EVE General Discussion

Crawled through all the mud to get here :>

As always I'm seeing 3 camps here, the notorious "hater" the fluffy carebear and some objective views.

I guess the simplest solution would be to remove Incursions and pretend they never happened.

From what I've seen it's fairly low risk versus high reward much better than running Level 4 missions.

Few things that I think might work out, although I cannot supply "hard numbers"

- reduce Incursion spawns in highsec, increase in lowsec -> raise value of lowsec?
- reduce payout on "easier" sites or increase difficulty. I do not have insight in the developement process behind Incursions but I guess you have some kind of number on how much you should earn and how much you actually earn?
- gatecamps would support the whole EVE is harsh theme but I guess there is too much crying involved in the implementation of those
- greater spread on Incursion spawns if possible -> keep them farther apart
- more dynamic sites would be a great addition, maybe some kind of escalation chance based on killing stuff?
- rethink the influence bar, as far as I remember you were supposed to run smaller sites to reduce the resistance penalties so you can run the harder sites. Right now it doesn't have any real impact since skills/fitting negate the negative effects until the bar hits 0
- increase the time needed to "blue" the bar but make it act as some kind of hardcap, if you're pushing the Sansha's back as hard as it's going now they gonna sack up for one last attack and then retreat
- dynamic scaling of sites e.g. the harder you push the less easier sites you get

That's all I can come up with :>

Please please PLEASE get someone to translate your posts for you. From what little I understood there is some very intelligent thought in the chaos that spews forth in your posts, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is between the spelling and grammar.

I'm not a perfectionist, but the scion of a family of teachers inside me cuts himself every time he sees something this bad.

My suggestion for fixing incursions is to get rid of HQ sites, and have the MS hotdrop people when she spawns. Forces people into bigger fleets, which forces them into the higher level sites, and more or less raises the risk level high enough that people would not be nearly as upset as now.

The will run the same risks null/lowsec incursions face, but without having to submit to pvp.

Vanguard Sport

Vanguard sites in Incursions have long become a sport. They are quick, not too difficult and fairly rewarding.

Because entering a site isn’t a big commitment there are plenty of fleets that are willing to compete for a chance to deny the opponent the payout and shorten their own time per site.
When there are no competitions, organized Incursion running clubs like SSN, ISN and alliances like Polaris and Sk33t Fl33t run sites in time trial mode and try to shave off as much time off the site as possible.
For many it has become more than a way to make ISK. It is a social low risk PvE sport where the competition and the tears of the losing opponents are worth more than money.
And this is where a way to lower the Incursion ISK output comes from.

Reward competition.

Decrease the payout per site if there’s only one fleet in it and increase the payout for competed sites.


Possible adjustments.

It is important to keep the payout balanced. Current 10 million ISK per site reward is good. Average time ranges from 3 to 6 minutes.

If the concept of competition is brought in, consider these payouts:

• 8 million ISK for a site with a single fleet of 10.
• 12 million ISK for a competed site with two fleets in.
• 14 million ISK for a competed site with three fleets in.

It’s enough of an incentive to push people into more competition thus lowering the total reward gained by everyone in a Vanguard system.

Role-players.

I’m aware that many role-players are upset about the never ending farming of Incursions and find it immersion breaking, however, think of the cynical nature of capsuleers as they are portrait in the lore. Profit and personal entertainment above needs of planet dwellers and generally others.
Vanguard sites are a perfect arena to flex your muscles and show your skill to the other fleets without engaging them in direct combat.


Leading the way.

Creating this sport will once again put CCP ahead of competition as this type of an experience has not been seen in any current or upcoming MMO.

Other Incursion sites.

All that said same concept can hardly be applied to Assault and Headquarter sites as they are a much bigger commitment due to the time they take to complete. Those sites also need to be rebalanced perhaps increasing the total payout and difficulty, making them a more common type of a PvE raid experience where your main enemies are the NPCs.

Oh and for Incursion not to be unfair breaker of risk/reward and all that.

As I said, overall ISK payout should be reduced by 20-30%, with LP increased so in end VGs pay 10-20% less than current; and Assaults and HQs paying much more, to reward effort of gathering larger fleet and risking more (losing ships in HQ sites is more of a when then if).

