Warp To Me (The Gateway Drug of New Eden) and the "Invasions"

o7

I am Maximus EnvictoTalon, Fleet Commander of Warp To Me. Warp To Me, WTM, gets a sneer and giggle by null sec vets, other incursion communities and gankers a like. We are the largest of the incursion communities but we find more time for the newest to EVE. We have pilots who haven’t seen a decade in real life and those nearing a century. We have pilots ranging from care bears fresh from level 3 missions and venture mining to null sec carrier pilots and spectre fcs. Some among our number are very adventurous and some who like to play things safer than most. We encompass a respectable sample size of the player base. We often are teased that we are the starting point for most other communities; both PVE and PVP. WTM is the Gateway Drug of New Eden. We are feeder community into a greater many things.

Among the topics covered by the command corps covered with great zeal in the past few months; how do we incorporate the upcoming invasions. Several of our most experienced and knowledgeable commanders spent weeks pouring through readouts, dev blogs, API pulls and rumor for new information about this new content. Our line pilots were told we would find ways to incorporate this new experience into the player experience.

When the invasions went live, commanders took players, new and old, with them on small raids to figure out what makes these new rats tick. This was a frustrating mess. After some initial success and decent looting, the fleets continued. Several figured out that ninja looting paid more than clearing systems of rats. What good is it work a group when they can earn more feeding off the spoils of other victories?

Further still, there were no sites as we were promised. With no sites and high sec incursion focus spawns reduced to 1 (at least we hope this isn’t the last high sec spawn), many among WTM feel that CCP failed in their promises. CCP steals content enjoyed by thousands of players and CCP failed to provide the new content it had originally promised.

I understand that CCP may not look on high sec incursion runners as viral content but we are much more active than null sec alliances who end up in the news. We are not the catchy part of their in game videos. However, WTM is not the community that sits on their ass for days at a time waiting for another fleet to move. We don’t take one tactical action over the course of the day. We are almost always in motion. WTM has 6,000 x ups a month flying fleets at best from down time to down time and at worst 2/3 of the day across 14 time zones. We drive the markets. We are avid consumers of all sorts of in game and real life products by CCP. The isk earned in our fleets fuels structures in null, miners chewing belts, ganker fleets, low sec roamers, wh space adventures and production on large scale. CCP may be able to point many better fleet commanders in EVE but few of them will manage fleets as constantly or feed them new content on the same scale as a WTM FC.

The most base concept in our community that governs WTM is the good of the community. Not just the elite pilots or the newbie players learning to keep at range from a target. We are concerned with the entire community. CCP has demonstrated with piss poor planning and terrible execution that it has blinders on. CCP has failed to come through on a promise and turned its back on a slew of players.

CCP please consider upping the high sec incursion spawn up and actually providing the sites from these new invasions.

Thank you

Maximus EnvictoTalon

65 Likes

Well said

agreed as usual this feels like a NERF ccp often shows hate for high sec players ,mission runners, and they hate miners the most period.

Excellent post!
CCP has once again introduced half finished gameplay that greatly limits who wants to (not can) participate, while hamstringing current active groups by reducing their options. If CCP failed to run the invasion mechanics through the CSM, then they wasted both the dev’s time and the asset that is knowlege and experience of 10 veteran players making up the council. If they did run it past the CSM and the players found nothing wrong, then it was the CSM that let us down.

CCP Devs continue to have interesting ideas, but fail to follow through with balanced and interesting gameplay available for players of all skill abilities and group sizes, including solo players. For them to canabilize their player base (incursions) in the hopes of inflating invasion participation, just shows that they don’t seem to understand many of their player’s needs and wants. Just another case of selfinflicted wounds…

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you do understand csm is like student counsel…just there for decoration…right?

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Actually, I consider the CSM to be more like a photo enforcement camera reporting speeders: they only report what is obviously wrong or right, but it is a whole another entity that must act on what it reports. You could even consider an analogy of hacking the camera to ignore certain incidents to correspond to “irregularities” in certain gameplay design.

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Wait … the sites will appear soon.

… But no reason to look forward, they will likely pay out nothing but in loot and salvage (have fun with the distribution and ninja looters)… forgot the new asteroids for some mining fun.

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This is what you get when your game is driven by market forces. If some activity is depressing the market from what the game developers intended then it’ll get nerfed.

It’s less about balance and more about preventing market distortions that will break gameplay.

Personally I am treating these starting weeks like the first invasions of Sansha, when we had live events and no idea of fittings etc, just show up and open fire.

Yeah, I am hoping for a few things to fix this current state to ship and stabilize but not too much, I like a bit of randomness and chaos. But then I also like to see the nija looters get some comeuppance every now and again. Like back when they used to loiter about to scoop the bpc when the Mom died in Sansha raids.

m

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Well said! WTM is a GATEWAY to the game by providing a decent isk return for hours of effort.

I counter-nerfed CCP today by declining to extend a subscription. Hit them in their wallet to best get attention.

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Oh now, just you hush. Ninja salvaging is an honorable profession. In fact, once we’ve voted you back onto the CSM, I expect you to advocate for the ability to tractor yellow wrecks. (Now, that would scare the horses.)

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Back to the good ole daze! When a nube could earn millions working a fixed NPC site with the recently gifted Noctis. No one creating the wrecks minded, they were collecting the bounties afterall. This got nerfed by all the incompetents screaming loudly.

The system nowdays sucks, the wrecks are nearly always abandoned and lost, since a runner makes more isk in another mission rather than cleaning up. Put a time limit on tractoring, 50% of the time to expire to the ‘final shot’ and the other 50% to everyone (wrecks go blue).

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And return the criminal counter upon those, stealing your salvage.

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This I actually agree with, use it or lose it ( say 1 hr of yellow then it goes blue). And as an added flare? Blue wrecks show to combat probes.

m

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Sure

I could live without farmfest like incursions are no sites please provide rewards for rats where you find them keep em moving and challenging for bots and or input broadcasters to track down.

if this is nrfing incursion when is the price of plex going to drop?

+1 on WTM being a gateway drug. WTM was my first experience of fleet combat and an excellent way to learn. The repetition being an advantage when trying to understand all that goes into anchoring, shooting the right targets and trying to remember your drones.

Although I no longer run incursions, I hope your play style isn’t destroyed.

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Maximus o7

Just here to support this well written piece.

C’mon CCP…

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Well said FC.

CCP add whatever content you want but leave incursions alone, put the spawn rate back the way it was and allow us to pick our content instead of forcing it on us.

  • 1 sub until fixed!
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DO what you want with new content just give us our HS Incursions back CCP!

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