Wormholes

Someone asked me to crosspost this here.

Hyperion Wormhole Changes: A Completely Biased Opinion

I've been meaning to make this post for the last few days, but I kept getting sidetracked by Important Things. Not anymore.

Hyperion was released as a mini-expansion with a bunch of wormhole changes. More wormholes overall, new frigate-only wormholes, mass-dependent spawn distance, extra statics for C4s, wormhole effect rebalances, and a few other things were all added. Some of them were good, some of them have been terrible. I think most people who live(d) in wormholes would agree that this expansion did not deliver what had been hoped for.


Frigate-Only Wormholes

Oh man, these byproducts of Fozzie's hardon for small things are great. People are complaining everywhere "abloohoohoo I might get attacked by some frigates in wormhole space" but unless you're sitting in one of the newly rebalanced Wolf Rayets (and possibly not even then) the average Sleeper poses more of a threat. Current forecast is cloudy with a chance of dead salvaging Noctises. These uncollapsible holes are great for launching, say, a frigate fleet from Deklein to N3 renter space, or to serve as a conduit for frigate explorers. They are not great for launching wormhole invasions. In fact, this is why I love them: they are the answer to hole control during evictions. You see, the modus operandi for any invading force looking to take a giant dump on somebody's fortress of solitude is to stuff as many people as possible into the target wormhole, and gain local numeric/tactical superiority. At that point every wormhole is either collapsed (if wandering) or is rolled and then has enough mass passed through to put them on the brink of collapse. That way, the defenders are unable to bring in reinforcements, as jumping out to find a route closes the exit behind them and locks that person out of the hole. The attackers then rinse and repeat until the target POS(es) comes out of reinforced and/or they have all the reinforcements they want in-system, at which point they destroy their target(s) at their leisure.

Frigate wormholes change that. CCP said that they are extremely difficult to collapse and regenerate mass, and given that they are designed to be a huge pain in the ass if not impossible to collapse, I haven't even bothered trying myself. Now all you need to do is send a probing frigate--possibly an uncatchable interceptor instead of a scanning frigate, because Fozzie decided cheap and functional invulnerability was a good thing--through to the other side, find an entrance, and bring all your friends into your wormhole via interceptors. The attackers can't collapse the hole or stop you from warping off of it, so you just have to hand out ships to people at the POS and voila, now you can stand a chance. This right here is why frigate wormholes are fantastic: people with preparation and a bit of luck aren't totally screwed by a larger invasion force anymore.


Mass Dependent Spawn Distance

Big fat ships spawn further away from the hole now, so rolling a hole (repeatedly sending high mass ships through to collapse it until you get the desired destination) actually poses a risk, particularly with capitals. This is a good change and fairly significant. Naturally, people are Very Very Mad about it.


More Wandering Wormholes

This change could have been good except CCP went completely overboard with it. CCP's vision for wormhole space was a semi-connected network of systems with changing connections. Unfortunately instead of upping things just a bit to see how it would affect things, they decided to change the average number of wormholes in a wormhole system from like 2 to about 4 or 5. This has fairly profound implications when you consider the exponentially increasing chain sizes that results in. Running Sleeper sites in a system with that many connections is like trying to pick up pennies in the middle of a highway where every passing car is something straight out of Mad Max and filled with people who want to murder the **** out of you. People aren't that dumb, and when CCP does things like buff Incursions while making it vastly riskier to live in wormhole space they start to take the hint. Highsec stations don't have fuel or rent costs.

Furthermore, this change affects small group players vastly more than it does large wormhole alliances. If you don't have enough scouts to watch entrance holes while you run sites, you're pretty much taking your hands off the wheel and closing your eyes while you cruise down the highway. Small groups don't have that manpower; the mechanic has wound up being a tax on Little People.


Extra Statics for C4s

This change really made me question what the **** is going on over at CCP HQ. "Our data says people don't live in C4s. We should fix this!" So they added a second static. Either they don't understand why people live in certain wormholes over others, or they were being dishonest in their devblog about their reasons for changing things. An extra static is not extra money. An extra static is extra risk. Whoever was working on this over at CCP completely failed to address the reason people currently don't live in C4s very much: the money sucks. If you can run a C4 site, you can run a C3 site for more money.* Thus the gap between C3 and C5 wormhole activity, the lowest class in which capital escalations can occur. People choose where they live in wormhole space based on money, not PvP. You can't go and lose bazillion ISK ships--for ratting or for PvP--on an empty wallet.

gonna need more space apparently

The whole point of calling your spacefriends and getting them into the system via frigate holes is to not be outnumbered horribly.

