Wormholes

TL;DR give us more grav sites, gas, asteroids, fix buggy sites, make W-space defense a little easier, something?

CCP indicated they plan to make more PvE-oriented changes to W-space, e.g. content, ISK potential, etc. but these changes weren't ready for the Hyperion release. We all know these things are closely linked, and many W-space residents are unhappy with a suite of changes that seem quite PvP-oriented without any related PvE modifications; but I would sure like to see those PvE changes be good ones, even if they are delayed.

Some background: I'm a newbro. I've been playing Eve for 4 months, and spent most of that time in W-space. My corp is around 40 players and about half of us occupy a C4, the other half are highsec folks. We're all carebears, not for lack of trying, but for inexperience.

We are unhappy with the Hyperion changes because all of them make it harder on a corp with our size and experience-level to exist in W-space. This was our growth area, and we (especially me) have learned a lot from it. We hope we don't get tossed out on our butts by some bigger W-space group, but we know it could happen any day and there isn't much we could do about it besides take it as a learning experience.


Changes we would like to see are obvious, and I believe these opinions are widely-shared.

More content that has to be scanned, not just appears in probe window for a PvP gang to immediately warp to you when they arrive in your system. With all the new traffic, there is far more risk in doing PvE content now. Guess what? We're not doing it as often now. That removes content for PvP players, and it might cause us to lose money in W-space, especially because the price of ice has nearly doubled due to the recent jump drive changes (duh.)

Few groups mine in W-space. It has a lot of downsides compared to mining anywhere in K-space. There are many ways this could be improved or variety added. +5%/+10% asteroids would be a start. More tritanium or pyerite maybe? Occasional ice spawn of random type? More frequent gas sites to put expedition frigates to work? Make the ore sites have to be scanned? I hear they were like this before.

Data/Relic container hacking is sure a chore in W-space. The rewards are not that great. Making the mini-game a bit easier or improving the loot tables would be nice.

There isn't moon mining in W-space. No shortage of moons, though. How about putting something on those moons for us? Maybe add more planets to W-space systems so PI can contribute more to your fuel production, or whatever industry you might have in your system?

Combat sites, well, since I am in a C4 you know my perspective on that. However, there are no IHUB upgrades in W-space. No increasing your spawn rate. Making people farm their static is good fun, but a lot of them are empty of sites. A general increase in the spawn rate would be nice. Loot for C4 sites sucks too, we all know it could be improved a lot.

POS changes would be nice. This is a broad topic, but any improvements to POS are improvements for wormhole residents.

How about that Personal Ship Maintenance Array that was talked about in the past?

Would it hurt anything to make the Personal Hangar Array hold more items? 50k m3 will hold a couple of hulls but I don't think CCP's intention is to make it hard for players to store ships by limiting the PHA size. If you want to harvest ore or gas in W-space, it doesn't hold much; so you are using Freight Containers, Corp Hangar, or other shared location. I don't see the harm in allowing Personal Hangar Array to hold like 1 million m3 or something.

Also defending your W-space system from a determined invader with greater numbers, I think this is virtually impossible and it runs corps out of W-space. It's not as easy to batphone some help or get everyone in your corp to show up as in K-space. The recent hole control changes are an improvement, but 10 guys in t3 cruisers will still litter the holes with cans and try to prevent you from finding a way to K-space, and they can still roll the holes with a couple of battleships, so help can never reach you in time. This is pretty unfortunate. I think when a POS becomes reinforced, the system it is in should spawn a bunch of K-space holes with no practical way to roll them. This creates content by giving the defenders (or their allies/hired help) an easier way to fight their adversaries.

Finally, I am really surprised and disappointed CCP thought these significant changes to C4 space were needed urgently, but PvE changes are on the back-burner. A frequent release schedule is a great thing that allows incremental changes to a game, but not when that release schedule directly causes you to push out changes that are incomplete, and these are sorely incomplete.

o7

Corpmates in the past that ran sites in their C5 static were always griping and complaining about needing a Noctis and how vulnerable and expensive they were.

Then they saw me using a salvaging Catalyst with my scanning alt and their minds were blown.

