Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'll say Incursions are difficult if you are not prepared for them.. I tried to solo a pair of sansha ships in a belt once, my little destroyer got blown to bits in two vollies.
Does that make the rats too hard, because i cannot solo them ? Do I need a bigger ship to solo them ? No, I need friends to fly with, and better equipped ships to withstand the punishment.

Incursions have not become easier, they are still hard.
The communities however, have adapted, they no longer bring a fleet of cruisers and rifters into sites. That is how brutal the incursions are.
The communities have become more aware of what tatics each site requires, what the minimum ships required are, what kind of firepower is needed, how much of a tank is required, how many ships are required.
All these information did not come when incursions came out, they were painfully collected from the sweat and tears of those there came before us, those there learned the tatics the hard way.

All this information, adapation and perfection have made the incursions less dangerous ? No, you have just adapted your ships with better tanks and better logistics.
Have it made the incursions easier, like all things possibly, but they are still dangerous, you still loose ships in there if you are not carefull.

I am very much annoyed when this happens, and am of very low opinion of people who do that. But on the other hand, it's an MMO game. It's a sandbox. It's social interaction. I don't necessarily think this mechanic is broken and needs fixing. It's a bunch of people that is the problem, and under different rules they will find another way to be the pain in the ass if that's their goal in this game.

Make all HQ's harder/longer/riskier to run?

Make it harder to grind down the bar?

Add more alpha to the MOM site. Perhaps make the MOM one shot a random ship every ... seconds/minutes?
This makes the MOM very unappealing but OTOH everyone wants their LP. It changes the dynamic from competing for the MOM to sharing the 'mom responsibility' between incursion communities.

So we've already had a very large discussion about the difficult of incursions.
Let's discuss the respawn time, the community drama and the lack of high sec incursions for a moment.

As many of you have stated, the mechanics of incursions are just fine.
Unfortunately the people running it are not. Resulting in this discussion obviously.
If you take a look at what incursions are designed to be and how they came out we'll see that they do need a change.

1) Incursion are a "random high sec dungeons" thing in my eyes.
This means that randomly a constellation is targeted where there are extra rats in belts and what not.
The result is that miners can't mine the belts in said constellation, which is made out to be a really big deal.
Truth is that highsec mining only has limited ore spawns, which can easily be found in the neighbouring constellation.
Thus the "miners can't mine" becomes an invalid arguement here.

This leaves us with the design that incursions are there to be farmed for isk and concord LP
To get capital blueprints and 6% implants. Otherwise sites wouldn't respawn either now would they?
So killing the incursion a mere 2 hours after it spawned, with 80k being the n°1 score, is defeating its purpose.
At least the way I see it.

2) The community drama is the reason incursions need changing.
While you can say that this social stuff is within the idea of sandbox, it's making a certain part of the game obsolete.
As I just defined the purpose of incursions, this drama is causing it to be lost entirely.
Measures need to be put in place to prevent any single group to kill a very big pve part of the game for everybody.

Somebody in the replies mentioned that in any other aspect of the game you can control the outcome.
Another person pointed out that if 1 hulk gets ganked by 5 nados he hasn't much control.
But he can still go out, replace his ship and get back to mining immediatly.
With incursions we can't control when it dies, but we can't just pack up and be flying again 30 minutes later.
Because it takes up to 48 hours for a new one to spawn, so we're down for at least an entire day.

People who can only play on weekends because of RL often find themselves without incursion for in their free time.
This isn't seen anywhere else besides technical difficulties, where somebody can't do what they want in sandbox.
While popping the mom is within game mechanics, putting people out of flying for up to 48 hours,
or even for weeks let alone months.... That surely is a larger breach of the sandbox idea,
because you doing what you wanted keeps others from doing what they want.
Simply because of in game mechanics being outdated and no measurements put in place.

This is why I, and probably many others, feel that we need a "minimum incursion uptime",
which as I explained shouldn't be a big issue for high sec miners.
Reducing respawn time won't solve anything, increasing difficulty r putting in "mom won't spawn untill" won't either.
What we need is a solid solution that keeps incursions alive, whilest also catering to the "they're too easy" issue.
The answer seems to lie in the red bar....

So if we want to be constructive, let's focus our attention on figuring out what the best measurement is.

I wasn't clear - I want anyone who engages the now-suspect pilot to go suspect as well. Damnit.

A suspect flag that propagates through anyone who shoots the mom, then anyone who shoots/reps anyone who shot the mom, then anyone who shoots/reps them, etc.

you have no need to apologise. i know i can be a complete **** on the forums some most of the time.

i have massive amounts of respect for all of the FCs that i've flown with over the last few months, huge amounts of respect. They do put in a disproportionate amount of effort vs the rest of the fleet. however from a non-fc perspective incursions are genuinely easy. i think that's what i and many others really refer to when we say incursions are easy. if you're not FCing you're just smashing F1 on the tags in the correct order and pocketing 100m+/hour.

there may be things that compete with high sec incursions on income however many of them either aren't in high sec, or have significantly higher barriers to entry, or require more input. the combination of low barriers to entry, high reward, and minimal effort on the average line members part is why incursions are viewed as they are.

Wouldn't the simplest option just be "mom doesnt spawn until 4 days" or something?

+1

Wait what?

What are you smoking and can i have some...


Realy if you dont know how to keep a hq fleet alive without a 0-6, your doing it wrong

Null/low are already harder with better rewards, and the lowsec one is the only way to get a revenant BPC, which has an absurdly low droprate.

No-one runs them anyway.

Agreed on the dropping HS to LS though, but after three hundred dead vindicators/nightmares, people will just stop running them.