Player Features and Ideas Discussion

all CCP needs to do here is change the respawn timer to mirror that of a static wormhole. When one incursion goes down another one respawns and off you go.

This would solve most all with one simple change of incursion mechanics. No need to do anything further. Have a nice day.

This changes nothing.
The incursion would spawn, people would grind the bar, kill the mom, move to the next.
All you solve is the "weekend without incursion" problem, but not the actual issue presented by the OP.

A more concrete solution would be as somebody said:
Keep the bar at 95 to 100% for 1 to 5 hours for the mom to spawn, and make it a lot harder to keep 100%
If you don't manage that the mom will spawn at day 6 when the incursion goes into withdrawal regardless of red bar.
This will not only insure that incursions stay up for at least enough time to say, get home from work....
But it will also in some cases keep an incursion alive for up to 6 days.

I remember the days of the hundreds of VG communities that used to do vanguards. This was pre-nerf, before the hqs blew up and became the norm. back then, the communities quite frequently were subject to contests, and some shiny communities were always the best at it, built specifically to perform at peak efficiency as they do now in their HQ format. people could bounce from one community to another, and between armor and shield formats. there was a lot to learn, and a lot of people to meet.

and don't even think about staying in system with a legion fleet, they were king, especially at NCO's.

incursions were a way to meet people; to learn about things in eve that you might not have learned from your small mining corp. aspects of the game became open to me just from listening to people from all over the game. i've flown with members from all walks of life in eve over the years. that's one of the draws. incursions are like the universal aspect of eve where people who would normally be absolute enemies can fly with each other on a focused mission to complete sansha sites. it's a unique chance to earn isk, but also rub elbows with people from anywhere, everywhere.

fast forward to after the VG nerf, and everyone moved into HQ-based communities, sites that take typically between 10-30 minutes (depending on fleet comp and specific site). i can understand the frustration of doing a site that takes longer, and with more on the line only to lose to a better fleet, but that should still be the benefit of a better trained and fit fleet. in these hq communities the egos are larger, the stakes are higher, and the rewards are greater. the hq communities have grown so large that there are now i think 5 or 6 hq communities (not even counting the vg and as communities that are still active). the incursion community at large has grown significantly since the beginning.

the issue with incursions isn't the ships, the sites, the spawn rates, its mostly in the communities, which unfortunately is filled with human beings, and while they don't get along, i believe ccp won't take much heed to the argument that something needs to be done on dealing with certain communities taking down motherships 'early' in a way to 'punish' other communities, but like gant said, the sites have become easy, and predictable. as far as a game feature, one that has lasted quite a while, and has grown quite large as far as active members go, it has had little to no effective changes or improvements. in fact, as far as i can tell, the last thing ccp did regarding incursions was to denote parking on a gate to keep it open and sites from respawning as an exploit, and changing the mechanic to make the site de-spawn once completed regardless of a person on gate.

as a person who has specifically dedicated this toon's skill queue for incursion-based ships and fittings for over a year and a half, i find it frustrating to be caught up in the middle of all this drama. a lot of us are. so many others who have made incursions a primary focus in this game and they, too, are caught up like collateral damage. and before someone mentions carebear, incursionbear, and whateverbear remember quite a bit of people who are in nullsec and pvp corps use incursions as a way to satiate an income apart from their 'mains', not all incursion runners are just carebears who whine about nothing.

i plus 1 gant's suggestion. he has been doing this for a long time, and can date everything back from the beginning. not that this thread will make much difference in the future regarding any changes, but CCP could take note that there are quite a bit of people that are involved with incursions, even those who benefit from the implants sold from incursioners selling concord lp items. like it or not, incursions and the world that we are wrapped up in regarding in are quite a large part of the eve universe, even, as ro says, miners and missioners who are caught up in juiced up rats when there is a spawn in their constellation.

FIX IT, FIX IT, FIX IT, FIX IT... FIX IT

but seriously, something must be done and what gantrithor has suggested is a very agreeable idea.

