Prediction

Hyperion has been out a week now. I've posted already on how its affecting the different corps I'm in. But now its time for me to try and predict just what I think will happen over the next couple of months.

I've been getting a fair few mails and skype messages from players and a fair few from people in lower class wormholes saying they are having similar issues to my alt corp in the C4.

One of the issues with wormholes is if you have had enough and want to leave. Its a fair bit of work you need to do, unless you just want to lose everything in your wormhole. You have a crap load to pack up, ships to move out, spare ammo, mods, any sleeper loot you have. Then your pos and the pos modules. 

When Aharm moved out of Nova they had 120 million m3 of stuff to move out over 3000 ships a 100 capitals and over 50 pos's. They expected it to take 2 months but managed to get it done in 3 weeks.

Small groups won't have anywhere near that amount of stuff, But then they won't also have the manpower to help either. Either way it will probably take a while to move out. What this means is that some stats just won't show up for a while.

Anyway on to the prediction.

In the next 2 to 3 weeks alot of smaller groups in C1 to C4 will find that with the new frig wormholes and the fact that closing statics is alot harder they won't be able to farm anywhere near enough to cover loses they have due to losing stuff rolling or running sites. They'll move out stubborn ones will stay. While others go to hisec to farm incursions. (its worth noting low class income is pretty terrible anyway and what with the new risks will make it even worse)

The next month will see the bigger groups start to maybe not feel any isk pressure. But they will notice alot less people in W-space. In NoHo we have HUGE chains due to the frig wormholes, there all well and good but if all the wormholes are empty, whats the point?

Some of them might run in to issues when connected to bigger groups they cant fight. I can see some corps/alliances merging.

Some due to lack of content and stuff to fight will leave and join null or lowsec groups.

At the 3 month point I see things settling down people who haven't left at this point won't, you'll have the die hard of wormhole space left, that's it. Lower class wormholes will be a barren waste land due to the fact its just not worth the risk to live in, combined with there being much better income else where like highsec incursions. The larger groups that are left will probably spend most of there time doing nullsec roams for pvp.

By this point I can see anywhere from 20% to 40% of the wormhole population gone. Which is dire. I really hope it doesn't get that bad, and that CCP make some changes. The issue is changes might already be to late. People are leaving and once they have left the chance of them coming back isn't great. 

For all the people who have sent me mails/skype messages of support and thanks, its really appreciated.

Mother of Bob, Hyperion changes.

Hyperion has been released, Alot of it I am fine with, in fact I really like the majority of it.

Sigs keeping ID over down time is great. +1
Wormhole effect balance I'm happy with Black holes are no longer the leper of w-space. +1
Bookmark copying increase. +1
K162 spawning when you jump in. +1

The next few things will be from the POV of my small alt corp that lives in a C4.

Some thing I think is good for wormholes in general is the second static for C4 wormholes. However it does come at a price, One I'm willing to pay though even if it really sucks for me.

Second static.

My small alt corp I have that makes T3 also has a C4 wormhole it had a C3 wormhole and was a really sweet place to relax, It had perfect PI me and 4 of my mates could easily run sites in there and pvp in the c3 if we wanted. The down side is with the patch we got our second static that was a C5. Now this sucks combined with the mass/distance change and the frig wh. we are basically screwed. As a small corp we really struggle to close the C5 with assuming we could all use orcas which we can't it would still take 2 rounds to close it, with battleships 3 rounds, If there is any big group in that C5 we basically have no way at all of closing it safely.

Frigate wormholes.

These seem cool on paper but for my alt group we cant collapse them at all. If we want to do anything we have to bubble and leave a scout on them to run sites. Even this isn't ideal a group of interceptors could easy just fly through a bubble get tackle while other frigs burn through to come help kill us.

Mass/distance jump mechanic.

This just plain sucks, it makes it so hard for us to actually collapse our new C5 safely, using Orca's takes one guy at least two trips which gives who ever is in there plenty of time to find us. Using battleships isn't much better. That would be three rounds needed to close and while we would be closer to the wormhole. But would need three rounds so 10 minutes at least.

