EVE General Discussion

I have in fact run incursions in null, and to date have not lost a ship doing it. I freely admit my ship is encrusted with deadspace mods and any gankers would love to have it as a trophy on their KB. As others have stated though, null incursions that are runnable last less than a day, and it may be months before one spawns close enough to run, as opposed to being completely farmable for 6 days, and always having one up to run.

It's not just multiboxers. Even running one account in Hisec manually with an alt is going to either beat or be competitive with the isk/hr you are going to get in null per character, and have virtually none of the risks associated with it. Incursions just stand out more than L4s. This is bad game play because there are no real decisions to be made here; Hi Sec is the better choice. Just as many Hi Sec people do not want 'NullSec Online' where it's the only viable choice, there is a similar situation where people want to see an end to "HiSec Online". There's room for both in a game as big as EvE; just that they should offer different things at different risk levels. Eve is intriguing because of decisions - social, fitting, tactics, economic....the list goes on. When it comes to shooting red crosses, the risk/reward paradigm is pretty broken.

Think about people who run data/relic sites. Killboards are littered with dead explorers who either got lazy or ended up on the wrong side of a good sabre pilot. This is a good thing - explorers have to make a decision if they want to accept terrible income in HiSec with virtually no risk, or the potential for a good haul with a healthy amount of risk. There's actually a decision to be made here, making it good game play. In fact, there's even a spectrum with Lowsec offering some risk and better rewards, but not as risky as null with the best rewards. Data/Relic sties represent a good model paradigm.

I don't think there are any sane arguments against the internal consistency of the Data/relic sites risk/reward paradigm. It's rock solid. I'm waiting for a good argument why Incursions and L4s are allowed to so break their respective paradigm.

It's why i get a sense of accomplishment when I solo some PvE content. I can't count how many times a player told me they soloed x,y, and z but then tell you about the three accounts they have.

Except that they don't really, for two reasons: first, explorers are not concerned with ISK/hr, because even in the absence of Sabre pilots their income is feast-or-famine. The lucky streak, the big score and the risk involved are all part of the appeal. Second, exploration's paydays come from finding rare things and bringing them back to civilization. The more people do that, the less the rare items are worth--any veteran explorer can tell you what happened after Odyssey hit and a huge number of new players tried exploration. Exploration only scales if the ratio of explorers to players who can afford their shines remains constant. (Wormholes, same thing: after everyone and his brother set up in a wormhole to get some of that sweet sleeper loot, the value of sleeper loot plummeted.)

If you're a line member in Large Coalition, and you have jump freighter and carrier pilots to pay for getting your doctrine ships to you (new ones only, assuming SRP, is still a fair chunk of change) plus ratting ships , roaming ships, etc., etc.... do you roll an explorer alt, or an alt pursuing a career with a much steadier income? Or maybe an alt that makes money in a semi-automated (drone boat) or minimal-attention (mining, industry, trade once you're settled in) way?

This is why some people choose salaries over piecework and commissions: when you have a steady stream of obligations, and dependents, a reliable stream looks pretty good even if it will never yield a jackpot.



Er, the same reason there are different flavors of space? Different people get different things out of video games under different time constraints and for different reasons. Incursions are social, and at the highest level they're basically EVE's raids. As with all reward systems contingent on LP, they become (somewhat) less lucrative the more people do them. L4s are content on demand if you don't have time, and again, they pay out mostly in LP. L4s and L3s could be tweaked to minimize the extent to which they are exploited by veterans, but none of the people at CCP seem to care: it's old, awful code, and fixing it is clearly a lower priority than working on new stuff. The latter decision tells me that CCP doesn't believe there's anything game-breakingly wrong with them. They even introduced MTUs.

To turn the question around: if CCP has directed most of its income-diverting attention not to L4s and Incursions (which did get a rebalance pass that the runners seemed to find agreeable), but to nullsec anomaly income via the ESS, and if CCP Fozzie has gone on record saying "we know how much money you make in null, and it's a **** ton," then why are you convinced that L4s and incursions are a problem? Why are you convinced that ISK/hr is intrinsically a problem, when the prevalence of AFK ratting boats suggests otherwise? I made 40M ISK/hr the year I was in a C2 WH. If I had the choice to do that again, or to run a highly repetitive and involved process to tweak the absolute most out of L4s for three times the income, I'd be back in that WH in a heartbeat.

The only convincing example I can think of is the near-evacuation of C6 WH space; many of those guys apparently wound up in incursions. But their previous method of ISK making was also really safe (because they would "zip up" their holes) unless someone went to a great deal of planning and effort to make it unsafe for them by setting up a massive login trap. With tens or hundreds of billions of ISK on the field and unable to move for five minute intervals, that precaution was understandable.

