Wednesday, January 18, 2012

My take on the December CSM summit - Wormholes

I haven't really been keeping up with the blogging, but I wanted to make clear my views on some of the stuff brought up at the December CSM summit.

Firstly, I want to note that I was not present at the summit. I am the 4th alternate, and while the 1st (Elise) and 2nd (Prom) alternates went to the summit, enough full CSM members were able to be there so I didn't get to go.

When I heard that CCP wanted to have a session on little things in wormholes and FW, I spent some time talking to folks and came up with my list of smaller issues that most folks wanted fixed. My list is:
1) Shields on ships out of a SMA/entering a Pulsar/joining a fleet (this applies also to after jumping shield caps, and is one of the reasons they suck)
2) Better system than POS passwords for POS access (same UI as chat channels would be awesome)
3) Capital SMAs allowed in w-space (hard to store large numbers of capitals... :) )
4) Cans in corp hangers. Should be able to name them, open them, put stuff in them. Also would be great to be able to repackage stuff in corp hangars
5) Rename all POS structures. Currently, you cannot rename SMAs and corp hangars
6) Randomness in sleeper spawns (same for incursions. At least make triggers random)
7) Don't change sig ids after downtime (not done after crucible)
8) Capital ship SD timers. One other suggestion I heard was that SD should force on overheating of all your mods, so you can't just run hardeners and SD.
9) Swapping T3 subs at a SMA. I (Two step) don't actually care about this that much, but lots of people complain about it a lot.
10) More wormholes. It would be great if C5s or C4s or something had dual statics. Right now, our w-space map looks a lot like a single line, and this makes w-space more boring.

That list was presented to CCP, and the discussion turned to basically talking about AHARM. Both CCP Soundwave (the only CCP person present) and one of the CSM members (going to leave him nameless until he speaks up), said that they were concerned about the difficulty of taking over "fortress" wormholes. AHARM's home system (we call it "Nova") was presented as one of these systems. The CSM member explained the difficulty of invading such a system, including an explanation of the math of chain-collapsing (there are only 113 class 6 wormholes, so if you have a static C6, you have around a 1% chance of getting the correct one). Once you do find the correct one, you can only put 3 capital ships into the system at a time, and then the wormhole will collapse again and you need to start all over. At past summits, there was some very brief discussion of having a "wormhole stabilizing" ship or module, and this was brought up again. The idea would be that the ship/mod would prevent a wormhole from collapsing due to the total mass that had passed through (but not change the maximum mass that could jump at a time, to prevent supercaps from getting into w-space). Some of the other CSM members though this wasn't a good idea, and presented several of the reasons I will discuss below. The final result was that CCP would be looking into the issue in the future, though probably not all that soon.

Since I wasn't attending the meeting, I only heard about the discussion a day later when I watched the video of the session. I immediately posted on the CSM forums about why I think the discussion wasn't correct, and I will reproduce some of those points here:

1) Built up wormholes aren't nearly as "impossible to invade" as was presented at the summit. I would point folks to AHARM's invasion of CCRES, AHARM's invasion of Firebird Squadron (see this killmail, for example), and Brotherhood of Starbridge's attempted invasion of Aquila, Inc (described here). In the case of the two AHARM invasions, we infiltrated at least 9 (I think 12+ in CCRES, 11 in FBS) capitals into the system before we invaded. Starbridge managed to get 80+ subcaps into Aquila's home system, and would have won had several other groups stepped in to save Aquila.
2) It is a good thing that built up wormholes are hard to invade. It took people a long time to get capitals/POSes/ships into the wormhole in the first place, why should wiping them out not take considerable effort and determination?
3) The removal of the Jumps API from w-space makes it hard to know when people are after you. Previously, we could tell when R&K were trying to chain collapse to us, as we would see the number of jumps in a system spike. We could then make sure to watch for incoming K162s at those times. With the API now gone, this cannot be done, and nobody can watch for incoming wormholes 24/7.
4) A wormhole stabilizer would just allow groups like AHARM (and Narwhals, Starbridge and others) to further dominate high class wormhole space. Right now, we don't bother to invade small groups in C5s because it is a lot of effort for us to move capitals in and move them back out when we are done. If there was a way for us to move large numbers through a wormhole, we would easily be able to attack these groups. It would also allow large nullsec groups to rampage through w-space.

