EVE General Discussion

The thing is, aside from the issue I'll discuss below, it doesn't actually have to be a reduction in profits — it could just be done as a reduction of pure ISK. Instead, swing the rewards (far) more into the form of LP and not only do you reduce what has suddenly become the third-largest ISK faucet, but you also increase the use of one of the largest ISK sinks (the LP store) and increase the velocity of ISK through the transactions that will happen when that LP is turned into profit. It's a spectacular triple-whammy.

As an added bonus, it might also increase the competition and difficulty of making mint from the incursions — something that has gone sharply downhill once the sites have been fully analysed and fleets optimised, and since the whole thing has been “professionalised” and organised into a few large groups that largely try to milk the incursions rather than compete over them.

Well, aside from the 13 percent-a-year inflation, which is rather simple to fix by doing the aforementioned shift to LP, there's also this continual issue of incentives.

This is a problem CCP has struggled with ever since Exodus. The goal (as the name suggests) was to get people into null, but at the same time, they introduced L4 missions which gave everyone unprecedented reason to stay in highsec. This odd cycle has continued ever since: add something new and fancy to draw people out, and immediately void that work by giving people better and better reason to ignore it and stay in highsec.

In a sense, it's this game's version of “MUDification”, only instead of providing better and better equipment that obsoletes what everyone has, it introduces better and better activities that obsoletes old ones. The earning potential of Incursions has rendered old content obsolete; the mineral potential of the drone regions has rendered mining obsolete; or, for that matter, the old L4s that rendered other money-making activities obsolete. For some reason, they seemingly can't add stuff that's only just as good as the old stuff — it has to be better. I could understand that they don't want to make it worse (because then it would be obsolete out of the gate, and the effort spent on it wasted), but not even trying to make it in the same ballpark is… sloppy.

The problem is that this sloppiness kills variety. They want to see everyone flock to the new nifty thing they've created because this shows that it was time well spent and that people enjoy it. While this may look good on their audit sheets, it's not actually good for the game: if everyone flocks to the new thing, then they haven't actually added anything to the game — they've replaced some old thing with something new and the net result is that the same amount of “stuff” exists in practice. This is the OP's worry: that Incursions are rendering more thing obsolete and that we're moving towards negative “additions”, where this one new activity makes two, three, [whatever] older activities pointless in relation to it. Just because the old stuff is still there doesn't mean it has any practical use (cf. many of the lower-tier small ships).

In short, the damage is that Incursions provide too much of an incentive to do them, so they kill gameplay variety and draw people into singular activities in a select few areas, rather than having them spread out all over the place, doing a myriad of different things. This is in a sense a much worse damage than the effects on the economy, because those can be adjusted fairly easily — this is damaging the expectations people will have on how convenient their space-life should be and how space-rich they should become… feelings that aren't necessarily supported by the overall game design.

FWIW, NPC buy orders for sleeper loot injected about ⅔ as much ISK as incursions last month… Granted, it's not a “direct injection” since it's the NPC buy orders doing it, but it's still a decent-sized source of injected ISK.

And as with all things EVE people never look at the larger picture.

You can't get to a Class 1 from High sec any more. All high Sec wormholes intersect with Class 2, have since the last big patch. Because all Class 2 are already inhabited by low sec and null sec bears and Class 1 aren't lucrative enough to do a pigtail jump people are abandoning the 1's and doing what people always do when displaced. Moving back to high sec.

Feel free to nerf incursions but see it for what it is. Pushing people in to high sec with nothing to do there. Its what leads to frustration and quitting.

It seems the forum ate my post, so here it is again.

I suspect the price of trit (and some other minerals) is more to do with 1) The large conflicts going on in the north (Goons/test Vs Raiden/WN) and south (Solar/-A- Vs RA/XXXDeath/PL/NC.) increasing demand for minerals to keep the war machines running and 2) the effect that the southern conflict is having on the Drone region entities (mainly XXXDeath). These are the reasons behind mineral price increases, and while the amount of ISK entering the game through incursions may be having some effect, I doubt that it is the main driving force.

Coincidentally, the rising profit potential for those in wormholes is also increasing due to the amount of T3's being lost in these two conflicts.

War really is good for the (Eve) economy =D, and yes incursion rewards need balancing. The highest available income (through NPC's/Mining, not stuff like manufacturing) in high sec should be about 50% of the reward of doing basic stuff in low sec, and 25% of null sec/wormholes.

For example - Someone running incursion (single accounts for all examples) in high sec should make 50% of what a ratter woudl make in the same timeframe in Low, and 25% of someone in null. Risk/Reward is badly broken, people should not be leaving low/null to make money in H/S.

For the record, I would also make it so that only standard ores, such as Veldaspar were available in H/S, with the concentrated being available in low, and the Dense only being available in null/Wormholes.

And before people start bleating on about nullbears/moons ect and how safe they are, players in null and low sec have to create their own security, and deal with many more potential dangers.

More grav belts need to be added to lowsec. Encourage players to go out and ninja mine without being exposed in a directly warp-able belt.

Is this where I say ... "I told you so"?

The solution is quite simple.

remove CONCORD response during incursions.

I do care actually. I'm one of the leaders of our alliance, we are noob friendly, and I do actually care about the game as a whole.


Sure we will gank somone if we find them, as anyone would do to us on the other side of the coin. It's not the only kind of pvp we partake in of course.


This isn't coming from a selfish perspective. *I* make tons more than incursion runners, and have more than enough isk to pay for all of my accounts for the next 7 years. Which came from market activities, not wormholes. I'm making this post out of a genuine interest in game mechanics, and the well-being of the game itself.

Income needs to be rationally coupled with gameplay risk. That may mean for example that nullsec income is buffed higher than wormhole income. I don't have all the answers, but I do know that income activities in lowsec, and nullsec need buffing, and highsec income needs to be squashed. L4's need to be moved out of highsec as well.


For the most part, our alliance doesn't really run them as most of us are doing C4's, which are pretty clearly better. I don't personally see why C1-C3 should be worth less than *anything* in highsec considering the larger amount of risk one takes on when running them. The same holds true for lowsec and null.

remember sleeper salvage, too. they simply cancel each other out at some point by inject both isk AND T3 material into market.

Ew, but...yes.

I do think group PvE was a good idea, just implemented ...oddly. And clearly risk vs reward, the entire basis of this game, was not at all implemented correctly.

Inflation aside, I feel that you are *always* going to have the "centralization" of effort in a video game, people will always move to those things/activities that maximize their earnings per hour.

Dev's can never keep up with the rate at which the best players min/max their efforts to get the "most" out of the game. Unless there is a way (and I don't know it) to determine and set rates of return for X value of people / y activity in / z security - it's almost always (imho) going to be that way.


But thank you for that good answer.