With the newly added addition to wormhole jumps. Instead of having it based on your specific jump in time and then delayed one minute, Have the wormholes themselves OPEN on a regular schedule, say every 3 minutes, and you have 30 seconds to pass though them before the next opening. Not only would it adds risk to traders and added interaction with pirates but it also would delay anyone from using the wormhole as a quick escape, except on occasions when it happens to be open.

So you want this as opposed to this: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11276?page=1 oookay. I tend to think that a 3-5 second timer to jump would make it less hard to run away than having wormholes that open and close on fixed intervals.

I don't like the new changes AT ALL, but my point was, if your going to delay the ability to jump wormholes, why not make it even for everyone. Everyone could jump every three minutes, or decided time. That way you know if and when they are going to use the wormhole and gives you the ability to follow and have same exit point if someone is escaping.

I don't have a problem at all with the time limit on wormholes. I do NOT like the fact that I'm vulnerable entering a wormhole I have not been thru in the last minute. For one thing, the transition lasts too long (I thought so even before the change) AND you're defenseless. Why not do away with the entry animation and retain the exit? At least shorten the entry animation by at least half. Or perhaps just make the person vulnerable if they have been thru the wornhole in the last minute, but allow the jump anyway.

I also definately do NOT like the full battery requirement for in system jumps. If you add the time for a battery to recharge and the time of the animation, you're vulnerable AND defenseless for almost a full minute. Ridiculous! It was perfectly logical to me that one could jump in system with a partially depleted battery but required a full charge to enter a wormhole. While this will make it more difficult to escape a pirate, it also makes it impossible to shake a strike force. Every battery except the fast charge just became totally useless along with the ships that use them. Maybe a half charged battery, or a fixed number for every battery could be required for an in system jump. The latter would certainly even the field.

Now, what about the timed missions for traders? If one has to wait for a battery to recharge between each and every jump, time required to navigate around asteroids clusters and thus avoid ion storms just doubled. Say goodbye to your bonuses folks.

This was not a well thought out update.

""While this will make it more difficult to escape a pirate, it also makes it impossible to shake a strike force""

and the strike forces have been so wussified for so long that this is actually a point in the updates favor. strike forces were meant to keep the areas claimed by factions and nations SAFE(er). so far they have been failing miserably.

""Now, what about the timed missions for traders? If one has to wait for a battery to recharge between each and every jump, time required to navigate around asteroids clusters and thus avoid ion storms just doubled. Say goodbye to your bonuses folks.""

while the trade mission times bonuses WILL need to be adjusted for this, you are also only looking at the immediate results of the change. look a bit farther down the road for a second.

When the new hive becomes active in ALL the systems, it will be possible to clean out hive infestations and keep them cleaned out. I can easily see stations offering combat missions like:

"clear the route between this station and the wormhole to <SYSTEM>. this route passes through sectors <list sectors in direct line>. report back here when all sectors have been confirmed clear of hive infestations for your reward."

since the stations will be paying people to clear the routes every few days, you wont NEED to plot course around asteroids. couple this change with a complete randomization of ion storms so that they dont appear in ONLY asteroid sectors, and the direct route quickly becomes the fastest again. Even if you catch a storm or two you dont have to avoid hive bots.. just potential human pirates. :)
If you are in nation space with the more effective strike forces, even that shouldnt be a problem.

john, the wh timer is only for jumping back again... its a very specialized case, you don't have to wait to jump, you just can't jump right back.

Spellcast:

"When the new hive becomes active in ALL the systems, it will be possible to clean out hive infestations and keep them cleaned out."

one moment... ROFLMAO!

It's obvious to me that you have not tried to kill a leviathan. It requires a large investment of time and credits by several players working together (the more the better). Aditionally, there is absolutely no immediate reward for doing so at the moment. If you've paid any attention to the hive activity in Sedina you will have noticed, that after the 1st couple of days no one even tried to kill the leviathan and Sedina soon became over run with hive in EVERY roid sector.

If the hive remains as strong as it is and the changes are implemented throughout the galaxy the entire place will be hive infested in no time. Trade will be impossible.

"and the strike forces have been so wussified for so long that this is actually a point in the updates favor. strike forces were meant to keep the areas claimed by factions and nations SAFE(er). so far they have been failing miserably."