These three changes combined have basically made it impossible for us to live in the C4. Which really sucks as it was a great wormhole to relax in. Now alot of this is down to the fact we have a C5 as our second static if it had been a C1 to C4 we'd maybe have been ok.

We've not the only ones having this issue. So are others and I see others leaving. However while some move out others will hopefully move in as its potentially a decent PvP wormhole for small groups. This is why for the dual statics I'm happy to pay the price for this change.

Now for the NoHo POV.

Frigate Wormholes.

These are pretty sweet for us, We already have a frig fleet comp. So we can pretty much take on most small groups running sites in lower class wormholes. Caps in a escalation site is probably a bit out of our league for the current fleet set up but we're working on that. If we connect to anyone running sites in C1 to C4 i'm totally confident we can kill them no problem with our frig fleets. The slight down side is even after being toned down, these things still seem to be bloody everywhere, While we appear to have a huge chain, in reality 85% of the chain is off limit for anything but frigs/destroyers. So this is mixed blessing, if you love frig fights your in luck. If you don't, sucks to be you.

So for us great. smaller groups it potentially sucks.

Mass/distance jump mechanic.

We are currently up to 100 pages on the main feedback thread, with a extra 36 pages on a earlier feedback thread. Again this really isn't going to affect NoHo, rage rolling will take a bit longer. Our (NSFW) Bhaals deep fleet, needs a few tweaks but is otherwise not really affected. But then we're one of the largest groups out, Smaller groups will certainly be feeling this. Especially if they connect to us or we connect to them. Its going to be really hard to close any wormholes that were active in, Yep I said it ANY wormhole, not just our home system. Yesterday we caught our first cap trying to close there static that had connected to our static. They made a bounce and warped there dread there and in that time we managed to get Dictor to the wormhole and bubble up. I'm not sure if people will keep doing this, I feel that just slow boating back is much safer than making a bounce, especially if you have a nano cap.

This is also worse in lower class wormholes as you can't use caps so actually need more people to roll a wormhole (or more trips) as shown below.

C5 to C5 you need 1 dread, 1 orca and 1 battleship.

C4 to C5 you need 5 (potentially 6 if its a plus mass wh) orcas. or 10 or 11 battleships

C4 to C2 you need 4 orca trips or 7 battleships.

Again putting more pressure on smaller groups in lower class wormholes

I just don't see anything good coming from this change at all. People are happy with a certain amount of risk, But this will most likely end up being a unacceptable amount of risk, leading to people not rolling.

there are already several threads about people not getting any new sites in there system. Which could well be a indication that there is less people running sites now. Which isn't good at all. I'm hoping to get numbers in the next few days from CCP and hope these will provide more information.

My own view this this mass/distance change is probably one of the worst things to happen to wormhole space so far. I'd realy like this rolled back and the number of frig wormholes lowered considerably again.

Annoying stuff, If you have read any of the threads on wormhole forum you'll see alot of people (normally out of corp alts or nullsec people) post about changes that really don't know what they are talking about and while I don't go quite as far as The Mittani I do some what agree.

I've used one of his paragraphs a couple times now in the thread.

Here's the hard truth: If you don't live in Wormholes, and you've never lived there, your opinion about how wormholes should or shouldn't be is worse than irrelevant: you are the virgin offering advice on how to get laid. Like a virgin, you probably genuinely believe that your opinion matters and that the mere fact that you have no personal experience on the topic shouldn't invalidate your opinion, while everyone else listening to you is quietly shaking their head.

What is worse than people talking about stuff they don't know, Is people talking about stuff based on stuff they think they know that's actually wrong. This frustrates the hell out of me if people don't understand the basics of how to roll a very simple wormhole how the hell are they ment to comment on how this will effect wormhole space. Now one of two people can easily be ignored on the wormhole forum. But what about when this is happening on actual podcasts with, so called wormhole experts. This to me is way worse you have people listening to these assuming they are correct when in fact there "expert" is talking total shit, basic stuff like, "closing with two dreads and orca" highlight the point they don't know how to roll wormholes. Then getting basic facts about the changes wrong (caps will now spawn up to 50km from the wormhole) when its stated clearly in the dev blog exactly what it is.

