Missions & Complexes

Several high-end legion fleets, and fleets with purely shiny faction battleships have been talking about their current vanguard income being only slightly better than soloing l4's. A few public fleets from BTL pub (public shield incursion channel) were reporting doing one site every 15 minutes on average, netting them around 37m isk/hr assuming the fleet runs non-stop.

If the current changes remain in effect, vanguard systems will pretty much become a ghost town. Public fleets won't be formed anymore due to solo l4's becoming more profitable for them compared to doing vanguard sites in their current form.

So unless at least some of the changes are reverted, or possibly bounties added to sansha, these changes will pretty much destroy incursions for the average player wanting to hop into a vanguard fleet for a few hours a week, the shiny blitz-fleets will be able to break the isk/hr of doing level 4's and will most likely be the only fleets in incursion vanguard systems a couple weeks from now.

I guess we'll have to wait and see whether assaults or headquarters can become the new "thing" for more serious incursion runners, but at the moment it seems that the majority of casual incursion pilots are getting completely shafted by the new changes.

I hear there's good money to be made in wormholes. Just be careful. They say people can actually shoot at you out there.

(edit: the isk nerf is the first part of an across-the-board bounty nerf. The blitz nerf is to renorm payouts and discourage the vanguard farming that has gone on for so long. They're two fixes for two different issues.)

Oh joy \o/

I still prefer incursions to missions for that very fact... But if it's discouraging other people from coming to play. Then it will mean longer times to form fleets, people will have less patience since the reward for waiting around to form a fleet won't be providing the same reward as something they can achieve on their own.

One of the things I love doing is bringing newbies into incursions... and honestly the easiest way is to show them that it's better money than sitting on their own.

And side note... I'm not bitching or whining about any point in particular. I like the 3 different changes that CCP have used. I just think 1 or 2 would have been sufficient. That all 3 in combination will make Vanguards a lot less popular. And that it's already hard enough to form an Assault or HQ fleet... but when you don't have a pool of active players currently in the area doing VG's it's going to make it a lot slower process forming the larger fleets also.

I was going to ask you to share with me some of what you're smoking, but then I remembered the stuff I smoke doesn't turn me into a raving lunatic.

Sounds like CCP got the nerf perfectly.



Thanks for confirming that the "social" aspect of Incursions was all a lie and the only thing you care about is isk payout per hr and nothing else. In fact, these changes give you more time shooting and less time warping around so that's more time to "socialize" and be in a fun and interesting group of people.

I foresee a lot of useless alt accounts not being renewed with PLEX which will only mean good things.

People did this before, the problem is that 1 of the 3 Assault site takes twice as long for normal fleet and there is no blitz fleet taking away this burden like in VGs. HQ is simply to big for complete random fleets. I done a fair share of Logi FCing in HQs(posting late posters myself, helping on bug reports for "You can't lock this, it is feature not a bug, regards CCP." or simply laggy situations for everybody evolved, doing all the reimbursements etc.) and it is a pain to explain the do/don't every 2. site when 1-2 Logis leave and get replaced. Don't compare it to Assaults or VGs, it is a complete other ballgame with the limits in locking and watch list in place, making 10-12 Logis work together as a team quite a bit more complicated. This might shift, providing more players that know the basics, similar to VGs this days, ending up there but there is still a lot more organisation needed. At least compared to normal VG or assault fleets where you simply assume everybody knows what they do, and even if not it is trivial to compensate her mistakes, making smooth runs possible with random people.

Edit: On topic, I won't believe that it takes so much longer for a organized fleet to clear out the sites, however I might admit that the gap between high end and casual incursion might be this big that VGs become pointless over L4 for most. It is not a bad goal to move more dedicated Incursion runners to the higher sites(given the rewards make it attractive), however if this comes at the cost of making VGs unattractive for the casual player it will do a massive damage to the concept of multi player PVE, since it is your set entry point of Incursion PVE and most people that run or take part in random fleets start from there.

The self organizing fleet is already more useful than LFG tools for other MMOs, however this will only be this way as long CCP can motivate players to lead and organize other players, what again needs rewards in place to justify the effort and a solid entry point what VGs represent as we speak.

The ground breaking days of a eve as pvp mmo have ended years ago(wtz, nano/web nerf, etc.). I for myself do miss them.

Incision is actually a good thing since it makes PVE a multi player environment in a MMO. I like the WOW reference, however everybody that did both a lot might know that there are a lot of differences. Actually if you go for the maximum grind factor Incursion can best WOW all day long, since there are no valor point or gear limits and it is actually competitive compared to "please suck a little bit less this time" LFG.

If the intent of nerfing incurisons was to balance the risk/reward for highsec blitzing fleets, then the mechanics should have been changed specific to highsec incursions. Low/nullsec incursion runners had much more risk to deal with, and gave plenty of juicy targets for pvp pilots to shoot. This nerf makes incursions (regardless of sec status or risk) not worth anybody's time or effort, and no longer a social "endgame" of PVE in EVE.
if you want the players of your game to enjoy the game, you have to give them balanced, worthwhile incentives as rewards. "defeating the sansha meanace" is hardly a reward when i could "defeat the serpentis menace" for more isk/hr, for less risk,

That's just adorable.