Fixing Eve – Incursions

Not much has happened lately on the Skunkworks front. We’ve done some fighting, but nothing special. The most notable thing of late is that we have teamed up with Brick Squad and Lead Farmers, a wormhole group, to close out highsec incursions quickly. The past two weekends have seen very little time for active incursion running. For example, they shut down the incursions Friday night. When new ones sprang up yesterday, they were closed half a day later. The moaning going on in the forums and incursion chat channels has been incredible. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to be a part of the mothership-killing fleets, as they have been operating before I go online in the evening.

So, I’ve had a lot of time to think about ways to make Eve a more consistent, balanced universe. I’ve tried to think through changes that would enhance gameplay, balance various mechanics, and make sense in respect to existing lore. As we have continued to make incursions the hot topic on the forums, I figure I’ll cover that first.

I’ve never been “into” incursions. I was interested when they first came out, but never had a fleet of friends to run them and never wanted to play the “LFAF” pickup game. So my first real exposure to them was after I joined Skunkworks; that whole story is well documented and I’ll spare you even a summary of how it started. Early on, I started trying to think of ways to fix the issue of highsec vanguard farming without breaking incursions.

It needs to be said that I do not object to incursions. I’m all for cooperative content. After all, I got my start playing cooperatively with some friends. Had incursions existed when we were actively playing together, we probably would have been involved in them as soon as we possibly could. The problem is that high sec incursions, specifically their vanguard sites, create a bottomless well of isk. It’s like missions, only the payout has been reported to be twice as high. As an avid explorer, I have a problem with CCP creating something that pays just as well per hour as wormhole life, but more consistently and without the risk.

My first solution was obvious: reduce vanguard payments, and balance that change by increasing the payouts of the larger sites which require larger and more coordinated fleets. It’s an obvious solution, and perhaps too simple. Taking it a step further, I suggested a lore-based solution: Concord would become frustrated with capsuleers farming incursions when they are being paid to stop the Sansha attacks. As a result, after a certain amount of time (or a certain amount of PvE activity), rewards for incursions would be reduced over a period of time to about 50%. It would then become more profitable to end the incursion so that a new one could spawn than to continue farming the same one.

Recently, I had this idea: have Sansha adapt their strategies. If Vanguard sites are being swarmed, reduce the number of vanguards and spawn more of the other sites. What’s more, they could react to the fleet composition of the defenders, fielding more e-war or more DPS depending on what kind of resistance they were facing. It makes sense that a force capable of overwhelming Concord would be clever enough to not press a failed strategy over and over again.

These three solutions are not exclusive; they can all work together. Rebalance payouts, create a steady decline in rewards in order to make a compelling reason to go after the mothership, and make the Sanshas smarter on a macro level. Do that and you’ll have much more interesting and balanced PvE content without enraging most of the incursion community.