These API-based sources give part of this information; just by jumping through the WH and getting the system's name they provide statistics about NPC's, ships and pods killed through severals days. Of course, it could be the residents doing their stuff or someone that came to run their sites or kill them.

In my opinion, while the information provided by these 3rd party sources is indeed useful, it is not an indispensable part of any PVP activities. At the end of the day you'll be sending scouts anyway, which will give you even more information than the API did. If you're following a chain, you should be scouting the whole chain, otherwise the chances of bad things happening to your group increase a lot, and that would be completely fair: in a type of space the only info you'll get is through your scanners, not using them is comparable to having Local Chat minimized in nullsec.

If this idea is approved and implemented, every WH resident (and raiders from K-space) will have to learn again how does WH-space work: the way it was originally intended to do. It is not impossible to gank site-runners without API intel; it requires more implication by the attackers. New hole? Take those covops, jump through and start flooding your fleet chat/TS/whatever with information and bookmarks. Stay there for some time, consider taking vigilance turns, keep at least one scout in each system of the chain you're exploring. Make sure those cloaks are running, find the site-runners, arrange a fleet adapted to what the enemy has, let the hunting begin. Just like playing WH-space was when it was first implemented. Not the end of the world.

WH-space is designed to be like living in the wild. If you want intel, you have to look it for yourself, or risk falling prey to those who do. The rewards are highly desirable: high-end salvage, ore, gas and the remains of the quite pimped-up ships needed for achieving that, as well as the stuff stored at POS'. Having access to intel through 3rd party sources does not fit with this definition of WH-space and, in my opinion, feels a bit like cheating.

"Change X is bad because it makes me have to put forth more effort to play in niche Y. No, no that logic and reason you just showed me is wrong my fallacy is right. I deny reality and the facts no matter how it affects game balance. GOONS GOONS GOONS! CCP CHANGE THE GAME TO FIT MY SELFISH PLAYSTYLE AT THE DETRIMENT TO BALANCE OR I WILL UNSUB ELEVENDY ACCOUNTS!"

The overall effect on wspace will be close to zero, and if anything will serve to increase the number of people in c1/2/3 space.

Stop Being a Bad PVPer, Use Intel, Use cloaky Ships, Plenty of ways to get kills in a WH without having to set Logon Traps or be an all around Terrible PVPer. Go back to the days BEFORE all the Third Party apps did the work for you and rise above being a Pubbie level PVPer. It's oh so amazing how the carebears hold the advantage and get more kills in WH space while the oh so Elite WH PVP corps fill the tear jars being delivered to BOB.

I would argue that the reason that c1-c3 w-space is empty is because c4-c6 corps (like mine and many others) ruthlessly murder anyone we find in w-space.

c1-c3 holes tend to attract PVEers (on the whole) who are the easiest to attack without risk.

I would not be surprised if the majority of c1-c3 residents are tired of being slaughtered to the sound of the maniacal cackling of prepubescent teenagers who take out their unfulfilled desire for recognition in the real world on the weak and defenceless, and have left to seek an easier fortune elsewhere.

You can still find targets, and you can still get decent fights, but it's not necessarily easy. You have to carefully escalate the fight, not showing too much of your hand before your targets throw more ships at you. Bears and Null groups won't fight. You'll have to catch them by surprise, which will now be virtually impossible compared to the ease in which they can avoid combat. But hunters do still take bait -- we almost always take bait, win or lose -- so if you are careful, you can get a nice fight out of it that isn't always decided before you engage warp.

But on the whole, W-space is now like Nullsec in that it is easier to avoid combat there than it is in Hisec while still doing something useful.

Wormhole space is about stealth, stalking, hunting, and being hunted. It's about taking what you can while either trying to stay away from the wolves, or it's about taking what you can while being a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's about waking up each day with a completely new destination, a completely new starmap to look at and explore, and different (sometimes new) people to interact with.

