Heh, I never even got to do incursions and probably never will. The training reqs are just too high and take too long, the wait is not worth the effort, neither is paying for skill injectors.
Burners are all right, but get stale.
If this new PvE content will have reqs along lines of incursions, then I will avoid it just the same, but if the reqs to complete this stuff will be reasonable and offer some decent rewards, I will try to stick with it a bit.
If CCP wants more players to actually do this stuff then the percentage doign incursions, then they need to make this stuff more accessable and doable and worthwhile for a larger playerbase. And that’s the bottom line of it. No one will come to content that will just blow them up without having any chance. Likewise, no one will join fleets that will just turn them away because they can’t fly the meta (whatever will develop for this) at optimum.
So while it would be fun getting chased by NPCs etc., it needs to be also balanced on all fronts.
I also don’t see why this has to be HS only ? LS, Null and WH space would be a ton of fun with this stuff going on. Just imagine trying to rat and have a bunch of extra rats spawn and scram or ewar you while some actual player pirates are on their way, or vice-versa, imagine you’re a pirate and you drop in on your quarry to a bunch of scrams, ewar, maybe a NPC battleship punding you really hard.
Now that’d be awesome ! More chaos and more shenanigans everywhere !
So we have 30M per char + XX in loot (you will have trouble to protect and distribute), how long does it take to remove one FOB from space? How many are there to make that a sustainable income for the effort and trust needed to organize a community fleet? I could imagine incursion groups doing it during downtimes, but else?
I’m all for better PvE. But content that requires fleeting up is probably going to be ignored by the majority of people who CCP want to engage in the content. Without any stats to back me up I’m going to assume a significant proportion (possibly even a majority) of players are engaged in solo activities for the majority of the time.
The reasons are time and convenience. We’ve all been in fleets twiddling our thumbs waiting for stragglers to show up, or hung around waiting for fleets to form up while we sit in a station. Playing solo allows us to avoid these annoyances and constraints on our time. When I see new content proposed that’s “balanced for 10 players” I’m probably going to say “Hmm that’s nice” and continue doing missions or exploring.
They move around and expire in less than a week. From my raiding days I know that a fixed weekly schedule vastly improves the chances that you’ll get the right mix of folks to show up. The Incursion lifecycle mechanic plays merry hell with any sort of schedule.
The wandering nature is another large demotivator. Not too long ago there was a string of high sec islands (lol, nope). Very recently one popped up right next to Niarja (Can you say wardec?).
Even when not playing near a choke point they’re still a factor because there’s a good chance you’ll need to move some very expensive stuff through them. I know a few people that refuse to do anything but Amarr sites because this got to be too much of a hassle.
Sites can be contested. Most fleets try to avoid doing this but there are Incursion groups that go out of their way to make life miserable for others. The Incursion can be ended early (rage popped).
All of this makes running a fixed group very difficult. Throw in some site selection criteria and that becomes an untenable problem. The successful fleets work more or less like PUGs (pick-up groups) where people drop in or out at will.
From the early reports it seems like the FOBs don’t need nearly the bling of the current Incursion meta. If they spawn fairly regularly and are evenly distributed throughout empire space there’s an excellent chance they’ll be far more approachable than Incursions and much more suitable for fixed teams.
I see people tossing around the 30m figure and completely ignoring the 750m one. Unless I’m Englishing bad the way it’s worded the payoff is 750m+30m/participant. A 10 member fleet would get ~1B isk per site or 100m/member if it was evenly distributed. (turns out I am indeed bad at English, carry on)
It means maximum 30M per char, and maximum 750M per fleet. Hence above 25 chars in fleet the individual payout decreases below 30M. With 10 chars, the overall payout will be 300M, 30M each.
Some of the replies reveal issues that I’ve been talking about here.
For example:
Overall the Bases seem to be working out quite well, I have yet to destroy one because not may people care about, I talk about a lot about them in incursion communities and no one really cares. So the end reward will have to be equal to time spent running incursions or carrier ratting. You do have to after all, have to find a system with a mining fleet, scan down a hauler, form a fleet in that system(which means pulling people away from what there doing, which is hard), and taking the tower down(which I don’t know if it will take many days and maybe not getting the loot due to someone stealing it.)
In other words, WHY other than "the npcs force you to because they are spreading? People won’t stop doing incursions and blitzing burners and SOE missions for this stuff. People will just move (or not log in)
People are trying to solo them, one guy did in a Marauder. People are already in ‘min/max’ mode to beat them, and they will find a way, unless CCP turns them up to ‘Drifter’ levels or power.
And again, unless the rewards are better than incursions and burner mission blitzing, no one is going to screw with them for long. So the choice becomes make them so over-rewarding they warp the risk/reward balance of the game, or leave them as is and watch them become yet another failed project no one uses.
The point of my criticism is that, rather than look at what PVErs do (rather than what vocal PVErs say, and they always say “omg moar group content” mainly because they don’t want to see themselves as loners in an MMO), CCP is making content that won’t be what PVErs want while at the same time not being what PVP players want because pvp players hate ‘imitation pvp’.
I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know what will happen. I predict the things I do based on how similar things went in the past. It’s not rocket surgery, people generally don’t change much and if a group of people (like say, PVE players in EVE) are doing something one day, they will probably be doing the same thing tomorrow, and there is a REASON they are doing things that way.
It amazes me (both in game and IRL) how people simply refuse to look at what people actually do when considering how things might go in the future. I think the problem is too much optimism and wishful thinking that clouds judgement and ability to be critical of an issue.
EVE is gonna die because of the inability to retain the largest MMO demographic, which happens to be also the largest demographic in EVE.
CCP develops new PvE for the customers they would like to have, which probably don’t even exist, whereas they ignore the customers they have, which happen to be a large demographic without which EVE can’t survive.
At worst, nobody will run the new NPC content, and the dev time will have been “wasted”.
But it isnt going to ruin EVE nor PvE, as it exists otherwise now and even with the changes.
There is one caveat though, which is whether the NPCs will invade DEDs/gated missions, especially if they have dangerous EWAR. That could potentially become a fairly serious problem for PvE. Will have to wait to learn more.
At worst, PCU will keep going down as PvE types leave becasue CCP wastes time in stuff nobody uses rather than develop what PvErs actually use.
The problem is not wasting time in the wrong thing, the problem is not spending time in the right thing.
Lifeblood is supposed to be the PvE expansion that CCP was talking about when they admitted that they had a problem with PvE. And instead of sorting the PvE issue, they just wasted a year developing stuff that, as previous experience tells, will be largely ignored.
