I don’t like speculating on upcoming content. At best I’ll make my readers angry about some feature that doesn’t sound good, at worst I’ll be completely wrong and look a bit stupid. I’d rather wait until the content release and use all the info I have to make a decision on what I think. If it wasn’t obvious from the title, I’m going to be giving my opinions on the new Triglavian region of space, Pochven.
As a quicker primer for anyone who hasn’t read the patch notes or the /r/eve whining, CCP have introduced a new region of space to EVE Online. Essentially, the 27 Triglavian final liminality systems (Trig victory) had their empire gates shut off entirely, cutting off certain trade routes permanently. These systems were then connected together through a series of Triglavian stargates with further access out through new wormholes. It looks a little like the map here.
The Standings Issue
So jumping straight into one of the main points that people have been discussing for the past few weeks, we have the standings issue. That problem is that the stargates between systems in Pochven require +3 Triglavian standings to access. This ramps up to a whopping +7 standings to access headquarters systems. All that without access to something as simple as a mission system to grind standings up. It was estimated by one Reddit user (though I cannot verify the accuracy of this) that it takes two months of grinding 7.5 hours a day to go from -3 to +3 Trig standings. If true, that’s insane.
So what did people do about this? Well there was a bug present for a while wherein you could smash one particular structure in certain Rogue Drone sites. Doing so would raise both your Triglavian and EDENCOM standings giving you best of both worlds. Better still, you could raise both to +7 within about two hours. That’s speedy.
So this bug was patched and it was declared to be an exploit, placing users in violation of the EULA for taking part (and meaning that CCP need to reset standings). It’s always good to squash a bug and I’m happy that we don’t have some exploity way of gaining standings for the new area of space. This, however, does not solve the initial problem in that it takes a hell of a long time to simply get access to Pochven in any meaningful way. And that’s really a great shame.
Like anyone defining the problem, though, you can’t just leave it there. What do we do about it? Well there are a lot of novel ideas. One that just popped into my head while writing was “what if players could get massive standings from shooting each other?” Create some sort of player war system where you gain higher standings for killing off other players in PvP with their own opposite high standings. Probably a bit to easy to exploit that idea.
Perhaps a more interesting idea is to introduce Triglavian or EDENCOM agents offering all sorts of hauling, mining, or PvE missions in Trig space. The EDENCOM agent could even be justified by warping to and speaking with something like a wormhole-based radio transceiver to contact the specific agent. Give players reasons to move about in Trig space for some solid rewards and suddenly you should have a popular and fun area of space to hunt and to PvE in. Realistically we will probably only get a few minor bumps to standing gains if at all. A girl can dream.
Like Wormholes, But Better
My initial thoughts on this new area of space were that it would be fantastic. Local chat behaves like wormhole space, there are a decent number of incoming and outgoing connections, and you get the edgy Triglavian aesthetic. It’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, this has been let down completely by the standings problem, leading me to scrapping any plans of moving my corp there for fun and/or profit,
Really, though, the reason why I was originally interested in the space as a place to move to was because of the new filament system. CCP have introduced a number of teleportation filaments that will allow an entire fleet to travel to and from Pochven in style similarly to Needlejack fleets. This is fantastic and has huge implications for small groups that regularly field fleets of 15 ships or fewer.
The reason why they’re great is that you can easily filament out to wherever you want to go and get into any kind of trouble with an easy out button. As long as you know that you can survive out of combat for 15 minutes, you can wait for that timer then collect yourselves together and portal home in one jump. It’s badass and I wish I could do it (but again, standings). There is actually an entire list of possible new filaments that you can use, they’re detailed below:
| Filament Type | Sends Ships To |
| Glorification-1 ‘Devana’ Filament | Minor Victory System in Known Space |
| Glorification-5 ‘Devana’ Filament | Minor Victory System in Known Space |
| Glorification-15 ‘Devana’ Filament | Minor Victory System in Known Space |
| Proximity-5 ‘Extraction’ Filament | Random Known Space system within range |
| Proximity-15 ‘Extraction’ Filament | Random Known Space system within range |
| Cladistic-5 ‘Krai Perun’ Filament | Random Triglavian system belonging to Perun Clade |
| Cladistic-15 ‘Krai Perun’ Filament | Random Triglavian System belonging to Perun Clade |
| Cladistic-5 ‘Krai Veles’ Filament | Random Triglavian system belonging to Veles Clade |
| Cladistic-15 ‘Krai Veles’ Filament | Random Triglavian system belonging to Veles Clade |
| Cladistic-5 ‘Krai Svarog’ Filament | Random Triglavian system belonging to Svarog Clade |
| Cladistic-15 ‘Krai Svarog’ Filament | Random Triglavian system belonging to Svarog Clade |
| Border-5 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Border system |
| Border-15 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Border system |
| Internal-5 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Internal system |
| Internal-15 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Internal system |
| Home-5 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Home system |
| Home-15 ‘Pochven’ Filament | Random Triglavian Home system |
There are a number of super useful implications of these other filaments, too. You could, for example, undock with a T1 hauler in Jita with whatever worth and just yeet it into Pochven with very little risk involved. Dock up and collect your goods at your leisure while you self destruct that clone back to Jita for another run if you need it. There is also so much potential for launching your fleet not only to nullsec, but to a minor victory system to begin a roam or to a specific set of k-space systems. It’s unlike anything we’ve had in EVE before, unless you count being teleported to Jove space to take part in the Alliance Tournament 😀
One more thing. It would be silly for me to not mention the problem with wormholes in this space. They’re not normal by any means. The wormholes that connect to Pochven form a deadspace dungeon where you are forced to land at 70km similarly to Drifter wormholes. Depending on what you’re flying, you’ll then likely need to burn 70km under very heavy fire from Triglavians, Drifters, or Rogue Drones. It’s interesting in that it somewhat forces content, but I’ve never had a positive experience with this style of wormhole. If anything it tempts me to not use them at all since it’s such a big risk of sending your ship to its death.
