Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Relevant

+Incursions of other factions

Problem: Highsec incursions dont "feel" like they're dangerous outside of the sites themselves

Solution: Spawn incursion rats on gates similar to lowsec and 0.0, but less powerful

Possible Nuance: Achieve the less powerful part of it by having the Sansha brawling with CONCORD or Faction Navy thus splitting fire.

They aren't going to put in gate rats, guys. It'd be too disruptive to everyone not interested in incursions to be worth the hassle. Same with changing incursion systems to lowsec.

Anyway.

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1.
Problem: NCNs kill assault fleets, specifically due to the fact that T3 cruisers are needed. One could point out that other hulls can go on that side, but T3s are effectively the only thing you'll see people bring, and there are never enough of them. It's the only site in incursions where something other than a battleship is required for DPS, and the only site where a T3 will get a jobs other than shooing the fleet's drones around. On paper, that sound like it'd bring some diversity to the game and make people alter their fleet comps. In reality, people would rather make an effective fleet for the other two sites, run until there's nothing but NCNs left, then either stand down or go to HQs or Vanguards.

There's also the issue of having to run an extra logi at the end of it, one that isn't needed for the other sites. So in a lot of fleets, specificalyl late night, you'll run out of non-NCN sites and either not have enough logi around or not have enough T3's, where you could do the other sites perfectly fine.

It was a neat idea, but it's just not worth the hassle tbh, and the way assaults are treated reflects that.

Solution: Just take out the cruiser side entirely, and open up the other side to all hull types. Combine the corresponding pairs of spawns into one room if nothing else. Hell, if you want to take the easy route, just remove the restrictions on the battleship-side warpgate and switch the triggers for the subsequent gates to the room they're in, rather than the other side. Not a perfect fix by any means, but it'd get assaults up and running.


2.
Problem: Scout sites are useless. They pay less that L1 missions.

Solution: Just reuse the scripts that are already in place, but make the spawns bigger to match the stated fleet size, and adjust the payout to be in line. Using fairly high-dps enemies with squishy tanks would work well, assuming a fleet of 4 dps and one logi. This way vanguard runners would spill over into them, as their fits would still be optimal.


3:
Problem: Lowsec and Nullsec incursions are rarely done.

Solution: Make them more profitable, perhaps by shifting some of the LP payout from highsec to low/null, perhaps by offering greater potential end rewards for corps/alliances running them. Just make them worth it somehow.


4.
Problem: This is a big one. The mechanics that revolve around ending incursions encourage people to be dicks. It's pretty cool when it works, but tbh, a lot of the time, it just doesn't. It ends up creating more headaches than fun gameplay.

Solution: I would suggest simply having the incursion continue for however long it normally would in highsec/lowsec, but have the mothership site only spawn the one time, and take a much longer time to actually spawn. Say, once the blue bar has been kept up for 12+ hours, or something like hat. This way you still get to fight over the mom loot, but it doesn't go down just to troll people...you can have a genuine race to kill the thing without people getting butt hurt about it. That's fun. In nullsec (and probably low, too), at the very least the system-wide cyno jammer should probably go away after the mothership is killed, so important systems can still be cleared. Gate rats, too, though I think it might be more interesting to tie gate rat spawns with the current influence level in the incursion, which would continue to give groups something to work toward if an important constellation is incursion'd. There are obviously still issues with that setup, but the key point is that there doesn't need to be an easily-attainable "make everything stop" button. The system should encourage cooperation, not the opposite.


5.
Problem: The contest mechanisms also encourage people to be dicks. A good contest between two roughly equal fleets is fun. One really shiny fleet of regulars following around a small corp or channel that decided to give incursions a try, and farming them for faster sites, is most certainly not fun for at least half of the people involved.

Solution: Refine the mechanics beyond what we have now. The easy solution would be to split it 60/40 or something like that, provided both fleets contributed significantly to the site. Maybe 55/35/10 for three fleets. That way contests can still happen, with a clear winner, yet super-shiny fleets don't stand to gain much by following other guys around. The goal would be to look at how much faster the sites get done because of this tactic, and adjust the winning fleet's payout so that instead of profiting from picking on the little guy, they roughly break even compared to just doing a site themselves. One could argue that the weaker fleet should just suck it up and deal with it, but c'mon guys...it's a video game...if it's not fun, what's the point?

