WH Townhall – I am content

CSM delegate Noobman and member of the most powerful wormhole alliance in the game kindly organized a townhall to update the wormhole community and ask a few questions.  For my remaining two readers I provide a heavily biased summary below.

The full recording is here, at 2h, its manageable, there is so much repetition and group hugs (circle*** for some) that one can easily fast forward. Actual content maybe 10 minutes.

tl/dr  Townhall meeting (real life or game) give the floor to those who take it and in general those are the ones with the most aggressive agenda.  Extremism will always win in a debate as categorical statements are easier to digest and remember.  There is no fighting it and hence I rarely, if ever participate in these events.  Basically, the townhall confirmed what we all expected, Noobman and his friends in C5/C6 space have nothing to do with the wormhole space that I experience.  Large-fleet, capital supported evictions, dozens of farming holes to make money, PvE as the necessary evil are literally a different game from mine.  My purpose in their world is to be “content”, i.e. I serve the role as dumb prey.  To that end, they want me to live in Wormhole space and throw me a few bones so that it becomes worth it.  And when I get too visible, it should be easy to evict me.  Actually, this is fine by me.  I like gnawing on bones.

Here are some cliffnotes.  Sorry if I missed anything, I tuned out a few times when the echo chamber reverberated too much.  My comments in italics.

• Apparently, CCP has not forgotten about wormholes and fact many (shitloads) of CCP devs reside in low class wormhole space.  Guess even CCP devs need PI.
• Noobman asked how the T3C changes had affected wormholers and the audience collectively went into EFT/Pyfa mode, started extolling the virtues of one ship over the other.  Consensus emerged after a few minutes:
  • Proteus, Tengu and Legion are useless.  Loki is the only T3C worth flying.
  • The halving of their tank and an increase in signature and DPS means that their role has changed from heavy tackle with staying power to tackle that needs a serious fleet to bail them out.
  • The whole point that T3Cs are more flexible is irrelevant.  Anyone basing out of a citadel has the ability to re-fit or take a specialized ship.
  • I had always flown a Proteus in “bulldog” mode, holding on to the target and tried to kill it with my other character.  I think these days are over.  I have an active-tank fit with good DPS but it is very sensitive to neuting (and has no cap injector).  I expect to move to Stratios soon. At least I won’t lose SP when it dies.  
• Scanning changes
  • We like it.  A few glitches but overall its an improvement.  Took CCP 3 (?) fixes but its workable now.
• Big discussion on spawn times of anomalies and signatures.
  • I was surprised about how much HK and the rest of audience cared about PvE sites but its obvious, each chest-beating PvP player has a private farming hole where they run sites to make money.  
  • The spawn rates of anomalies apparently is “class wide”, i.e. a site only spawns if another dies in a same class Wormhole.  With many, many holes being abandoned and accumulating sites (see my discussion about our C2 when we moved in), active holes are empty.  The audience wanted a timer on each site that a newly spawned site despawns after a few days with a chance to conveniently respawn within the safety of their farming hole. Basically, they want Nullsec mechanics
• Suggestion that sleeper should scram more so that Player battleships can’t use their microjump drive to escape from PvP.
  • The consensus was its too hard to find idiots like myself to kill.  We are called “content” and we are tolerated in WH space for this purpose only.  It should not be so hard to find, tackle and kill us.    
  • CCP is considering that change to add more scrams into sleeper sites.
• Drone aggro
  • Apparently there is a bug that sleepers attack Drones more than they should.
  • I have not seen it but if I had seen it I would have assumed that it was a new mechanic.  For C2, I stopped using Gallente drone ships and went back to Caldari since drone micromanagement was just too tedious.  If this had been intentional, I would have not cared.  Sleepers are smarter NPC, so why wouldn’t they shoot at drones?
  • I assume this mechanic eats into the AFK money making of their farming holes so it has to get fixed.
• Drifters.  They are the Battleship-sized sleepers that infest C5 and C6 space when you kill a structure.  They are hard to kill, persist and attack citadels.  (and can be killed with a citadel).
  • Consensus seemed to be that they should spawn if you have a Capital ship on grid or shooting the structure.  This of course removes them as a game mechanic to teams like ours coming with Battleships from a C4 and kill them because (gasp!) its a fun game mechanic but this is obviously of no importance.  ISK/hour is the only thing that counts
  • The idea behind it is of course that the hardcore PvP-ers want more capital ships flown by incompetent fools in sites where they can be tackled.
• Industry and moons mining.
  • CCP is thinking about it.  Come back in 2018 maybe.
• Smaller temporary structures to help evictions.
  • Without POS, eviction teams don’t have a safe space to log off.  This makes evictions too hard and the suggestion was to develop a new structure that has a docking ring or something
  • I personally wanted a smaller structure for temporary wormhole camping trips and if it is making evictions easier, so be it.  If anyone wants to evict me, they can do it anyway so what do I care what they need to bring?  
• Some conversation on using capital ships, cap chargers, dreads etc.  I lost track what the discussion was about.