While I do agree that the strike force has been so ineffective that it was a joke, I do not believe it should be completely impossible to escape. Why don't you try getting a seeker or 2 on your tail.

We don't have to kill a Leviathan just to keep the routes clear. We just have to kill the bots in the sectors along the route. Which most often means observers or collectors, unless we let them go for a long time without cleaning them out, in which case it might get to the point where (*gasp*) we'll have to kill a queen. Also, I believe the devs have said that the Hive in Sedina right now is more aggressive and expands faster than they plan on having the universe wide Hive.

Beolach:

In my experience, you can not clear a sector of bots. They respawn as fast as you kill them. Unless this is changed, the only way to clear a sector is to clear the entire system by killing the leviathan.

That's the old way. The new way, it is possible to clear them out.

Beolach is right, in all counts. Right now the Sedina Hive grows at a ridiculously(sp?) fast rate, due to it being a test. Note that the Hive in Sedina will eventually be everywhere.

According to the Wiki,a sector that's cleared of bots will be ignored by the Hive for repopulation for a period of 24 hours. That means that, once cleared, it will stay like that for a whole day.

Then, the Hive will send a couple of observers to check the place out. If they are killed, the Hive again passes on populating that sector for another 24 hours, after which the process start all over again (another couple of observers).

This means that the Hive can be permanently cleared from whole sectors if the players simply put their minds to it. Ion storms would still happen, but if you got caught in one in a cleared sector you will just have to traverse it, no bots around to bother you.

So yeah, the BONUS timers (that's all they are) on the Trade Guild missions will have to be adjusted somewhat, but as long as the community pulls together and "prunes" the Hive from the trade routes everything shoould be fine and fear of death from bots should go away.

Of course, the same cannot be said of systems where the player base is just too small or uninterested to clean off the Hive...

I still think that a "jump fuel" option is best for jumps, but I realize it involves massive rewriting of some kind or another, so I'll give these current rules (which work with what's already in the game) a try. If I don't like them, I'll simply come here and have some cheese with my whine ;)

I just think it needs to be reduced... with the ability to take damage during the jump in and out, you already have the deterrant for jumping through one if you didn't want to stay on the other side. Make the timer 5 seconds instead of a minute, and it will be far less irritating... that's plenty of time to do significant damage, and you can always follow them back through to finish the job.

erm ... the fastest charging battery (the fc) has a cap of 250 and charge rate of 50/s. iow it takes 5 secs to charge. The delay would be a little pointless then.

Is one minute really that long?

point taken... 15 secs then.
Yes, I think a minute is too long. It's inherintly irritating.

""-one moment... ROFLMAO!

It's obvious to me that you have not tried to kill a leviathan-""

actually i was in on killing the first one that spawned on the test server when it became first availible. AND if you had to KILL a leviathin to clear a system it would be difficult, and it needs to get even MORE difficult yet. (at lesat 10 times harder IMO)

However as beolach says, you will be able to clear the sectors. go to the design wiki thread on the general forum http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/10268
and follow the link there to the hive design wiki
http://design.vendetta-online.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hive

read it. then you will know what we are talking about.

"--Why don't you try getting a seeker or 2 on your tail.--"

I did. Last night. I was able to evade in a cent MK3 in sedina with about 50% damage, long enough for me to flee to an empty sector and get away from that station(and reset the temp KOS). It would be much harder to get deep into itani or serco space, but thats the way it should be. UIT space is a bit easier because you can flee to a corporate sector if you need to.

and the WH return timer can just be removed IMO. being able to be damaged on the outbound portion of the jump is enough of a WH hopping deterrent IMO, and i have jumped the wrong way through a WH on occasion, which is just annoying.

johnhawl I gotta say, for once I really like your suggestion.

It makes sense; according to the backstory wormholes are supposed to open and close on a regular schedule... now granted the wormhole back to earth isn't going to open for something like a billion gazillion years, so the time scale may be a little bit off, but having wormholes periodically move in and out of "phase" would be a great little bit of the backstory implemented in game.

Two things I'd like to throw out there to take this suggestion a little further:

Each wormhole could have its own individual cycle, making certain areas of the universe more easily accessible than others. e.g. the Dau-Azek wormhole might be 6 minutes on, 1 minute off, whereas the Odia-Sedina wormhole could be 2 minutes on, 3 minutes off...

