EVE General Discussion

Hi,

I'm making this thread on behalf of CCP Bettik, who is a very shy and retiring dev and doesn't like to post much on the forums

As mentioned in the CSM minutes, we're looking into making various adjustments to Incursions in the coming months.

This thread is primarily to collect suggestions for "little things"-style fixes we can make to Incursions to make the user experience better.

Additionally, if you have any especially well thought-out feedback about the feature as a whole, and particularly about specific things you feel are wrong with the current implementation, go ahead and share those too!

CCP Bettik will be reading every single page of this thread in the coming weeks, but he doesn't like to make the posts - don't worry if there's a lack of visible dev presence in the thread, your opinions will be heard regardless

Thanks for listening,
-Greyscale

Make the entire region of Stain one big incursion, just to see what happens.

Reduce payouts across the board. Bring vanguard sites down to level 4 mission (ISK/hr) payouts (per member of fleet).

Anyone else who complains about people killing the Mom are ignorant to the way incursions were supposed to be run. Farming vanguards w/o giving thought to killing the mom to extend the incursion as long as possible is nothing short of an exploit that should be fixed.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, CCP Grayscale, but you do know that this thread will only draw every single troll, incursion-hater, and whining incursion-runner that have until now been starting their own threads, right? I don't expect very much "thoughtful" discussion, myself.

However, I will contribute what is my layman's perspective (never having run incursions). The main issue appears to be people being able to "extend" incursions to farm Vanguard sites over and over, which have very high payout. For an activity done in high-sec, and with little risk of losing your ship to unexpected circumstances (no PvP), the amount of money is too high. "Too high" as in "higher than most other activities in all regions of space, including those with a significant degree of risk of sudden pew pew".

A simple fix would be to have incursions "dry up". CONCORD doesn't print money just to pay capsuleers (hopefully) and it makes no sense for Sansha to keep sending troops into the meatgrinder of Vanguard sites if they are getting utterly destroyed. Have the CONCORD rewards for a particular site decrease with the number of those types of sites that have been run in the incursion, or have the number of site spawns decrease. That would give people a reason to kill the mothership and allow a new incursion to respawn elsewhere.

Sorry I can't offer "little things", as I don't do incursions myself yet. I just trained Logi though, so who knows, I might get into it.

Thank you, CCP.

Deploy incursion fixes in batches of two (the first being able to be applied quickly).

1. Reduce vanguard payouts by 15-20 % and boost assault and headquarter payouts by 20 %.

2. Do everything you discussed in the CSM minutes.

3. Include a more "battlefield" sense in the incursion constellation. Make it much more insecure than it is already.
Have all systems continous respawn of rats on gates/stations/planets on a set timer much like rats in an asteroid belt.
Have these rats scale with the difficulty of the system.

- I am aware you currently have Sansha spawn on the gates at the beginning of the incursion, but please make them respawn.


Yours truly and again thank you for listening to us,
Krissada

PS: Payout balancing cannot happen soon enough.

Thank you.

Increase variability to add risk. Remove ability to blitz sites.
Make the rewards from incursions add something to the game beyond isk. Make the reward primarily LP, meaning that incursions runners could provide a service to the rest of the player base with those rewards just like every other form of PvE.

Something like that

Some changes I'd like to see:
- Increase the number of sites needed to be run in order for the MOM to spawn.
- Have the spawning of the MOM trigger the end of new sites spawning. (people get the payout for the sites they're finishing but
no new sites). This would help eliminate the farming and the griefing that is happening atm.
- Depending on how many sites must be run for the mom to spawn (stated above), maybe increase the spawn rate of incursion
sites. This would also help with the congestion issues currently happening.
- Increase the payouts for scout incursions. To a bit higher than lvl 4 missions.
- Decrease the payouts for vanguards, not a lot though.
- Increase the payouts for assaults and headquarters, should make more isk than vanguards.
- Increase the payout multiplier for incursions in low sec.



So. in summary, with these changes there would be more incursions in more system that would run for shorter amounts of time than they normally do now (when being farmed), people would kill the mom as intended, and move out to another incursion. With more incursions at the same time there would be less congestion. With CCP controlling the spawn rate, any complaints about HS making too much isk, could be adjusted on the fly behind the scenes. There would be more incentive to run the higher level sites, as there should be.

Well.. that was my 2 cents. Thanks for listening.

There is nothing wrong with getting rich in EVE, yet Incursions allow so with little afford. Quite in contrast to most Incursion haters I actually run them. The best I ever got where 780M before LP in a single day (about 7h). All I had to do was to warp around in the same system and shoot the same NPCs over and over again. I know of two pilots that crossed 1B in a single day before LP. That might be a little much for highsec don't you think? One player told me he used to bot before Incursions. So Incursions is even better then botting.

