Eve has half been founded on such principles to me, at best. The tedious farming side of it has always been designed to be more or less safe in high sec, and stable.
Yes, but it is poor game design when the risk/reward ratio is so horrible that you can make such huge sums of money for no risk.
If you are making lots of money, it should be dangerous and competitive and something you have to fight for.
I'll assume you don't know people lose ships to NPCs in Incursion fleets fairly often. I'll also assume you simply don't know we have to compete for the payout. I'll also assume that you think Level 4s, PI, Manufacturing, and exploration in highsec is also poor game design because you don't have to fight for that either.
People still think that Incursions are SO MUCH MORE profitable than missions, and the reality is that unless you're flying a 5 billion ISK pirate BS in an equally fit vanguard fleet, they are not that much better.
The average HQ fleet does one or two sites per hour, at 31,000,000 ISK paid our per pilot per site before taxes. These are slow fleets that take a long wait just to refill between sites, and take equally long just to shoot the tower. They are rarely optimized for profitability.
HQ Incursions: 62,000,000 /hr
Assault incursions are rarely done, but they pay about 18,000,000 per site per pilot. Finding a fleet that does these is like pulling teeth, last I checked. I have never found a consistent Assault fleet, so I can't comment on the payrate.
Assault Incursions: ???
Vanguard fleets pay 10,000,000 per pilot per site. However, with a high DPS, high tracking pirate BS fleet they can finish a site every 5-7 minutes. That's where the imbalance comes in. Now you're finishing 12-8 sites per hour. If you have an issue with Incursions, look here - not at the entire concept. Changing the NPCs that spawn here to ruin the shiny blap fleets is what would fix this. This has already done once, and the avg payout has gone down because of it.
Factoid: Vanguards had their NPC spawns and their payout nerfed at one point, ruining the site completely. Devs then reversed one of the changes, bringing back some of the profitability afterwards.
Vanguard Incursion: 120,000,000 /hr
BEFORE RECENT VG NERF.
Level 4 missions, by the way, yield an average 25,000,000 per site in salvage, loot, and bounties. If you have a good L4 ship and a Noctis, you can finish 2-3 sites an hour. Many more if you have a salvage & loot alt, which many do.
Level 4: 50,000,000 - 75,000,000 /hr
It's also well known that LP is where the money is really at, and if you are willing to screw your faction standings, the tags pay out even more. I'm not an LP guru, so I won't get into the profitability increases between the two. CONCORD LP used to be extremely worthwhile. It's not so much anymore.
Onto the Risk vs. Reward: I will point out that you can and many do make far more in nullsec than they would in highsec. There are I-RED pilots that run 9/10 and 10/10 anoms, and for their risk they earn far more than they would in Incursions. It's more luck based than grind, but they still do make a whole lot. Highsec does not make more money, but highsec does require less effort.
Incursion fleets do lose ships. They lose them a lot. Unless you fly Incursion fleets regularly, you might not realize this. Flying one or two fleets and not seeing anyone die doesn't mean it does not happen. It does, and often.
People are late to call for reps, Logis are busy tying their shoes IRL, somebody popped the trigger, drone-guy didn't kill the jamming frigate... plenty of reasons. Unless you fly a shitfit Tech 1 battleship, losing your ship in any Incursion fleet negates that much income from your grinding. It's a huge loss, and it DOES count towards Risk vs Reward.
Players are not the only ones that can introduce risk. Just because you are not the one who comes in and pops that Vindicator does not mean it doesn't ever die.
Again, Vanguards are really an exception. These smaller fleets are often making enough money to pay for their ships many times over by the time they lose them - which is rare. They pay attention, they know what they are doing, and they have invested enough time and money into their ships to make sure they are operating at maximum efficiency. Isn't this knowledgability and attention and effort worthy of some respect? They aren't AFK while doing these sites. Isn't that what you demand of low/nullsec moneymaking? Or is the problem that YOU are not the one who gets to blow up their ship?
I know that it's popular to say "INCURSIONS ARE OP, NO RISK, ALL REWARD", but I disagree. There is risk and the reward is (except Vanguards) negligible compared to existing gameplay.
Pimpfitting a carebear ship is not something new. Making crazy cash in highsec is not something new. It's not something Incursions popularized either. They are a scapegoat, in my opinion, for the ganking crowd who can't effectively gank them. Incursions ships require a buffer tank, which is the bane of gankers everywhere. People don't complain about L4 pimpfit carebears because they run active tanks which are easily ganked and looted. Instead, they complain with salivating jowls about Incursion fleets, clusters of faction/deadspace/officer fit battleships that aren't so easily popped.
The problem isn't that Incursions as a whole are imbalanced. The problem is that gankers can't gank.
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Topic: [Everything is RP] Incursion Culture (Read 12167 times)