When the wormhole goes out of phase, it disappears from the HUD and radar, but the wh sector remains on the navmap. When the wh goes in phase again, it appears in the sector in a slightly different location... so the tactical situation of a wh sector is always changing slightly.

CtC would be very interesting since the transports would have to "camp out" around for the wormhole to open if they arrived at the wrong time, bringing back some of the old-school "stand and defend" gameplay. The different cycles could also be tweaked to balance the CtC routes for Itani and Serco.

Trading would also be very interesting since you would have to take into account the different openings and closings of the wormholes along your route... an expert trader would know the wormholes well enough to time his jumps so that he hit every one while they were open... an inexperienced trader might find himself high and dry at a wormhole sector, vulnerable to a possible pirate attack as he waited for it to open. Oooh, tension!

Phaselight, you got it exactly as I had seen it in my head. I also really like your additions to the idea!!

I also realize that it might hinder traders a bit, but isn't money too easy to make anyway, this will slow some of those TGFT traders down a bit, perhaps slow enough for a few of the pirates to catch them with a moth full of Heliocene.

Hmmm, something gunny happened with the wormhole timer while doing a small trade run between Nyrius and Verasi.

I was taking some stuff from a Nyrius station to Verasi C-4; now, the wormhole is in Verasi C-2. So I would jump throught to Verasi C-2, then jump to the base (C-4), drop the stuff (I was stockpiling it before selling it), and when I returned to C-2 to jump back... it said I couldn't jump for another 38 seconds.

Of course, this isn't the way it's intended to work. The timer's just there to stop you from jump right back, right? so how about shutting down the timer if you jump elsewhere? this way it still stops people form jumping right back but doesn't affect people who are just simply moving back and forth, like me in this case.

That's why I'm either for making it a standard time, OR, NO timer at all, doesn't make sense that the wormhole would know who jumped in and when, it's not alive, and it's not the ships engines that make the wormhole work. I'm actually for making it a set time like Phaserlight and I have been saying. Would add more interaction between players since you'll have to hang near wh's at times. And it gives pirates more oportunity to attack traders. It will slow down the deneb race though, and anyone trying to get across the universe fast but I thought it was too fast as it is anyway. Also, this IMO is a much better way to spawn player interaction then the ionstorms, though they have their place too.

if i recall the womehole phasing thing was supposed to be on roughly a 1000 year cycle. The whole wormeholes opening and closing thing was more ment to explain components of the planed exploration ubdate where womeholes to unexplored systems would appear, or diaappear every once and a while. (also as an aside the posability od getting stuck in a closed system may be why the home station method of respawning seems so broken at the moment).

Anyway, i liked the original update: 100% battery for in system jumps (this 25% thing is pointlesly low) and 1 minut delay for re-activating the wormeholes (although i see that addition as unessisary some people seem to think it's essential and i realy don't have a problem with it)

as for strike forces:
they are plenty avoidable, you just have to know what you are doing.

as for the FC battery being the only worthwhile battery:
the hevy battery will always be the battery of choice for the PVP jocks who home near the warzone and refuse to run for reasons of honor. And althoug i haven't tried them, the medium and light batteries may be more usefull now then they were previously (but don't expect to see them in wide use). I personaly use the FC battery almost exclusevly now, but i often used it on non infiniboost ships before the update, i just like the high charging speed.

As for the time bonus:
if you are using a trade ship (high cargo and infiniboost) the 5 seconds per jump for your battery to charge is not an issue. hitting one storm will do far worse than the update did. And it wouldn't be the end of the univers if the devs had to recalibrate the timers, to make everything fall into place after the various hive additions.

And finaly, as for the leviathin:
killing the leviathin to clear thrde routs is a lot like buyi9ng a 747 to get the free penuts. if clearing a trade rout is all you want there are a lot of easier ways to do it. also, killinmg the leviathin is ment to require the resorces of a large guild.

[edid] heh, i forgot my original point, but here it is: the womehole schedual thing sounds like it could be interesting, it will be a different game mechanic so i don't think we can realy say whether it is better or worse that the curent system. i would be willing to try it, but many players see this game as more of an FPS than anything else, and i expect they will be highly annoyed by such a change, and again, the backstory does say thet the ship's engins are needed to use the wormehols, and it implies that womeholes are acessable prety much on demand, but that could esily allow for a 1-5 minut wait for the next opening [/edit]