Rumors of WH life being slow and boring are greatly exaggerated, at least based on our first weekend. Holy crap did a lot happen.
After the previously reported POS setup failure, the EVE gods smiled on us and opened up a perfect exit for us to move everything inside Friday night. Orcas, Industrials, and PvP ships all come inside, as did most of the goods we immediately needed. We literally had most of the Corp going in and out for hours, all while trying to line up who needs to buy what and where to store things. The whole thing looked like a busy ant colony doing work. Very cool stuff.
We onlined the POS and started setting up the defenses. I had a bit of a fail-fit moment with my placement of guns/ECM, but the next day, and after a humorous forum post, corrected things. As with most things in EVE, the first time you try to anchor structures you don’t really ‘get’ it, and will likely fail. Once you figure out wtf you are doing, the system is actually not that bad. It’s easy to call this bad UI design, but given the complexity and the freedom, it’s likely the best system without totally making things too easy. Learning curve; EVE has one, even after two years of playing.
Saturday night we cleared the available Sleeper sites, and after just a few hours, collected about one billion ISK worth of loot that was successfully delivered to market. This was a rather nice haul, and hopefully the Sleepers keep coming back and bringing their toys with them.
While this was happening, we also started working on a grav site, mining ABC ores. It’s at this point that we discovered one of the challenges with mining in a WH: the refinery you can online at the POS only refines with a 75% yield, and that’s assuming you can get 25% yield from skills. Oh, and that refinery takes three hours to run a cycle, and the maximum volume for a cycle is just 200,000m3, plus you can only refine one ore type per cycle. And speaking of maximum volume, it did not take long to fill the Corporate hanger with ore as well, meaning we had to stop mining until we refined some ore down into the much smaller minerals. Perfecting this whole dance will take some time, but it makes normally dull crafting very interesting.
Sunday was a bit of a shitshow, as we had a high-sec entrance open up on us. Initially this was a huge boon, as we moved a bunch of goods out to market and get more stuff inside. The downside is that we had some visitors, and they did not play nice with the locals. We made some pretty serious tactical mistakes, but total losses were not huge and valuable lessons were learned. I expect us to continue learning such things the hard way as we go, and so long as moral stays up and we keep learning, everything will be fine.
Looking back on the weekend, I can honestly say that WH life is even more interesting and challenging than I had initially expected. There are hundreds of little details that demand attention, and any one of them could result in disaster, be it financial or combat. At the same time, the potential for income is ridiculous, and almost everything encourages your Corp to band together and tackle it as a team.
Oh, and it’s also a hell of a lot of fun in the purest of MMO terms. Cyndre covers some of it in this post, and he also has a post similar to this one about the weekend. It’s been since DF with Inq that I’ve felt this connected to an MMO, the immediate community I have within it, and the overall community as a whole. It’s that connection that I believe is the ultimate selling point of the genre; it sucks you in and makes you care more than any other game possibly could.
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Hardcore Casual 
Anchor a Large Ship Assembly Array … use it to drop your ore into until your refining or shipping is done. Even if you don’t use it for manufacturing it has enough space to store more than your corp hanger. You only need it online to put in or take out and the rest of the time it stays dormant.
So offlines structures retain their materials? Does this apply for hangers as well?
yes, offline just means you can’t access anything inside… important note: you can’t unanchor a structure with items inside so make sure to empty anything you want to unanchor first or you will have to re-online, empty, and then unanchor… this applies to guns as well as the tower itself.
Yes they stay around. Back when onlined modules affected POS fuel usage, people use to keep hangar arrays offlined so they could put stuff in, then online it when they needed to take stuff out.
Just don’t unanchor them.
God I hate EVE’s unfriendly community. Instead of simply telling him to anchor and offline a large ship assembly array, you insult him and then try to scam him! The rest of the comments are no better, a gross display of epeens in the form of a calm question and answer session about the differences between K and W-space
Tobold was right, Eve-ites are literal embodiments of evil.
eve-il?
Could someone please explain to a non EVE player what the purpose of living in a wormhole is?
I found some guides and wikis that explain what wormholes are and the mechanics about them, but I couldn’t understand why someone would try living there.
Because the combinations of features give you the real sense of being on your own little remote “island in the sky” kind of feel.
You feel like a frontiersman who is working the unkempt and fruitful lands while at the same time defending it from hostile invaders, roamers, and other unknown terrors. Its like being a homesteader. The life is hard, but once you get used to it, you’ll never go back to “K(known)-Space” ever again. It is also a perfect embodiement of “risk vs reward”. It takes a lot of effort and training and real time experience to learn the ins and outs of life as a wormholer, but once you master it… It all becomes second nature to you.
I actually feel MORE afraid when i go back to k-space and see tons of people in local and on my overview i don’t recognize. Its like being a sailor who belongs at sea who feels uneasy when in port is the only way to describe it.
The pvp in wormholes is also much more fundamentally sound. It doesn’t get dominated by super cap large scale megaconglomorates and lends itself to more “seek and destroy” hunter and hunted, Lion and gazelle types of fights than anywher else.
Its simply awesome.
Thanks for the explanation. I’m going to have to try some of this stuff some day.
So, you mention risk vs reward. From what I understand, the risk part would be the inconvenience of living there. As for rewards, I suppose preventing large scale attacks would be a big plus. Is there a monetary advantage, though? Or a risk that I’m not seeing? For example, are you somehow more vulnerable in wormhole space than in known, low security space?
Until Incursions, Wormhole life was the most lucrative way to spend your time in Eve. It’s about on par with low-sec Incursion sites, but without the ability to pick and choose a wide variety of sites based on your fleet size (without going through another wormhole and doing sites there)
High-sec incursion-running, however, has a lower but more reliable income stream, yet considerably lower risk than running Sleeper sites.
The risk isn’t simply inconvience … it is the danger of always having the possibility of someone being in the dark looking for you with no local channel giving you the intel whenever an intruder drops by like normal space does. Local channel doesn’t show anyone that doesn’t actually type into it.
Monetary rewards are the primary reason to live in a wormhole, though the ‘intangibles’ mentioned above are very cool.
As long as sites are spawning, you are making several hundred million isk a day, up to the billions per day, if you are working the W correctly.
Risk are numerous. There is no CONCORD obviously, so its more-or-less constant cat and mouse PvP. You never really know which animal you are either…
There is also the risk of sites not spawning, which can be more dangerous to a wormhole corp, than all the cloaked Tengu hunters in the galexy.
It’s not the wormholes are always slow and boring, but when they are: they *are*. And, as you’re finding, the rewards tend to be worth it.
If you’re looking to stay there for a while, you may want to look in assembling some capitals (once you have pilots). The caps can never leave the wormhole, but a decent cap fleet can make you nigh invulnerable to being kicked out (unless someone *REALLY* wants you gone. The added bonus to this is if you can put together a Rorqual. The industrial core allows you to compress the shit out of your mined minerals, making them much easier to store and transport. It can also provide mine links from a POS better than the orca can (I think better than the Orca, I might be wrong there. I haven’t mined in foreeeever.)
Morale*
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