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[AOkazon]

[Extremely mild spoilers for Pacific Rim below]






[... thread preview defeater space...]



So, I'm just riffing off the bit in the prologue where the narrator talks about how "we got really, really good at winning" and how Jaeger pilots were more like rock stars than soldiers, and it reminded me of Incursions.

High-sec Incursions get farmed into the ground by people with very, very, very expensive ships. These are battleships that are turned out like sports cars; fighting vehicles that at the same time are anything but grim, pared-down machinery of warfare. You could easily imagine luxurious interior appointments, on-staff massage so the gunnery crew don't get RSI... [Joker@ME2]real leather seats, Commander[/Joker].

Low/null-sec Incursions? Uh... yeah, hrm. I'd love to come defend you against harvesting and enslavement, but someone might hurt my Machariel...

So, combined with the natural fame-generating potential of capsuleers... you have a blinged-out, hyper-televised 100% victorious war starring people's favourite athlete/captain/heroes, side by side with Nation freely pillaging and kidnapping in the unglamorous, dangerous systems next door, where film crews certainly aren't going to travel, let alone Incursion fleets.

 

[Katrina Oniseki]

[Extremely mild spoilers for Pacific Rim below]






[... thread preview defeater space...]



So, I'm just riffing off the bit in the prologue where the narrator talks about how "we got really, really good at winning" and how Jaeger pilots were more like rock stars than soldiers, and it reminded me of Incursions.

High-sec Incursions get farmed into the ground by people with very, very, very expensive ships. These are battleships that are turned out like sports cars; fighting vehicles that at the same time are anything but grim, pared-down machinery of warfare. You could easily imagine luxurious interior appointments, on-staff massage so the gunnery crew don't get RSI... [Joker@ME2]real leather seats, Commander[/Joker].

Low/null-sec Incursions? Uh... yeah, hrm. I'd love to come defend you against harvesting and enslavement, but someone might hurt my Machariel...

So, combined with the natural fame-generating potential of capsuleers... you have a blinged-out, hyper-televised 100% victorious war starring people's favourite athlete/captain/heroes, side by side with Nation freely pillaging and kidnapping in the unglamorous, dangerous systems next door, where film crews certainly aren't going to travel, let alone Incursion fleets.

 

Holy crap, this is the best solution for the immersion breakage of Incursion farming EVER.

I LOVE YOU.

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

I'm personally all for taking all in-game actions as RP, which makes the typical incursion farmer - the one that only farms high sec incursions because they'd otherwise have to risk their ships - the Eve equivalent of:



Very heroic, indeed!

[Utsukushi Shi]

This is just a great way of looking at it. I really want to read a chron about it now lol.

[Esna Pitoojee]

...I thought this was a given from the beginning? That the answer was that capsuleers are a self-serving lot, and they've calculated where their efforts are best rewarded?

[DeadRow]

...I thought this was a given from the beginning? That the answer was that capsuleers are a self-serving lot, and they've calculated where their efforts are best rewarded?

CC

This is why even most of high-sec incursions close after the Nation forces start withdrawing, barring when incursion communities have a bit of drama and pop the mom early.

Capsuleers on the whole do not care what the Nation forces are doing as long as CONCORD pays them, they are more than happy (and would prefer) the incursion to stay open as long as possible!

[Saede Riordan]

And this is the reason the Nation loyalists can claim with a straight face that Sansha is winning.

[Graelyn]

Oh, but the drama-bombing that occurs when they do that...

[Katrina Oniseki]

I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha. He loses as much material in ships as CONCORD loses in cashflow, likely more. It's a pretty ridiculous waste of resources, on par with regular rats dying by the tens of thousands of battleships every day. Sansha is losing entire stations and installations, along with supercapitals. Meanwhile CONCORD is spitting out enough ISK to cause serious game balance concerns in the metagame. Both sides are bleeding themselves in an unchanging game mechanic that provides no real substance to the story.

The argument can be made that Nation doesn't care about the material cost, which is comparable to "didn't want that titan anyways" as an excuse. But on the same note, the argument can be made that CONCORD's payouts are just a drop in the ocean that is their banking system. "Didn't want that ISK anyways". Both of them are assumptions made without much backing in order to excuse an aborted storyline.

Nobody is winning, nobody is losing, because nobody in CCP has touched Incursion story since the patch hit.

[Utsukushi Shi]

I was more just interested in the "feel" of Kazon's description. Had never quite thought of it that way. The specific game mechanics and how realistic they are is of little concern to me.

[Saede Riordan]

I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha.

