Wormholes

A lesson my father taught me by example comes to mind.


Once upon a time I lived on a farm. We had dealt with a certain equipment dealer for many years. Business relationships in the rural agriculture community are based on trust far more than other areas of business. You didn't even think about getting competing bids on things, because you didn't have to.

One day my father sent me to a competing dealer that was 15 miles farther away. I was confused and asked why.

He said " I'm not happy with the last few deals for dealer A. Complaining while continuing to spend your money is not nearly as effective as voting with your money by TAKING IT SOMEWHERE ELSE"


Within two months we had personal visits from two salesman, the junior partner at the first dealer, then the senior partner.
Who all asked, " We haven't seen you in a while, what can we do to fix that?"


Stashing a plex on four accounts. Letting the timer tick down.

No you can't have my stuff.

I stayed quiet on this for awhile, because I wanted to see how it played out.

Several of my characters live in a wormhole. We're a medium-sized corp, although we have almost 100 members, that many are never online. Sometimes we can field 45 members, but usually it's more like 6-10 at a time and at off hours it's only 2-4.

When we have more than 20-25 online, we will roll for connections, otherwise, 3 or 4 people will poke into the static, someone else will be scanning around. Sometimes a person will solo a connected site, or make a run to k-space.

Normally, we would roll into very uninteresting, empty, boring chains with no PvP or PvE options maybe 3 out of 4 times. This kind of rolling happens most often when there are only 3-4 people online, because that is when there are the least options for content. The people who work in off-hours have learned ways to roll the holes for content, to avoid needing to sit idle all day waiting for larger gangs to come help them.



Here is how I saw today:


1) We scanned down our static. There were frigate holes, which prevented the 2 people online from doing any sites, or really anything at all. The hole wasn't very good, but they couldn't safely roll.

They logged off, bored.


2) A larger group came online later in the day. The same awful hole was up, however there was a few active T3s in the chain, so cap pilots didn't want to roll. Instead of rolling and having content, we formed up 10 battleships and rolled the hole. Due to luck, it took 6 HIC runs to close. 25 minutes of POS spinning later, we got a new static. Our next hole was really awful. No content, few connections. We took another 20 minutes to roll that one and scan down the next chain.

90 minutes of POS spinning for most of our pilots, they logged off, bored.


3) We discussed if our normal Friday rage rolling would happen. We cannot afford to overcommit one of our few caps to a fight without an escape plan, so it seems unlikely we will roll for content on Friday.

Bored members made plans other than the normal Eve activities for Friday.

4) With so many people logged off, we considered bringing out PvE ships into the chain, but it was a pretty bad chain. There was no PvP to be found (4 nearest holes were all Russian, and two of them were EoL). We didn't have numbers to support caps, and everyone was tired of rolling in battleships.

More people logged off, bored.

5) Now there were too few people online to roll in a reasonable amount of time. Now, I'm looking at our chain, which is boring as hell, connected to a bunch of offline Russians and some middle-of-nowhere Lowsec that's sitting EoL. A few guys went for a frigate roam 15 jumps to nullsec, but some of us have a 500m pod, and roaming in a frigate without any facilities for jump clones is stupid (why do we get shafted here, too?).

6) Our chain, which normally changes 12-14 times per day and is active with PvE and PvP gangs hasn't changed in 12 hours and is a bunch of random nullsec groups in frigates and a whole lot of offline Russians and EOL holes that nobody wants to roll. I don't think this is the intended consequence of this change.

I'm logging off, bored.


Bored, and a tiny bit disappointed.

You do realize that there are combat sites that automatically respawn in every other class of system? In Nullsec, there are ALWAYS combat sites. You can chain belts and chain belts and roll combat sites until you bleed guristas.

Most people also have access to Jump clones. And markets. And they can actually LEAVE if their corp is not active.

In W-Space, combat sites go away and they do not respawn, sometimes for weeks. Not being able to roll for isk will *obliterate* W-Space corps who do not have the manpower to roll to new statics. There are no "military upgrades" or "industry upgrades". That **** doesn't exist.

Our home hole, right now, has 1 site. We are holding it for cap escalations (which we run with a maximum of 10 pilots). That means ~45 people have nowhere to make isk.

Now, I'm sure during the evening sometime tomorrow, there will be a gang of 6+ people online who will roll it.

But for the next 18 hours, we will have ~20 people log in, find there are only 2-3 others online and there is nowhere to do anything useful, and either do the insane solo PVP into a C6 wormhole with 1b in implants, or log off.

You clearly don't understand the economics of W-Space, at least as it is now.

I feel like this will bleed out all the small corps. The big ones will probably adapt, but even with 30-40 members, corps will struggle and lose membership.

I don't know if you're aware, but in order to make 300m running sites for 2 hours, BEFORE this patch, a group of 6 people had 1-2 hours of logistical crap (rolling, scanning, mapping, scouting, hauling loot) BEFORE they could even field PvE ships, or make a single isk. Did you really have this bullshit idea that it was just a stroll in the park and risk-free isk with minimal effort?

You know what's a stroll in the park? Chaining Forsaken Hubs endlessly (with isk magically dropping into your wallet), 5AU from your outpost (where your jumpclone is waiting) while staring at a bunch of blue icons in local and an intel channel. That's the thing that ACTUALLY needs the risk introduced.


