Wormholes

M8, you have almost 300k people in your corp, you do not qualify as a "small group". Mkay?

Forum alt best alt.

My main activity is hunting in W-space. People have become more cautious since the patch. It's clearly noticeable.

As someone pointed out previously the two main arguments is that it is to dangerous in w-space and that there are too few targets. The patch makes some activities more dangerous, especially for smaller gangs in lower classes of holes. Also, by increasing the number of holes appearing, the traffic in W-space may increase as moving around gets easier. The changes, to me, makes care-bearing in w-space more dangerous.

I think that CCP went in the completely wrong way about this. Well, that's depending on what the goal was with the changes. If they wanted less site-runners, miners and industrialists in w-space I think they succeeded. It's not a question if the risks are real or not, the perceived risk might be enough for people to leave. And I've seen several corps leaving. Might be coincidence I was there and also correlation is not causation. But still.

A big part of W-space is perception. If you feel safe, you'll stay; if you don't, you'll probably leave if you can change your situation. It's part of the reason people avoid Lowsec: people have in their minds that every gate is camped and as soon as they jump in they're going to explode.

The fuss about Hyperion, plus the reversal in the Odyssey K162 mechanics, brought to mind the dangers in W-space. I read more posts by PvE types complaining about the K162 changes than anything else, followed closely by the second static in C4s.

K162 changes + uncloseable (frigate) holes + mass spawn distance when rolling (to try to make yourself safer) + increased wormhole spawn rate overall + second static in C4 systems

If you think about it, those are a lot of changes all at once smacking a PvE-centric group in the face ... which may have been CCP's intention all along.

Oh, and they buffed hisec incursion site availability.

I skipped through most of this post just to give my 2 cents. I run a corp in a C2 with HS and C3 statics. Lower class wormhole risks have increased tremendously. We barely even run sites now and when we do we scan down the chain looking for c3/c4 content preferably mag and radar sites where in order to gank you they previously had to scan. We see probes and we're cloaked at a safe. This sucks. It sucks horribly.

9 out of 10 days we skip running sites because there is too much activity. I should also add that on average we have 4-5 connecting wormholes now. It's impossible for a small corp to manage. Losses are inevitable, but when your losses outweigh your income you are left with the options of being super-extremely cautious or head out the high sec and find content in k-space which is not what we want to do.

We are not making money in wspace any longer. To really make money you need to run the combat anomalies and we don't run them because the risk is too great. That said we do try. There are the occasional night where we can rake in 500m on anomalies in peace. Pre-Hyperion we could do this unmolested twice a week or more. Now we can do this twice a month. I've got the spreadsheets to prove it.
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On the other side of this coin one of my greater alts is part of a C5 wormhole corp. The large chains have made our lives better. We can still close our hole (the mechanic isn't that bad) off to the world and run our cap escalated sites in peace. We can run c5's in the chain using marauders and we have a plethora of null exits for pvp.

The changes have ****** life for the small lower class wormhole corps. If you have the skills and bodies to roll your holes and cap escalate home sites you can do your business in mostly the same way you always have.

Sounds like the coffee question. People idealise a certain way of things but their actual consumed product or content is often much weaker.

Three pages in and so far it appears to be one friend of a friend, and one out of corp alt.

We're never going to get any credible data about this. All we can hope for is anecdotes. They'l never be evidence, just stories. Hopefully good ones.

A NoHo proteus decloaked on our hole rolling dread a couple days after Hyperion landed, we got him out okay though.

We've caught people rolling holes and murdered them, no caps though; main difference being the ease with which you can blap them 'wrong side'. Not an awful lot of difference here, but a hole cycle is now more of an op, and far less viable in off-timezones.

We've murdered a couple different groups through frigate holes, closing though, not siterunning. A frig comp capable of busting open RR chains and withstanding sleepers with our ~10 men average gangs is currently beyond us.

We have also had the X00 holes display lovely lovely pew at us, like a bunch of fresh faced kittens behind bulletproof glass. Last one held a chance at a threeway so threw a covops through and scanned beyond to K to attempt to connect via a different branch of our chain to get real ships in. We weren't fast enough this time unfortunately and the involved parties tore eachother apart before we could make it but I think this mechanic holds promise.

WH effect changes are positive all round, as long as you stay away from Cerberus gangs in Wolf Rayets.

K162 changes ironically seem to have made the smallest difference so far - nobody rats anymore. Most unexpected.