Wormholes

So in data/relics, until you can add the drifter, we keeping the same mechanics as now? or we getting these worthless escalations and no drifter?

EDIT: After testing
You can do the whole site with a solo dread (Naglfar), t2 fitted. Avengers last ca. 15s vs normal guns; ca. 50s vs HAW.
There is no reason to bring carrier/fax if you are solo farming, they add a value of around 70m/100m combined. Better watch holes with those toons.
So, at this stage, it looks like the site is designed to need even less cooperation.

Why not just fix the spawning mechanics so they don't regen during downtime? lol...

The caps dont increase the inherant value of the site, but will increase clear time. Especially if you use a HAW dread to cause the extra wave, as well as help clear the site faster. If you do the site twice as fast with a dread, its twice the isk/hr for the fleet.

Well i´m somewhat left wondering, why those of us living in a low class system with a C5 static get to fight those Drifter Bosses.
I mean Fozzie you yourself said they will be the hardest NPC ever designed for EVE, they will be reasonably killable by capitals and extremly hard by subcap fleet.

As of now the ones who finished the C5 sites whole where guys like us living in low class space who have to venture in our statics to make our isk. Because we can´t escalate the sites and we can´t keep those holes around for 4 days.
So we had to bring our ships out of our hole, out of the protection of our home, away from the possibility to fast reinforce our fleet into the danger to let them possibly rolled out ... an still be barred from being able to make the big isk sleeper escalations offer.
Then unlike the C5 and C6 residents we have to farm our static to get more isk than our towers burn through in a month.

So i have to say i find the changes somewhat intresting –
But i have mixed feelings about this -
Sure it´s a good thing, that those not living inside a c5 get a piece of the isk pie which was exclusive to those living there – which was somewhat justified through the fact that they might have to fight enemy capitals but the disparity was to large given the effort we had to put in in comparison to them.
On the other hand, we have to fight this Drifter Boss everytime we complete a site with subcapitals because we can´t bring anything bigger and are even before that limited in the number of ships we can bring through the mass limitation of our connection.
So i´m left wondering how you will manage to make this Drifter a challenge for those capitals while on the other hand not letting it´s power get out of hand against a sub capital fleet.
Then despite it´s high value, it´s nowhere near enough to replace a lost ship -
and the prospect of a fight which is gonna take forever against a single NPC which scrams is not very appealing and I don´t want us to become the guys who are gonna let the site stand with the remaining ship in it because we can´t hope to compete against this Drifter Boss.
(And you should keep in mind there are those of us who are good at math – so if to kill this thing takes longer than to run another site(s) worth 350millionen nobody´s gonna kill them)

What brings me to my next point -
Have you considered that there might be corps out there who are going to spawn this drifter with malicious intent.
I mean it might be pretty easy fighting a few of these by using capitals – but that won´t be true for sub caps.
So what does prevent a C5 resident from spawning Drifter Bosses and letting them roam the wormhole ?
You can essentially get the Drifter Bosses to protect your home sites depending on where they will be able to warp to and even to fight potential aggressors, visitors and the like. (we are not aware of CCP might allow those Drifter Bosses to do ...)
So you can generate an army of NPC to fight for you ... especially the low class corps will have no means to face them if they exceed a certain number – from what i imagine might not be a high one.
And if they even prevent you from crashing a connection to such a wormhole system by engaging your rolling ships forcing us to keep this wormhole around until it dies through time,
then this change defeats the whole purpose for us to have such a static connection when only the C5 residents will be able to fully utilize their sites and defeat the Drifter Bosses.

And what you should at all times keep in mind is, that most corps living in j-space a rather small.
So even if the Drifter Bosses can be beat by subcapitals it should only take a rather small number of pilots.
Most corps can´t be expected to field 20 ships - hell there are a lot of us who struggle to field ten or less.
Would be a huge change to barr the small corps from the sites C5 has to offer -
Than as of now it is not a rare event to see 2 Pilots flying those sites -
either in Tinker setups or Maruader.
I don´t mind if the entry for those sites is upped a bit – but when you have to bring 20 guys to challenge the Drifter Bosses most of us living in low class space with a C5 statics better start looking for another wormhole. Than this are near unachievable numbers for most of us.

And the last point is -
Like some have already stated while this might be an up in isk for us that live in low class holes who occasionaly run C5 sites. It is a nerf for C5 residents. I´m not sure if you thought the consequences of this through – it is already hard to get people to live in j-space, then let´s be honest it is work! In other parts of eve you sit in your ship undock an there is content – but not in here. Here you have to put in hours and hours of combined effort to get your content and even now a lot of us are struggling or are even left far behind in regards of what you can earn by null sec anomalies the escalations of them and the earnings you can make doing incursion.
So only from a finacial viewpoint the incentive to commit to a life in j-space is slim as it is.
With the introduction of Citadels and the no asset safety in wormholes ( and by in my opinion substantially reducing the bar for evictions), and therefore the risk of loosing your assets, you don´t create more reasons to wanna live here on the contrary the opposite is true.
And j-space Population density is thin as it is – we don´t need another mass exodus of j-space residents.

As an alternative that might balance concerns of smaller WH corporations with the desire for more PvE and PvP content, perhaps a new capital module could be introduced that would halve the mass of the ship similar to the warp disruption array on HICs?

Like the changes by the way ~ exciting, challenging, unique, changing the environment daily, and at the heart of "why WH?"

