Friday, March 4, 2011

What is wrong with wormholes

I've been getting a lot of questions from people about what exactly I think needs to be changed in wormhole space. I'd like to say first of all that I don't think my role as a CSM delegate would be to push for my specific proposals, but to push for things that would help the most people, both in and outside wormholes. With that being said, I have two major areas that I would personally like to see CCP devote some attention to:

POS life

The biggest area I think needs improvement is POSes. The current POS system is clunky and a security nightmare. One of my biggest complaints about running a wormhole corporation is that I have to spend a lot of time and effort managing security issues. I would love to be able to have a lot more folks out in wormhole space, but every wormhole corporation end up having to deal with huge trust issues that the rest of EvE has much better tools to deal with (though I would still like to see plenty of improvement in that area for everyone). A wormhole POS only has a very limited number of security options, some of which are tied to roles that you effectively cannot give out (Starbase config, for example). POS passwords help some, but are incredibly buggy and annoying to use. Here are my concrete proposals:
1) Allow corps to give POSes a simple allow/deny list, for characters/corporations/alliances that can enter the POS shields. The UI that is used to manage chat channels is exactly the sort of thing that is needed here. It would also be good to be able to use the same sort of list to manage access to hangers and SMAs.
2) Allow Capital Ship Maintenance Arrays to be anchored in non-sov space. Up until Incursions, basically every w-space corp out there was using offline SMAs to store extra ships. I understand CCP wanting to fix that bug, but now we are left with huge issues trying to store capital ships.
3) Fix issues with containers in corporate hangers. Currently you cannot open a container in a corporate hanger at a POS and use it like you can in a station. Again, many wormhole corps place bookmarks in a can in a corp hanger to distribute.
4) Allow people to rename all POS structures (except offensive ones). Currently you can rename production structures, like the component assembly arrays we often use for storage, but cannot rename SMAs or CHAs. This is dumb, and seems like it would be a quick, easy thing to fix.
5) Report POS CPU/Grid in the API. I know there are some apparent technical challenges here, but it really should have been fixed long ago.
6) Make low fuel warnings less annoying. AHARM currently has 40+ POSes in our home system. At least one of them is crying for fuel every day. I would like to see a couple changes here. Firstly, people with the starbase fuel technician role should be getting low fuel warnings. Secondly, it would be nice if the corporation management interface listed POS towers with their fuel statuses. Thirdly, my corp members need to stop slacking and fuel their POSes.

Other fixes

There are also a bunch of non-POS issues that are very important. Here is my non-exhaustive list:
1) Corp bookmarks. I know this was a past CSM issue, and I thank them for bringing it up. CCP needs to get on this ASAP. Players currently waste hours of their time copying bookmarks 5 at a time to and from cans. It sucks, is not fun, and adds load to the database.
2) Deep safespots. This was brought up in some of the conversations I have had recently with other wormhole folks. These were supposed to be eliminated, but I (and many other people) still have some. You should not be able to bookmark more than 20 AU away from a celestial, period.
3) More variety in the sleepers. I have done the new incursion sites and they have some mechanics that would be interesting to see in wormhole space. I would love to see CCP add a couple of new sleeper sites using this technology. It would also be nice to see a little variation in the sleeper sites. Right now they are always the same. I want sleeper officers to show up. I want the sleepers to sometimes decide to attack my POS. I'd love to see them become a little more dynamic rather than their current melted nanoribbon dispensing machines.
4) More variety in wormholes. Why aren't there some longer lasting higher mass limit holes? How about putting some sort of 3 day wormhole at the end of one of the new and improved sleeper sites I mention above? How about some wormholes that are unstable and damage you when you go through them? Ones that dump you out at a random spot in the system the first time you go through them so you need to probe your way back?

That is my list for right now, though I am sure I have forgotten some stuff, and I am also sure that you guys have some great ideas of your own. I'd love to hear them, either here, in my eve-o thread or send me an eve mail or a convo request.

5 comments:

  1. >Deep safespots. This was brought up in some of the conversations I have had recently with other wormhole folks. These were supposed to be eliminated, but I (and many other people) still have some. You should not be able to bookmark more than 20 AU away from a celestial, perioD

    Thats not a bug. Probably they were made warping to wormhole anomaly. Anomalies are filtered out on client, but they are still valid celestials.
    What i would like to bring up - client should not recieve an anomaly as regular celestial object.

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  2. Wormholes are always within 8 AU of a celestial, so I don't think that explains it. I have a bookmark that was a deep safe, but it was only moved in to 50 or so AU from the sun.

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  3. Wormhole Anomaly == Magnetar, Pulsar etc.
    They are typically located 30-100 au from any celestial and off the plane - above or below it.
    Before incursion they were available in overview as "second sun". In incursion they have filtered it out client side.

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  4. Ahh, right. Certainly some safes are from those, but I have one that is not.

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  5. Anomaly counts as celestial. So its 20au from anomaly bounding sphere.

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