Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hisec incursions are a massive part of Eve. I wonder if CCP has a metric for how much Hisec Incs contribute to the total amount of ISK being created in New Eden. That would be a good number to know.....

Anyway, they are too well loved to simply get rid of them. Even small changes will upset huge numbers of players. Eventually the story arc must come to an end (i.e. Sansha will achieve their campaign objective or abandon it) and incursions will stop, but not for a long time to come.

It'd be great to see different kinds of incursions by different perpetrators. Sansha incursions could be relegated to lowsec, as they are driven by a mad genius with a master plan to whittle down empire space, and he'd need to start at the frayed edges. Makes sense that his style would be to lock down and cyno jam the system, then debuff everyone. He wants to appear in full control while demoralizing everyone.

Blood Raiders could show up in brief harvesting stints in highsec, where they endanger common players who aren't paying attention or who spent too much time AFK. They attack a system by moving in a hidden harvester base of operations, and begin to actively chase players in weak ships that prepared noobs could either fight off or run from. Once their forces start taking a beating, they start constructing activity sites with stronger NPCs. Defeating these lead to the harvester hub. All short term, couple of hours to shut one down completely, and they are more likely to pop up in systems with a lot of ships that aren't moving.

Serpentis might gather in large numbers for an empire station siege, in which they surround the station with dozens of frigates and cruisers, all shooting at the station. As you kill them, more warp in in progressively bigger and stronger ships. At some point, they bring in a handful of carriers and dreadnoughts to finish off the station. If the station reaches zero hit points during the attack, the Serpentis run away and players lose out on valuable kill opportunities. If players kill the capital ships, everyone involved gets a cut of the fat ISK and loyalty point payout, and a chance to try and loot or salvage them.

Perhaps Angel Cartel would "gank NPC industry ships", in which sites would be created where a damaged freighter or convoy of industrials is moving through, and it's up to players to save the industrials/freighter from the Angel Cartel, scoring CONCORD payouts, loot from the rats, and rewards from the thankful NPCs.

Guristas might lock a system down and create gate camps at the stargates, in which they would literally tackle and blast player ships that come through. They would have fast-locking tacklers and hard-hitting cruisers to start with, and would bring in stronger ships as long as players resisted. If you try to jump in from outside the system, you receive a warning that the other side of the gate is camped by Guristas. Players can work to keep the gates safe, receiving payouts not only from the kills but also from players making it through the gates safely (on an amount of time gate is safe basis, not number of safe jumps). After protecting the gates long enough, the main Guristas attack hub spawns and players may attack it to finish the incursion and score phat lewtz.

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That was all a lot of random stuff off the top of my head, based loosely on vague notions I have about the differences of each pirate faction. Maybe soomeone who knows more about their styles could adjust this.