+1, totally agree. something needs to be done. the current mechanism leads players, who want to run incursions to but cannot, to look for other things to do. this might be mission running or mining or it might be some other game. i think there are probably some simple changes like what has been proposed in the OP that would reduce frustration and increase enjoyment...

+1

MarVLs are you thinking about gaining faction LPs also ? I mean, let's face it, you can get Minmatar LPs only by running incursions against Angels (for example). Not only CONCORD LPs or instead of CONCORD LPs. Also it will be a change for those who are active in Faction warfare.

+1

I dunno, I quite like incursions as they are right now, generally speaking. However, I also think they have been fully explored - as in, people know the risks, what fleet composition to bring, and how to run them as fast as possible. Incursion running has been fully optimized.

Maybe it's time to introduce a new difficulty level for the high-end incursion running communities?

Or make it so that people in all levels of incursions (scout, vanguard, assault & HQ) need to kill a "mothership" before the incursion pops - and of course limit the hull size of lower-level sites, if that isn't already the case. This wouldn't stop persistent communities from popping the incursion sites though.

The simplest thing to implement would be to have a minimum incursion lifetime before the mothership appears. Either just a timer (>24 - 48 hours - randomizing the time the mothership appears would also be nice), or a 'max influence change / hour' limitation.

They just need a rebalance to adjust to the higher-level ships doing them. Without making them inaccessible to newer players - 3 months to run vanguards effectively sounds good to me. In practice it'll be more than that, since the 3 months is with a specialized skill plan (i.e. it's the minimum, optimal training time).

To be honest, I would make only 3 changes to incursions. For quick summary:

1. Incursion bar

Make it so it can have delta of 5-10% per hour (to ensure at least 10 hours of red bar)

2. Timers

Highsec - Mothership cannot be sighted unless the bar has been 75 % blue for last 24 hours.

Lowsec- Mothership cannot be sighted unless the bar has been 75 % blue for last 12 hours.

Nullsec- Mothership cannot be sighted unless the bar has been 75 % blue for last 6 hours.

Only one mothership can be sighted at once (so if lowsec mom is spotted, well, either go kill it, or wait for incursion to withdrawn before you are able to sight one in other incursions).

3. Target breakers

Introduce new true random spaws in all incursions, can be drones / frigates / cruisers / static towers / structures that spawn on irregular basis in irregular numbers, have low EHP and break locks (not jam, just breaking lock) to higher number of ships (lets say 30-60% of fleet every 10-30 seconds).

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Results from changes (boring wall of text intended for DEVS and those who want to know more if they even care)
Red bar makes ISK farming at least a bit slower due to lower DPS that ships output.

New timers would ensure sites to stay up longer and only one mothership being spotted would make interesting game changes, lets say one group spots MOM but the other one is running in other highsec incursion, you have a choice of hoping they will kill theirs in time for you to spot yours, or you can move to theirs and kill off mom and then you need to move back along with them and you'll end up contesting each other for 24 hours at least till new mom is spotted. If you are hoping to contest then you lose time moving there and back. The other community might want to keep the mom alive as long as possible to make the first community move, etc. Opens whole lot of options if you think about it.

And yea, target breakers? Why not, make some new mechanic where ships randomly lose locks and have to re lock. If it happens in wrong time to most logies, one ship goes boom. Slows down the progress of site. Cripples the boxers as well. We all know there is one community who can do moms with just 4-5 guys online. If you lose random locks on random toons, you are going to have more issues boxing more then 1-2 characters. Im here thinking of something in the range of:
Vanguard: 5% chance per site to get 1-2 target breakers spawns which randomly break targets of 4-5 ships every 15 seconds.
Assaults: 10% chance for something to spawn. Who even does these?
HQ: 15% chance per site to get 3-5 target breakers spawn which randomly break targets of up to 10-12 ships every 15 seconds.
Each spawn consist of 1-3 entities and they are timed apart for 1-3 minutes.
This would add that uncertainty again where you need to pay attention to clear them out as soon as possible. Some might argue niarjas now work the same, but we all know in contest you ignore them mostly, especially if they are jamming the other fleet or your logies.

My 2 cents of the top of my head.

Regards, Sentenced 1989,
Founder of The Incursion Guild