I don't know if PvP is the issue here. The PvP opportunities will change, but they will still be there, but PvE is a big reason WH corps can afford PvP. Running sites in a WH is *much* more dangerous already, than anywhere else. The payout offsets the risk, and affords opportunities for PvP, especially without moon goo and easily accessible stations (and consistent ratting).

I agree that finding active systems hasn't been easy, however it's definitely harder now. Time is everything in this game.

Look at japanese mafia's post: This is what happens when it takes too long to roll the hole. People are impatient by nature, they want instant gratification. While you can scan down your chain into oblivion to find something to do, the deeper you scan, the more jumps you have to do when you reship or bring the rest of your fleet with you. Rolling your static, and any other connections for that matter, not only gave you the option to cherry pick your content, it also gave you the option to reship to something more appropriate for the content you've found, relatively quickly I might add. Mission runners and the like can choose when they want to accept a mission or not, haulers can choose to bypass a system with large amounts of activity. In Null Sec, the "blob" can choose when to engage another "blob" or retreat.

Intended or not, wormholers have been able to find stuff to do by rolling holes. Making it more difficult to do forces smaller groups to re-evaluate the value of being in wormholes. Making more wormhole connections doesn't fix the problem. Small groups cannot cover all of the bases if there are too many active connections. In the Risk vs Reward game, we have to choose what level of risk is acceptable to us. making it so that small groups can't handle the risk, just plain sucks. It's like poring cement into my sandbox :(

Adapt or leave some might say. Is that the right answer? Join a bigger group to mitigate the risk? Yes, but if the group gets too large, bye-bye small gang PvP.

I personally don't want that. I like small skirmishes, not 5 vs 20...

I like to see the statistics of player activity of the last 2-4 weeks now because what I expect to see is much less activity. At least this would match my experience scouting our chains the last weeks. Less and less activity. As well saw yesterday a C4 or C5 corp leaving and let them go w/o attacking. Fair enough with this change I think.

@CCP Falcon: everybody here stating that constructive feedback was given in a good way already before the patch is right. You did not reply. Bad comunication. Even now you kept everything as planed you did not explain why you think that is good. Of course everybody understands that as ignorance.

I don't like this change because it made and will make wormholes less interesting. Now I can easily camp a static hi and kill every incoming ship and pod with ease. Especially new players will be affacted in a bad way.

Smaller groups are ****** now as well like I stated in a constructive way before.

Industry change were bad, but with some good changes at least. But I dropped industry for several reasons and so do others I know. But this change will make WH life even worse. Risk increases, but no rewards are given. And for rewards I don't count ISK, but player activity. Check your statistics and I am sure my experience / assumption is correct.

I don't like this change and neither do 95%+ of wormholers.

Okay, so I came in a little more gently last time, because I know that there's quite a few people who don't like this particular change.

A large proportion of our development staff also play the game, myself included. At times, I don't agree with changes that are being made. However, I do exactly what the vast majority of other people do when a change is made that I don't like - I adapt to what's happened and adjust how I play to suit.

This thread was created over a month ago, and a big chunk of the valuable feedback has been drowned out by people ranting and abusing both CCP and eachother, hence why I asked for concise feedback in the Hyperion feedback thread.

If you guys want to keep it here, feel free to do so, but don't complain if feedback gets removed because it's packed in with ranting and personal attacks.

So, simple instruction for you guys out of your reaction to my previous post:

Here are the forum rules. Follow them, or scroll down and read what happens when you break them. It's that simple.

We have no problem with you guys voicing your concerns. In fact, I did the same for a decade as a player when I felt CCP had done something wrong. We do however have issues with people breaking the forum rules.

Carry on discussing this. I'll point people here, and look at collecting feedback to send to development. However, don't break the forum rules.

I think part of the frustration comes that we appear to be talking past each other; during the wormhole townhall, numerous people from both big and small corps outlined scenarios to CCP Fozzie in which they felt people would behave in a much more risk averse way after the changes, and thus generate less content. He was then asked for the reasons for the change - repeatedly - he was either unable or unwilling to articulate these.

On the feedback thing - I've noticed that camping highsec wormholes is now much more of a thing (HIC+webber+inties) - apart from generating more kills of new explorers, I'm not sure this is a great change. Ultimately I think if you want to stick to this spawning distance thing, you are also going to factor in the types of space a particular wormhole links between.

Seriously ...

Adapting to the change may lead many small/mid sized wormhole corps to simply leave w-space and probably leaving the game.

Theses changes makes farming in wspace almost impossible. The risk/reward balance is too unbalanced.

Let's draw for you the big picture :

You have done a patch for w-space that represents maybe 5% of your customer base.
95% of theses 5% told you how and why theses changes are bad.

You have not taken this into account. The current patch is exactly the same as the blog post.

This patch leads to less w-space activity.

I hope your are monitoring activity in w-space, you will se less activity in the coming weeks.

About the forum breaked rules, this is what happens when you stay blinded.

We have not read ANY explanations about the REASONS of theses changes. We have given to you A LOT of comments, you given NOTHING. This is very rude leading to rude reactions.

As somebody working in CRM for more than 10years in RL (oh the bad word real life) this response from you is so bad. Honestly.