You’ve got my vote.
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- Ratting Access
Sorry, I think I was unclear here. When I said “abundant PVE” what I meant is access to higher level PVE, like high class dread ratting or some of the high class roaching fleets.
- Drifter/Avenger Payout Values
After some reflection, I think this is less of a concern than I had originally stated. I had a conversation with some folks earlier today who rightfully pointed out that moving payout away from the drifter and towards the avengers in high class sites, while at the same time implementing scram spreading on all sites, essentially nerfs subcapital ratting twice. I think the primary concerns as far as those fleets being able to MJD away from tackle are addressed with the scram proposal, so adjusting values in high class sites is not as much of a concern as adjusting C4 sites (see below), and providing alternate avenues for content generation outside of just ganking ratters (mining fleets, event sites, etc.)
- Subcap Ratting Fleet Commitment
The additional commitment would come from having to shed tackle from multiple sources. In a perfect world, each wave would have a predetermined number of scrams it could apply, and those scrams would be spread randomly across anything in the room, and would come not just from frigates but from cruisers and battleships as well. If the fleet noticed something on D-Scan, they wouldn’t be able to just immediately jump away and would have to deal with whatever was tackling them first.
- C4 Sites
No, I don’t think C4 sites should have higher payouts than C5 and C6 sites. I do think they should have a higher step up from their C3 counterparts, though.
To put some numbers on it, the average payout for combat anoms per hole class are as follows:
C1: 10m
C2: 13.9m (1.39x increase)
C3: 46.46m (3.34x increase)
C4: 80.48m (1.73x increase)
C5: 199.98m +300m (2.48x increase, 6.21 w/ drifter)
C6: 352.68m +300m (1.76x increase)
I recognize the distinction between low class and high class sites, and I know a lot of people would really like to protect that distinction. But the poor state of C4 sites, especially when you could be making six times the money (since you don’t get a drifter) while not having to deal with the miserable spawns that drive up the time it takes to run those sites, is what drives groups out of their home holes to roll their statics looking for more lucrative ventures, or to set up dread farms if they’ve got the money for it.
You could double the payout of C4 sites and still keep the distinction between high class and low class sites, since C4 sites don’t have drifters.
Please let me know if you’ve got anything else specific to ask. I’m happy to help clarify any questions you have!
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Adding a burst jam to high-class rats would also help make the sites riskier for multiboxing subcap fleets without severely hampering marauders, dreads, and fleets of subcaps that aren’t just a single person with 16 alts.
What is wrong with a single person using 16 alts?
I am not a representative of Mark in any way other than being in his corp, but I believe his comment on “We’re certainly not the most competent wormhole group,” was meant as a jab, or “joke” if you would, on the elitism of Jspace, as a wormhole corp we obviously respect and honor actual piloting skills and abilities so I don’t mean to sound disrespectful to anyone, it is simply that we do not believe that people should ever have to feel bad about having fun in the game, so when events occur where others may be mad about the outcome (Re: When you feed), we take it in stride and instead enjoy the learning experience and always go for more fights.
To more simply and elegantly explain what I feel he meant by not being “the most competent”: We enjoy playing the game and taking fights. We don’t consider ourselves better than anyone in space, and when we take fights we do so for the excitement, fun, and enjoyment of the game, whether it ends in a Turbofeed or in Glory.
As for why you should vote for him over another similar wormhole candidate, with Wormholers simply not having a CSM member last year, I feel Mark would agree as long as a candidate exists which people can agree on and who would listen to more than only their allies then they should be the person who wins, whether or not it be him, or as he put it:
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Can you explain what you mean by this? There’s no mechanic that is stopping this.
This is already a mechanic. The issue is the amount of subs can clear these scrams almost instantly. I wouldn’t mind the only change being spreading scrams if they increased the amount of ships that scrammed. That could be a nice balance.
This would make c4 sites have the best isk/ehp in wh’s but land total payout between c3 & c5 sites. Possibly add some more scrams if the isk gets buffed. I dont have any experience in c4 sites so I’m not really sure how to balance them in line with the rest of the wh pve sites.
