puts anything on the menu without exhaustive testing and refinement/iteration. You don't strive to uphold high standards by just randomly hoping for awesome.

These changes by any standard haven't even really been on test as a whole long enough to even do that.

I want to start off by saying that the way that you are communicating this change is extremely upsetting, not to mention underhanded. You posted these new changes 10 minutes before the WH Townhall meeting where it was very obvious that this would be one of the main topics of discussion. I just rechecked the thread for dev posts, and there was nothing in here for almost 10 days, no updates, no indications of what you're considering, just silence. Springing these changes at this time, essentially during the WH Townhall, makes it very difficult for us to evaluate the effect that the new numbers have. It didn't give us any time to test it or gain a better understanding of the new mechanic that's being piled on top of this already new mechanic (collapse % randomness modulation). I certainly hope I'm mistaken here, but it certainly feels that with this change in particular the dev team is purposefully dragging their feet, dragging it out as long as possible while the release date for the Hyperion patch draws closer and closer, until eventually you can just say "Sorry, it's too close to the launch of the patch, we already finalized all the changes."

These new numbers don't change or address the enormous list of concerns that have already been raised in this thread. Traiori has stated the majority of these concerns very succinctly and clearly on page 1 for you to read, but these concerns are still unaddressed and undiscussed by devs here.

This is going to kill a lot of options for WH corporations without giving us anything in return. I'm still waiting to see an explanation of how this is supposed to benefit WH space overall. From the tone in the dev blog and the very sparse postings here, it sounds like this is change for the sake of making changes. If there's some information to the contrary, I would gladly read (or listen) to it.

Fozzie, first of all I'd like to thank you for coming to the WH Townhall yesterday. You gave us your views and reasonings why you want these changes and I'd like to answer to some of the things I heard. Some of this applies to the new frigate wormholes and the K162 changes as well.

Correct me if Im wrong, but you said that you want wormholers to rely more on their chain connection to find their content instead of "ragerolling" for it, and also that you want wormholes to be more random and unpredictable. I haven't read all of the thread but people have already given a number of arguments against this change and some for it, but I want to look at it from a slightly different viewpoint.

Different groups and corps have come into wormhole space and settled in the system that best suits their needs. Small, industrial oriented groups have settled in the lower classes of wormholes with high or low sec statics. PVE oriented groups are mostly in the higher class systems with a static that allows them to also do PVE in their static. Then there's the PVP groups. They'll choose a system with a low-sec static if they like low-sec PVP, a low-class WH static if they like roaming WHs in smaller numbers, or a high-class WH static if they want to catch capital escalation site runners. For example I think it was Bronya Boga yesterday who said they live in a C5-C2 because they enjoy the smaller group PVP in lower-class WHs, but they also want to play with the higher-class guys once in a while when they get rolled into. All of these groups have found the WH that suits their needs, but they also have access to everything else W-space offers by scanning their chain further down the static or by random WHs that connect to and from their home system. Now if they don't find the content they want in their static or the chain, they'll want to roll. But if they deem it too unsafe to roll, whats going to happen? They're going to POS up and twiddle their thumbs or play a different game until another entity rolls the hole or it dies naturally, which can take up to 24 hours.

Obviously this doesnt really effect the larger groups, I doubt much is going to change for HK except maybe adding a rapier pilot to our hole rolling team to web the capital off. But consider something else. Let's not kid ourselves, EVE is sometimes a harsh mistress. We endure a lot to do what we do to live in WHs. Luckily I haven't been here before corp bookmarks or before POS fuel blocks were introduced, but I can imagine how tedious it was. People still managed, but things just took a bit longer. You keep asking us for small things that will improve our quality of life (and thats not just wormholes, thats for EVE as a whole). The UI and some gameplay elements are changing and improving to allow us do the stuff we want to do, which is fun, faster, and not have to bother with something like finding out exactly how much m3 I need to keep my POS running for another month. Ofcourse, there's people who might enjoy this aspect, I even heard there are people who enjoy scanning. We can copy bookmarks faster after Hyperion, and maybe save 10 seconds doing that, yay. But at the same time, we are going to be spending 5 more minutes rolling our connection. I know Im complaining about something that might seem like a mere nuisance to some people but its about the principle and I hope you know what I mean with that.

Now I know that ultimately you want to create more content and a less risk-free environment for wormholers and people in this thread have given a lot of arguments why this is the bad way to go about this, and some arguments for the change. But mostly against it. I'll give you one more argument against. Hole rolling as it is right now isnt risk-free. HK has caught a number of capitals that were rolling their hole, simply by going all in and crossjumping them into their own home system. One of our pilots even solo killed an Orca using a Stiletto after the hole closed behind them. It took him over 30 minutes and all the residents could do was warp two cov ops to try and get the Orca out, but they both died as well. Because groups feel confident that they can roll in safety, they get caught. If they dont think they can roll safely, they wont, and they wont get caught. Also, we dont really WANT to catch hole-rollers. We WANT them to be safe with all their connections closed, so they can run their sites and we can drop on their 4+ capitals instead of killing just 1 on the hole. But if they have an incoming WH they cant close, like the new frigate WH, what you are basically telling them is that they can go and do something different than playing EVE for the next 16 hours, and you are also reducing the chance of us catching them running sites (ergo, less content). Now this has all already been said before in this thread and elsewhere so I'll just stop here.
In summary, from my own point of view:

Mass-based spawn distance: NO
K162 changes: great, especially after the last update
Frigate WHs: yes, but at the same time no (create more content but at the same time destroy some other)
Bookmarks: hell yeah
Effects Rebalance: I see where you are going with it, should be good with some minor tweaks.
Second Static C4: Don't live in one, but having one in your chain is a major PITA, so yes to those.

So Fozzie is it your intention to ruin any Capital based PvP? Because while you are making rolling harder no one other than Winthorp actually thinks this change may bring anything good to wormholes. Attackers jumping capitals into a a well set up defensive group are going to get f*****. Im sorry Mr Dread you landed way outside refit distance and you have to use long range low damage ammo to hit your targets.

Well this is going to make everything in w-space tedious and make combat as we know it a jumbled mess. I'm going to let my sub run out after the patch, it's not worth my limited playtime to deal with this.