You can't just brazenly waltz into a system with a brick tank, engage and light a cyno, and have 1000 of your closest friends jump in from across the EVE universe to help you kill that Drake in an anomaly. What you have is what you brought with you. You can't just dock up when you are out numbered: if you are caught outside of safety, you will die. If you poke your nose out of your POS forcefield, the skilled player can bump you just right to knock you completely out and you will die. There are no docking games, station games here. (Yet). Absolutely anything in your wormhole can be destroyed; no invulnerable stations to hide your stuff in. (Again, yet).

You have no free intel data in the form of Local. Dscan is the life blood of W-space. Those who are good at using dscan do well, if you don't use it, or are poor at using it, you will die.

The largest aspect of W-space is that if you can put forth diligent effort, you can be safe. If you can put forth diligent effort, you can catch targets. Through working and preparing, you can be the victor, whether you are hunting or you are the hunted. This is what we prized the most in W-space.

At real issue is the increasing safety that CCP is affording those who wish to avoid non-consensual PvP. Through multiple changes, CCP has completely flipped the balance on hunter vs hunted in a way that seems opposite to their actions in other regions of space. The conspiracy theory is that CCP players, or their Nullbear pets, encountered an environment that was too dangerous to bear in the near-absolute safety found in the blue Null doughnut. The real reason is probably that CCP has no clue about W-space. The largest of these imbalances centers around instant sig intel data.

Previously, you wouldn't know what non-celestials were in your system until you dropped probes and actively sought out this information. The act of dropping probes would make you visible, and often vulnerable if you weren't smart about making an intermediate safe spot. Anyone scouting the system would see your probes and know there was activity.

If a new wormhole opened up into your system, you wouldn't know this until you scanned and saw the list of signatures change. This means that hunters had a window of opportunity to pounce on their prey. The size of the window depended strictly on the diligence of the prey: if you had an active scanner continually refreshing the scanner, you would know within a few seconds and could warn your fleet. It was easy enough to be safe, but it required diligence and preparation.

If CCP had changed nothing else, but removed the kill API data, it would have been acceptable. To the majority of the hunters, this information was mildly useful at best. Unless your targets were careful, you would catch them with or without this information. And if they were careful, they deserved to get away.

But CCP gave the hunted a free tool: you know instantly when someone new opens a connection in your system. As soon as the person in the connecting system initiates warp, the sig spawns in the other system and appears in the scanner window, before the hunter even exits warp in the connecting system. Bears in PvE sites can immediately see the sig and warp out. They even have time to shoot anything that scrams. Even if you, the hunter, are diligent and as efficient as you can possibly be, and have all the luck in the game on your side, your target has to be braindead to fall prey to you.

Sigs should not show up in W-space unless scanned with probes.

The only remaining risk of non-consensual PvP was the logoff trap, which often used the kill API data. Because of other changes, the presence of this free intel balanced and offset the availability of the free sig intel.

The removal of the kill API data means the dynamic in wormholes for PvE fleets will drastically change. You already did not need a dedicated scout, especially if you close all existing holes and do not warp to the new static (meaning the other side doesn't spawn). Now you no longer will need to constantly twitch-mash dscan to watch for hostiles, since groups will be less likely to seed into a non-home system without knowing it is active.

You can't just roll into any system you want whenever you want. If you put a scout in a system, it may be difficult to get back into that system, especially if you want to seed capitals.

It's like Joe Mission Runner who is in the third room of his mission being told that John the Ganker has just initiated warp to his mission's gate. There isn't a blessed thing John the Ganker can do to avoid alerting Joe Mission Runner that he is on the way.

Remember, there is no Local in W-space unless you speak up. No one is supposed to know you're there.

In reality, this data indeed shouldn't be available as it was. But it enabled the last major unknown threat to PvE activity in W-space, so in that alone it was balanced.

(Sorry for the length)

Big post, but very nicely written and well worth reading.

There is only one discrepancy in it. the probe scan window does not refresh immediately. There seems to be a polling interval so there is a window in which you can get into a victim's system immediately after rolling a hole.

I do agree though - making sigs magically appear was a bad idea, as was making grav sites into anomalies. This is massively unfair on miners, of which I am not one.