Could you give your opinion on the strategic strike patch from a year ago and whether you think it achieved ccps goal of creating a “brawlers paradise”. Also elaborate as to why you agree or disagree with the three main changes that pertained to whs and possibly better alternatives to achieve a “brawlers paradise” if you disagree with any of them.
for reference
20% resist nerf to mods
buff to t2 short range damage ammo
fax nerfs(1 cap booster lock)
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Can you explain what you mean by this? There’s no mechanic that is stopping this.
What I mean is that some smaller groups don’t have the financial girth to field farm dreads or big nestor/leshak fleets. Those groups should still have other ways to make money at a reasonable clip, in order to defend their own stuff and participate in fights.
This is already a mechanic. The issue is the amount of subs can clear these scrams almost instantly. I wouldn’t mind the only change being spreading scrams if they increased the amount of ships that scrammed. That could be a nice balance.
This would be the intention, yes. You have a set number of ships that each site scrams, but the type of ship that scrams you would be random.
Possibly add some more scrams if the isk gets buffed.
My saying to double the payout was a little tongue in cheek, but the original point remains - even getting them to any kind of workable state at all would be preferable to the condition they’re in now, which rests firmly in “not worth the effort to attempt”.
In general I kind of think it was a mixed bag. The T2 short range ammo buff was great, especially since it ushered in the age of the Chad command ship - the Nighthawk. Surgical Strike making brawling ships feel like they have weight to their guns was a good change and one that I’d gladly hold on to.
The other two big changes, though, I could do without. I understand the reasoning behind the 20% resist nerf, but all it really served to do was make the brawls shorter, since everything is so much squishier now. This, coupled with the fax nerf and the increased damage, means that while Surgical Strike made brawlers a lot more fun to fly, it effectively killed the “big armor brawl” as a concept because you can’t keep ships on grid as long.
I would scrap the fax nerf at least immediately. People can complain about them all they they want, but there are few better avenues for a small group to punch up if they’re being attacked/evicted/etc. than to put a fax on grid, and I think that’s something that should be encouraged. I’d love to see more faxes in space to shoot at, especially if that meant more groups feeling like they can come out and take more fights because of them.
Mark,
Are you able to answer my post above?
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Apologies for not getting to this one sooner. As you can probably imagine, the questions have been coming hot and fast the last 24 hours or so!
What I do care about is whether you understand wormholes, and whether you can actually articulate ways of improving them to CSM.
I believe I do. In my saying above that I recognize that I’m not an expert, I didn’t mean anything other than that - there are certainly some who spend more time in EVE than I have, and have a greater depth of knowledge than me. But that’s not to say I’m out here kicking sticks around - I wouldn’t have started this run if I didn’t feel like I had a solid knowledgebase to work from.
Your second point is important, I think, because that’s something I have specific goals for. Communication, I feel, is the key here - there are plenty of stories of CSM members approaching CCP with one thing or another and either bring brushed off or politely disregarded. I believe with simple, consistent messaging about which issues are most important to wormholers as a whole, we can really make headways in getting something done. Communication is literally part of my dayjob, and something I feel specifically qualified to deal with.
This sort of statement doesn’t do much to fill me with confidence. I would echo the comments made by others above about your lack of experience in wormhole PVP.
My tongue-in-cheek attempt to be relatable appears to have fallen flat, and I’ll own up to that. All I meant to convey by that was that TURBO as a unit is not attempting to be the pinnacle of wormhole PVP - the very makeup of our group likely wouldn’t allow for it, even if that was something we wanted. But we’ve taken fights with larger entities and fights we legitimately shouldn’t have won, and then either cut even or taken a slight edge. I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, and while I may not have the PVP history that some others might, I don’t want to give the indication that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been working with our FCs over the last year and a half, and was an FC myself for a year before that.
why should I vote for you ahead of someone like Phantomite?
I live in wormholers, and I engage with wormholers. Ever since I came back to EVE early in 2019, this is all I’ve done. My history out here isn’t as long as some, but we have been busy in the time we’ve been here. Phantomite is a good candidate, and if you want someone to pursue changes to Faction Warfare then he’s a great choice. But if you want someone who is going to hear the concerns of wormholers and present them to CCP in the way that gives us the best chance to see actual, workable change, then you should vote for me.
