Wormholer (Erutor), BTW

EVE Onion’s investigative team is pleased to bring you this excerpt from the original draft of the October Balance Pass developer notes.



We said at Fanfest that we wanted to address bizarre behavior by our employees in public places when you combine a warped sense of humor and 500mL vodka bottles, but that is impossible; we will instead focus on what is possible when you combine warp disruption field generators and 500mn Microwarpdrives, because that’s the best way we can think of to really torque off J-Space while driving PLEX sales.

500MN HICTORS!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you are probably a Highsec carebear, an AFK VNI ratter, or a Lowsec pirate. It is currently possible for Heavy Interdictors to achieve perfect agility and extremely high speeds with warp disruption fields active using a specific combination of modules and activation timings. This allows them to decloak anything in a gate camp, which makes Nullsec significantly safer for botters, while allowing opportunity for successful roams of super annoying nano gangs you can’t kill unless you’re flying an Orthrus.

It’s quite broken and has been in-game too long. In fact, we estimate that 92% of all players who will inject into HICs to facilitate abuse of this broken mechanic have already done so, which means the status-quo is no longer expedient in driving PLEX sales. In this patch we are planning to solve this problem by removing all navigation related penalties from the warp disruption field generator. This does mean that HICs with normal fits will go faster with active warp disruption fields than before, but we don’t see a problem. Faster is better, right?

It’s important that we deliver an appropriate gameplay experience for each of our demographics. NullSec occupants want to make ISK safely, and lose it in staged fights. J-space dwellers have regularly called for the game to be more difficult, especially for Nullsec. We are most successful when we can serve both of these constituencies well with simple changes. We previously reduced the number of connections to Nullsec space from J-space, for example. Now, we are pleased to announce the same sort of win-win with October’s changes to HICs.

With this change, Null Security space does become more dangerous for those holding SOV, since they can no longer gate camp with nearly 100% effectiveness. To offset the sadfaces in Nullsec, we will continue to focus on other QoL improvements to maintain support for Nullsec’s preferred multi-botting and F1 monkey gameplay style. Since it is no longer worth your time to camp gates or roam with HICs—an active playstyle—we suggest Null Sec players feel free to go ahead and inject more Rorqual pilots! We estimate that removing the need to worry about such troublesome work as actively camping gates or learning to applying points and webs to roaming Nano gangs will lead to a 0.84% increase in PLEX sales, which translates directly to greater happiness for our Pearly overlords.



As a bonus, this fundamental change to HICs also ensures the game becomes more dangerous, just as Wormholers asked for. Anyone who complains is clearly a risk-averse “Not Wormholer, BTW.” Besides, we’ve provided a superior alternative to rolling frigate holes! We suggest that J-space dwellers invest in multi-boxing smart-bombing Proteus bots set to activate their bombs immediately upon detecting the wub-wub of hole activation. This will increase the number of explorers killed in J-space, which will drive up exploration loot prices, which will lead more explorers into J-space, in a deliciously wonderful orgasm of destruction estimated to lead to a 0.69% increase in PLEX sales! When we need a cash infusion, we’ll simply ban a few hundred J-space botters, who will immediately buy PLEX on their other accounts to inject new bots. Besides, we have a stock of Proteus hulls, and they’re rotting in Jita. Truly a win-win!



We look forward to the salt these changes will generate on Reddit!