Adanthar
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Posted - 2009.08.27 17:03:00 -
[1]
I have a decent amount of experience living in a class 5 WH. I'll sort of repeat what I said in the explo thread:
-aside from every single system being claimed or run by somebody daily, class 1-3's seem fine, but I'm not in a position to know much;
-class 4-5 sites are extremely hit or miss;
-class 6 is almost worthless.
Class 4-5:
The main problem is that the actual sites are not balanced with regard to each other. Some can be ninja'd, so 3-4 accounts can do them in 15 minutes. Some can't, so 4-6 accounts can manage them in about an hour. Since there is no rhyme or reason to what sites can be done easily - a server bank can yield a billion split 3 ways in half an hour* while a regular site yields a quarter of that over 6 people/2 hours* - the risk/reward is horribly out of whack and people often skip a bunch of ostensibly easier sites to just ninja server banks all day.
*half that time is 4 accounts waiting around on one person to use their dedicated hack/arch/lootship while the rest of the team watches TV; the tedium of actual hacking/archaeology is something else that needs fixing ASAP.
Class 6:
A typical WH can take approximately 16/2 = 8 BS passing through it in both directions before it collapses. If you were to live in a class 6, your first exit would also usually be to another class 6, and sites in class 6 WH's take 6-8 people to do. Even discounting the logistics ships since they have less mass, if you wipe, you're automatically done for the day or until you collapse the exit. The whole thing is dicey before you even consider that, because the payout has to be split a billion ways and it takes forever to run anything, the loot is significantly worse than a class 5.
Overall:
Exploration is generally a 1-2 person affair in K-space. In class 4-6's, it's a team job, with 1-2 people having to spend hours on dedicated scan patrols and a half dozen people then having to log in at the same time. This already makes the whole thing annoying to 0.0 explorers (because I can make an average of 500m/day doing stuff on my own in the same amount of time) but I could put up with it...if it didn't mean running server banks over and over because every other site is 50% of the payout for 200% of the effort. When combined with 0.0 being better for plexing, it's not even close to worth it unless you are also running a team gas mining op. Most corps do, but gas mining is largely automated and really requires only one account. So the typical evening of a wormhole crew in a class 5 turns out to be:
-1 guy mines gas
-1 guy spends the whole afternoon scanning, then logs off for 3 hours because there's nothing else to do
-(that evening) people log in 1 at a time, spend hours waiting for "enough" personnel online to run a non-server bank site, get bored and ninja a server bank (or just log back off)
I don't know how you'd fix this, but I hope you do. Also, regardless of how you fix class 4-5's, please make class 6's useful. Thanks.
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