My corp is transitioning back to Cascade Imminent. So I'm in the "24h" transition phase. The good news is I'm pretty much ready to head back to 0.0. The bad news is that as a space holding alliance [FAIL] suffers from the usual constant annoyance wardecs of people looking for cheap kills in Jita. And since I don't have an incursion alt (defined as a character with enough skills to run in good incursion fleets), this will pretty much put paid to my ability to run incursions for the foreseeable future. It says something about incursions that I had very serious thoughts about dropping corp and either running solo or forming an incursion focused corp. Only the thought that my gut tells me they are due for a pretty significant nerf soon swayed the decision towards staying in a null sec corp.
The problem for all the Incursion haters is that the truth is most of the serious incursion fleets usually include a fair seasoning of 0.0 pilots. Null sec alliance leaders probably hate the damn things since they seriously reduce the attraction of null sec as a whole. Heck look at me. I KNOW I can make more isk more easily by staying in high sec and running incursions. Since I didn't have the ships the join PvP fleets after I unsubscribed my alts for the summer and returned after Crucible, I didn't have any problem justifying doing incursions. And I was right. I'm heading back to 0.0 with a carrier that can move my PvP ships from high sec to 0.0 bases and staging systems. I would not be able to afford this by now had I stayed in 0.0 or gone back to it right after becoming active again. And therein lies the quandary for null sec alliances. Null sec alliances need bodies for the fleets they run to protect their space. No bodies, and the fleets don't happen. No fleets and pretty soon you don't have any space. The alliances need this space for it's T2 moon goo and renters. The grunt pilots though are just looking for better income than in high sec and possibly some fleet action. Or vis versa, some fleet action with some better income than high sec to afford the shiny ships fleet actions call for.
The call of "Fleet up to defend your space" rings rather hollow when "your" really means "the alliances" and from the income point of view it's rather shit compared to incursions especially since the sanctum nerf. The worse thing from the point of view of the alliance leaders is that this affects the "mid level" grunts the most. The guys senior enough to fly the fleet ships but not senior enough to have a vested interest in the alliance's space.
Couple that with the 0.0 alliance influence on the CSM and CCP's stated interest in getting people to move to 0.0 (It's like herding cat's isn't it?) and you get "incoming nerf". When I don't know, but it's going to happen. Heck I suspect we'll see them move most if not all the high sec incursions to low sec. That'll make the pirates happy.
Incursions as they stand are probably a rather large failure of design. What they should have done is designed high sec incursions aimed at a fleet of 10-20-40 2-4mil sp pilots with apropriate levels of rewards for those levels. Aim the low sec ones to to need Logistics ship support and aim the 0.0 ones to need logistic support with serious dps. Then there's the problem of targeting 0.0 incursions, I would have made them smaller but more spread out and they would concentrate on "developed" constellations (i.e. make them 3 systems only (VG-AS-HQ) and spread them out more and have more of em running simultaneously (have 6-10 of em run simultaneously) so that it's not a twice a year experience for null sec pilots (which it currently is for those run in null sec). Seriously: as a null sec pilot how many times have you run a null sec incursion? I think goons and russians get like half of them - if you're a smaller entity they're a once in a blue moon thing you can mostly ignore. I'd have the 3 system null sec incursions run for half the time so that they bounce around null sec more.
That would be more balanced. Is it going to happen like that? Probably not. Sad.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
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1) reduce incursion payouts for VG sites
2) AS and HQ sites are probably ok, due to the much longer time to complete and difficulty maintaining a large enough fleet
3) reduce the time that the incursion takes to change to 'withdawing', so that it is 24 hours after 1st time the incursion goes 100% blue
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There, that solves the incursion ISK problem. The important problem is that null does not feed the grunts. Oh, there's plenty of ISK in null, but the primary, best sources of it flows not to individual grunts, but directly into the coffers of the moon holding corps.
You want more grunts to defend your 0.0 space? Make sure more than a trickle of moon-goo ISK gets into their hands.
You want CTAs to be well attended? pay for kills or attendance during the CTAs.
Piles of ISK is generated in null each day, every day. you want more hands in null, grease a few palms.
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