History of Incursions: Difference between revisions

{{Incursions links}}

The '''history of Incursions''' is long and storied. Game balance changes by CCP over the years have both indirectly and directly changed the shape of Incursions and the groups that run them.

== Timeline ==

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== January 2011 - Introducing Incursions ==

Initially CCP ran Incursions as global events, until they were finalized and added as to New Eden in the point-release for Incursion on January 18th, followed by a few patches.

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|If you like ships with lots of spikes that fly around and try to kill players, you’re in luck. Patch day is coming soon, which means you will all get to play with the Incursion feature shortly. On January 18, we will softly rub the hamsters in the server room till they fall asleep, prod them sweetly with foreign objects, and, if we’re lucky, they’ll wake up again with brand new content later that day. (If they don’t, we’ll have to place the largest order ever for very small coffins. Sadface).

CCP Soundwave}}

{{quote|

* Sansha's Nation is finalizing incursions, and they are making their last preparations. Get ready!

* New implants and capital weapons relating to Incursions are available.}}

{{quote|Incursions opened Tuesday, January 25, 2011, and we’re seeing tremendous activity in the constellations. I’d like to thank everyone who has tried this feature, regardless if you made it out of the sites alive or not. As with most other features, tossing thousands of players at them means that some things break or need tweaking, and Incursions are no different. Yesterday, we deployed the first set of changes:

That said, we’d like to continue making tweaks, fixes and balance changes. The first step is ironing out the bugs and most critical issues so we can get a realistic picture of how the feature works. From there on, we’ll evaluate the balance and gameplay, and make changes if needed. With the fixes made today, actually completing an Incursion should be considerably easier, and we’ll be monitoring the progression over the weekend. Most of us will either participating on our player characters until we run out of drakes/money, or will be on our dev characters observing.}}

{{quote|

'''Incursions?'''

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|

'''Exploration & Deadspace'''

* Adjusted Incursion site contribution to give slightly less influence. We also adjusted the influence regain in low- security and null security, to make sure they can be completed.}}

{{quote|

'''NPCs'''

* Drones set to 'aggressive' were getting confused and not engaging Sansha ships. Drones have now realized that Sansha are not friendly and engage accordingly.}}

{{quote|

'''Incursions'''

* Incursion Encounters reward graphs featured the label 'Reward payout ratio' which has been re-named with the more accurate label 'Reward Multiplier'.}}

{{quote|

'''Exploration, Deadspace and Incursions'''

While many of the changes were warranted and for the most part, reasonable, too many things were changed at once. The end result turned out to be a classic example of how hard it is to predict the outcome when you're making too many changes at once.

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|Incursions have been a hot topic on the forums, so Team Five 0 decided to see what we could do to shake things up a bit.  After collecting a lot of valuable feedback from you guys, we decided to give the spawns more variety, without significantly altering the difficulty of any one spawn.  This was done by grouping the NPCs into waves, and moving the trigger to spawn the next wave from an individual NPC to the group as a whole. This will mean that you now need to kill the whole wave to trigger the next one, rather than just specific NPCs.

** Spawn triggers moved from individual NPCs to the group as a whole.

** Lowered the rewards from Vanguard sites by 10%.}}

==== Changes ====

CCP didn't tell us anywhere near all the things they changed, glossing over many highly relevant details in their devblogs and patch notes. Below is a list of some of the actual changes:

== June 2012 - Balance restored ==

Balance was restored, somewhat, after CCP reverted some of their changes as well as finetuned some of their changes from '''Escalation''' back in April. Vanguard communities, including ours, gained renewed strength and bounced back.

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|With the Escalation to Inferno release we made several changes to Incursions. We promised to monitor the result of these changes and we stand to our promise: after evaluating both your feedback and our internal metrics, we have decided to roll back a few changes. With so many tweaks made at once, it became very difficult to determine the success of each individual change. We have rolled back the following changes:

* Lowering the reward for vanguard sites by 10%

* The system influence

This is now available for testing on Singularity and we will continue to monitor the feedback closely.}}

{{quote|

'''Incursions'''

** Lowering the reward for vanguard sites by 10%.

** Increasing the system influence change rate.}}

==== Changes ====

Just like with the first set of changes back in April, CCP left out a lot. Additionally the following was changed:

== February 2013 ==

The introduction of info panels came with some changes to the Incursions info panel. The fancy icons were replaced by drab, grey icons.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|

'''Info panels'''

== June 2013 ==

Odyssey brought some changes to modules that indirectly affected Incursions. The new hacking minigame was never introduced for Incursions, they still run the same old system (so you still use multiple data analyzers to increase your hacking speed).

