Wormhole Town Hall: Audio Recording

So we had our short notice wormhole town hall meeting on Sleeper Social Club's TS3 server tonight. All in all, I found it to be a very interesting and informative session on the wormhole changes, including a mention about a change to the mass jump distance when going through wormholes, which will now also depend on the state of the hole!

For those interested, here is a link to the audio file.

I will probably follow this up with an analysis of what was said.

Wormhole Town Hall - TODAY at 22:00 UTC

I just found out about this myself, but there is going to be a wormhole town hall meeting regarding the Hyperion changes at 22:00 UTC - that's 30 minutes from now. CSM Corbexx and CCP Fozzie will be there, plus potentially more CSMs and more devs. If you're interested, get TS3 downloaded!

So posting to let everyone know I'm hoping to have a town hall for wh bro's on the date above. I've been temp green lit to use SSC's joint TS.
Focus will be on the wormhole dev blog here, http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev ... -unknowns/
Apologies for the short notice I'm hoping to sort a couple moderators and some one to mediate. With luck we should have a Dev or two there.
Ideally I'd like as many people there as possible espically people from lower class wormholes, If you are coming please make sure to read the dev blog before hand.
Once Ihave the final ok on TS details I'll post them as well.
Will probably be some other CSM people on as well but there will be no derailing from topic. Its a wormhole town hall first and only
CCP Fozzie confrimed to be there.
The teamspeak address is "townhall.fcftw.org" with no password. The channel will be "WH Town Hall" which will be moderated.

Kronos down!

I logged in today to hear that we were forming up for a gank in one of our nearby connections. The first thing I heard was that there was the potential to kill a Kronos, which sounded fantastic. Our bait site running ship called out over comms that a Pilgrim landed on grid and started neuting him. This was followed by the Kronos and a Proteus.

Our fleet jumped in and rushed to support our bait ship. The Pilgrim was taken off grid first followed by the Kronos, who - for some reason - switched into bastion mode. Once he went down, we turned our focus towards the Proteus and took him down easily too.

In total, we killed about 1.7 billion ISK worth of ships. Unfortunately we didn't get the pods since we didn't have a HIC or dictor but otherwise it was a lot of fun.

Here's a link to the kill mail.

The Sky is Falling (Wormhole Changes)

The other day, CCP Fozzie posted a dev blog discussing the wormhole changes that will be coming with the Hyperion update near the end of August. The reaction to the majority of the changes have been positive, as there will be additional statics in C4s, K162s won't appear until you jump through the first time, there will be more wandering wormholes and there will be a new type of wormhole that only frigates, destroyers and double-bubbled HICs can traverse. 

However, the biggest source of contention right now is the proposed changes to where you spawn when you jump through a wormhole. It is described as follows:

The next major change we are proposing to wormhole mechanics is a variable adjustment to the distance that ships appear at after jumping through wormholes.This change is intended to ensure that all attempts to control the local wormhole environment are open to risk of player disruption. We are not satisfied with how easy and safe it is to close wormholes that could potentially allow other players to interact with W-space operations, as the risk of player interaction should always be the main source of tension and danger in W-space.

CCP is not wrong in this regard. The ability to close off all incoming connections to your wormhole and safely run the sites is the opposite of what w-space should be. CCP wants to add an element of risk to the rolling procedure, and as such they have proposed a system that increases the distance you spawn from the wormhole with the higher amount of mass that your ship has. This means that Orcas and capitals, ships usually used for rolling, will be put at more risk as they won't spawn within immediate jump range.

I think what CCP might have underestimated was the amount of rolling that goes on to find new content as opposed to hide from it. I know that we will always roll our static if there is no interesting PvP or PvE opportunities in it. Now from my point of view, since we use battleships to roll our holes, these changes won't mean too much extra risk for us. For C5/6 corps that use capitals to roll their holes, that's a lot of ISK to put at risk when rolling, especially considering that they spawn further from the hole than battleships do.

However, how would you add risk to rolling holes for those trying to hide from other people while simultaneously not discouraging people from rolling holes to find new content? If I knew the answer to that, CCP might as well hire me on as a game designer. It's an interesting conundrum, there's no doubt about it.

One way CCP has added risk is by implementing these mass-regenerating holes for frigates and destroyers. Because they regenerate mass and have mass limitations on them, it will be next to impossible for someone to roll them to close them off. That means it's possible that using these small holes to gank site runners will be a new thing to do. I think that'll be pretty interesting!

Finally, I don't know what is going on but it feels like the wormhole community has transformed into a bunch of WoW babies crying about these changes. They're crying about how the sky is falling just because of these changes, particularly the wormhole spawn changes based on ship mass. If you take a look at the EVE Online forums you'll see a bunch of people saying that this is going to ruin w-space and people are going to choose to POS up and log off instead of roll their holes.To me, this is unbelievable. If you have a dead connection, you'll roll it regardless of the spawn, because why not? If it's dead then you won't be risking your ship by jumping it through. It will make combat rolling much riskier, and maybe that's a good thing.

I'm interested to see how these changes pan out. Hopefully CCP will release more dev blogs on the topic soon! Until then, don't worry, the sky isn't falling. Be happy that CCP is turning their gaze towards wormholes and (hopefully) POSes too!

Quiet Weekend

This was a long weekend for us Canadians and I was hoping to use some of my extra time off to get some things done in EVE. Wormhole life is great because you don't have local, which means you can sneak an entire fleet into a wormhole and they won't notice unless they're smashing D-scan (which they should be).

We formed up for many potential fights this weekend but every one seemed to fall through for one reason or another. We spotted some people down our chain and decided to put a bait ship in their system. Turns out they didn't bite, but they convoed us to tell us they couldn't bring a fight, even though they had more people than us. Apparently, they thought that because we were E-Uni we had more people waiting to join in. In reality, we didn't. Of course, by the time we got back home someone else from their corp convoed us saying that they could fight, but by then we had lost some of our pilots and couldn't bring a fight.

We had some sort of connection with Hard Knocks yesterday, we saw one of their pilots and one of their alt pilots in our connections. Unfortunately we couldn't find where they were coming from and they didn't come try to jump us while we were running sites.

We also had a distress call from one of our members in low sec. I guess he was ratting in a destroyer so we all abandoned our site running and spiked local as we jumped in and warped to them. Some of them warped off and two of them kited us out to 250km+. In local they accused our member of baiting for a fleet. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a bait Algos before, but I sure haven't. As I said, he was in the low sec system which was the static of the system we were running sites in, so we were happy to go soil their pants for them. I shot them a quick wave as we left the system as quickly as we entered.

We also played various games with people sitting on holes, including an Abaddon that jumped out through an EOL hole that we didn't want to chase and a number of covops ships that were popping on and off of d-scan.

We also had a pilot find some nullbears mining ore in one of our null sec connections. They quickly POSed up when they saw him in local, so we tried waiting a while and jumping in and charging for them. They were warping off even as our interceptors arrived on grid, so they were doing a good job of mining while aligned. Good for them, that saved them their ships.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but for me this was a quiet weekend for PvP. I did get to run a number of sites and an Instrumental in a C5, so at least it was a good ISK making weekend.