All quiet on the wormhole front

Its been quiet on these pages and I have to assume that both my remaining readers have defected to more content-rich pastures.  Of which there are many and with great variety.  Imperium.news which focuses on the great events in nullsec, Crossing Zebras doing excellent analysis of nullsec politics and of course the venerable EVE News 24 formerly a cesspool for pandemic legion and now a honorable news outlet for the whole of nullsec.   Lastly, the subreddit /r/eve is the de facto community hub of EVE online where all topics can and will be debated as long as they pertain to nullsec.  

Yes, I know, its unfair. There are excellent blogs out there providing more variety, solo players like EVE Hermit, cynical but painfully true commentary from Kong, venerable Kirith Kodachi balancing real life and Wilhelm Arcturus’ quiet and insightful writings that inspire entertaining skirmishes with notorious EVE personalities Gevlon Goblin and Dinsdale Piranha.  Of course, there is my friend Oreamnos Amric who tends to focus on the same events as me, logical because we mostly fly together and a few other blogs that I periodically peruse.  But I do have to admit becoming lazy reading about EVE in general.

Its not that I don’t log in and play the game, I do.  I even built myself a Legion to replace my Proteus when flying with my corp fleet as heavy tackle (the Legion has no DPS but 168k HP and 4 neuts…) and on fleet nights we have instigated a hole rolling technique known as “pulling an Epigene”.  Basically, it involves opening a fresh hole with a Lachesis, the Gallente Recon ship bonused for tackling that does not show up on D-scan. The thinking behind this maneuver is that a possible victim may see the new signature of our newly opened connection but with no amount of D-scan spamming can see a ship emerge.  My Lachesis will then find and tackle said victim and allow the rest of my fleet deliver the decisive blow.  The method is flawless, beautiful and true “EVE” except that it has one issue: it has not worked once.  We have literally rolled dozens of holes and at no point found anyone or anything to tackle.  Except Drifter Response Battleships of course, the scourge of C5 land.

They are waiting for me….

So, the Lachesis-maneuver is called pulling an Epigene because I insist of using it for its elegance but we believe that it is cursed and are contemplating to use it for PvE nights where we specifically look out for empty systems.  So far, that has worked perfectly.

This brings me to my main point in this post, I can’t shake the feeling that overall activity in Wormhole space has declined.  Sure enough we hear about the big (for us) nullsec-style fights between Hard Knocks and Hole Control (or whoever) and we recently got ambushed ourselves by Goons but overall I can easily scout for a couple of hours and not see anything or anyone.  Sure, most C4/C5 holes still have an Astrahus but more often than not its owned by an obvious sub-group of a nullsec outfit who use it to print money once every few weeks.  C3 space is similar, except on weekends when day trippers filter 1 jump deep into Wormhole space, I rarely see people.  Unless of course they are Ventures and extremely dumb (yes its the same guy killed twice).    This happens, the herd needs to be culled, in general however I get the feeling that things Wormhole space has really slowed down.  Since I don’t have hard data to back this up, its a little difficult to comment on the cause.  I am sure if one looked at the sleeper kills / day or even PvP kills one would get a decent number.  The reason could be that the dedicated farming groups are just better at securing their system, the ship doctrine has changed (Rattlesnakes and Gilas are the Meta even for C2, gone are the days where people attempted to run C2 sites solo with a Drake) and Citadels have allowed far more absentee-landlord system occupation than POS-es.     I assume that the risk/reward has shifted far toward nullsec. ISK is easier to make by AFK carrier ratting, mining is incredibly profitable with Rorquals and fleet fights are easy to get by joining anyone of the large or medium sized groups.  Other than gas and sleeper loot, Wormhole space has nothing unique to offer and the infrastructure to run a corp in Wormole space is significant.  Its so much easier to join some nullsec renter outfit complete with intel channels and local making life safe for the semi-sentient ratters.

What wormhole space needs is a shot in the arm, a unique structure or resource, a valuable but rare commodity, an interesting sleeper mechanic that is interesting and requires thinking and maybe, just maybe an overhaul of the Citadel mechanic, for example fuel requirement for the second re-enforce timer or similar.

Anyway.  Its just a hunch maybe everything in EVE is just hunky-dory and I am just rambling.  I should stop and read /r/eve, so much easier than writing anything myself.