+1

I think that Corbexx has been working on this issue since his election. I support the increase of base site payouts in most of WH space. I do not personally run static sites anymore, but from my interactions with others it appears to me that the risk/reward is out of whack. Wormholes should be inherently higher isk/hr than ANYTHING in hisec. Otherwise you're incentivizing everyone to stay in hisec. Same thing with mining. There is currently NO REASON that I can think of for someone to mine in wormholes.

Yeah, highsec incursions are pretty ridiculous, especially as they just received some tweaks to make farming them steadier.

There is certainly no danger in wormhole corps becoming too wealthy by giving us more content or better loot tables.

Also these things are easy to adjust. It's not a huge, complicated problem such as nullsec sovereignty / alliances consolidating too much power (I read the Chinese server is in danger of becoming a one-alliance-game.)

For the above reason, I think whatever changes CCP has planned for W-space PvE must be pretty dramatic (thus they take developer effort to complete) and hopefully that means lots of new content. So, I don't think they want to do simple things like add loot. They must want to give us new kinds of encounters.


As to the moon mining, by the way, my understanding is the supply of certain moon products are effectively controlled by that handful of powerful alliances (above) and it's basically easy for them to continue controlling those products as long as they can move their fleets of supers about at no real cost or risk. Adding moon products to W-space would disrupt that market and cause some people to move into W-space to get those moons. Both those are good outcomes.

Yes, I can understand why a small(ish) PVE corp would want that. But I don't see any reason why CCP should open the faucets any wider. With 20 people in a C4 you should be able to buy your POS fuel, replace any lost ships and still make a profit. If not, you're doing it wrong.

Thanks for the condescending insult. I'm glad you appreciate the newbro's perspective.

We're not asking for more ISK without more effort or risk. We just got more risk -- a lot more -- from the Hyperion changes. You'll notice I suggested increasing the rate of anomaly spawns, and several other material or ISK faucets, that are not effort-free.

The fuel for one Large POS is around 1 billion/month now. That's about what our C4 gives up in combat site loot in A WEEK. We farm our static when we can; and having another static gives us more access to potentially-lucrative systems, but the reality is our risk just went from pretty low to pretty high. I've had 4 or more wormholes into my system since the patch. I expect that will be the new normal. That's a lot more entrances to watch (or collapse at greater risk than before.)

The reason I suggest moon products is because it offers a solution to one of Eve's larger problems, and would be a motivation for more corps to enter W-space. Right now there is really little reason for corps to come here instead of rent space in nullsec, which is just feeding what's wrong with nullsec -- landlords controlling huge amounts of resources with little effort besides collecting taxes to fuel their supers and gather intel.

In other words, your post is wrong, and you have contributed nothing to the discussion. I hope your next clone has only nine fingers.

If CCP invented a way to harvest tears and turn them into ISK w-space would be the richest space in the game. Fozzie please get on this.

If you don't really, really, really p***-off another corp why should you be evicted? So nothing to fear, as long as you care about the fundamental attitude, that everything that you have in your WH is considered lost already. Don't bring anything in your WH, that you can't afford to loose. (As all things in EVE)

Another thing is: make friends!
If some bigger WH corp is coming to pewpew you, for instance while you're farming, have a good fight and make friends with them afterwards.

We had epic fights against much larger corps defending our WH when we were living in a C2. Just make friends! Giving them the possibility for a decent fight is the fuel for every WH corp, coming to help you.

There are some good and reasonable points here, a couple that worry me though.

There is a grave danger in adding moon mining to wormholes, it would immediately make wormhole space at risk of being simply an extension of Nullsec.

Incursioning is an area with its own issues and balance, but It is not either 100% safe, or a giant risk free Isk fountain.
One can earn a significantly higher income than a C4 but again, with all the waiting etc not everyone actually does.
It is easy to look at the maximum one can earn in any area of the game and expand that to ISK per hour.
However that is usually incorrect, people who do not understand wormholes do the same thing.

Next. If one opens uncloseable holes to HS during an eviction, one would almost certainly make the eviction more certain.
And it would actually encourage more to take place, not an ideal result.

Other than that, you raised a number of very valid points, any of which would have been more welcome than the current changes.

You could, ya know, go into your static and farm them?

You now have 2 of them and they're unlimited....

I mean, once you've sucked one dry, you close it and get a new one.


Man, some people really do need their hand held all the time