Wormholes

Today I would like to talk about
-Book marks
-W space mapping
-Intel sharing

Living and moving around in W space is difficult for any individual. Wormholes have to be manually scanned down to move to and from different systems. Then after the wormhole is scanned down it has to be documented with a bookmark. Then in a day or so the wormhole will collapse due to time decay. The wormhole can also be collapsed by ships moving through them due to mass limits.

W space mapping is difficult. There is not a in game map functionality for wormholes. The people and places window and bookmarks can have each bookmark named and have notes, but this is often not enough. Many players use a wormhole mapping tool like siggy.

This is to facilitate intel sharing of what bookmarks mean in relation to the locations they document. A wormhole mapping software maps the locations of systems in a visual way relative to each other, while also giving a lot of different information about the system at a glance. And then some more information with a longer look. Siggy also lets the player re-name the system on the third party map. It also allows the player to set destination to any given mapped location. It also lets the player get the show info on the system to drag and drop a clickable link easily in chat. The tool can let the player edit the state of the wormhole to show time and mass states. There is also a jump log if any given member had siggy up while jumping through a connection. Siggy shows if the system is in J space, the class of wormhole, or the general security rating of K space meaning Hi sec, Low sec, 0.0.

Intel sharing in w space is difficult. Even sharing intel between people in the same corp can be hard. The mapping software helps. But sometimes the map has not been kept up to date as some of the data has to be manually entered. The corp has to also have a bookmark naming scheme that allows the book marks to be associated to the siggy map. There needs to be a bookmark naming scheme for different types of signatures like combat sites, data, relic, and gas sites, player owned star bases.

Now what about sharing intel with people outside of corp? This is where sharing the intel with bookmarks is difficult. This is also extremely relevant to W space because so many locations can only be documented with bookmarks.

One way of intel sharing is documenting the chain then giving the signature names and locations to the second corp and having somebody in the different corp scan them down. This takes too much time and is tedious for the other party. Another option is the bookmarks to inventory but this also has downsides. There are no contracts in wormhole space, POS permissions are difficult to set up in a way that provides security for item trading. The last option is jetcans. This also assumes both players are in the same physical location. And also dragging dozens of bookmarks between two players is so obscure that many players I've interacted with did not even know it was possible. On top of that it is a clickfest that is so bad that most when educated on the functionality just do not want to share bookmarks that way. Instead most pilots usually opt for the fleet warp or warp to me dance party.

The warp to me dance party is not a great way of moving around wormhole space it is "the least bad way" of sharing location intel.

-Coordinated movement
-Fleets in w space
-Scouts in w space

What about movement through and around wormhole space? I live in wormholes. When educating a new player about staying safe in wormhole space and moving around in wormhole space, as well as introducing him to exploration relic/data I need fleet warp.

I scan down and warp him around as if he was attached to my ship. We do data/relic site after data/relic site and chain through wormholes together. I can show him gas sites, combat sites, different types of wormholes. I can talk to him about wormhole best practices while he is 'hands off' the pilot controls just seeing the shiny things. I can watch D scan, Intel chat channels, whatever just keeping him safe as he does things and listens to me as he is preoccupied with knowledge overload.

I can let him show info and read the information on the wormhole we just jumped through, the thing he just got from a data scatter container, the ship that just showed up on D scan, all while being able to warp him to the correct locations or even off grid to perches or safe spots so he remains un-exploded if we encounter other players.

After that I introduce him to corp bookmarks and the difference between personal bookmarks. I let him practice scanning and warping to things. I let him practice warping me around. I let him practice navigating through chains of wormholes with specific destinations in mind. I let him practice all the things I was previously doing for him.

Personal bookmarks are also important because the corp bookmark limit is 500. This is sometimes a problem. Any given system in W space will have many many bookmarks. Often members will also have to make personal bookmarks like safes, perches, tacticals as to not clutter or contribute to the limited bookmark slots for corp. Often scouts will need to pick and choose which bookmarks to edit to move them from personal to corp when certain situations happen.

If you take away fleet warp from me this education process will be hindered as I can not start from "this is how I move around and do wormholes, just watch, now you try" It will instead be "hey here is this thing called warp to fleet member, do this 100 times while I try to explain what is happening", or I will have to pre-scan a chain and bring instruct him that way.

tldr

i think the whole wh community agrees with you, but this might be a losing battle if CCP doesn't want fleet warps to BMs in null battles. it's looking like you can chalk it up to WHs being a casualty in space mechanics. again.

Having lived in wormholes, the only thing I really see wrong with this is people having to do *gasp*, a little more work.

Have scouts. Fast cloaky frigates. Let them get to the locations and make the bookmarks for your corp. Whats that, your non-corp friends need to have the location too? Well they can either wait for it and land staggered when the rest of the fleet with the locations get there, or they can, I don't know, have scouts of their own? Maybe have the scouts of all the fleets share a chat channel so they can co-odinate with eachother?

This gives people jobs in a fleet besides anchor FC and hit F1.

As far as I understand, this wasn't intended in the first place. Now that people are losing it, they're acting like it will kill their entire game because a bug that was taken as a feature is being removed.

How many times have you tried to get a claoky frigate into the middle of an escalation group without getting declaoked and nuked by sleepers? Not saying it impossible but it makes it a lot harder this giving more safety to the escalation group.

And yes T3s can tackle and hold (for a bit) but what to do with frig holes (another poorly thought out idea on CCPs part)? T3s will also slow down the already slow process of chain mapping.

Having lived in wormholes, you are wrong