One thing that was pointed out at the summit is that w-space is basically the least broken part of the game right now. There are some fantastic small gang engagements happening often, and most w-space folks really enjoy it. I would hate to see that changed by removing one of the key restrictions that makes w-space what it is.

Discussions like this one just make it clearer to me that I need to run for CSM 7, and I need to secure a full seat, which will be even tougher than it was for CSM 6. Hopefully issues like this make it clear to all w-space residents that we need a seat at the table, or our entire playstyle is at risk.

27 comments:

  1. I couldn't agree with you more on this topic. There are things to complain about with WH space, but this isn't one of them.

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  2. The people suggesting "wormhole stabilisers" are obviously lazy people with too many capitals on their hands. I'm guessing the person suggesting these things was the one who promised not to comment about aspects of the game he didn't play.

    Removing restrictions on movement means that all your capital ships will be in every fight. This applies as much to k-space as to w-space.

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  3. How many votes will you need to get a full seat?

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    1. That depends on how riled up the highsec community gets. Based on last year's votes, I would need 2200 or so votes to get 7th place. That is more than double the votes I got last time, but I am hoping that things like corp bookmarks will help a lot.

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  4. Totally with you Two-Step. I want the ability to setup frontier style 'outposts of civilisation' in WH space. I want to have some dude fly past and see 'the last gas station on the desert road' and think "thanks fuck for that, I only had 4 probes left" or "great boom marks for a way out" etc. Basically everything 0.0 was before the 'attack of the clones' took over :-) Contact me in game, you get my vote just for this !

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  5. AHARM, Narwhals, Starbridge... you joking? If you could stabilize a worm hole, you would have PL coming in with 100 faction fit capitals to clear someone out. Null alliances would be able to dominate w-space with something like that because they can and the income in w-space is enough to make it worth doing.

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    1. Absolutely agree with Bagehi. The WH stabilization is an incredibly stupid idea, clearly by someone in nullsec who wants WH resources but is too lazy to put in the effort to establish and defend a presence.

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  6. iirc, the idea of wormhole stabilizers came up for approximately two seconds at one of the CSM5 summits. It got no traction then either. It's a stupid idea that would, if implemented, take away much of what makes finding or living in wormholes so interesting/challenging. Bet I can guess who "the one" CSM member is that you refer to. Will be interesting to see if he blogs or forum posts about his point of view in the matter.

    I hope you run for CSM7 and get a full seat. You deserve it; you've been one of--if not the--most actively engaged CSM6 members with the community since you guys took office.

    -- Mynxee (Chair, CSM5)

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  7. I'll rally support in my Ally. I'll try to rally support in our oalition too. Hopefully we can get You enough votes. OR ELSE :P

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  8. I'll also try to get you some support in my alliance, and you have my 3 votes.

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  9. "Discussions like this one just make it clearer to me that I need to run for CSM 7, and I need to secure a full seat,"

    I have 11 Accounts. You will have all or most of their votes (depends on if Jester runs).

    Wormhole Space is indeed the only part of Eve that isn't broken and we need to keep it that way.

    If the WH corps get their members motivated then I can't see you not getting a full seat.

    Sov. 0.0 is broken. Instead of fixing it and making people WANT to go there CCP seems to want to make other aspects of Eve less fun and so 0.0 becomes a viable option again.

    Few people want to play in 0.0 because you do all the work and have no stake in it. No one wants to pay to "work for the man"

    Good Luck Twostep

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  10. 2 votes from me. Without WH, I would be playing Skyrim now. There is little else left in the game for me to get excited about.

