Life in a Wormhole: The Great Debate #eveonline

The next couple of days feel like one very long debate about the merits of joining a new alliance. I'm sure it's not the only thing we talked about it, but it's the only thing in my notes and the only thing I remember, so let the record show we talked about this a LOT.

The day passed much as the previous had; much as the next would.


The alliance does get back in touch with us, and quite quickly. A number of very informative and interesting conversations are had, and the upshot is that they'd like us to join them for a trial period. That's the good news. The bad news is they want us to, literally, join them. That is, to pull stakes and move our stuff into a system we'd share with one of the other member corporations.

To fair, even that isn't all bad news. We've realized benefits from sharing a wormhole with other pilots in the past, and we know it can work; extra eyes in the system, backup when you need it, more folks to chat and be social with, and (in this case) veteran wormhole inhabitants to get advice from. All good.

Also, it would be a 'better' system than the one we're in at the moment -- we could generate all the fuel for our tower locally (except for the stuff that just isn't available in any wormhole system), and the persistent connections from the new class two would be one to low security space (a skosh more dangerous, but WAY less tourist traffic) and to another class 2. This potentially provides a LOT more variety in our wormhole constellations every day, because that class 2 would in turn ALSO connect to another wormhole system, and so on. Currently, our class one neighbor usually just connects to... nobody, leaving us with fairly limited options.

The downsides are not inconsequential. As hard as moving in was, moving out will be worse, because (a) we've assembled a lot of ships that we originally brought in all packed up and easy-to-haul, and they can't be repackaged out in wormhole space (b) we've brought in more stuff since the first moving day (c) we know how bad it will be, so we'd be dreading it with a mighty dread. Couple that with the fact that, following moving out, we'd have to get everything back to some staging system, then move it all back IN somewhere else and put it all back up, and it sounds unappealing.

And what if it doesn't work out, either with the folks we're sharing the wormhole with (too many hands reaching for the same slices of pizza means we'd move to some other alliance-held system) or with the alliance as a whole (meaning we need to move out and find a new home on our own)?

Truly, these are First World Problems, but they're problems none the less.

To complicate matters, our home system seems to sense the possibility of our departure and tempts us with a cornucopia of riches -- every evening sees a new batch of good sleeper sites to run and the long drought of mining sites ends with a massive flourish. Knowing how comfortably profitable and fun our home system can be doesn't make our discussions any easier.

Though all the loot may help defray the costs of moving by a whole lot...

Assuming we move... which we may not.

Ugh. Tired of thinking about this. No more talky. Time to shoot ancient, evil, drone ships and grind their bones to make our bread.

Figuratively speaking.