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The reason I asked about Phantomite is because he seems to have done more for wormholes as a “low sec CSM” than we got from our “wormhole CSM” the year before.
With no wormhole CSM in the last 12 months wormholes objectively got better. With a wormhole CSM the previous year they objectively got worse. As one example, we lost capital rolling with a wormhole CSM, but it took a low sec CSM (Phantomite) to get it back for us.
In my opinion, no wormhole CSM is better than a bad wormhole CSM. You have said that you aren’t an expert, but you have some knowledge. You haven’t any experience from what I can see that covers highclass wormhole PVP. Since this has been pretty much killed by CCP, how do you propose building up your knowledge of this? What do you think are the problems that have killed this type of gameplay off and what would you like to see done (if anything) by CCP in this regard?
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No wormhole csm is indeed better then a bad one.
So lets either give Mark a chance or hope Phantomite does a good job again.
but HK has proven in the past that they cant be trusted with a csm position so lets not try that again.
3 Likes
I’m still unsure of your position here. What are you actually advocating for? There’s plenty of empty c5s and holes with c5 statics.
All I mean is that setting up forts with dreads, or fielding a bunch of leshaks/nestors can get expensive, especially if those groups don’t have a more local source of income, or an alternative way to make money.
That’s not saying they can’t make money - obviously it’s not that expensive to run C3s, but it’s not what I would call an efficient way to get corp money together for larger ratting fleets, or home defense doctrines, etc.
I’m actually really glad you asked this, because this discussion came up in Praise Bob the other day, and you’re right - we don’t have an abundance of first hand experience in highclass brawling. I spent most of the day talking to a couple of high class CEOs about what they saw as the biggest issues plaguing high class PVP, and came up with what we thought were a pretty comprehensive list of the most significant issues facing the meta currently. I’ll paste here what my comments were there, and then add some extra thoughts at the bottom.
My biggest issue with the meta as it stands now is twofold - brawls tend to be a DPS race that require nearly a 1:2 logi to dps ratio to keep things from being burned off grid, and HAMs in general are over-represented in the meta. Surgical Strike is to blame (for better or worse) for most of the former and all of the latter, and reverting the resistance nerf would almost immediately result in fights that aren’t over in a couple of minutes and decided by who can put 20 dps ships on grid first. I would much rather fights be longer, dirtier affairs that require groups utilize a variety of tools - positioning, ewar, focusing on important targets and cap pressure on logi. More use of caps in these fights, especially when outnumbered. Faxes that don’t just melt under any kind of pressure.
Realistically, CCP is probably going to be loathe to revert those changes due to the way they affect fighting outside of wormholes, so what option is there? One suggestion I heard proposed was a buff to capital cap mods in order to allow for cheaper regen faxes. You could couple this with a buff to plates (even a wormhole specific buff) to help counter some of the increased burst damage that arose from Surgical Strike, but reverting the resistance nerf and (possibly) the fax nerf would be the easier, more immediate option.
The problem is that surgical strike was designed, in CCPs own words, “…to see bloodier fights, less stalemates, and a huge cross-sectional shift in the fitting meta.” In our case, this hasn’t really resulted in bloodier fights, just shorter ones, because it amplified the inherent disadvantage that smaller fleets have. You don’t have the extra margin anymore, and fights are over before they can really pop off because if you can burst down everything in the other fleet in just a few minutes, nobody is going to want to come out and fight you - and since FAXes can’t handle the added pressure anymore, those groups don’t have a way to compensate.
I’m not sure what the answer is here, to be honest. The easiest solution is probably the least likely option to get implemented. It’s possible some of this could be accomplished with wormhole effects, but that’s not really a solution as much as it is just reverting the changes but only in wormholes, which also wouldn’t fly. I’m thinking additional, wormhole specific changes to cap construction to lower the cost of regen faxes might go a long way towards making groups less hesitant to drop them in big brawls, but that’s probably a stretch.
