Into the Wormhole: An afternoon with Eve Online's least understood demographic

The thing I love most about this story is that the developers (CCP) added a feature with zero documentation or explanation of how it works. Players were left to figure it out on their own (and subsequently many of the player groups who have mastered this feature have kept the knowledge to themselves, only making it more alluring).

I remember when a TON of games worked this way (not always by intention), and it's one of the things that drives me nuts about gaming today. Everything has a guide, maps, tutorials, and you are essentially told exactly what to do every step of the way (especially in MMO's). There is absolutely no sense of exploring the unknown or messing with the system and game-play mechanics to figure something out.

Since I miss eve wormholes so much I thought I'd entertain myself with some reminiscing. Heres goes.

I was amongst the first people to take up living full time in a worm hole in eve. We got stranded, and while getting ourselves out we stumbled onto some corps in the middle of a war dec and stole a tower off a freighter pilot that exploded right in front of one of my corp mates, who stole in and docked up, waiting for the cool down timer (or so the tale goes, he showed up with a small serpentis tower so no reason to doubt him). It was like an act of god to set up a base and we spent almost every day over two years in wormholes hunting other players, raiding, laying traps, and generally just being the unseen death of hundreds of players.

There where days when between 5 of us we would get 20-30 kills in a few hours, especially if we got a Jita opening. One weekend we managed to two down two towers between about 7 of us (by controlling the collapse of wormholes so reinforcements couldn't be brought in by our targets, effectively stranding the targets) just using Battleships, took forever but was heaps of fun.

I would describe living in a worm hole more like hunting than anything else, spending heaps of time trying to create a bait scenario, then releasing the trap. Nothing funnier than having the a covert ops ship accidentally bump into few retreivers, decloak, and watching them scramble in panic before we can drop on them. As must people are aligned to warp, when that happens you only have the time it takes to warp a barge to get the drop down.

We eventually got our comeuppance though. Lost something like 20 billion worth of ships, probably about 8 capital ships atleast, as well as a tonne of T3 stuff, one of the players came online outside of our normal hours with a bunch of mates... and just stole everything. Left us unable to defend against the C6, 20 strong cap fleet came in, towers fell within a fortnight, ordered out by the new occupants, and we I went back into 'normal space' and hated the game.

Within a two month most of our core group quit. I went back to boost some indy guys I was helping from within teh hole, and sent my main character to join up with a null sec group. A few months later I lost totally interest, and quit.

I still miss the wormhole days TBH, the amount of laughter, emotions, hours sitting around trying to release a trap talking on vent. I feel like signing back up now, but I know it wont be the same.

Wormholes are definitely one of the most interesting parts of EVE. Even if you're a player with powerful ships and allies and money on your side, going in and exploring one comes with the palpable risk of getting stranded inside and having to surrender all your stuff, or suddenly getting ambushed by people you didn't know were there. CCP does a nice job of making it worth the trouble, by putting all sorts of interesting stuff in wormholes that you can't find anywhere else and making the built-in AI residents more dangerous than other enemies. The fact that the connections change all the time means that it remains interesting to pop into a wormhole and explore it. On the flipside, when a wormhole opens up in comparatively 'civilized' 0-security space, sometimes wormhole denizens pop out and wreak havoc, which is fun too.

Reminds me of a higher-tech version of Chaos Zone in Continuum/Subspace. All formal etiquette was out the window, it was always funny to see zone newbies complain until the penny dropped.

I remember early on in eve (I joined pretty much when it launched) there were hidden asteroid belts in various systems that didn't appear on the maps. You instead had to warp into planets/moons, sometimes other belts if memory serves and then use the "scanner" to try and find them. I loved doing this, you'd spend a load of time constantly narrowing your scanner down to a particular direction then flying off in that direction, constantly rescanning to make sure you weren't off track.

Eventually there was a website setup by another player who'd buy the locations I and others had found and sell them on to others, since the hidden places often had better loot, or sometimes asteroid belts with no enemies.

I used to run my own wormhole when I played—the threat of losing my stuff was such a thrill it kept me playing. Of course, I mostly lost my stuff due to stupidity.