But also. Tweak the multipliers and base payout so that while highsec sites pay as outlined above, lowsec and null incursions pay noticeably more than highsec. Currently math says its 45%, they should at least pay 60-70% more than highsec sites.

Increase anom payout a bit, increase anom faction ship spawn rates a tiny bit, and also escalations chance a tiny bit up.

And if you want to create utopia rework T3 material requirements so we don't have 1 diamond worth bottleneck and 50x more "useless junk".

So you want to remove the highest level site and(other than mom) and then have mom hotdrop so it forces people into bigger fleets and bigger sites? But you just removed the biggest site?

HQ sites do not need to be nerfed. HQ sites do not make THAT much money. In fact, if you are on EVE anytime other than peak Euro hours you will make less than 30m/hr running HQ sites and sometimes you will not even be able to run them due to lack of pilots. The advantage to HQs is that it gets pilots to cooperate and form large fleets, also newer players can join as there is little to no contestation.

VGs need the nerf. Not going to sugar coat it...it is too easy to get a 10 pilot mach fleet together and pump out 100m/hr. In my opinion the ISK/hr should be more for the larger fleets as they take more coordination and effort.


Now having said all that, I would not mind a bit of risk injection into all incursion sites. At this point it takes no effort to beat these sites, even HQs and motherships. All of the spawns and ship stats are all documented...a bit of randomness and difficulty would be fun.

I played incursion 6 months after it came out
I played a Guardian in the Armor fleet.
It got very boring after the first few times as people just kept farming the most lucrative incursion over and over again.
The DPs just followed down the same a list of targets over and again.
If you were even partially sober you could complete an incursion with out any effort or risk.

Things be can to become interesting when we had to do the mining related mission because the other incursion were engaged.
- the scampering for mining drones. etc. there was excitement because the list was a little different.

I listen to Ender Black on Podgoo and he had some good ideas.
http://www.podgoo.com/podpress_trac/web/388/0/enders_editorials_1.mp3

Vary the trigger spawns, very the fleet types
once the Mother ship appears the Rate of return drops for isk per hour as Concord becomes discourages from the Capsulers drawing out the engagement and allow more innocents to be kidnapped. The mobs become stronger as their moral hightens as thier flag ships has no joined the battle.

There should be some battles that Capsulars need to try to escape from. A good story teller in a role playing game needs to provide a varrying amount of challenge to the Player Characters. Trivial 20%, Moderate 20% Challenging 45% Almost too mush 10% Easily over Whelming 5% - I will not only give breaks in the story but will make the players question do I stay or do I leave? Do I take the chance?

I think incusions even though provide an awsome revenue source, I think it needs to be entertainment not a grind.

The rewards should be self-balancing.

You decide up-front how you'd like to see the payouts spread across hisec/lowsec/nullsec and scout/vanguard/assault/hq, so, for example, 12% of incursion payouts should be hisec vanguards, Then the system automatically increases/decreases payouts to maintain this ratio.

Too many people doing hisec vanguards? No problem, because the payouts for that will drop like a stone. If you decide that 7% of payouts should go to lowsec assaults, and almost no-one is doing them, the rewards for the few who do will be massive.


Ultimately the auto-balancing should be extended to include missions, exploration sites, belt rats, etc.

Looking at all secure sov nullsec incursions not being touched by residents actually makes me think they certainly need a boost.

And HQ and Assault sites need a point and purpose. Effort of gathering more people and actually taking greater risks (way easier for something to go wrong with 40 people involved than with 10) must be rewarded or its pointless.

LP increase , ISK decrease is nice in theory; but fact is that people who had been doing this since release have accumulated stupid amounts of LP. Shifting the weight of payouts from ISK to LP would force them to start utilizing that LP and would crash both CONCORD and all empire faction LP for a considerable amount of time, until those oceans of LP are used up.

I previously posted about Scouts and newbies, and figured I would expand now that I have more time to post.

Newbies and Progression

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I would like to see more Incursion content for newbies. Newbies have a lack of skill points, and they have a lack of experience. I think a progression could have value for both areas. Several people have mentioned "I haz Drake, and I
can't get a fleet invite" "butt-hurt", which I found surprising, as someone who haz Drake with T1 launchers and gets fleet invites. In E-Uni, we have "I haz Caracal, can I get a fleet invite?"