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|

'''Modules'''

* Navy Battleships:

** Increasing requirement to fly Navy Battleships previously known as Tier 1 (Armageddon Navy Issue, Scorpion Navy Issue, Dominix Navy Issue, Typhoon Fleet Issue) from level1 to level2 to make it consistent with other navy ships.}}

{{quote|

What are the impacts of all of this?

* Tech 2 specialization will be faster, or at least have more related skills. Training for a tech 2 hull requirement will give you skills you need to fly the vessel you aim for instead of being unrelated time-sinks.

* The ORE ship progression will no longer be inconsistent and will offer two paths of progression: mining hulls with the Venture, then the Mining Barges, or industrial support vessels with the Noctis, Orca and Rorqual. As a side-effect, the Orca will be significantly easier to train for.}}

== July 2013 - Battlecruisers retired ==

The changes from Odyssey sunk in and we realized that it was simply not realistic to continue dragging battlecruisers around.

==== Changes ====

The reduced efficiency of '''Tracking Enhancers''' pushed some ships and fits that barely had the range needed before, to a place where they simply didn't measure up anymore. Combined with the reduced skill requirements for battleships, the community made the decision to finally retire battlecruisers once and for all.

Battlecruisers never really measured up since Escalation back in April 2012, but we bent over backwards trying to be as inclusive as we possibly could. The changes in Odyssey was simply the last straw that broke the camel's back.

==== Effect on the community ====

At the end of the day not much changed. We didn't have many battlecruisers and the training time pre-Odyssey for battlecruiser pilots was about the same as the post-Odyssey trains for a proper battleship.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|

'''Modules'''

*** 3% bonus to strength of Siege Warfare and Skirmish Warfare links.

}}

==== Changes ====

The changes dropped the efficiency of warfare links, most noticeably the web ranges as well as an overall reduction in the efficiency of the shield boosts.

== November 2013 ==

With Rubicon came some changes to Marauders that made some of them lose their webbing role.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|

'''Ship Balancing'''

** Sensor strength: 11 Ladar

** Signature radius: 360(-65)}}

== January 2014 - Accolades ==

{{quote|

I am not a man of lots of words. There are two people who have spent a huge amount of their time for building up and maintaining Eve Uni's Incursion community. It is my honour to award them Eve Uni's [[EVE_University_Medals#The_Star_of_Outstanding_Service|Star of Outstanding Service]]. This is one of Eve Uni's highest awards, which we only hand out for very special contributions.

== February 2014 - The world is changing ==

CCP made various updates on the backend of the database, which had some effects on things like asteroid belts, incursion spawns etc.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|

'''Database backend'''

==== Effect on the community ====

== March 2014 - Incursions on Dotlan ==

==== New features on Dotlan ====

{{quote|CCP FoxFour announced yesterday on the forum that there’s a CREST point incoming for getting information and states about incursions. Yeah! Finally! It’s been a long time since I’ve asked for exactly one of those information layers that are public available on the ingame map but not accessible outside.

   

With the ability to track incursions changes and influence over time you’ll get a nice history about all the incursions, where they happend and how they progressed over time. I only have to decide in which section I’ll pack the incursions stuff into, so I don’t overload the navigation bar or the site structure.}}

{{quote|CCP deployed the CREST endpoint for Sansha Incrusions today. I updated the site! Lets see how the progress tracking of the sansha influence looks like. On sisi there wasn’t so much activity.

   

   

Links:

== August 2014 - Scout sites revamped ==

In an attempt to bring scout sites back into the fold they received a substantial revamp. Changes were also done to the spawn mechanics of assault sites, as a stopgap measure for fixing the [[Nation Consolidation Network]] assault site. They also lowered the respawn time of Incursions, making them spawn again at a faster pace.