You still need the frig hole in your system at some point in the siege and it needs to open to somewhere with a k-space static. Frig holes are w-space only. You need the connecting wormhole system to be inactive and connecting to k-space with reasonable number of jumps to your buddies. Its a long shot. Almost certainly the planets will not align in this manner for you to save your tower(s).

Frig holes were a nice idea on paper. Dreams of fiery death in clashing swarms of tiny ships. But the idea had no "reality balancing" or integration into the whole wormhole ecosystem. Hence all they really do now is further screw up the balance between PvP and PvE to replace PvP losses along with all the extra "swiss cheese" random holes.

Would love to see you expand on your thoughts on the mass spawn distance changes other than "WH people hate it so it must be good"

Most valued combat anomaly in a c3 is the Outpost Frontier Stronghold, 32.5m in blues. Of the data/relic sites its the Unsecured Frontier Database that clocks in at 72.5m in blues. The other salvage is very random what you end up with.

For the time/effort to do these sites solo (that is solo with no alts multi boxing). You probably better of do level 4s in empire.
Just because you able to do something solo, doesn't necessary mean its a good idea to do it.

So yeah the numbers to high. (and the actual rewards to small for actual effort and risk imho).

Especially considering you won't lose your ship/pod and have to haul in a whole new set doing empire L4s unless you're rolling with a stupid amount of bling. And lol, I remember ppl saying C1-C2 was worse than L4s like a year ago. Now C3's even. But tbh I don't doubt there has been enough power creep and tactics/fitting optimization in that time that you can now blitz those L4s competitively with C3 all-in rates.

Edit: Also forgot that securing a WH for site running is now way more risky and time consuming. That is probably the more compelling reason why blitz L4s can outperform C3 incomes now.

The SA part should have been a hint. He is a goon and sticks exactly with their postingline since the changes were announced. Just compare it with f.e. some Querns posts in the stickies.
And esp the entire part about C4s shows he has no real knowledge about wormholes.
My favorite is just at the start where he did not see the one change (c4dualstatics) people were asking for for years coming...
Also his numbers are bad, I´m sorry but I do not earn 250+M/h in a c3 or earned 400M/h with higher ribbonprices.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4883282#post4883282

This is not a personal attack but please do your due diligence before posting.

I'm not saying it'll never happen that a frig hole won't defeat a siege, but its certainly a fortuitous outcome and cannot be relied upon. You need the frig hole (obviously), and the siege will obviously not even start until there's no frig holes so you'd have to be super-duper lucky by getting one to spawn during the siege. Siegers can't be smartbombing the **** out of it (they will be, this is theorycrafting right?) and your batphoned buds would all need to be able to fly interceptors (else you would need all the other conditions in place that I wrote in my earlier post, and the k-space exit would probably have to be of the high/low variety. Oh and irregardless you'd need to flood the entry with targets with the expectation of eventually getting enough past the camp).

You would also need to have a lot of useful PvP ships and mods stashed in your SMA that just happen to match well with the skills of your friends and just happen to counter or outnumber what the sieging fleet has on field. You can theorycraft a lot of things, but reality is usually not even close to being this forgiving.

There is no "pro" really, it's a straight up nerf.

You could make the argument that C5+ residents had it too easy with the relative ease (easier than lower classes, bizarrely) with which you could control routes into your space, relative to the amount of ISK that C5+ sites with full capital escalation made.

But, if risk vs reward imbalance was the primary motivator they could've just stopped people farming by preventing respawning Sleepers after downtime. They could've done that and let the dust settle to see what effect it had.

CCP doesn't really do light touches though, so everyone got battered by sweeping changes equally, even the guys in low class wormholes that are too small to survive in C5+ (else why would they even be there when the ISK making potential is so disparate?). I honestly do not know why CCP felt that low class wormhole guys had to eat this change as well, or tourists coming from highsec for that matter - who now run the risk of landing in a webby highsec WH camp when previously they did not (imo one of the original key strengths of WH space - manageable risk). Did anyone ever cry about the life people in C2s and C3s were having?

So yeah - there's no upside. You have the same sites with the same rewards, only you probably can't run them half the time anymore because your wormhole - which have an earning potential considerably less than Incursions do by orders of magnitude - is swiss cheese.

As the member of a C5 resident corp I don't have a problem with the spirit of the mass distance change, at least for C5+ where the serious money is made, but the blunt and narrow minded way it was applied - I do. Worst of all it is done in the very same expansion that Incursions were buffed in. You'd think CCP really don't want people to bother living in W-space, frankly, which is a shame because it's so cool.