A short history of moving wormholes

That was when Fin and I moved a wormhole and tried to catch a transport aiming for it, but Sleeper technology has since been upgraded to prevent that kind of shenanigans.

I remember looking for the post describing these events when it came to editing the above entry, but couldn't find it. That was odd, particularly as I remember the engagement fairly vividly—the transport held together as it crawled the few kilometres we were able to shift the wormhole—and the event is in my notes. Even so, with well over a thousand posts about EVE Online I occasionally have trouble finding a specific incident, often because I get my timescales wrong. Elroy Skimms reminded me about the reference, as he wondered how it was possible to move wormholes, and so I went looking again. And I still couldn't find it. Here's why.

Fin and I successfully moved a wormhole to catch an Iteron hauling expensive items, which was a pretty sweet kill for us. The comments tell more of the story, because almost as soon as that tale was posted the client was updated to stop wormholes being moved, a change I agreed with. Moving wormholes was nefarious and mostly undetectable, and posed a danger that probably shouldn't be present.

As there is a delay between what I do and when I post, that wormhole-moving kill story only just got posted before the tale became obsolete. The second tale, with the transport ship, happened a few days or maybe a week later than the Iteron, and of course was scheduled later by the same time period. As the situation had been fixed before the post was going live, and I had plenty of posts still lined up, I ended up spiking the second tale. I maybe didn't want to be too obvious about the delay in my posts at that time, even if I'm no longer so coy in that regard.

But there is an additional point that should be collected with these notes, which is that we knew how to move wormholes for a long time. We just never really did anything with it. I thought it was a curiosity, something that was interesting but not something that could be used to any effect. That was before colleagues started messing around and testing what could be done. Even then, it was hard to put the theory in to practice. My intention here is to illustrate the time difference.

I make an off-hand comment about the threat of moving wormholes, which is followed-up with a couple of comments, including one from a different w-space corporation, describing how it is done. This was over a year before we managed to get a kill from moving a wormhole in practice, and also two or three months after first discovering the effect.

I have no real point but to collect this information together, as a reminder to me and as a curiosity to others. Being able to move wormholes may not have been particularly common knowledge, but it was certainly known and, as I show here, was shared openly long before we managed to use it effectively. And I'm still glad it is no longer possible to do. Besides, we can always collapse wormholes to create shenanigans.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, w-space