+1 since I helped come up with the idea. We came up with it specifically for military personnel. Not to say that the open super wormhole sounds bad, but it just wasn't where our heads were. The mission would be only available to those that have signed up for the military and would be a way to get them into Deneb battle quicker.

Making the travel to Deneb more interesting isn't a bad idea, but that wouldn't address the same issue that we're talking about. What the super wormholes would do would give Deneb participants easy access to the war zone. This would undoubtedly make traffic to the Deneb conflict increase to some extent. That would be a good thing.

Also, enforcing an empty cargo would be necessary for this to remain focused on military folk.

If you want to get into battle in Deneb quickly, hang out near Deneb.

You don't want to hang out near Deneb? Then either make the area near Deneb more interesting so that you do want to hang out there, or don't sign up for duties you aren't prepared to fulfill.

Solve problems, not symptoms.

+1 The only supporting argument for not doing this is "I like things how they are."

Certainly there is a way to make travel in VO both shorter AND more interesting.

If someone's really that interested in doing Deneb, why not have a separate Deneb alt that hangs out there? It isn't as if leveling alts upto decent licenses would be very time consuming for most of the vets here, and switching to that character would be the quickest way to get to Deneb.

You could allow for instant teleportation from anywhere to Deneb and that wouldn't improve Deneb participation, simply because Deneb is unrewarding and repetitive and would get boring very quickly.

The only supporting argument for not doing this is "I like things how they are."

I don't like things how they are. The problem is that this isn't an improvement. You can improve Deneb's accessibility, and a few more people will participate as a result, but that won't fix the problem. Deneb doesn't suck because it's far away, lonely, or lacking in rewards. It sucks because it doesn't create a story.

That's what makes a game like this fun -- the story that develops around your character as you play, its direction and outcome influenced by the choices made by you and the players you encounter.

Deneb doesn't do that. It's just there, week after week, with no consequence for ignoring it other than the war convoy. The Itani won't be conquered if they neglect to defend. The Serco won't be corrupted and turned into a bunch of hippy pacifasts if they slack off. Winning doesn't get anyone access to rare, valuable resources. It's just a constant static status quo. Worse, there's no real sense of progression as you fight in Deneb. Contrast with hive skirmishes, where you fight the lesser skirms for the hell of it until the central skirm appears. Then you go after the crits, hunting around if you're in greyspace to make sure you got all of them, then you rustle up a possee and head to the central skirm. That has three phases -- kill the queens, drop the levi shield, and kill the levi. It's a busy epic fight in a huge sector that requires teamwork to pull off, and it's capped by a huge explosion followed by a lack of hive for a bit. You feel like you've accomplished something when you win.

What do you feel when you win Deneb? Like you've wasted a week.

How do you tell a story about your week in Deneb? You can make most individual battles into a story, but the whole sequence? You can do that with the hive skirmishes, but with Deneb, there's no sense of movement. You're not pushing back and forth across a field of battle. There aren't any strategic locations you absolutely need to defend or the greater war effort will be hampered. There aren't any decisive blows along the way, unless maybe you rally up a team and just spend a day crushing everything. It's just a bunch of irrelevant fights in irrelevant locations at irrelevant times, and only the final numbers matter. Boring.

Letting people get to Deneb faster won't fix that. What it will do is reduce the number of encounters people have with other players on the road, making space feel even more empty.

Doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff.

The amount of times I've encountered a random someone between Jallik and Deneb is like maybe 5 times in the entire 10 years I've played this game. These magical "encounters" you are talking about don't really exist in any significant quantity, so you can't make an argument using them. Space is ALREADY empty as fuck. The universe is WAY to big for the population that plays (or, has ever played, truly).

Moreover, this suggestion isn't about fixing Deneb, it's about making travel suck less balls. I don't doubt Wash think's Deneb is broken as all hell, he's just saying that improving participation there could be a beneficial side effect of the reduced travel time.

I'm assuming the universe was designed in a way to force people to travel through certain areas to get to others as a means of encouraging interaction. The experiment is over, interaction is failing because the sheer size of the universe is way to large. Better to facilitate travel between areas where people congregate -- then we should have more real encounters and less fake/imagined ones.

The point of talking about why Deneb is broken is to illustrate how irrelevant travel time is to the situation. Changing the travel time won't help, so why bother with it?

While I don't disagree entirely with you comparison of hive skirms to Deneb, decreasing the travel time will absolutely help to get more pilots there. That's just a fact.

Hive skirms are so popular because they don't cost an arm and a leg to participate in. Currently, it feel like you gotta commit half an hour to get to Deneb from grey. Not to mention the fact that hive skirms are inherently a PvE situation. Deneb is quite different in nature.

I also get your point about sticking closer to Deneb if that's what's important. But I want my cake and to eat it too. It's that simple really.

And it's not like this would take away the ability to fly through each system to get there, if that's what someone wanted to do. There might actually be good reason for doing that still, especially if there was some more eventful things going on between grey and Deneb. But some pilots just want to get into action. Action's in grey? Let's get it. Action's in Deneb? No problem. I just see this as being a great stepping stone to get more participation in Deneb.

Shortening the trip to Deneb is like fixing a broken shoe lace by super gluing the shoe to your foot. It's treating the symptom, not the problem, and it's a bad treatment that will make things worse over the long term.

You can't make empty space more empty, rin.

If you do Deneb on a regular basis, you’ll notice that your brain will usually go on autopilot while traveling there from anywhere in your nation space and that it doesn’t really take that a long time too.

Knauf completed the Corporate Sector Run in an EC-107 in what like 15-20 minutes? That’s around 13 wormhole jumps traversed in a very short time.

It's also 15-20 minutes that he will never get back.

most people don't have unladen swallows though

I don't understand why all of you supposed "combat pilots" don't just use Sedina B-8.

Because im never online :P