Crime & Punishment

I have seen that some of the pilots who have been closing down the Incursion fleets recently have stated:

"If you don't fight for what you have, then you will lose it."

Which is fair enough. I actually quite like the idea of that.

But unfortunately the current game mechanics make this somewhat difficult without going a little outside the box, I mean, stopping their fleets wouldn't be too hard through hiring big names in the merc industry, but it wouldn't be long before their alts and pubbie groups pick up the torch and are taking down MOMs just as fast, and it isn't really practical (not to mention EULA breaching.) to continually remake characters for the pure purpose of suicide attacking with blackbirds.

So I was thinking how else we could get at them, but first I want to put some things into perspective.

I have been living at home with disability living allowance (crysommoar?) for the past year and a bit, and I wont lie, a vast chunk of my time has been spent dual-boxing incursions every single day. But there's only so much you can pimp your ship before it gets silly and you just become gankable, but getting that kind of ISK to begin with from running incursions on 2 accounts isn't really a biggy, heck, that's only about 5 days of work tops.

So what do you do when you have your perfect incursion ships, 6% implants and all the PLEX you will need?

Well you carry on doing the Incursions for the social/fun/gameplay aspect and the ISK becomes irrelevant and just stockpiles up and up. But after running Incursions for 4-12 hours a day, on 2 accounts, for, let's say, 300 days to break for the days I wasn't able to get on, assuming that I am averaging 90m an hour (A more realistic number over the period of 6 hours+ after counting in fleet form up times, bios etc) how much ISK does that leave you with?

A lot.

And I am not the only one in similar situations, and I know there are plenty of people in my channel alone who have invested their ISK wisely and have far much more ISK than me. A year down the line from when Incursions went hot, there must be a lot of the "Old Guard." who are also standing in my shoes.

So what can we do? Well, before I was an incursion runner, I made all my success from market manipulation, so:

My proposal: Hold the markets ransom.

How much ISK do you think you would need to inject into the EVE economy all at once to severely cripple it? With spending power that reaches into the tens of trillions through my incursion channel alone, I wonder what sort of damage you could do and how deeply it would reach and for how long with that concerted effort alone.

And if we stretched that out to include the larger channels of BTL and TDF which have memberships in to the thousands, if we really concentrated our spending power into causing as much disruption as possible and rendering PvP completely unviable to anyone who hasn't already accumulated a mountain of ISK to sit on, how long would it be before the underlings of these puppet masters started yanking on the strings and crying "Hey, let's just let these guys run incursions with their friends in peace, because paying 200m for a Hurricane sucks."

I know that plenty of PvPers can actually only play the game if they buy PLEX. What if you bought all the PLEX and forced the price up to 1b< each? Wouldn't that literally force them to stop playing the game? Metagaming is a ***** :P

If you purchased all the Tritanium in Jita, Hek, Amarr and Dodixie for a week, how would that reflect in the prices of all the ships in EVE?

How many times over would you need to increase the price of Logistics ships before people refused to fly them in fleet and SRPs could no longer afford to replace them?

I might not know a whole lot about PvP in this game, but I never shy away from a battle of the wits. I know plenty about markets, both this one and real ones, and if me as a nublet sitting on 3b ISK could manipulate the markets heavily enough to double that in a month, I wonder what a whole community of players with an ISK reservoir bloated beyond all reckoning would be able to do?

I will be in talks with individuals over the next week or so and if I can congregate enough compadres this will be happening on a very large scale, and then we will sit back down and talk about closing incursions when we have something to bring to the table too and we can mutually agree a way forward.

Of course the obvious downfall of my plan is that this ISK will not at all last forever when being spent at this rate, where as closing MOMs is an infinite option. But tell me, what do you feel is bigger? The collective wallets of 1500 pilots who have been gorging themselves on 90m/hr ISK printers for the past year, or your patience? Would it really be worth playing in an EVE like this for more than a few months

And yes. It is also my intention for this to damage the new player experience (GL grinding in a Kestral for that 30m Caracal on level 1's) to such an extent CCP is forced to intervene one way or another, either by nerfing our interactions with the market and screwing their own game design, or by finding a good compromise for Incursion payouts.

I honestly believe that 60m/hr is fair for the amount of work that incursions require, and this should be maintained by making the sites harder/longer rather than decreasing their reward while the low/nullsec ones should remain exactly how they are now.

"May we live in interesting times."

Over 9000!!!

I am in favour of blasting the MoM out of orbit everytime it spawns. I support the actions of those who disrupt Incursion grinders. But, I love your idea mate. If you are able to pull this off, you will have lived the spirit of EVE.

"So you want to heavily impair new players in said Kestrel?"

Sadly, 30m+ Caracals are just a knock-on effect of destroying the T1 mineral market.

But it's effective nonetheless.

Bring it!

Do it.

Hint: you won't.

Amar Citizen, you are a genius. As someone who has remained neutral (read: didn't care) in the whole incursion debate, you have convinced me in <1 minute that incursion runners have amassed far too much power for too little effort. My trade alt, however, will be pleased to profit off of your price fixing.

ISK is easily trackable, any RMT'ers would have gotten banned.

Also stupid logic because actually logical game play is to maximize reward to yourself. Same reason why if you are in a Mission, and the goal of the mission is to kill 1 battleship, you may kill the other 3 battleships accompanying it with 2m bounties to maximize your profits even though the "Objective" is complete.

If this wasn't intended CPP would have just stopped sites from spawning once the MOM site spawned back in March last year when Incursion blitzing became a fine-tuned art.

And you think that's actually a subversive way to launder ISK that CCP couldn't possibly keep tabs on? Lawl.

To put it bluntly, the farming of incursions was only possible because incursion runners had set up a system of treaties/agreements that allowed it. Now that a new set of players have appeared that have no interest in joining your cartel, you somehow feel entitled to force them to play ball. Whether by whining to CCP or by holding the entire game hostage. This attitude does not reflect well on you and your friends.

In other words, you are jumping the shark that will sharply turn public opinion against you.