The title of this post is misleading; one of the things you can’t do in a wormhole is skip the boring stuff.
Every day, when you log in, you scan. It may just be a passive scan and d-scan, or it might be with scanning probes, but either way, you scan.
Sometimes — perhaps even most of the time, if you have a lot of active pilots in your wormhole — there won’t be much to do locally. Anomalies in the home system are run almost as soon as they appear, with the rarer signature sites taking very slightly longer to attract pilot aggression. Likewise, gas clouds (which only take a few minutes to harvest) die pretty quickly; that leaves only the gravimetric signatures of mineable asteroid belts to accumulate until the locals decide that they too need to go, and if you don’t like shooting rocks, that’s not a terribly enticing option.
If you want more to do, then there’s more scanning to do; find the connection to the nearest wormhole and, once you get there, do more scanning to see if it’s got stuff to shoot or is as picked over as your home. If the later, maybe you push big ships back and forth through the wormhole until it collapses under their weight, or maybe you scan further afield, looking for better pickings.
Maybe by this point you’ve found something to do. Maybe not. Maybe you’re shooting sleepers, or other pilots, or they’re shooting you.
Maybe.
Sometimes, though, there just isn’t much going on. You can’t skip it.
You can’t run over to the next system and pick up a couple missions from the nearest Fed Navy agent. Even roaming around looking for some PvP takes a fair amount of preparatory scanning work.
It’s sometimes hard — mentally — is what I’m trying to get at.
But is it worth it?
Absolutely. Even at it’s most boring, wormhole living is better than 90% of everything else in the game, because although you are sitting at your tower with nothing to do, and nothing to shoot with your shiny guns, you are still sitting at your tower, in your system.
You are, for lack of a better word, home. Sitting around your home may be boring, but sometimes it’s kind of nice.
HOWEVER.
Just because that’s what we end up doing for the next couple days days doesn’t mean YOU need to hear about it, so…
Berke and Ichiban’s Orcas gets a workout for the next few days, and we rack up an impressive number of incredibad wormhole connections — systems that are picked over, over-populated, just plain empty (and inexplicably so), or halfway useful systems we don’t have the manpower to make proper use of. At one point, we scan through the next door system to the next one over from that, find a bunch of sites to hit, get a good group together, hit a bunch of sites, and gather up what may go down in history as The Worst Loot Ever — so bad that it’s actually possible we lost money on the effort once you calculate the cost of expended ammo.
Our loot accumulates, however slowly, but the other side of the poor connections is that it’s simply building up in storage, since we can’t seem to get a decent outbound connection to known space, either… though it’s possible that our scouts are being a bit cautious in the aftermath of the loss of Berke’s old orca and Shan’s Hurricane.
But enough of this nonsense. I haven’t been on much in the last few days, but I have an open day tomorrow and I decide that is going to be the day switch the momentum back in our favor. Enough of this crap; bored people are boring people.
At Dawn We Ride!
You’ve used this pic before, but that’s okay… I really like that one, it kicks.
Yep, both of the images in this post are reused from previous stuff – I was on a limited connection and had to make use of the library of stuff I had saved locally.
I’ve been “day tripping” into WH’s, getting a feel for them before committing anything substantial (also waiting for skills to finish as well) so no true downtime for me thus far.
Question, when day tripping, at what point do you say “thanks but no thanks” to a hole? It seems that most holes spawning into High Sec space are occupied, regardless of how many sites left. They are positively littered with POSes and more often than not, ships.
I’ve been probing down with cov-ops, peeking inside and running a quick passive and d-scan. If ships are present I’ll pull out the probes. I then run back to high sec for the Drake if things look nice. I’ve been lucky so far, but after a close call a few days ago (got tackled by an assault frig with his friends in-bound.) I’m wondering what I can do to increase my security.
I feel like I’m being stretched 5 ways from Friday trying to keep an eye on the d-scan while running sites and keeping myself aligned to a celestial or safe spot, and I’m at loathe to run a cloak on the Drake since I’ve already got a probe launcher and salvager.
All I’ll say to right now is “thank you for providing me a new post topic for this week.”
Fair enough. I’m learning quite a bit from your writing, it’s become a daily site for me.
I can think of one more option for a truly boring day: fool around in known space with an alt for a couple of hours. Compared to wormhole space, it may not be very profitable (unless you’re running incursions), but it should be enough to keep you from doing something risky with your main character out of sheer boredom.
I’ve definitely considered getting an alt into RvB or something to keep myself occupied when nothing’s going on. Only problem is all my alts are currently in ‘hole, doing stuff. Need to figure out how to address this.