That being said, another idea a high class CEO mentioned recently was a buff to subcap logi to mitigate some of the difference from not having FAXes on grid. In his words, giving the Oneiros a 5% rep amount per level and the guard a 5% cycle time buff would reduce the amount of logi you’d need on grid - and the same would apply to the basi/scimi. You could do the same thing with the zarm, increase initial spool or cycle time (might be broken tho tbh). This kind of buff wouldn’t affect null fights because you would still die to the alpha, but would definitely affect high and low class brawls. Increasing logi power/efficiency would also make opposing ewar that much more important as a result, leading to more interesting fleet dynamics.
As for the issue with HAMs, the reason they are so popular right now is that they have great burst damage. Great burst damage is even more effective when your opponent doesn’t have the resistances to mitigate it, and is relying on subcap logi because their faxes are ass. I don’t know if I can say with confidence that reverting the resistance changes would immediately end the stranglehold that HAMs have on the brawl meta, but it would be a good first step.
We also discussed more recently some other options to fix the issue of stagnant PVP in wormholes in general, when the issue of evictions came up. The general consensus seemed to be that wormholes lack a long-term objective to fight over, which leads to structures being the only “long-term” objects worth hitting. I was really pleased to see that a lot of people (including the other CSM candidates) are in agreement that wormholes could really benefit from the reintroduction of rorqs, since they are thick, stationary targets that almost always kick off a response if they’re attacked. Since moon mining in wormholes has been given the bat, Orin commented that a better fix might be to introduce gas huffing rorquals, which would be very cool.
I had also mentioned introducing something into wormholes in the same vein as the ESS - a stationary target that does something (my suggestion was increase site spawns and take a percentage of blue loot generated) over time to increase its value, that would be worth fighting over. Give it a couple of timers, let it pay out its billions when it drops, badabing badaboom content. It was Orin’s idea was to just throw those two things together - a stationary structure you would deploy one of in a hole that increased gas spawns, and maybe accumulated gas of its own over time as you cleared gas sites. Couple that with gas huffing fleets (gas huffing barges would be cool here too) and rorqs, and suddenly you’ve created something worth fighting over that takes time and staging to accomplish (if you want to hit the structure), but also natively generates content by making it worth having capital mining ships out in space again, all while not having to rely on evictions to do something in wormholes.
Now - again, there’s a lot of spitballing here and most of it is probably a stretch. But it’s the kind of thinking that I think is at least worth having voiced to CCP directly to see what sticks. PVP in wormholes is a mess right now anyway, especially in high class, but I think there are some clear solutions to some of these issues that just need clear, consistent pressure to get taken seriously.
2 Likes
Marks point here is something incredibly important for wormholes as a hole. No matter what it is, creating some sort of objective based gameplay for WHs will really help fill out the space.
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Mark is, in my opinion, the best candidate for wormholes.
I have not been in his corp very long (~2 weeks now) but I can tell these are some great dudes, with some great ideas.
I’ve been in-and-out of wormholes a few times, for many reasons, and everything im seeing from Mark is making me want to stay.
Good luck, you’ve got my votes!
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Most younger wormholers will not know me, many older ones may remember who I am. I’m Jim Suletu, the CEO of Dropbears Anonymous, a (currently inactive, soon^tm) wormholer group which has lived from humble C2s well in to the prime of C6 space, where we held Nova (J105934) until its fall (and the end of lived-in C6 space) towards the end of 2015. You and some of the other candidates are a little younger to wormholes, so I will provide some backstory to my questions.
A long, long time ago, myself and the other CEOs of (then mostly C6 and C5 space, back when that was the way/place we lived) sat down with CCP in a series of open town halls, hosted by then CSM Corbexx. You’re free to go over and revisit this if you’d like as a look in to how we thought about it back then.
During this conversation a number of concerns were brought up to CCP, one of which was asset safety (originally, as first presented, wormhole citadels were to have this, we spent a lot of time walking this back). Other concerns were more focused on the interruption of the status quo of evictions either in favor of the attacker (citadels very easy to break) or the defender (regardless of citadel strength, safety of the pilots and the assets therein).
