Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Zipping Up in Hyperion

I had a nice conversation last night with a reader.  He had a question that I did not know the answer to.  Having now found it, I thought it would be of interest to most wspace residents.

For Hyperion, CCP are going to change things so that the K162 wormhole is spawned only when the first transit of the wormhole happens.  (This is good -- gives hunters an extra thirty seconds or whatever.)  In response to that, many wspace residents pointed out that it would probably decrease connectivity in wspace, perhaps quite a bit, because often times people fly to a wormhole to see what it is but then decline to enter it if it goes somewhere they don't like.  So, as of fairly recently CCP updated the dev blog to include a means to connect wormholes even if they are not transited:
Although K162 signatures will not appear as soon as a player warps to them (as they do currently), they will have a random chance to appear every several minutes once the wormhole connection has less than 15 hours of natural lifetime remaining.
Parenthetically, let me criticize this proposal: it seems unnecessarily harsh on lower wspace, and/or unnecessarily lenient on high wspace.  Wormholes in lower wspace have 16 hour connections.  This change would mean that a flown-to wormhole is "safe" only for an hour.  Meanwhile, in higher wspace connections are generally 24 hours, meaning they are safe for a full nine hours.  I'd propose either to make every wormhole connect up after 1 hour (or more generally, N hours for a small integer N), or to make it be a quarter of the total lifetime of the wormhole.  The former would serve CCP's apparent goal of higher connectivity; the latter would allow players to farm for a good amount of time.

Back to the main topic.  This new behavior was ambiguous about what happens if you don't fly to the wormhole.  Does it connect itself anyway?  And the answer to that is: no, it does not:
Even with the timer, K162s will never appear unless someone has initiated warp to the other side.  If you don't warp to a wormhole at all, the behavior of that wormhole will not be changing in Hyperion.
So, there's your answer, George.  No problem: we will be able to zip it up meaningfully in Hyperion just as before.

5 comments:

  1. Corbex is aware of the 1 hour issue for some low end whs and is bringing it up with ccp.

    Not all low end whs are 16 hours but that does not change your point.

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  2. Do yall like your 16 hour holes or do you want uniformity over this type of thing?

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    1. Yes! Emphatically.

      The problem with 24 hour holes is that retaining a tab on their schedule is practically impossible. (In fact each type of wormhole is N hours + 0 to 1. So, a "24" hour hole is actually 24-25 hours.) With a 16-17 hour hole, I can be confident that if I open it religiously every night at more or less the same time, by the next evening it is gone.

      A "24" hour hole, on the other hand, rotates its schedule around the clock. You have it known for a while, and then, not. It's unknown for a while. You log in, and it is EOL for an unknown time. You want to play but instead you wait for it to time out. This is boring. Yuck. I bet the higher wspace people would love it if you just got CCP to reduce high wspace wormholes to, say, 22 hours (really 22-23). But even more for say, 20.

      Now, is it overly cheatish to want to be able to know and control somewhat the schedule of your local wormhole? I don't think so; I live in my system after all, and nowhere else. I don't play 24/7 because I don't actually live in EVE, but I'd like to think that if I did, I could at least pay enough attention to my own environment to know reasonably well when my local wormhole died.

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    2. Okay :) Thanks for explaining.

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  3. Awesome, I was just about to head out looking for Corbex's response to that question from the townhall, but decided to check here 1st. Glad you were able to find it, feeling a bit better for smaller groups now.

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