Missions & Complexes

:don'tKnowIfSerious:

I went pvp'ing yesterday in lowsec with a group of people. I was dualboxing t2 logis.
That's 300 m right there. Not that that is much.
I've seen a many incursion runners lose t2 ships, t3 and even a faction battleship or two (navy ships, rattlesnake), in PVP.

Now that people have had a taste of the good isk from incursions I think it is time to move it off to low sec only with the lvl5s. If they have some balls they will continue doing them in low sec. If not, well go back to lvl4s.

If not then move lvl5s back to high sec and unnerf anomalies. so people can make a steady 100mil isk per hour in 0.0 without having access to the best true sec.

Atm I am very tempted to grind up my sec status so I can do high sec incursions. I do lvl5s and it just isn't worth the risk when I could easily make similar isk per hour in the safety of high sec(and I wouldn't have to triple box to do it!!).

It's relative. It's so unbelievably relative mate.
One pilot may not have lost any ships in incursions ever while another pilot might have lost several faction battleships and t3's over the course of a few months.
If you want to look at it as an average I doubt you'll be able to, because you don't have access to the necessary data, and again you might be able to although it won't be accurate.

Either way, you don't know how many mission in EVE and you only have a vague estimate of how many run incursions on a regular basis.
I could easily say the same about incursions. DAILY people lose ships to incursions across several sec level.
Look for yourself in constellation ship losses over highsec, lowsec and nullsec. Daily losses.

And what loss mail? I was talking about the guy's kills. All those kills he's been having the past couple of days account for BILLIONS of isk, all of those are incursion runners that have been griefed.

Just because those who run incursions are much more public about it by having massive channels and a large concentration of pilots in one place doesn't mean you can automatically assume anything about them without having necessary data when comparing missioners and incursion runners.
I'd say at peak time, a saturday or friday afternoon you'll be able to count a max of 500-800 active incursion runners at good circumstances.

Let's just assume:

3 highsec incursions, each with 3 vanguard system, each with 4 fleets in them (extremely crowded).
10 (11) pilots * 4 fleets * 3 systems * 3 constellations =360 - 396 active pilots earning isk.

Let's for that sake assume we have 4 assault fleets and 2 headquarter fleets:

20 * 4 + 40 * 2 = 160 pilots.

At best let's assume a total of these 520-556 pilots are all earning an average of 70 m/hour. This is totally viable, since some fleets are earning 40 m/hour because of dreadful long breaks, losing sites, forming fleet, losing members or waiting for better sites to spawn while other fleets are earning 120 m/hour.

So 520-556 * 70 m/hour = 36,4-38,9 billion isk is being created for incursions at PEAK time and EXTREME crowdness an hour in highsec, which only occurs at max 20 hours a week. The weekly average is much lower than that.

Half a thousand pilots, all this because of half a thousand pilots? Seems quite negligible in my eyes.

I was falsifying his statement about Incursion runners not being PvP'ers.
Hence the incursion killboard.

You're missing the 'big picture' of Incursions through the developer's eyes... sure we can talk about isk/risk but that's not the point.
The point of Incursions is to provide a viable means of TEAMWORK and actual player interaction/introductions.
You take away HS Incursions, you take away hundreds if not thousands of player interactions simply because all those people will go back to what they were doing beforehand to make isk: small predetermined, closed groups, or worse, solo work.

Incursions themselves really have nothing to do with 'a lack of balls,' rather it should be marveled that a player has enough confidence in others to frequently field that 500m-3b isk ship to random PUGs.

Hi, my name is Ammzi.
I've come here to ask you if you have ever heard about nullsec incursions?
You know ... those that give 100 % reward instead of 60 % reward like in highsec, practically doubling the reward compared to highsec?

The easiest fix for Incursions would just be to increase their difficulty. Best example are HQ sites like Ouroboros that you can run with 8 Logis and 10-15 DPS and you don''t even get full rewards because minimum fleet size for max rewards is like 40. Also having run Vanguards on different characters it think its to easy to sigtank them, given that a lot of their dps comes from SB style hulls.