Old (read, POS) evictions ran something like this:
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You seed, then form up in full and either have a full fight with the defenders or begin defanging and bubbling their towers; the size of the tower and the safe area was in was such that pilots could anchor bubbles around it and prevent prevent people from leaving, which looked like this.
Reinforcing locked down a number of things pilots inside could do. Pilots inside were no longer able to touch their corporate hangars (as the CHA required CPU), but could touch their already prepped ships (SMA does not require CPU) and refit them if they needed to (using available space, since the hangars were offline). This locked assets in place and forced defenders to commit to truly defending their space, rather than just hard pulling and evaccing everything, which is very easy to do in current citadel meta (see below).
Defanging did two things.
- It prevented the defenders from having the on-field DPS to continue fighting once they had already lost or given up the first engagement above
- It allowed you to anchor these bubbles such that the tower would not just automatically kill them (or prevent a gunner from just shooting them). If you wanted to leave, you had to actually commit to escaping.
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You waited a max of a day and 18 hours for the tower to come out of its only reinforce phase, and then you’d kill it. Those inside have either been “forced” to self destruct their assets in full view, guaranteeing they do not get away from it clean, or they have committed to the fight and either won (generally routing an evictor for long enough for them to properly either rebuild or evac the old fashioned way) or lost (you as the evictor get what’s left).
That said, with frigate holes (which I think are good) and current, null oriented citadel mechanics (which I think are horrendous in wormhole space specifically), a defending force has essentially never been safer in 2021 back to the advent of citadels in the first place:
A defender can realistically not be defanged, as citadels made guns part of the defending structure; so long as somebody is online and has the ability to take control (so, literally anyone a CEO trusts to shoot the guns, skills not needed as they were in POS days), an anchored bubble cannot stand on the field of a citadel as an attractor to defending pilots to de-tether to kill, since you cannot sit there and babysit it forever (note the damage).
These anchored bubbles cannot be anchored such that they cover the safe area of a citadel; since they cannot be anchored within tether distance, the only citadels which can be bubbled in such a way that it affects the defender is the Athanor. A pilot with anchoring 5 can anchor a T2 large in such a way that it just barely covers the doors, and anchoring them around the citadel perfectly cannot cover the safe space in such a way that they are actually prevented from leaving; they can very comfortably just maneuver to an empty spot and warp off, leading to the other problem with eviction defending.
Additionally, and I have brought this up since their introduction to a couple of other CSM and have been told this is “working as intended:” what is your opinion on the use of filaments in wormhole space, namely to ignore mass limits during evac? As it stands currently, should I be in danger of being evicted, I essentially can do the following:
- I get in my ball of Orcas, DSTs, BRs what have you
- I wait until you’re asleep, since you cannot defang my citadel, cannot bubble the doors (unless it’s an Ath and you have anchoring 5, then you can just barely touch the doors but since you can’t defang me I just clear the bubble) and I always have safety to undock
- I warp to a safe (deep or otherwise) / off dscan from you
- I filament out as soon as I land, completely ignoring any efforts to attempt hole control and since there’s no warmup phase you very likely don’t get to me in time.
- I either dock up in friendly space, if I have the option (I do, as an example, as would anyone aligned to most blocs these days), or I just keep doing it until I get a freeport, NPC space, or something reasonably close that I can sneak out to good kspace for industrials. Alternatively I do a pochven in/out, which honestly is probably even safer.
I’ve spent what, 5m per filament? In exchange for evaccing billions in potential assets with no real, tangible danger to myself or these assets. A recent change to nullifiers has made this even more potent.
It is not my expectation that we return to the old ways; citadels are, on the whole of the game, a good thing - just not (in my opinion, at least) as they stand for wormhole groups. Would you propose adjustments to citadel mechanics specifically IN wormholes to help address the wild disparity between attackers (who are at the disadvantage even before citadels) and defenders, whose shiny bits are now safer than ever? If the answer is yes, what would you suggest? I have my own opinions as to how it would go, but I ask you (and the rest) how you would handle it.
tldr: Bittervet grr wormhole citadel (but in a constructive way)