What’s wrong with regular wormholes anyway? Fighting over the polarisation mechanics and trying to drag people away from wormholes is great. If it wasn’t interesting at all then we likely wouldn’t care for wormhole space at all in the first place, right? I don’t foresee CCP bailing on their dev work with these dungeons, but maybe some accommodations can be made. Personally, I would like to see the deadspace zone shifted to 100km, giving MJD ships (including Marauders!!!) the unique ability to act as the quick way through such a hole while changing very little for anyone else.
Is It Good Though?
So what is there to do in Trig space? Well, there are a few anomalies, there are the wormholes we discussed, and there are mining sites. That’s about it sadly. It’s not that many places actually have a huge amount of content mind you (just look at any other system in EVE). It’s more that as a collective, these systems and the region of Pochven are a bit, well, dull. When discussed alone of course without the effect of filaments.
While I haven’t done a deep-dive into the stats on Zkill – I simply don’t have the time – they do seem to reflect what I’m thinking here. The active PvP for the last week at the time of writing looks to be about ~700 active characters putting it on par with Stain and lower than other regions such as Paragon Soul. That in itself is a little bit worrying since you’d expect these first few weeks to be popular as hell in Trig space before the hype dies down. I’m just hoping that this doesn’t become another Solitude.
I think the worst case scenario for Trig space, though, is that groups set up gatecamps in ships they can easily escape with. Due to the triangular pipe-style routes that you must travel along, a groups could catch pretty much all of the traffic wanting to head through a certain clade. If done right, these campers could set themselves up to gank all day and not participate in PvP at all. I have no doubt in my mind that this would kill all interest in Pochven as a concept.
All-in-all, my view on Triglavian space is that it’s a super interesting concept with some severe accessibility flaws and a bit of a lack of content. If CCP would unhinder travel throughout Pochven then it would encourage more people to live there. If agents and posh new 2020 missions were introduced then it would also bring more people. And really, I think having MJDs as a key to use wormholes would be a pretty snazzy compromise.
Update: I’ve been told that there are potential changes incoming on Hoboleaks. Hmmm
Other News
Originally, the article was meant to end there. I’m just quite slow sometimes and things happen like the ridiculously well made 2020 Quadrant 4 trailer: Phoenix. If you haven’t seen that then go and give it a watch right now. And if you’re wondering about the music, it’s Beginning of the End by All Good Things.
The trailer showcases a big new mechanic that CCP is introducing for supercarriers pretty soon. Basically, respawning. You’ll be able to take a drug (Nanoheuristic Clone Mapper) and jump straight back into a ship from your friendly super’s 5 million m³ ship maintenance bay when you die. It sounds like it’s going to be a very interesting mechanic that will change the way that people approach a fight. One such way it might do that is by making ship volume matter a lot more, bringing smaller ship classes to the forefront. This could work doubly well if your reship doctrine is a direct counter to what you expect to be fighting.
A secondary change that is being rolled out alongside the new respawn mechanic is that supercarriers are now doubling in size and receiving improved fighter bonuses. It’s looking pretty great for supers right now and they’re even better to see in person. I recommend heading over to SISI and finding a Hel and a Nidhoggur next to each other. The size difference is incredible now!
To keep things brief I’ll also just touch on the Dynamic Bounty System too. This is yet another (good!) change being introduced which will mean that travelling to more dangerous of null space to rat will yield more ISK/hr. Additionally, you’ll find that sitting with all your buddies and ratting the Hel (get it?) out of one system drops your ISK/hr. The aim is to reduce the reliance on small ratting pockets and to encourage people to spread out. It then offers more opportunities for hunters to use information and intuition to find juicy targets while rewarding more active krabs.
All in all, I’m happy with these extra changes and it seems like the upcoming ESS updates will be fun, too. Howling Interdictors is obviously a big topic for me, so look out for an article on that pretty soon. I’ll have all the fits you need to make good use of the new bonuses and new… wubbles?
interdasting