Basic problem is also, that the resistance penalties are to quickly reduced by completing sites. Another problem with the risk vs reward of nullsec/lowsec vs highsec is that you don't have guaranteed clear out of the final site. If that doesn't happen you risk having more ISK but offsetting that by getting no LPs. Also its way to easy to draw fire on specific ships, especially in larger sites (i've probably tanked 50 % of the Lirsautton bomber waves in the ouroburos sites i've run). We didn't use that weakness of the AI since my ship was one of the thinner tanked ships on the field but its certainly possible to make those sites even easier by cheesing on that part. Another problem of the design is that the payout is mostly fast and rdy cash instead of LPs which is only the icing on the cake for most of the incursion runners.

To summarize my ideas of an adjustment for incursions:

1. Shift rewards more to LPs (and probably do a 50/50 split for lp payout, 50 % for site completion, 50 % for incursion completion)
2. Make certain sites less susceptible to sig/speedtanking
3. Improve AI
4. Reduce the required fleetsizes for all sites by about 20- 30 % (would also reduce the speed at which sites could be blitzed due to having less dps) - problem is that it requires even more logi pilots which are already the bottleneck
5. reduce the speed at which the resistance penalties drop.

True on the Ouroburos fleet size. Still we did it more often than not with less than those 30 due to not having more pilots online and compensated that by having an alt armada sitting at the accelleration gate in t1 frigs and stuff. And its still very manageable. If you run it with 50, you're almost bruteforcing it, especially with a frontloaded shield repping logi gang where the bomber alpha is way less a problem.

I know that increasing LP vs reducing isk is a nerf. And i think its needed cause the isk faucet on incursions is pretty much the same as on sanctums which got the latter nerfed.

Regarding the AI: no, the AI is very predictable once you're staying in the site a bit longer. In fact there are a lot of ways to get almost snap aggro on the stuff if you exploit the way sleepers/sanshas prioritize their targets. I'm not going to tell you exactly how, but i think i dropped enough hints how to do it (and as far as i know there are incursion fleets that use the same principles in HQ sites already).
Also reducing the fleet size (both max and minimum) by 20 % is not dumping on the idea, merely adjusting on the risk vs reward vs timesink side. Granted, its not a perfect solution (given that it would increase the competition for sites and logi pilots) but otoh you have to admit that risk vs reward isn't perfect atm given people farm vanguard and assault sites rather than hqs. If the balacing would be perfect it should be like HQ > Assaults > Vanguards simply because HQs require the highest amount of organization and effort. You will probably all agree that most players do it exactly the other way round, because vanguards are both easier to run and more profitable, only limited by the amount of competition. Which is the reason assaults are getting run at all (and thats only true in highsec, in lowsec incursions people only farm vanguards).
So a reduction of a vanguard fleet to 8 persons would still need teamwork, actually more of it because sites get more difficult. Or people can agree that they are willing to take a small payout hit by running sites faster in a slightly larger group.

Don't get me wrong, i think that incursions are generally a good feature and should be rewarded higher than l4s in hs. Same applies to the comparison between nullsec anomalies and nullsec incursions. But even the often quoted Soundwave rather recently stated on Eve Vegas that the balancing between the different tiers of sites needs an adjustment. And at least in my personal experience as well as from talking to a lot of other people i feel that especially assault/vanguard running in highsec is a bit over the top atm, especially given the fact that all other ways of npcing have taken a hit (either by the flood of lps on the market or by nerfing nullsec anomalies).

Few people convert their concord LPs to normal for net loss. Even if all concord LP is converted, it wouldn't have made a dent. Incursions are limited to at most 3 constellations in highsec, with 3-4 vanguard systems, supporting at most 3 or 4 dozen people each running at the same time time. The amount of LP and isk gain is a drop in the ocean when compared to missioning or ratting. You might as well claim an ant can move a mountain.

Majority of mission runners are noobs in Ravens, not blitzers. Even they have enough sense to not take -2.4 standing hit per mission on faction kill missions. It has everything to do with tag prices. Simple math will verify this: Calculate isk per LP value for items requiring tag trade ins, but assume tags are free, both for present day and 2 years ago. You will see that the resulting LP value is higher for present day. Numerous faction mods have gained in prices as result of tag prices that gained faster, eating into LP value.

If flying missions for Vir Honn is the only thing they're doing in eve anyway, why would they bother going anywhere else in empire?