This was true before tier3s/ABCs. These now substantially outperform t3s in this application.
Same problem, different hull. Slightly more likely to be able to get people to carry them, but not much and a bigger challange to the logi to keep up.

As I said, different hull, same problem. Not arguing the point, I think everyone who has flown AS fleets knows that the NCN is the thing that kills fleets.

This is assuming that everyone carries a set of ships with them...

Putting more of them in would just make assaults even less commonly run than they already are. The idea looks fun on paper, but in practice it just hasn't worked. People can't be arsed, and I don't think anyone blames them.

It requires a different fleet composition even compared to the other two assault sites, and even if the only requirement is that 1/3 of the fleet re-ships between sites (assuming you have that many people that have brought spare ships), that's still wasting enough time to annoy people. And that's IF everyone has the right ships available. Trying to force that issue will push things further toward either assaults simply not being run at all, or only being run by dedicated assault communities.(Because those are so numerous.)

Is that really what we want? To continue to have communities that all only run one kind of site? That one half of one site is literally the only thing keeping the various HQ-focused communities from running assaults regularly as well.

That kind of thinking is also part of why low/null incursions aren't run often. If they aren't even done in highsec, how often do you thing they're done down below?

Issue: Gate rats are broken for highsec incursions.
Solution: Place proper sansha camps on gates in incrusion systems.


Reason: If you were to try disrupt a system, would you open gates for free travel? Is that how you invade? Also, any attentive capsuleer would just fit 3 stabs and warp off those camps, being webbed into warp.

Edit: I doubt this would pose any threat to the incursioners ship when he's travelfitted coming in. Also, gatecamp in the region of 1-2 renyns and 2 romis or such. Just something that blows up an afk catalyst pretty quickly x)

I have been following this thread with interest and reserved my problem analysis and suggestion for later, NCN's and Scouts have been mentioned enough by now, no need to repeat it, but Fronkfurter posted what I initially wanted to post ... so I'll just quote him..



I would also add to the last point, that from my experience the human vs human competition has so far mostly been fun and we all act like gentleman unless there really is an issue. We usually avoid contesting the same fleet more then once, especially on purpose, some just become continuous friendly competitions until the payout really is off, then we split.

The one dissatisfying competition is vs multiboxer, usually there is no communication, no agreement, just ignored steamrolling. That's not really an issue of Incursions themselves, rather with multiboxing (which I so far dislike, but endure), but it would be great if something could make multiboxing more difficult to run in Incursions, so a real human fleets have its place in effectiveness, fun, payout etc... got no solution so far.

problem: incursions not fun for small gangs (~3-4 pilots). scouts are way too easy, and vanguards way too hard.
solution: add something in between scouts and vanguards, perhaps limited to cruiser/battlecruiser level play here, to give the small fry something to do without getting overrun by the big boys.

I run with a small crew (2 dps 1 logi usually) and we tried incursions to get something more challenging than L4 missions when we're together. Wormholes / L5s are fun but we'd like to test our skills vs the incursion AI. scout site we tried was uselessly easy but we got insta-smashed to bits in a vanguard.

well we knew it would happen in the vanguard but gave it a go anyway in the name of science .

Problem: Number of incursions are out of proportion.
Solution: Increase the number of incursion in 0.0

A quick google search brought up that the number of systems were / are as of 2013



Given the number of 0.0 systems there should be more incursions there. For reference the number of incursions is, according to a post from 2014:



Why are the proportions so skewed? Especially when you consider 0.0 incursions create the best content, shutting down Jump bridges, setting up deadly gate camps, setting up some great PvP encounters, they really force people out of their comfort zones. Give us more so it's not a once a 5 month affair that the incursion comes to town and we get to do cool stuff.

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Also a single account running in incursions gets more isk per an hour than me multiboxing 3 accounts in 0.0 (After the refining changes i will be making even less isk from rat loot too, making the problem even worse.). That's broken. I guess i should just unsub 2 accounts and run incursions like the rest of my corpies are doing?