Filaments force groups to comp engageably and can lead to more fights. If two groups are going to fight, each side must have an expectation of the possibility of victory. If one group brings an vastly superior fleet in terms of numbers or composition, the other group can use filaments to extract. Without the use of filaments the smaller group might not have tried to fight in the first place for fear of being camped in a system and forced to log out for a day or longer.
Filaments allow better large brawls between mid to large size wormhole corps. Often these brawls will happen in the home system of one the two larger corps. The home corp has a built in advantage in terms of quickly reshipping if their pod is not bubbled or they have an escape frig. Another big advantage of the home corp is the mass of ships they can bring to the fight. The visitor has to consider the mass of connections needed to reach the other system and whether there will be enough mass left for them to bring their big expensive fleet back home after the fight. Filaments allow a secondary mass independent extraction method after the fight, putting the fight on still disadvantaged but fairer terms.
People roam null or access events with filaments. Sometimes people have a limited playtime and can’t wait for good connections to go on a roam or do event sites like the winter nexus event in LS. Removing filaments from wormholes directly removes that content.
There is a middle ground between filamenting in perfect safety and nuking their use entirely. A 30 second spool up would make filamenting as dangerous as safelogging and allow a competent combat prober to warp tackle to a fleet intending to filament in order to create a timer to disallow that fleet to escape.
Filaments allow rolling ships not worth scanning home a way to return to a central location without self-destruction. In KSpace, you can get anywhere and you have asset safety.
Proposed better solution: Spool Up Timer
How long should the spool timer be? 30 Seconds. Why? That’s the accepted length of the safe log timer. So if you aren’t safe enough to safe log, then you aren’t safe enough to filament.
There’s already a 15 minute timer after you use a filament, and other timers for engagement that have to all be discharged before you can use another filament. Adding 30 seconds more isn’t going to do anything extra.
Let me give the answer, 15min warping from safe spot to safe spot or staying cloaked is different than the proposed staying in one spot uncloaked for 30s to make others being able to catch you.
My understanding from conversations is, that CCP wants to do that, but it’s not easy to figure how to implement, that’s why they choose the sledge hammer solution now.
Also whether event filaments will be forbidden in WH is not said (I doubt it). It’s only needle and Pochven.
The game mechanic right now does not allow a needle or pochven filament to be activated while you have any sort of player or NPC timer on you (at least none that I have encountered). Those timers can be up to 15 minutes long.
If you have eluded an aggressor (either by warping sp to sp, cloaking, docking up, etc) adding another 30 seconds on top of the timer won’t matter in the bigger picture.
If such a mechanic were implemented now and if careful statistics were collected about it, then I’d bet a year from now those stats would show maybe at best 1%-2% of the time at the most a player is caught in those extra 30 seconds. It isn’t worth it, just a harassment of the player base.
I really think a spool up timer on filaments is a good idea and support to add a spool up timer to all filaments (including abyssal filaments).
The delay from such a timer removes the possibility of using these filaments to avoid conflict to instantly get out of a sticky situation when chased by people.
Movement filaments (noise, signal and the various pochven filaments) are a fantastic tool to drop people in parts of space that would otherwise be much less visited (and therefore much safer), creating conflict and content. Downside is that these same filaments can currently be used to avoid conflict and remove content as it allows players to instantly disappear from a chasing group after they warp around enough to drop their combat timer, which isn’t hard to do (and trivial with a cloak).
As abyssal filaments have a similar wayto avoid conflict (they can be used to immediately jump into another abyssal site upon seeing people camping the trace) a spool up timer would stop that unintended gameplay as well.
However, I do think that it’s good for the game that people can only leave wormhole space through wormholes, which now is the case again now that filaments are disabled in wormhole space.
Add a spool up timer, in addition to disabled filaments in Jspace.
If you’re being chased by combat probes there’s a big difference in
warping around (or sitting cloaked) and instantly activating a filament after 15 minutes and
warping around/sitting cloaked for 15 minutes and sitting still for 30 seconds uncloaked before being able to teleport away
A good combat prober will have warped to you in about 20 seconds, less if hyperspatial. They cannot catch a ship that warps off or filaments immediately (and does not re-use warpins) but chasers can catch a person who is required to sit still for 30 seconds before they can teleport to safety.
A spool up timer would still allow people to often get away, but good combat probers can now counter it.
Can we just make filaments usable for cruiser size ships and down so wormholers can still filament out to null sec for content?? If the whole issue is getting assets out during eviction this would solve that.
It’s just extra annoying steps. I mean maybe one day I don’t want to scan a whole chain to find a k-space connection. I just want to filament out and play.
Put some PvP ships and filaments in the station of your medical clone.
When you want to filament out and play, you self-destruct out to K-space (I’m no wormholer but this is possible right?), board your PvP ship, undock and filament.
