Wormholes

So I can only speak from experience from living in a C1 and various day trips to C2 and C3 systems but --

I felt that wormhole sites especially anomalies are very boring and unrewarding to run. They invite disproportionately high risk to the player compared to the reward. Hear me out: the mantra of saying "flying with friends for safety" doesn't really work when you're making less than 2 mil per head, per site. It's literally easier and faster to run level 4's and the rewards from level 4's are immediate and more flexible than blue loot.

So with the new "burner missions" (kill missions) in mind I have been thinking quite a bit about how to improve game play in wormholes especially the poorly populated low class wormholes. My proposal would be fairly simple: to keep risk present from dying to NPCs while not forcing the player to grind a site for 'too long' I would like to see kill missions extrapolated to wormholes.

Sleepers are supposed to be a dead race, mysterious and powerful. This is not the case obviously, as their mechanics, stats and site formats have been documented and are now so readily/easily farmed that corps can predictably make billions per week with only marginal risk to their key assets. This is especially true for higher class wormhole corporations who have the materiel and coordination to enact this farming (and good on you) but for lower class wormholes where many sites can be solo'd depending on skills and upfront investment there is very little incentive to stay predominantly due to the low payouts.

The fix here can be drawn from making C1's and C2's assault frigate and HAC playgrounds, respectively. The player will enter this new anomaly and fight 2 or 3 much more powerful NPCs that collectively retain about the same dps, EWAR capacity and tank as all of the rats in conventional fights but will permit the fight to be condensed in to much smaller packages ergo making managing d-scan and fighting/loot collection not such a tedious chore. Also by allowing the player to be off the field much faster it can hopefully encourage newer wormhole players to be more bold about what they fly and where they fly, simply thanks to not being pinned down on field for 10 minutes grinding 40 cruisers. By condensing fights in to smaller packages newer players can prioritise separate scram/point NPCs much more easily and kill those first before concentrating on the other NPCs. For aggressive players looking for pvp the shorter duration of this player being on field will hopefully promote much more initiative being displayed instead of waiting for form-ups. The snap decision making process should be more intuitive and fluid than it currently is, e.g. this player has just warped to that anom, now is the best time to strike! -- should be the main method of thinking.

Conversely the npcs we know do switch targets so the ganker may find himself on the receiving end of NPC aggression which could help the defending player a bit and again reinforce the idea that it is OK to be bold in wormhole space and that getting dropped isn't always going to end in soggy pillows.

Loot being consolidated in to fewer containers will surely help the situation in its own way as time passes, due to (again) not needing to expose yourself for what could be up to an hour with looting and salvaging. Under this new format of wormhole anomaly the loot would be exactly the same payout as before (until otherwise modified) and is otherwise just a modification to the duration of wormhole sites specifically instead of playing god with markets/isk printers.

I would like to see some other suggestions from the other players on this subforum about how they feel wormhole PVE could be improved, especially through providing specific examples and reasoning behind it.

c1 is a place of mining and PI, c3 is where the farming is for low class soloing ( c4 if you can use a marauder )

Yeah... C1's don't actually count. Unless you're in it for the industry or PI there's almost no reason I can think of to live in one. That said, I believe that risk and reward should go hand in hand. You're correct that you're better off in a lvl 4 mission than you are in a C1, and that bringing friends into a C1 site is unreasonable. That said, you can easily solo a C1 site, and if you have friends it's probably more efficient for you all to spread out just 1 or 2 per site to clear them. Still, you'd be better off doing literally almost anything to make isk.

Now, as for your proposal, I think it's going exactly against the idea of increasing conflict. Having fewer enemies means running the sites faster and cleaning up faster all of which lead to less of a window for someone to attack. IMHO it's the amount of time spent vulnerable that leads to people fighting, and this will lead to less of that.



Totally irrelevant actually.



Messing with people while they're looting and salvaging is a fun part of wormholes for many. I've been on both sides of it, and I don't want it to go away. The mobile tractor unit was more than enough on this subject, we don't need more.


In the end, the real problem is that most farming takes place behind a VoC static. That is the thing that is really keeping people from being vulnerable while farming. If you farm with an open chain, you'd better have friends for backup. If not, you're going to get ganked eventually.

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It would be if I wasn't currently being oppressed



How would you opt-in? Either they're there for everyone or there for no one. The only way that you could opt-in would be to have someone that gives missions sitting in a hole, and for so many reasons that makes absolutely no sense.

Pretty much everyone agrees that lower class WHs need a buff (at least from what I've seen), but I don't think this is the way to do it. It wouldn't be too horrible an idea if the sites lasted the same amount of time. I don't see a reason to allow sites to be run faster than they already are. Making them engaging is okay, but keeping people on field for less time is not.

2-5mil per head per site? What?

I used to daytrip C1s and C2s in nothing more than a Drake and an alt with a Noctis... I would go into 1 hole, clear 5-10 sites and walk away with 100-200mil.

If you're not willing to put 80ish million ISK of ships on the line to earn hundreds of millions of ISK... then that's not a game problem, that's a you problem.

I don't get it.

Why not use an mtu while you shoot red crosses? Then you just scoop and salvage, which shouldn't take more than 5-10 mins max. Another bonus is you may be able to quickly get blue loot if you have to bail out of the site.

Also what Jester said, we don't need to be less exposed and if anything I'd push for more sites that promote group play rather than solo. Reasons:

1. It is more fun to fly with space friends
2. if you get jumped you may be able to put up a fight
3. this motivates people to band together which should lead to more ppl in WH

Some solo content is ok, but I'd prefer to see more incentive for groups in lower class WH. If you want solo go to null and farm anoms, or pirate missions, or even lv4 hisec...

Fair point, i need coffee.

But i still don't see how OP's proposal would improve this. I always thought main issue was the blue loot vs salvage value... and the problem seems to be that only MNR have some value, with the rest being about as useful as carbon or reinforced metal.

The option is choosing to enter that anomaly or not.