    The CSM needs a full-time WH representative.

    PS. Jester is good also. Hope he runs ;-)

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  11. Great to hear! Glad you clarified your position on these issues. Count whatever votes those of us in Lone Star Exploration can muster up for you.

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  12. Other thoughts for wormholes:

    Repackaging at a POS (as you mentioned) would be great. But it would also make a few things different. Invading a c1/c2, for example, would become quite a bit easier, as one could throw up a staging POS, bring in packaged battleships on one wormhole, assemble, and attack without fear of the logistics of losing all those battleships to the hole. Not a huge deal, but it would be a side effect.

    More than sigs not losing their names after downtime, it would be nice if bookmarked sites didn't show up as unknowns after downtime. Once found they would stay found. You could certainly ignore the familiar names, but having the hits stay green would be a more elegant solution.

    The big change I'd like to see is for wormhole-wormhole links to be very easy to find. Easier than ladar. You could even have a non-covops ship whose role bonus would be to see wormhole-wormhole links like anomalies. The goal here would be to expand daily wormhole exploration and make the space seem less empty.

    I don't know if you guys read PJ Harvey's Tigerears blog, but she does a great job of describing daily PVP and wormhole exploration. I've tried to replicate her efforts, but even with all the scanning skills at level IV it can take a couple hours to map a simple wormhole constellation. That's time that needs to be devoted *before* play can start. If you want small roving PVP gangs through w space, opening it up internally would be the best way to do it.

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    1. I meant repackaging modules, though I don't have a huge problem with repackaging BSs. It only matters for C1s, and I suspect people just use the new T3 BCs to siege those now anyway.

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  13. "Starbridge managed to get 80+ subcaps into Aquila's home system"
    160+ subcaps and 4 dread + 2 orca

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    1. And that weekend my corpse collection doubled in size.

      Narwhals will be voting for Two Step :D

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  14. What about something like a survey scanner for wormholes that tells you the exact mass left?

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    1. I'm not a huge fan. Part of the fun of wormholes is sometimes messing up and trapping people on the wrong side.

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  15. I'll try to get you the support of my alliance.

    Side note: how do you vote?

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    1. There is a web site, there will be details posted on this blog when the time comes.

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  16. My two cents?

    If CCP is stupid enough to bring in a WH stabilizer, then I demand a WH destablizer.

    Ever try to collapse a C1 wh? compare the mass limit with the largest ship that can pass through, and you can see just how "forced open" c1 wh are.

    It takes an insane number of jumps to force a c1 wh closed, because the masses that can pass through are so small.

    You want a crowbar to get your big fleets to squash independent operators ? Fine. Give me a zipper to at least have a chance of closing you out.

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  17. Good ideas Two Step. I followed the WH Stabalizer idea on the podcasts and I know where the talk of it came from. Null SECers who want to rampage through a wh and keep it locked up in their space so that no one can have it. If a wh opened in 00 and they had one of these ships, they could keep the wh opened indefintly in their space and no one wold be able to have access to it. Lets have a mod that casues the jump bridges in 00 to empty into any system that the pilot of the ship who has the mod wants. This would be a great mod and increase the number of fights. Would null suckers want it? NO, but if they can screw our systems over, lets have a way to change the dynamic of jump bridges to screw them back. U have my 6 votes :)

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  19. I think the restriction of caps in WH space makes stratagy in invasion nessesary instead of optional as in the case of Null sec invasions. The force with the most capitals is likely the winner because of shear force of numbers. It would be a shame to destroy this one uniquness of WH space. 3 votes to two step.

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  20. Good luck with votes - you got my 2 and as far as I know about 90% of Ash Alliance voted for you as well.
    Will keep my fingers crossed tomarrow - when results will be revealed.
    Fly unsafe ^^

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