Viceroy
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Posted - 2011.08.12 14:11:00 -
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WTZ was a terrible solution to instajumps that removed the databse cluttering while reinforcing the actual game breaking aspect of instajumps; that they provide super fast, super safe travel at no cost and require extraordinary effort to counter. This in turn made EVE much much smaller than it used to be, and made every ship roughly the same in terms of travel speed and safety, greatly reducing tactical, strategic and logistical variation and basically dumbing the game down so that carebears could have faster access to more content without as much risk.
There was one simple solution to instajumps that CCP ignored back then, and the same solution will work today for WTZ. Make it impossible to warp closer than 15km to gates. Bubbles already do this, just use the same code and the entire discussion about bookmarks becomes irrelevant. I find it hilarious that CCP coded bubbles as a counterweight to WTZ after removing instajumps, but failed to realize that simply adding the same mechanic to gates would have fixed instajumps in the first place without any need for bubbles or WTZ.
All the miserable carebears in this thread who are crying their eyes out and pooping their pants over the prospect of WTZ being removed and piracy/ganking becoming easier are automatically wrong because whilst before WTZ you could run a blockade with a properly fitted/sized fast ship and some planning, after WTZ the size and fitting of your ship became entirely irrelevant thanks to bubbles.
The primary reason why WTZ broke the game though isn't about travel safety. Ultimately, WTZ didn't make travel so much safer as much as it made it simpler and dumber (greater sins by far). Before WTZ smart people would scout ahead and avoid trouble, as they do now. The unprepared and stupid would die. The difference was the extent to which you could prepare (using a smaller and faster ship to run blockades vs. just waiting because there is a bubble) or take risks (running blockade = variable chance of dying based on your setup and the enemy vs. jumping into a bubble = 99% instadeath). It just became a simpler equation with WTZ, which made the game worse and the instant-gratification crowd extremely happy.
No, the reason WTZ broke the game is because it utterly and completely screwed up travel times. It not only made travel absolutely faster for every ship, but it also shrank the travel time differential between bigger and smaller ships down to negligibility (aka warp speed). Travel fittings no longer mattered, fleets didn't need to fit MWDs to travel fast, and large ships went almost as fast as frigates. This in turn made the universe much much smaller, conflicts less consequental, planning less complex, space less vast, 0.0 less scary, the frontier less daunting, and sapped a lot of things that made EVE unique and exciting. Instead we got a dose of the treadmill & instant-gratification culture that proliferates certain games with goddamn elves and dwarves.
Prism, if you want a side project, adopt the cause of removing WTZ and fixing travel times in EVE. The benefit of making bookmarks easier to trade is a drop of irrelevant water compared to the sea of carebear tears and torrents of joy that would flow at the funeral of WTZ.
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