There is only one way to top that and that is running complexes in 0.0. Complexes that are not spawning as fast as you can clear them out like Incursions. And you only get this if you run a 10/10 solo. I'm sorry but that is not exactly balanced.

Risk wont come from NPCs it has to be provided by players. So either heavyly limit the Incursions that happen in highsec and move them to lowsec (OMGWTFLOWSECBOOST?) or make Incursion sites in highsec PvP zones.

Believe it or not Incursions hinder PvP. If you run Incursions regularly you neither want to have wardecs nor killrights on you. Given that those players who stay for years tend to be those that PvP a lot it might be in CCPs very best interest to have a look at this problem.

Another problem with Incursions themself are unpopular sites. They are unpopular because it's a PITA to get a fleet composition to actually run them and when you got that you make a good bit less ISK out of those sites. There should be more sites on top of that with more restrictions to ship classes.

Changing the LP reward wont solve any problem. LP for normal missions have dropped quite a lot since CONCORD LP dropped below 800ISK/LP. If at all either remove the ability to trade CONCORD LP or move it to 0.0 factions only.

I don't think that lowering the payout would change much. Players will just run them for longer to get the same ISK. You might have to use your brain in a reasonable manner to deal with the problem and it might even take more then one iteration to untangle it.

EDIT: The forum tried to eat this post. For all what is holy increase that stupid timeout already!

This thread is heading nowhere good. If you want incursion feedback, ask people who run incursions, not people who are butthurt because "ihazdrake!" doesn't get any fleet invites. Especially since you at CCP already know what really needs to be changed:

Blitzing needs to be fixed (payouts are fine, 1-2 minute completion times are not. 5-6 minute completion times are completely reasonable.)

assault/hq need to be buffed isk/hour to be more attractive than vg's by at least 10-20%. I don't know if it's the sites faults, or the FC's, but doing them is painfully slow. 1 hour fleeting up, 30 minutes doing a site, 1 hour waiting for replacements for the people the who dropped because waiting hour and a half between wallet flashes sucks noodles. Ludus knows how to blitz assault sites profitably at least, but no one else seems to be able to. How about you ask him how he does it, and what would need to happen to be able to get more people along. You know, like I said, ask people who know, not butthurt trolls.

mom timer - the whole not-killing-the-mom thing is the players trying to fix something that was broken from deployment, and still not fixed going on 1-year later. It was publicly stated by the designers that incursions are meant to last about a week. It is trivially easy to spawn the mom in an hour. It's not working as intended. It's broke. Fix it. Whether that fix is making the mom harder to spawn, a hard timer, or the mom despawns and the influence bar starts reverting if the players don't kill the mom, the current situation is broken and the trolls are all butthurt that players are using workarounds to make it work as intended. The fight against the influence bar should be a real fight. Seriously, why was this not fixed a year ago?

If moms ARE going to be killed within the hour of an incursion spawning, incursions need to respawn faster. Travel time sucks, but it's better than sitting with our thumbs up our asses going "now what?"

It would be cool/interesting if corp membership were rewarded in incursions instead of punished. Never ever EVER join an incursion corp. Especially a successful one. It's the single stupidest thing you could do if you want to run incursions. That is a problem. Not a game-breaking one, but one for which it seems like there could be some fun creative solutions.

It's annoying that the ihazdrake children whine about not getting into a decent fleet, but that's their own damned faults. Adding another class of site that pays less than lvl 4's for the ihazdrake children might not go amiss. The scout sites pay less than lvl 2 missions and are useless, move them to the rookie starter systems, put up a splash window on warp in telling the rookies to bring friends.

Incursions are pretty hard to do casually. If I'm x'ing up as a logi, I'm x'ing up with the expectation that my fleet might not find a replacement for me in 3-4 hours. That might be my own fault as much as anyone's, but having sites that pay in the lvl 4 range with a fleet comp of 1-5 people would help bridge the gap between solo PVE and incursions.

That's what's really broken, but you already know this. You already know that incursions add no more isk to the economy than any other form of PVE, especially since the LP added is an isk sink. You shared the data at the summit that inflation is not a problem right now at all. The whining "they pay too much" butthurt trolls are wrong, and you know it, though that's 99% of what this thread is going to be. Pay is fine. The players organize themselves, share standings lists, and have worked out a lot of that "emergent gameplay" you people like to brag about so much. Fix the problems and the complexity of the emergent gameplay will increase. Listen to the butthurt trolls, and incursions will die, and you'll lose all those subscriptions who refuse to go back to lame missioning or ratting after having done incursions.

edit: Lowsec incursion payout is fine. They already get farmed by people who can, and will NEVER get farmed by people who can't. Simple as that.