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|

'''Reducing the re-spawn time of Incursions'''

This change will only effect null sec Vanguard sites for now. Once this goes live we will monitor closely and see if this actually makes a difference in the way we want. If everything goes well we will consider applying the change to other sites as well and possibly low sec. If everything goes horribly wrong we may also revert the change. For now though we are looking forward to seeing how this plays out on TQ come Hyperion's release.}}

{{quote|

'''Missions & NPCs'''

* Incursion Scout sites have been rebalanced to be more in line with the risk vs reward of the other Incursion sites. Sansha presence has been increased within them and they now pay out 3,500,000 ISK and 400 LP.}}

==== Changes ====

Besides the announced changes there were some minor changes:

* The preferred orbit for the '''Antem Neo''', '''Vylade Dien''' and the '''Yulai Crus Cerebi''' was reduced to 60km instead of their usual 120 - 140km orbit.

* The Sansha rats also seem to stay on target for a longer period of time, changing targets a little less often.

==== Effect on the community ====

Overall these changes has little to no practical effect on the Incursion Community as a whole, or for the Eve University Community.

== December 2014 - Command Ships unlocked ==

Until this patch the Command Ships weren't treated like Battlecruiser-hulls in terms of being able to take the acceleration gate to the cruiser-side of the [[Nation Consolidation Network]] sites, but now they are and can freely take either gate.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|  

'''Gameplay:'''

* The ‘Gate to Residential Areas’ acceleration gate in the Nation Consolidation Network Incursion site now allows Command ships to use it}}

==== Effect on the community ====

This opens up a few more options for doing [[Nation Consolidation Network]] sites. Instead of having to rely on Strategic Cruisers we can also bring Command Ships as well, but unlike Strategic Cruisers the Command Ships can take any of the two gates. This makes it a little easier to split the fleet more effectively.

== March 2015 - Incursions on Shadowlauch ==

== July 2015 - Null security incursion incentive strengthened ==

From the [https://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-aegis-sovereignty Aegis Sovereignty v1.0] patch notes (July 14th, 2015):

{{quote|Nullsec and Lowsec versions of the Assault, Headquarters and Mothership Incursion sites now allow 50% more players before rewards begin to decrease.}}

==== Changes ====

Total payout for an incursion fleet in low and null security space rose by up to 50% due to the extra pilots, who also contribute to faster, safer and more flexible fleets that make even more ISK/hour than before.

== September 2015 - Empowered capsuleers ==

With the '''Vanguard''' release, new capsuleers started off with roughly +350,000 more skillpoints than before (400k instead of 50k), which not only allows them to use a wide variety of modules from the get go, but also saves them the trouble of getting basic fitting and support skills injected and trained to a decent level.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|'''Skills:'''

* All new characters will now start with approximately 400,000 skillpoints rather than 50,000.}}

==== Effect on the community ====

The role of [[Roles in Incursions#Hacker/Scout|hacker/scout]] can now be performed by anyone since new capsuleers start with {{sk|Hacking|I}} trained. The additional skills also reduced several trains, such as '''minimum skills''' for both [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Minimum skills for damage dealers|damage dealers]] and [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Minimum skills for logistics|logistics]] but also for [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Valet_alt|valet alts]] and [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Orca|Orca alts]], allowing people to get those skills trained a little faster.

With the '''Frostline''' expansion CCP made various changes to remote repairing, which simplified made no change to the overall damage repaired by these modules, but practically made them repair for more but cycle much more slowly. They also introduced falloff to various modules, including the remote repair modules and increased the grid size by a magnitude of 32.

==== Patches, devblogs & forum posts ====

From the devblog [https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/grid-sizes-you/ Grid Sizes & You] (December 8th, 2015):

* Shield logi frigate (T1 and T2): 300% Falloff role bonus

* Carriers, Supercarriers, Rorqual: 40% Optimal and Falloff per level}}

==== Changes ====

Practically these changes had the following effects:

* The increased cycle time of remote armour repairers meant you took 20% more damage before reps landed, buffer became a little bit more important for armour communities.

* The increased cycle time of shield had little to no effect for incursions.

==== Effect on the community ====

After a period of adjustment most things returned to normal. This changed things somewhat, but on a grand scheme it made very little difference for how we run incursions or the effectiveness of logistics.

== August 2016 ==

Minor adjustments were made to fix some gates locking capitals out of the end of the [[True Power Provisional Headquarters]] site.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-118.7-release Patch notes for YC118.7 release] (August 4th):

{{quote|

Corrected an issue that prevented capital ships from progressing beyond the first room of the True Power Provisional Headquarters incursion site.}}

==== Effect on the community ====

Very little, as that particular site was the least favourite headquarter site to begin with.