What I am looking for is the progression that some people have been discussing, but not just a progression of more reward and risk in the same ships, but also more skill points, as well as more out-game skill. So, I would like to see things that people can do in small groups with little coordination, (ie you need to apply more damage than one player could normally
put out, but that does not require an experienced FC to potentially screw up.) in T1 cruisers. Maybe this is just a matter of clearing gate camps and belts, maybe it is Scout sites. (IIRC, there is no reward for clearing incursion gate camps, other than to deal with the pain in backside of getting by them every time. )

Once you have gotten used to small group activities, you start learning the fleet commands (FC duties, as well as the Need-Energy/Armor/Shield, tagging, etc.). In parallel, you have to start fielding ships with better tanks (both in resist/depth, as well as more and more competent logistics pilots.) Maybe in Scout sites you can either fit a really good local rep, or you only need 1 baby logi (Osprey/Exequror). (eg these Sansha recognize that damage is a threat, but don't realize the problem with repping. I can't really think of another way of avoiding needing a logi pair and as a result blowing up the size of the fleet.)

Some have proposed zero rewards for too many pilots. I would suggest not. I think it should be a viable tactic to blob them with weak ships, it just doesn't pay as well, to lower the barrier to entry. While there is some amount of being able to
make up for a lack of SP by spending ISK (using faction gear), there is still a fairly high minimum below which Incursions are just not an option. (particularly, if a Drake is not good enough to get into a fleet.)

Variation and Training

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The other thing that I would like to see is that there are several ways of completing sites, and drawing in more skills to do it. ( I have only managed to do Vanguards so far, so I will take examples from that. ) I like that the designed way of completing an NMC is to mine ore, and to do an OTA is to hack. It is not the optimal way it turns out, but that is something to iterate on. Further, I am not sure which one it is, but I have heard that there is a need for sniping ships in one of the Assault sites, so I would like to see it being a decision as to whether you bring in sniper's and just lob stuff at each other while everyone else
deals with the near stuff, or whether you use ewar to try to damp the Sansha snipers down to useless or draw them in range of the regular guns. Likewise, it would be nice to see a use for ECM. (I am hesitant to propose that neuting be effective, since some of the laser boats use it as another ET. ) The problem with bringing EWar in is that the boats are generally very squishy, which is fine in PvP, because your fleet can still be successful if you hero-jam, etc. but there is no incentive in Incursions because once the boat gets squashed, you get no payout (and there is less point in ECMing frigate-sized things than battleship-sized things, though I could see the possibility in an NCO of deciding based on who you pick up whether to power through the Mara's reps, take out the Mara if you can get range on it, or assign someone to keep it perma-jammed.) Maybe one could even design a mechanic for making stealth bombers viable, eg allow cloaked activation of the warp gate, or allow warp-in on a fleet member in the pocket.

I would also like to inject a comment on random-ness to shake stuff up in those long incursion sessions: If this is in fact designed to simulate PvP mechanics, there is some value to it being routine and predictable. With PvP, you get a one-time try at a particular situation. Over the course of many encounters, you get a sense of the impact of various strategies in general and what works well in particular situations. There could be some value in having a situation where you can do-over under the same conditions to change stuff out and see what works and start to get an intuitive sense of how things work. (For example, I had been flying an ECM boat for about 2 months before I finally found out how to know whether my jams had landed. If I had a predictable scenario like a mission (or Incursion) where I could see missed jams and successful ones outside the stress of a 1 or 2 minute engagement after an hour long hunt for targets, I would not have had to ask such a "stupid" question.) However, there is definitely some value in having re-runs of very similar conditions, but with variations. Maybe the variations are one or two extra of something that is susceptible to some specialized skill, or some particular counter. So if you go all generic, you can complete slower sometimes, but if you had brought ECM to shut down that extra thing, you could complete faster. Then it is a decision as to whether you go generic damage, or lose one of your DD in favour of an ECM just in case that condition might come up. Likewise, if you could have extra Niarje spawns, maybe it makes sense to fit ECCM on the logis instead of tracking links, or maybe you just take the chance and have good enough coordination to take them down before they jam. Or maybe you have your own ewar to shut them down.