Nothing that we players can see is happening. But can you really say that its equal when 3/4 of incursions go completely uncontested? When capsuleers delay defeating an incursion so they can wring a bit more ISK for it from Concord? It would seem to me that the empire crowd has developed a very dangerous form of complacency in regards to incursions. People forget that Kuvakei still has Kyonoke, not to mention the weaponization potential of the wormholes themselves. It looks to me like a setup for a very nasty knockout punch by Sansha. People expect the Incursion runners to be successful, they're space-rockstars. What happens if one day Sansha said 'welp, enough of this' and dropped all of his incursion forces on one constellation and bounced the incursion fleet's face off the curb?  Anyone remember that one live event where like, 100 of the new incursion battleships were dumped out of a wormhole?

[AOkazon]

I can see it swinging both ways. There's equal weight behind Sansha winning and CONCORD winning, that for the most part I think it's just a stalemate. Nothing is happening to the Empires, nothing is happening to Sansha.

Nothing that we players can see is happening. But can you really say that its equal when 3/4 of incursions go completely uncontested? When capsuleers delay defeating an incursion so they can wring a bit more ISK for it from Concord? It would seem to me that the empire crowd has developed a very dangerous form of complacency in regards to incursions. People forget that Kuvakei still has Kyonoke, not to mention the weaponization potential of the wormholes themselves. It looks to me like a setup for a very nasty knockout punch by Sansha. People expect the Incursion runners to be successful, they're space-rockstars. What happens if one day Sansha said 'welp, enough of this' and dropped all of his incursion forces on one constellation and bounced the incursion fleet's face off the curb?  Anyone remember that one live event where like, 100 of the new incursion battleships were dumped out of a wormhole?

Yes, this is the other half of the "riffing on Pacific Rim" thing.

I doubt CCP will do anything so dramatic, but it's a nice thought. Well, OOC it's a nice thought. IC it's downright... ominous.

[Morwen Lagann]

It's been established that whatever Nation is doing isn't involving anything planetside at this point, so the only ~things~ they're doing are in space. What those ~things~ are, nobody knows. Not even the Nation loyalists know IC - so however much they scream and stamp their feet, their assumptions and theories are just as pointless, unfounded and potentially irrelevant as those of anyone else.

Something we have to accept as players is that a storyline, once made into a game mechanic, cannot end without serious concerted effort on CCP's part to provide a replacement or seriously expand upon them. Faction Warfare will never end. Incursions will never end. Wormholes and Sleepers will never go away. Why? They're the flagship Jesus Features of expansions. And the odds of them being expanded upon in a way that changes the course of the storyline away from where it is are low, because it effectively requires an expansion's worth of effort - especially in the case of Incursions.

It's often argued that just because you don't see anything happening, it doesn't mean that nothing is happening. I'd caution others to consider the situation externally and point out that sometimes when you see nothing happening, it is precisely because nothing is happening.

Onwards to incursion community stuff.

The reason that nullsec incursions are typically left alone is because they simply do not cause enough of a hinderance to normal operations to be worth clearing. Whoop de fucking do, we can't use systems here as cyno waypoints for a week. We'll find another way around with our MASSIVE FUCKING JUMP BRIDGE NETWORK AMIRITE?

Lowsec incursions are left alone for those reasons, which also precipitate the usual excuse: other capsuleers. Incursions are such a minor nuisance that the stigma against PVE means that lowsec dwellers would rather use the incursions as bait to bring in killmails than they would to actually make money.

If incursions were mindblowingly crippling events for the constellations playing host to them that week, they would probably not be farmed for that long. As it stands, it's just a reduction in bounty payouts, resists and DPS. Not exactly too much a big deal, especially in highsec where the influence meter gets ground down to zero within the first day of the incursion spawning.

[Saede Riordan]

If incursions were mindblowingly crippling events for the constellations playing host to them that week, they would probably not be farmed for that long. As it stands, it's just a reduction in bounty payouts, resists and DPS. Not exactly too much a big deal, especially in highsec where the influence meter gets ground down to zero within the first day of the incursion spawning.

I really think this should be the case, and it seemed at first like it would be the case before it got watered down to fuck. It could have been a cool thing, wherein if an incursion landed it was actually a threat to operations in that constellation, not 'lolnope, let me fly my retriever 4 jumps to the left'

[Louella Dougans]

Game mechanics.

If NPCs are able to do anything to inconvenience players to anything other than a trivial degree, then a large fuss is made, and people unsubscribe.

The cyno-jamming aspects of Incursions were one such thing. People were annoyed and influence was used.

You can't make people pay to not enjoy a game. Any kind of serious NPC threat to people's activities, and they lose interest in logging in and in continuing to subscribe.