Anyway rant over. Alot of good changes, some quality of life stuff and huge pants on head change, that drowns out most of the other stuff.

Ooh Huge thanks to Robb from Ixtab and Angelues from NoHo for helping me with C3 testing I managed to get 80% of the testing done in one day thanks to them.

Little project not so little.

When I ran for CSM there was a few things I really wanted to do and try and sort. One of these was trying to sort the income of lower class wormholes. The slight issue here being there is alot talk about what you can earn but no hard data. I've heard so much different stuff, for instance I've heard in a C1 wormhole you could make anything from 25 million a hour to 150 million a hour. That's a huge variance.

Some people I know did manage to give me alot of good information, Fits they use to run stuff rough idea of what they make a hour, what sites they run, how they run them. I got alot of great hints and tips. The down side is there is alot of people who talk out their arse. Just looking above you can see some of that 25 million to 150 million some one has to be terribly wrong. It probably doesn't help that this sort of thing is a pet hate of mine.

So with that I started to test what you could make, isk wise in wormholes. My first idea was to do a hour of farming in a couple different ways.

1 dps ship on its own then swapping to salvage after.
1 dps ship with a separate person salvaging.
2 dps ships and a 3rd person salvaging.

This gave me some rough ideas of what sort of isk I could make. I also got to work out correct percentages of salvage. 99% of all isk from salvage was from melted nanoribbons. I knew they made up most the income but didn't expect it to be that high. It also gave me a rough idea of what sort of percentage of the isk froma  site was from blue books and what was from salvage. Both C1 and C2 had a huge percentage from salvage, about 70% meaning they are incredibly reliant on the price of melted nano's.

The slight down side was due to melted nanos being random and my sample size being fairly small I wasn't sure how accurate they would be. I asked if I could get hold of the loot table so I could work out some exact numbers, which I was told was very unlikely. Its worth noting, to date this is the only thing I have been turned down on since being on the CSM. All other info I've asked for I've been told.

Part 2 of PvE testing.

I'll say now I don't do much PvE, nearly all my income comes from my T3 indy corp. I occasionally help out in NOHO with sites if there short, but that's not all that often. What I will say is when you live in a C6 magnatar stuff dies really fast to dreads, by comparison stuff seems to take ages when your just on your own in a Tengu.

I decided to do a much more accurate test. I'd run all combat sites (think small first then, relic and data sites after) 10 times, yep that's right 240 sites from C1 to C6 space. With another potential 240 from the relic and data, This isn't including Ladar and Grav sites, which would take it over 500. Holy shit what had I got myself in to.

I do all my testing on SiSi so I don't have to worry about being ganked. The down side is on SiSi its often harder to get faction mods which I wanted as they are often used in wormhole space. Combined with the fact finding wormholes is alot harder on SiSi. Luckily CCP devs are super helpful, a quick skype message and normally some one can come spawn me faction mods, more ammo (not joking even loading my Noctis and Tengu full on ammo I'd had to ask for a ammo pit stop) Find and move me to wormholes I need and in the case of testing C4's give me a couple million skill points to get marauders 5. Without there help I simply wouldn't be able  to test this stuff. So Shout out to CCP Leeloo, Affinity, Fozzie and Nullarbor, who have all helped.

When I do the sites I record how long they take, how long salvaging takes, and travel time. I record the isk from blue books and how many melted nano's I get. This allows me to work out a isk per hour for each separate site. I do this twice once including all 10 sites of melted nano's and once where I ignore the lowest and highest 2 sites of melted nano's, this allows me to get rid of any spikes I might of had where I got really lucky or unlucky. Thanks should go to our maths guru in NOHO, Faye for helping me out here with advice.

