Arnos Von
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Posted - 2009.01.27 10:40:00 -
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The concept is certainly interesting, and something I'm looking forwards to exploring (pun, as is, intended). Props to all at CCP for continuing to find innovative ways to interact with the EVE universe.
I did, however, think of several things that were ready exploitations of the system. It seems others have noticed the key ones:
1) A POS is ridiculously overpowered since the mechanics of taking one down is based on K space, not W. Things like reinforced mode makes the wormhole timers a boost to POS and mass limits makes large scale sieges improbable. Logistics of keeping it fueled will likely NOT be a problem (next point).
2) The wormhole collapse mechanism will be very easy to game in a 2 way state. Your POS needs fuel or you wind up with a gate to enemy space? Collapse the tunnel until you get one pointing to friendly 0.0 or low sec. Even worse any large alliance can simply cordon off pockets of W space by collapsing tunnels so they always point to deep W-W links or W-K only to their sov territory. I'm assuming this will be fairly simple since "prime" W space should have the fewest links to make initially finding it hard.
3) Even if you don't want to lock down the tunnel totally you can just destabilize it by sending through enough mass to be sure that no sizable attack fleet can ever come through to attack you.
4) Next all you do is pump in the building array, churn out any cap ships you want in your own W pocket, then forcibly realign the gates until you can drop your fleet into enemy space if you like.
On short reflection the best solution to stop fleets in a bottle sort of tactics might be to have a "here there be dragons" mentality to the space -- large NPC cap fleets that would occasionally remove POS in the regions, or space instabilities that would destroy anything in the region (with a bit of forewarning to get out).
Locking off pockets of high value W space by forced realignment will be harder to combat. I've seen a number of suggestions about altering the way mass limits are calculated, but perhaps it could be tied to a system destruction mechanism. Perhaps each wormhole opening/ closing in a W system has a small chance of triggering a destructive shock (countdown to certain destruction, then all gates randomized in and out, all ships logged off in system are thrown out of system by shock wave [prevents easy relockdown, idea here being you want to make people have a chance of rediscovering the prime system]). It could be a cumulative mechanic, so if an alliance kept trying to realign wormholes in a system, the chance of triggering the system collapse would also increase. Prime W systems could also be the most unstable, to counteract the fact they'll likely have the fewest links.
tl;dr? POS and wormhole realignment make W space easy to lock down and stagnate. Solution: blowing everything to bits and randomizing all links from time to time at least in prime systems to be sure it stays fresh.
Looking forwards to seeing it all in march in one form or another. 
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