Tuesday 12 August 2014

Wormhole Farming and You

The main argument supporters of the proposed range spawning changes have been making is that it's currently too easy for carebear farmers to just roll their holes and be 'completely' (realistically the correct word there is 'mostly') safe while they run sites all day, every day.
Well ok, it is pretty easy to roll C5/6 holes at the moment and while a competent enemy can prevent you from doing so, realistically most groups can and do close holes into their system that they do not want pretty regularly.

That said, is this a bad thing?  Let's discuss.

The crux of the conflict here I believe to be a fundamental clash of mindsets.
The people who hate farmers and automatically support any and all changes that hinder them, regardless of who else they also hinder, hate the fact that these people won't fight them and that they're hard to catch.  They consider them a waste of space in WHs and believe they have no right to be there.
On the other hand the have the farmers who just want to be left alone and their ideal desired level of interaction with other WH groups is as close to zero as possible.
This kind of difference in world view is pretty global and can be found in all areas of EVE, be it AFK cloaky gankers vs. botters in null, incursion runners vs. war deccers/gankers in HS or in WHs where it's the PVPer vs. the PVEers.  It's nothing new or unusual.

Are farmers actually a problem in wspace?
I'll go over this from a few angles.

Do they take up too much room?
Well, farmers generally live in C5 space as it is a bit more secure than C6 space (due to the nature of rage rolling and how many C5s and C6s there are.  There are also historical reasons that we won't get into...) while providing the same income when running escalations.
Ask anyone in WHs how populated C5s are.  Their answers might vary a little but none of them are going to claim that it is full, as it certainly is not.
I'm not sure exactly what the real number of empty C5s is but if I was to hazard a guess I'd say that somewhere between 25% and 50% of C5 systems are completely empty, ie:  have no active POSs, so C5 space is certainly not full.
Likewise C6s are also nowhere near maximum occupancy, C4s are probably closer to 75% empty and classes lower that this may be used for PVE but the corps there are not the 'farmers' we're looking at here.
This means that it not like the farmers are taking up room that would otherwise be used by PVP groups.  Anyone who wants to move into C5 space can do so, even with more or less free selection of what static they would like.
The rarest C5 systems are C5s with C2 static which is what my corp currently lives in and we were still able to find a perfectly good one with no occupants when we moved in a few months ago after maybe a week of searching.

Do farmers actively reduce content levels in WHs?
To me this is an easy no and I can't understand why anyone would claim otherwise.
They're not pushing people out of wspace, as discussed above, so the only comparison to look at here is do farmers bring more or less content to wspace than another empty C5?
Well I've killed farmers before, haven't you? 
I've killed them running sites, I've killed them rolling holes, I've killed their scanners, I've blown up their POSs, I've killed their haulers, I've even stolen their ships out of their POSs.
That all sounds like content to me.
What was the last bit of content an empty C5 brought you?  Well PVE, sure.  A bit ironic perhaps...
Bottom line is PVE farmer corps do actively bring content to wspace.  Sure it's not as much content as active PVP groups but it's a hell of a lot more than an empty system.

Do farmers hurt other groups in wspace?
Well they're certainly not going to shoot you if that's what you're worried about!
I had a think about this and I came up with two ways in which it could be said that farmers actively hurt other WH groups.
The first is that if there is a farming group in your chain while you're out scanning, it's very possible that their WH will no longer be there when you head back with your scout, leaving you stranded.
This has happened to me personally maybe a half dozen times in my entire WH career and while yes, it's can be annoying, it didn't really inconvenience me all that much and rolling their WH is well within a corp's rights.  Hell, I've actively collapsed scanners in and out of many a WH.
The second way is that if all the farmers suddenly left the game then it would probably drive sleeper salvage prices up a bit as there would be less people running sites.  It would basically only affect melted nanoribbon prices since blue loot is locked to NPC prices and farmers do not generally run mag/rad sites.
That said, PVP groups run site pretty often too and I doubt the prices would be terribly affected.  Still, it's a consideration.

Where does this leave us?
Well, so far we have discovered that farmers are not preventing PVP groups from coming to wspace, they provide real content and they have minimal negative impact on other WH groups.
So far, I'm not seeing the problem.

Let's look at it for the opposite direction and take a look at what impact the proposed changes will, or will not, have on farming groups.
As a brief summary, the proposed change is that heavier ships will spawn further from a WH the heavier they are.  The important ranges to note are caps spawn at base 20km, battleships at base 10km and orcas in the middle.
Basically what this means is that it's much harder and far riskier to roll holes with heavy ships and they spawn outside jump range and you need to get them back onto the hole to jump back.
Does this actually affect farmers though?
Well, I guess it does mean they can't roll holes as safely but do they need to?
I've run my share of sites in the past and I've even been on two PVE 'expos' before where all we did was run sites.
Our process did involve closing all incoming WHs and critting our static so yeah this would have been affected.
However, I've run many more sites in whatever home hole I was living in at the time and the process there was far simpler; warp to site, run it.
Sure, I'd put mass on WHs if I was on alone or I knew there were hostile groups in the chain but I never really bothered with much security.
The reason for this is that by FAR the most common way of getting jumped while running sites is to have someone roll directly into you and the is something you can't avoid no matter how much preparation you do and how many precautions you take.
I'd say at least 90%, probably more, of site ganks happen because someone with enough guns rolls into a system where someone happens to be running sites and this is something the proposed change will have zero effect on.
In fact, the changes will make this even easier as there will be less warning for new incoming WHs due to the K162 spawning mechanic changes.
 That said, this change will result in far fewer PVP groups actively rage rolling which means farmers will actually be safer than they are now.

So ok, in summary the changes would have up to 10% impact on PVE farmer corps.  This is very minor and can be further negate by using systems with low class statics that are easily massed with BSs ect.
To the farmer haters out there, is this enough to make up for the far greater hassles and limitations this will put on active PVP groups?
I say it isn't even remotely close.

Personally I have never understood the hatred of farmers by so many in wspace.
I mean sure, I get that they don't give you fights but there's not much any mechanics change can do about that.
People also seem to be of the opinion that is things become so difficult for farmers that they can't continue to function that they will somehow turn into PVPers or be replaced by PVP groups.
This just is NOT the case.
If CCP went today and deleted all farmers from WHs with a magic button and banned them from wspace their systems would not magically attract bloodthirsty pirates.  They wouldn't suddenly see the light and join an existing PVP group.  They'd just leave and go run incursions or rat in nullsec.

The alternative to farmers is not a PVP group, the alternative is an empty system.
If you need further proof of this, go look at what happened in C6 space around late 2011 and 2012 when several C6 PVP groups decided to evict everyone who didn't fight.  C6 space still has not recovered from the barren wasteland it got turned into.

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