I can then use these numbers to give a average of all combat sites in that class of wormhole or use just the best site, as most of us like to min, max and only do the best sites.

The down side is this takes alot of time. I average about 3 to 4 hours on sisi 4 or 5 days a week I finished C1 last week and that probably took 20 hours. To make it worse, is as I get in to the higher class wormholes its going to take longer. Ideally I need to get this done before the summit which is in roughly 6 weeks time.

With this in mind I'm probably going to ask for some help off people to do C3 and C4 wormhles.I'll do each site a couple times, so I can record the time it takes and then I'm hoping to get a whole load of people in to help me blitz all the rest of the sites super fast. Hopefully I can get them done in a day and not a week. C5 are a bit of a issue. but I think I can sort them and C6 I can get most the stuff from NOHO accounting site.

That should then be the end of wormhole PvE, I should have a fairly accurate set of information on what can and can't be earn't.

Other stuff that's been happening, some stuff got added to Sisi (jumping through wormholes lands you at a distance depending on mass of your ship), and people spotted it. Needless to say it was quickly put on reddit here. Then it spread to the eve forums here. I managed to let some of the Devs know and CCP fozzie posted here. Keep in mind it was a Sunday and he replied within a couple of hours, on his day off.

There will be a Dev blog out soon (tm). Then I will try and organise a wormhole town hall for this weekend. I've been keeping a close eye on the thread and speaking to people about it in mails as well as on comms. I'm also happy to come chat to anyone else about it if they want to mail me there contact details.

CCP Falcon has also been helping me sort out getting some devs sorted for a couple podcasts as well as some other minor community stuff. It's surprising just what you get asked by players. So a big thanks to him and the devs coming on the podcasts.

Quick update.

Sorry I haven't blogged in a bit, been really busy. This might well also be a bit random.

With Kronos coming out, there's been loads to check. Both before and after. I've spent alot of time on sisi testing some stuff. I'v had a couple friends from NOHO come and help, Big thanks to Blackish Person and Murashj as well as all the people who have given me input on best way to run different sites.

So fair I've pretty much finished with C1 to C3 space. Just started on C4's now and am half way through the grav and ladar sites. There's a pretty crazy amount of sites to check, some where over 60. So I guess I'm half way.

I should probably also say a huge thank you to CCP Fozzie, CCP Leeloo and CCP affinity, who have helped with mods, moved ships, found me sites and wormholes I need. Acted as a ammo store for when I'm running low. I really dread to think just how long it would have took me to find all the wh's and sites on sisi without there help.

The CSM is up to about meeting 26 now, I wasn't expecting us to be kept in the loop as much as we are. Sugar kyle has started doing a Q and A twice a month for eve uni one in Eu tz and one in US tz, I tagged along both times (Mayor JSilva came along to US tz one as well) It was really interesting hearing what people thought on stuff and answering any questions they had, We got asked some really random questions from "what's your fave ship" to "can we get a newbie only zone". A lot was taken on board and it was really enjoyable.

The slight down side of all this is I'm just not getting as much time to play. I'm still trying to get on NOHO comms every day and trying to at least get something done.

I did get to have some great fun suicide ganking last week. I was speaking to another wormhole alliance, Trapped and they said they were going to suicide gank some mission Tengus in hisec, and asked if I wanted to come along. I've never done suicide ganking so I said sure, podded myself out to hisec and headed to there system. There were really well organised and it was really interesting, seeing exactly how they went about going after people. I'd say half the people we went after we caught. The others managed to warp before we tackled them so we didn't lose anything but time. What I will say is its pretty crazy 6 (5 if you take in to account I didn't actually get any damage on it) thrashers can kill a 2.3 billion isk tengu. In total we used 19 thrashers at 11million a pop and got 1.25billion isk of loot in a hour.

Dealing with CCP.

I need to be a  "Angry salesman." I need to keep on nagging any dev I can get to listen to me about what I want to do.