High incomes per se are not a problem, leveraged high income in the case of ISBotting - is.

The topic has been explained by me, here - https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5729343#post5729343 and the rest of the posts on that page.

However, this being a specific case of Hisec high income, I'll let you guys duke it out in an impartial™ manner.

Quoting the one thing you said was true lol. I don't advocate getting rid of high sec incursions, but the dumbest thing anyone could do is compare high sec incursions (at last mention, 91-93% of all incursion payouts) with incursions that almost never get run. And all with a dose of "null sec is safer than high sec" lying.

I mean really, that last bit is delusional, so CONCORD isn't help?

Let's take a challenge together, since I've never run an incursion, but wouldn't mind seeing for myself.

Let's both fit out nice bling Nightmare's and go join the valhalla project for Vanguards. Run them for a week in highsec and then see if we can convince others to join us in a nullsec incursion.

Even if no one else decides to come I'll buy ships for some of my Corp mates so we have the numbers (and some of them do run incursions, so they have the experience needed). Then let's just go take our Nightmares to a nullsec incursion and see what happens.

Certainly suicide ganking is greater in highsec, since it doesn't exist at all in nullsec, but if you think that makes highsec incursion running more dangerous than nullsec, this should turn out great for us, as long as we can survive that first dangerous week?

Most of that does not really apply to sov line member income, i.e. anomalies, which I was obviously referring to in the post you quoted. Tags for sec is a good first step towards raising baseline low sec income, but you still cant sustain a group on them really, and this has nothing to do with null sec income. Most Pirate BPCs, with like 2-3 exceptions, have their prices in the gutter due to some combination of oversupply/under demand, and exploration has a hard cap on how many people can run it in a region. None of that really addresses the point that the sustainable, accessible, available income in Hi Sec via L4s and Incursions, especially after risk is calculated in, vastly out competes what you can typically do in null.



Already, before any of the changes are even live, just the announcement of changes, has empires consolidating, and some rather large areas of space changing hands or going up for grabs. This is a good thing. Phoebe changes likewise changed the way the game can be played - also a good thing. These changes are already having a huge effect and I think it is a little daft to not see any of them, and I'd suggest taking another look.

Taking space needs to be encouraged, not punished. It needs to be empowering. People need to want to take some of this space, make their own alliances and coalitions, and actually take part in things. Currently, this audacity is punished, not rewarded. If you want to see a major upset in the political and social structures out there in null, you need to get fresh blood into the mix, and what's more, you need to give them a reason to be out there. It's fully telling how poor the situation is out in null when Hi Sec alts are a thing, and can make better income there than they could in null, particularly off Incursions. Why would anyone want to fight terrible wars, guard space, put time into logistics, put time into social engineering and keeping allies happy, just to have space that is worth less to the everyman out there than Hi Sec? Taking, holding and living in space should be rewarded, and any sort of re-engineering of the actual income available there has yet to be shown.


I'm really excited about the ore changes, coupled with the rest of the Industry buffs to null, specifically because it could add to local development. Hi Sec should leave people very wanting in terms of the resources available. Miners who undertake the dangers of null should be rewarded far more than their HS counterparts, I'm happy that this at least has the potential to restore part of the risk/reward paradigm. I just wish more were being done for everyone else, and that ratting in null was rewarded more than its HS counterpart.

Whenever I see a new player venture down into low or null in a mining barge, on some level, they are a bit silly for taking such huge risks, but even as a brand new player, they have an intuition about how things should be - ores in more dangerous places should be more profitable than ones in safer places. Even if they are mining the wrong ore, or doing all of the things wrong to get themselves seen, wrecked, and podded, I can't disagree with the philosophy guiding that intuition. When I think about all the potential for new blood in null, new empires, I'm thrilled that Industry is slowly getting better and more viable out there. I'm just skeptical you will get that many people interested in building, guarding, and living in space which offers them less than Hi Sec, in terms of income. HS incursions break the income paradigm pretty badly; the should be adjusted first.

Hey good idea why don't you go and ask your Sov holder for a cut of the moon goo profits they make as your one of the people protecting there sov and fighting for the ability to mine it. and if they say know remember that as said by CCP Fozzie and has gone on record saying "we know how much money you make in null, and it's a **** ton,"

Two points.

Moon income at best is around the same as the income you get from a miner.

Fozzie said null injects more isk, he did not say people in null make the most isk per player.