At first glance, these changes sound exciting but after i took some time to think about it, it's clear to me that these changes do not improve the wormhole experience as they should. I believe CCP's goals with these changes are as follows:

1. To stop wormhole sites from being farmed
2. To encourage site running outside of your home system
3. To dissuade people from using capitals

I think most people will agree that points 1 & 2 are good design goals but I doubt any reasonable person would want capital wormhole gameplay to suffer as it will do in the new system... which it will because the risks are not balanced with the rewards.

How it will shape out

At first, people will farm their connections in sub capital fleets without fully completing the site, to prevent the Drifter from spawning. Once players figure out how to deal with the Drifter without losing a ship, they may kill the drifter. However, if the drifter takes too long to kill using sub caps, it will probably be better not to spawn it and just move to the next site.

It will be vary rare that capitals are used outside of a home system for two reasons - firstly because you can currently only bring one through your connection and have it safely return and secondly, because the maximum you can hope to receive from doing this is an extra 50 million.

So, what we will see is less capitals in space and instead, people will switch to more mobile, harder to catch sub-capitals, that can disengage from the site and roll their hole at the first sign of trouble.

How is should be

People have been saying for years that wormhole PVE should be more interesting and typically site the following as good ways to do this:

1. Add a random aspect to site spawning to make it less predictable
2. Stop people farming the same site for multiple days
3. Encourage site running in the static

The proposed changes do not do what we have been asking for and in has a huge potential of ruining wormholes space PVE in C5/C6 systems. However, with a few modifications CCP's plan could achieve the above design goals.

Firstly, capital escalations should still be a thing that rewards bringing capital ships, while at the same time making sites more challenging. I propose that it only takes one capital to fully escalate the site. However, the escalation sleepers will come in randomly timed waves. For example, you warp a dread on field and the first escalation immediately spawns but a random timer also starts in the background, so that sometime in the next 3 minutes, the next wave will spawn. The combined escalation value needs to be enough to encourage you to risk your ship... 400 mil should do it (a 10th of the cost of a dread).

Secondly, to stop sites from being farm-able, the site should simply de-spawn within a couple hours of 3 sleepers (including the trigger) being killed in the first wave.

And lastly, the Drifter should be somewhat random and it should be extremely more valuable. The appearance of the drifter should be chance based, as follows:
* A very small chance (10-20%) of a drifter spawning if you run a site without capitals.
* A medium chance (50-60%) if you use one capital
* A high chance (80-90%) if you use multiple capitals

The Drifter should also come in different forms depending on your fleet. For example, there should be a high neut power one if you bring a force auxiliary, a high alpha one if you only have sub-caps and one with a super weapon if you bring multiple caps. To keep us guessing, the different forms should be a little random.

Also, i think the drifter should be valued at between 700m-1b to make it worth hunting them and to make up for the removal of the ability to farm the same site.


I believe that the amendments I'm proposing will make capital escalation far more interesting and actually worth the time an effort to run. At the same time, we would see more people doing things outside of their home system which will also be great for the PVP community.

Too easily gamed
Install rig
Jump hole
Remove rig
Fight
Install new rig
Return

As CEO of Bro's I mostly support this idea. Full disclaimer: We were in the midst of setting up a [Isk Printing] hole in a c5 (we live in a c4 >c5/c4) when news of changes coming to escalations was announced, so we put it on hold.

That said, the concept of solo escalating dreads was broken, though I'm sad we didn't get to enjoy it (who doesn't like to take advantage of broken mechanics!!!), we're one of the young up-and-coming corps and that sorta comes to the territory with being late to the game.

If sites spawn more frequently that does sound appealing as one could conceivably run say 10 sites, spawning 10 drifters, then warp a cap fleet onto one of them (as the other 9 warp to defend it) and have a pretty awesome fight on your hands worth about 3.5b, sounds pretty fun to me?

Anyway, also excited about giving C4 space something new. We didn't move to C5 space before because we didn't think we were big enough, now we're big enough and I'm hesitant to give up having two statics. Give high class space 2 statics and I might feel differently but making C4 space more exciting by adding drifters helps too!

[Edited by ISD Gallifreyan]

But do you really just live in wormhole space to farm isk? I mean, for most of my guys this isn't a significant enough change to affect the viability of WH space. It's still significantly more profitable then null/incursions, we still love the mechanics of WH space and the nature of PVP.

Even if you do live out here for just ISK, you can make 600m/h dual boxing in a static C5 with very little risk (1.2b in ships on grid) and limited or no setup time (don't have to roll/crit holes). Where else in eve can you make even close to that amount with so little ISK on grid?

That said, I mostly agree that the value of the drifters should be about twice what it is if CCP is expecting folks to use 6B dreads to kill them. I like using 10% as a general rule for w-space, ~10% of the value of ships used to clear the site should be dropped in blue loot and salvage.

Maybe not ONLY for ISK, but the main reason behind WH life for us was isk. And maybe we won't up and leave, but it sounds like we may not bother with the escalations. We have a Static C4, so we may end up farming easier sites at a faster rate with less expensive ships. Which is annoying considering the amount of money we expended on our capital fleet for them to be mothballed. But isk farming will always follow the path of least resistance.

I imagine what will happen is we won't bother with our own sites as much and speed farm C4 sites more regularly. Then maybe if visitors spawn some drifters and accumulate in system, we will clean them up once in a while for some burst income.