My plan, first I'm going to start spamming then with skype messages every few minutes or so. As some devs are in few channels this will help as they will get multiple skype messages. I'll also be hitting the forums hard  posting exactly what I want sorted.  I figure this is pretty standard and probably won't get me the "angry salesman" title. So time to think out side the box. Maybe some leaflets left in pubs in iceland. I could also send the devs some business card I get made up with exactly what i want done on them. Maybe some billboards outside CCP's office. Maybe some big signs off the side of boats in the harbour. If we're going boats maybe a plan towing a sign with what I want done.

This all seems pretty reasonable and I doubt it would annoy CCP at all.


I've had alot of people mailing me or convo'ing me in game, asking "WTF I hope your going ballistic over the npc api date."

Now yes I guess I could have gone thermonuclear on CCP FoxFour. I could have made a huge post, calling him all sorts of things. Just what good does it do yelling and screaming. Normally when I have people like that screaming at me, I just think man that guy is a A hole, then just ignore them. This is the last thing I want the devs thinking of me. A much better approach is to be polite.

I'm reminded of a old classic film here Road house. Dalton the head bouncer is chatting to the other bouncers and basically say.

Ask him to walk but be nice. If he won't walk. Walk him but be nice. If you can't walk him, one of the others will help you, and you will both be nice.

This works much, much better than ranting and raving. Another example of how ranting and raving could go wrong.

There was also a slight issue the other day with mass on freighters. It got pointed out to me and I had a quick look. I'd actually missed this as well, so first things first. Check all the data, Its right there could be a issue with freighters in W-space. I mail the guy who pointed it out thanking him for his good post (more on these in another blog).  I received a nice mail in reply (which is a nice break from the norm). I post on the forum to let everyone know I have seen it and am on it. I then let the rest of the CSM know about it. Post on our internal forum to let CCP Fozzie know about the issue, along with the facts mass of wh's, mass of freighters. Why this would be a issue. I also let him know on skype. Its a sunday but within hours its sorted. Simple miss type. Everyone is happy posts are made to let people know its a mistake tweets sent. jobs a good one.

Now what would of happened if I went full retard on CCP Fozzie, I'm sure it would have got sorted. I'm also sure he'd think I'm a total prat and it sure wouldn't help in the long term. This I hope shows why being nice and polite works much better than going full retard for stuff that in this case turned out to be a tiny honest mistake.

Sig sizes

I said I would do this for Sugar Kyle.

With CCP looking at giving more lowsec wandering wormholes, a few lowsec residents have said this will make it more clustered and messy to find exploration sites. I've posted a couple times to say its not that bad if you use the sig sizes or know about them and how to use them, you can scan for what you want alot faster.

The basics.

All signatures have a size, this determines how easy or hard they are to scan down. Size 10 being really easy size 1.25 being very hard.
By launching probes and having them all in the same place (preferably centred on the sun) you can get a relative strength of all sigs eg

A  2.2%
B  2.1%
C  1.5%
D  1.1%
E  1%
F  0.5%

The highest a sig can be in wormholes is a size 10 so most the time the highest % sig will be that (not always as you may not have one in system) but assuming the easiest is a size 10 you can work out what the other sig strenght are as they will be in the same ratio. the above list would be.

A  10
B  10
C  6.6
D  5
E  5
F  2.5

Now if you know what size sigs are. you can look for that size of a sig and ignore the rest

Here is the table for wormhole sig sizes. Now I live in a C6 static C6 our static is a size 6.6 so the sig C will be our static wormhole I can ignore all the rest just scan that signature to find our static.

Now I want to move a capital in from lowsec. checking the table I know C6 to null is a size 10 and C6 to lowsec is a size 5. So in this case I would scan sigs A, B, D, E once at 25% it will say if its a wormhole, If it is I'll scan it all the way down. I would also scan C my static and then do the same in my static looking for these sizes.

