Assembly Hall

Nerf incursion rewards. Seriously. Halve them across the board, they'll still be very good.

nerf missions too?

A single solution to High Sec Incursions, would be to have the security of the system degrade over time, until the Sansha Incursion is finished. If players don't clear it quickly, Concord gets overwhelmed and the system becomes Lowsec, left long enough the Sansha defeat Concord and take over, and thus the system becomes NPC Nullsec until cleared.

I still think players killing Sanaha and being rewarded for it by Concord with Sansha ships is completely ass-backwards bang your head on the wall stupid. But with the above change players themselves will sort everything else that is wrong with Incursions in Highsec.

WAAAAA MUMMY PEOPLE IN HSEC ARE MAKING ISK AND I DONT LIKE IT WAAAAA WAAAAA WAAAAAAAAA

A impersonation of the OP by me 28/11/11

This.

Halving incursion payouts is too extreme, many people fly incursions in extremely expensive well coordinated groups. Their payouts need to be higher than that of mission runners, however I agree that payouts are currently too high across the board.

So... increase competition. It should be possible to find a balance where the best incursion fleets earn extremely large amounts of ISK, as they do currently, whilst your average groups earn only mediocre amounts whilst aspiring to join the ranks of the better players. This would probably also encourage organisation of corporation run fleets over public channel fleets.

Randomizing some events within the incursions themselves may also address the risk v. reward balance, and at the very least make incursions a little less mind-numbingly dull. Currently incursions require slightly more patience than missions, in the form of finding a fleet, but once inside are incredibly monotonous and simple. Random jamming ship spawns or unpredictable DPS spawns would mean that the FC at least has to think when calling targets.

As for a system security drop... I'm guessing there would be feasibility issues with doing that outside of a downtime, I also strongly suspect that the moment the system security dropped the incursion would be abandoned. Effectively making this solution identical to a decrease in high sec incursion spawns.

*The one foreseeable downside to this, and probably CCP's reason for leaving incursions as they are, is the public outcry any decrease in profit from incursions would cause. Once you have given a player base something, it is difficult to take it away. Even if it would in the long term be better for the game. Increasing competition in incursions rather than decreasing payout outright might negate this somewhat, but IMHO there is no real solution to the problem.

Agreed isk is not really a valuable resourse. Pilots and time are the core commodities in Eve. That said I really don't think making high a worse place is a good way to make folks want to move. I think my real disappointment in Incursions is what they have become as opposed to what they could have been. The idea of ecposing high seccers to coordinated tactics and enticing them with higher profit has potential. Potential that seems wasted....

Why do you think there is less risk doing an incursion in low sec than in sov null sec?

It would seem to me that low sec and npc null sec would be the most risky places to do incursions. Deep in sov null sec would have much less risk.

It has to do with ratting bots being more profitable than incursions.

I'm not sure I follow you. We seem to agree that difficulty securing a space against potential hostiles is an important factor in risk while running incursions.

It is much harder/impossible to secure npc null sec and low sec than sov null sec. Do you agree?

Yes I agree it is easier if you own sov there. It's not easier if you don't.

As to whether the pay is out of line, I think there is a easy way to tell. Where are incursion run most often and the quickest? If they are run more often in sov null sec than in low sec or npc null sec then we can assume they are better risk reward. or vice versa.