Wormholes

I think if we introduce whatshisface's change to sig strength - a Quality of Life change that is desperately needed - and even look at something radiaal like a wormhole collapsing bomb (make WH go away now!) to increase the frequency of rage rolling and up the tempo of this a lot, then rage rolling would be more efficient at delivering krab harvests.

Winthorp has nailed it on the head, and brax too. Corps (/alliances of one corp only) enter C5 space to PVE, and they are attracted to Mags because (once you get over the lock range nerf) it makes ISK printing so much easier. You want to run escalations because you want to make squillions of ISK and throw fancy T3's around and not be labelled a "poor" for flying a T1 non-Pirate ship around. Having double digit billions is the first step, natch. So you grab a bunch of guys, move in to a hole, prefereably Mag or RG, and you get your snout in the trough.

Of course, once you've made your billions, you get fat and lazy. Two Step is right, that when you are poor-ish, you can be hungry for playing the game, to get involved and accumulate your ISK and PVP and get involved. Some people either burn out in achieving non-Poors levels of ISK, or when they get their non-Poors level of ISK they get complacent. Either way, just like Whatever., efforts lag and attention spans wander and the whole effort crashes.

Very, very few people move into any wormhole with an effect for PVP. That's a complete rarity, if not an impossibility, because you don't get PVP in your home hole very often. Lets take W-R's. You just pull a Blue Fire and deploy 100MN RLML Cerbs. Or an Oruze Cruise, and cheap it up in RLML Caracals. You don't get fights from anyone decent because it's just dumb. or C5-C6 magnetars, you end up spelunked by Petes, nados, etc. That's the rare times anyone actually comes into your hole.

The problem with Escalations, to my mind, isn't the ISK. Like I keep saying, the problem isn't the amount of ISk in the game, it's the ability to concentrate the ISK-making apparatus into the hands of a few who make it overly routine and hence begin printing. Now, noobman is right that people aren't dumb (although I'm prepared to admit large carve-outs on this) and will figure out the most effeicient way to do an activity. But he's wrong insofar as nerfs are pointless. The question is, assuming someone can make the activity in question as efficient as possible, how much can they make in a given time, or in total, and how is that affected by game design?

The objective of a rebalance of cap escalations shouldn't neccessarily be to either remove them or trash the ISK/hour rate to less than, say, Incursions.

The key should be to design the activity around making it less farmable, or make the farming less overboard efficient, to create a more challenging and interactive environment for players which is less about "drop 16 dreads, siege once, warp next site" or "8 BS with faction bombs, plus 4 caps at 300km, bombs away" etc.

Thus, what is needed is a redesign of what escalating a site actually means. The best idea so far as been to spread the spawn points of the Guardians out, which minimises the usefulness of dropping a Moros at zero, reduces the efficiency of RG bomb farming, etc. Yes, there will be QQ from some, but they'll figure it out, but hopefully in a way that means they have to be on field for longer than 5 minutes a day for 4 days a month.

Another option is to make escalations work via the Carmen Sandiago / Waldo Principle. You drop a cap, some sleepers spawn for yu to kill, and the site despawns and is replaced by a new site, which you can warp to and kill a few sleepers. eg; Core Garrsion, warp a capital, 8 Guardians spawn (at 30km away from you) and the site clones itself with an Escalation Garrisson popping up.
Warp to the the Escalation Garrison, 8 more Guardians, and a new site Reinforced Garrisson spawns in system.
Warp to that, 8 more Guardians, final site spawns called Besieged Garrison.
Besieged Garison, final 8 Guardians, unicorn sprog milkshake and King Of Krabs Totem drops.

This would derive the same amount of ISK as a current site, but you would have,
a) an escalatable site which you could run efficiently with a solo capital in your static
b) lesser density of ISK in one site and at one bombable location
c) a clear target for people to check if they catch you halfway through
d) more soloable content, perhaps, and better Capital + Subs type escalation
e) no chaining this **** for days at a time

If this was implemented, you'd see people expo'ing their statics like all get-out because they couldn't just stay and farm their sites for days at a time. it requires you to complete the initial site, in order to get the subsequent escalations, and once it's all escalated, it's done. So you'll drain your home sites within days, and be back to static farming, which means more activity, more risk, more fun.

That should be the design goal of wormhole space - keeping you in space for longer, in a meaningful and rewarding way.

running PVE for 1.5 hours a day makes you a PVE corp, not a PVP corp.

A single anom with full cap escalation yields 600-700M isk with salvage. Considering the number of people required to run them, then yes...I am comparing them. In my hole we usually have 2-5 anoms at any given time. This is not a lot of ISK to support a corporation living in WH space.

Moonlocked WHs require tons of fuel per month, plus ship losses inherent to the risk of WH space. Even with cap escalations things can be tight.

Maybe C6s have many more anoms, but my experiences are in a C5...and I can tell you I am not getting wealthy. I participate in the cap escalations so I can keep exploding ships and being exploded so often that I am still only worth maybe 5-6B isk even if I liquidated all my assets? Considering I have many years under my belt, I think this is a very small sum.

I have argued for these points until i can't type it anymore. Whenever i mentioned Wh's rolling into active WH's or roaming WH's that connect WH's with more then 10 online people in each then everyone says its unfair... Taking away NPC kill data like i said above was one of the biggest contributors to WH space heading too far to the PVE side.

You could start with these changes alone then loot at PVE and escalations if this didn't go far enough.

This is the least salient point ever made in the history of points. Ever.

You've had your head so far up your backside you babushka dolled your head in your head if you haven't realised Citadels are coming, and moonlocking is so 2015. Even now, you'd have to be pretty special / touched by the mooncalf, to even bother. The advent of depots, Nestors and nowthe Bowhead have made ghetto sieges super-easy.

So, to reiterate, if you are "defending" your C5 with online moonlocking, you are an idiot and if that's forcing you to farm to afford fuel for your ineffectual blocking towers, you're an even bigger idiot.

I moonlocked my farmhole

Unrelated to donut, you have no idea how REAL invasions are being done, and what a problem it would be to not have a safeplace to go when your pilots need to take a break go afk etc..
Imagine that for 2-3 days.


I thought Fozzie was the one who made the change, and that he was the only one who wanted that removed badly? If not who is the guy who did it?

Right. Riiight.

Wow, you seem to really PvP in wormhole space alot and have an extensive knowledge of the current happenings of what is going on. Less and less people far farming on a whole compared to pre-summer.

The reason they turned into landlords was because their style of gameplay was screwed over by CCP, but I don't expect you to understand how BU was able to seed people and gank people almost everyday when WH NPC API was still a thing. Was it kinda broken? Ehhhh, but seeding people got a ton harder.

Just because your corp got dunked a few times doesn't mean everybody else in Wh space is farming constantly all day everyday.

Do you guys realize that the problem is not that you can make 75-125 bill a month in one hole, but that it can be done by one person with 8 accounts?