I want to gas mine for ISK  I know the sites I want are the Instrumental and the Vital these are size 2.5. So I'd quickly check what F is. If its not a gas site I would scan my static C, then do the same in the static checking all the 2.5 sigs.

Its worth noting here that a C6 to hisec is a 2.2 and will often look just like a 2.5. Its very hard to tell the difference.

Now this won't always tell you what each signature is, but it will allow
you to ignore stuff that definitely wont be what you are looking for.

Below is a screen shot of our static.

The top 5 sigs, 1.2% to 1% are all size 10. The 0.6% to 0.5% are all size 5 and the last ones at 0.3% are size 2.5. This wormhole has a static C5, which is a size 10, so to find that I'd just go scan the top 5 sigs on this screenshot.

Here  is the lowsec signature sizes. Its worth noting the easiest sig is a size 20 so if you do a quick scan of that sig to see if its a size 20 or 10 you can then work out the rest.

With one probe out I get the result below.

A  4.2%
B  2.1%
C  2%
D  1.1%
E  1%
F  0.5%

I scan A its a rogue trial yard which checking on the table is a size 20. I can now work out the sig sizes.

A  20
B  10
C  10
D  5
E  5
F  2.5

If I want to try and find 5/10 DED sites I know they are size 5 so I scan D and E.
If I want 6/10 I know they are 2.5 so I scan F.
If I want to find a wormhole to other lowsec areas for PvP I know its a size 10 so I scan B and C.

This can be done with core probes at 32 AU but its alot easier and more precise using a combat probe at 64 AU. Its easier in smaller systems if your in a huge system you may have a bit more trouble. This helps alot more as the number of signatures increase.

For people wanting to find stuff in nullsec here is the link to sig sizes.

On another note, had great fun on Down the Pipe podcast. That should be out in the next day or so. So I'd urge people to go give that a listen. I'll put a blog up when it comes out.

Removal of NPC data from the API.

I said I'd write about this.

So the basic idea is, npc and player kill data can't be accessed in game through the client in W-space. However you can get it using 3rd party apps through the API. As such they want to remove it from the API.

On paper this makes alot of sense, its very in keeping with W-space. We don't have local we have to scout, intel is harder to get.

The issue though is just because it makes sense doesn't mean its good for the game.

So first I start to look at what it will do.

You won't be able to get information on when people run sites or see in what day of a cap escalation cycle they are in. For most stuff this isn't to much of a issue this data is already a hour old so when it first appears on Dotlan/Siggy etc. Its often to late. This does heavy screw people who do log on traps as you can't just jump in to a system and go "hey they run sites for the last 2 days at 19.00". Then log off and wait till 19.00 the next day.

This will probably make it safer to farm as log on traps will be harder.

Making farming easier may increase the amount of melted nano's on the market leading to a drop in there price. This would then heavily affect people in C1 to C4 space who get a much higher percentage of there income from salvage. Worth noting I think the income in C1 to C3 is already low when you look at risk to reward.

Are any of these important enough to keep the API info in game. Speaking to CCP FoxFour it's something he wants to happen, but he is more than willing to change his mind if a decent reason can be presented. On several posts he actually commented on the fact that it was a good argument and took it on board.

Making PvP harder I'm not sure on, its not going to affect wormhole PvP in general much at all. Its going to hit Blood Union and Co hard. But I'm sure they can cope, They might have to scout more, which might add on a couple days to log on trap ganks.

Making PvE safer, this I do think is a much bigger issue, its this combined with instant sigs spawning that really make it safe farming. If sigs didn't instantly appear on the overlay, this change probably wouldn't be as much of a issue.

The knock on effect of melted nano prices I also see as a big issue, but its really hard to predict this.

All this I've brought up with CCP FoxFour, especially the effect of this combined with instant overlay spawns. He's taken all this on board. There is some concerns but not enough to stop the change going ahead.

The making PvP harder I think is a bit of a over reaction. Making farming safer I do have a issue with W-space shouldn't be safe. This is what I'll be pushing to CCP to look at and hopefully change. I do have faith that something can be done here.