EVE General Discussion

We're still waiting for CCPSoundwave to pull his head out of his arse and admit that his "baby" needs some tough love.

Exactly the issue that Incursion-nerfers are upset about. Incursions came along and increased the ISK faucet flow without sinking more currency out of the game. How do we balance the faucet that is Incursions? Perhaps remove insurance payouts for ships worth mire than 1M ISK unless insurance has been bought

There are other issues with Incursions which is why we have the Vanguard-nerfing arguments, but the main issue with Incursions is that the ISK sink that was introduced with Incursions in the form of the CONCORD LP store was not enough to soak up all the ISK being generated

Simple fixes could include providing more LP with less ISK reward, for example, or reducing payouts while boosting salvage from Incursion Sanshas wrecks. This will not necessarily reduce the income potential of incursions, but will reduce the ISK faucet

More complex fixes will involve the entire economy. The catch is that the economy appears to be unstable at the moment due to Insursions injecting ISK that wasn't previously entering the game. A simple proof that Incursions are impacting the economy would be to turn them off for two months.

Except that you are again completely ignoring all the other faucets by doing this and clearly not addressing all the inflationary causing problems as I described and others have shown that even with reduction in the issues associated with incursion you still haven't addressed the problem in completeness.

If we look at the QEN Q4 2010 with months prior to incursions we get an average of bounties isk around 24T. If we look at the current bounty figures of 32T its clear to see an increase in earnings here. And thats without considering what proportion of incursion earnings would have been bounties had incursions not been introduced.

That's a 133% increase at least in bounties alone. Of course it all depends on how all this is blaanced with sinks etc as to how inflation is apparent in the model. But it clearly demonstrates that even looking at the model without including incursions we see a distinct growth in bounty earnings. (See above for previous evidence showing how inflation wouldn't be solved by just looking at incursions).

Its this kind of stupidity to issues that we don't need advising game mechanic changes. And if anything shows a complete arrogance with a blinkered view of things and something you have specifically chosen to continue with by ignoring the issue more than once with a chinese water torture practice of dismissing the main problems that CCP have identified and continuing with a singular view of nerfing incursions only.

However, the compromise of LP for isk for incursions as a consideration for re-balancing the rewards specifically within the context of incursions may have some mileage.

So, incursions are not the big isk faucet. Bounties are.

I'm willing to bet the main reason why is the 23/7 nullsec bot ratters.

Nullsec faucet got pinched quite a while ago. You used to be able to do nonstop Haven/Sanctums, now you cant. Now its roughly the same as highsec lvl4's, but instead of having an agent you need to roam around low/null scanning... It takes more work for the same gain.

Lvl5's pay more then 4's yes, however consider its split between usually 2 or 3 characters and so the 'isk per hour' for each character is actually lower then lvl4's or incursions.

Expeditions often take you deep into hostitle territory where our fancy ships are at high risk. Often times you follow an expedition only to end up with the final destination in the middle of goon territory. Bleh.

In my opinion it's more a matter of their incredibly limited availability and the extremely narrow section of the population who actually runs them. 9T ISk a month is a lot of ISK, about 25% of the ISK faucet from bounties/incursions combined.

The majority of New Eden's population participates in the bounty system in one form or another, spreading the 30-some odd trillion across more or less the entire playerbase. Incursion runners are a much smaller portion of the population, quite likely vastly less than 25% of New Eden run incursions. We haven't got figures yet on this, but if the figure is substantially beneath 25% of New Eden running them, then their contribution to the faucet is far too high.

It's hard to imagine that at any given time between 6k and 10k people could possibly be running incursions.

what about the isk generated from LP conversions to shiny things that get sold on the market?

and of course bounties are more isk in total, but unless you are running 8/10s and higher all the time you will almost certainly get richer doing incursions.

so really its manipulating the numbers for a weak troll

With LP conversions you lose isk that is paid to NPCs in the process. You also lose isk on the sale of the products associated with them. And a sale is also mainly an isk transference from one player to another. As such LP rewards payments actually help to encourage isk sinkage to the EvE economy (see above for definitions).

This is why I like the potential proposed idea above of shifting rewards for incursions to potentially having more of an LP focus than isk in the process. Its quite elogantly simple on an inflationary scale even though some adjustment might still be needed. Unsure what the incursion runners may think however as an effective compromise.

The main opposition I would imagine is that it would need to be considered carefully how much is introduced as an overabundance of points may effect to end up devaluing the LP for everyone, requiring a rebalancing of other mission/warfare LP rewards. Especially since the LP offerings of items have fixed amounts associated with them.

Subsequent effects to LP related items may result in being more commonplace and their value subsequently reduced as a result.

Its a bit of a complex model really to know the effects of how much LP might effect values by what varying amounts (even though people quote exchange rates currently). But of course other LP options like more available items or services could be made available to compensate as a potential balancer here.

First off think about how many run Incursions. (Couple of thousand at most)

Now think about how many rat, mission, plex, exploration, etc. (Most of EVE, including Bots that rat 23/7)

Incursions are only a handful of people versus the swarms of players who do pve involving bounties.

If you think about the ridiculous amount of bots that run missions and rat 23/7 and normal players that do them, then its no surprise the amount generated by bounties are so high.

Isk Faucet and Isk Sink concerning different types of PVE.

1. Incursions generate quite a bit of isk for relatively small amount of people who run them in highsec. Many of these people don't really do much pvp and don't lose their ships very often. A lot of them don't really use or bother with the LP store, hence the isk sink from the LP store is not really effective at controlling the isk faucet.

2. Mission Running isk/hr is mostly generated by the Loyalty Store which requires lots of expensive faction tags along with isk to redeem the LP. The LP is really the only way to generate real profit with missions nowadays, making it much less of an effect.

3. Ratting in Null is mostly used to fuel PVP where billion and trillions are lost every day.

4. Wormhole space generates lot of isk, but at the expense of considerable investment and risk. To make profits you need to invest in a POS tower along with modules and months of fuel. Then you need a bunch of players who are willing to invest time and money to help with running the wormhole along with maintaining security. A Lot of time you spend in Wormhole space is mostly scanning, waiting, logistics and managing the POS. A lot of the isk generated in Wormhole space is usually kept in wormhole space as much of it is used to pay for the cost of fuel and ammo, for the players working there, and then ships and modules with PLEX to keep the account running. Last but not least there are players who will come to ruin your day. Profits and Infrastructure that you spents months building can all be destroyed within a day or two. Wormhole space works its a big Isk Faucet with a big Isk sink that I like to call the Black Hole.

Incursions don't really have an effective Isk Sink compared to other aspects of PVE and has relatively very low risk compared to equivalent ways of making profit.

1) Please cite where you found stats on how many incursion runners are not alts generating income for pvp related activities. I would be very interested in seeing hard numbers.

2) Please cite where you found stats on how many people are blitzing missions for LP and ignoring the bulk of the bounty available.

3) Please explain why you think ratting is mosty used to fuel PVP, but missions/incursions/etc are not used in similar fashion.

4) Unless the corp purchases a BPO (from NPC not contracts) the POS does not count as an ISK sink. The same goes for ammo and fuel (POCO BPO). Additionally, these sinks generally occur once. Meaning that the efficiency of a BPO to remove ISK from the game decreases the longer a corp farms a hole. BPO's are great for short bursts of ISK removal but relatively tepid after that.

4.5)Last but not least ship destruction is generally a faucet if you look at the total amount paid out vs. total amount paid in. If anything ship destruction has always been more of a material sink than an ISK sink. More importantly risk means nothing in terms of discussions of the amount of ISK in the game.