== November 2016 - On Grid Boosts ==

CCP brought off grid boosts on grid.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/patch-notes-for-eve-online-ascension Patch notes for EVE Online: Ascension] (November 15th)

== August 2017 ==

Changes were made to tighten up the requirements to get paid for a site, it's no longer enough to simply be in the fleet anymore; you have to actually participate in the site somehow.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://community.eveonline.com/news/patch-notes/patch-notes-for-august-2017-release Patch notes for August 2017 release] (August 16th):

==== Effect on the community ====

Alpha clone pilots could now pilot battleships, and most incursion groups tweaked their entry fits to accommodate the skill set they were allowed. The Uni's Incursion Community replaced T2 sensor boosters and heavy shield maintenance bots on its minimum fits with meta and medium versions, respectively.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/p9aexk/patch-notes-for-eve-online-into-the-abyss Patch notes for EVE Online: Into the Abyss] (May 29th, 2018)

{{quote|Abyssal Deadspace is now available to capsuleers across New Eden. For a full overview of this feature see this Dev Blog.

}}

When a Mutaplasmid is used on a module, both the Mutaplasmid and input module are consumed and an Abyssal Tech module is created

Mutaplasmids come in three quality variations:

Each Mutaplasmid can only be used on a specific corresponding module group. The following groups have been added:

Mutaplasmids alter attributes unpredictably by a percent value that falls within a specific range described on the Mutaplasmid

{{quote|Entropic Disintegrators:

Entropic Disintegrators are a new base weapon system used by Triglavians.

[...]  

Entropic Disintegrators use a new ammo type called Exotic Plasma Charge

==== Changes ====

* The addition of a competing form of highsec, high end PvE, that didn't require a group to run or be in any particular location, but could earn a similar or better amount of ISK in loot drops

* [[Mutaplasmids]] enabled the {{Sh|Vindicator}} to have even higher strength webs and/or better range

==== Effect on the community ====

== November 2018 ==

==== Effects on the community ====

Given the nonexistance of faction and officer sinks (which would later be added during the [[Triglavian Invasion]]), abyssal rolled Entropic Radiation Sinks became one of the only ways for Leshaks to improve their damage output beyond skill training and a rate of fire implant.

== December 2018 - Reboot of Community ==

Not long after Cassiel stepped down, the Uni's Incursion Community was able to get back on its feet. A wave of new blood within the Uni that was interested in Incursions, paired with many old timers like Cassiel to fly the more SP intensive roles, were able to break past the critical threshold needed to run fleets regularly once again. Within a couple of months, Ian Tucenghi was appointed as the new Incursion Coordinator, with John Parmelee as assistant coordinator. The community was back with weekly forms and fleets, a pace that has roughly been maintained to this day as of May 2020.

The Invasion update reduced the number of foci in highsec from three to one amidst the [[Triglavian Invasion]], while also allowing faction, storyline, and officer guns and launchers to use T2 ammo.

==== Patches ====

{{quote|All Tech II Ammunition can now be loaded into all Faction, Storyline, and Officer weapon variations}}

==== Effect on the community ====

The reduction to a single highsec focus was a significant hit to highsec incursion communities, as it now mandated a wait time of 12-36 hours during which no incursions could be done in highsec. Further, this forced HQ groups to share a single system, limiting how many groups could run at once.

As for the ammo changes, they did not appear to affect incursions much. Using T2 ammo still requires the skills to use T2 guns anyways, and T2 guns deal more damage than faction guns after the damage bonus from the specialization skill. Faction entropic disintegrators are a partial exception, as their higher damage multiplier to the T2 disintegrator means that disintegrator specialization V is needed before the T2 gun outpaces it. A niche benefit of this change is that Nightmares can equip faction beam lasers that use less capacitor to mitigate traditional cap issues that would otherwise be solved by swapping to pulses. This can be useful in groups that may neither have combat capacitor available nor run fast enough to make low capacitor sustainability a non-issue, such as the Uni's.

The hacking site of an Override Transfer Array was changed to use the minigame that all other cans had used since 2013.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/pxf1u0/patch-notes-for-september-2019-release Patch notes for September 2019 release] (September 10th, 2019)

{{quote|The Logistics Control Array structures within the Override Transfer Array incursion site have been updated to use the hacking minigame instead of the old random chance mechanic.}}

==== Changes ====

* Instead of using the old hacking system, where multiple analyzers could each be used on a single can for a chance of completion, the can in the Override Transfer Array was now an intermediate difficulty can (yellow core, 70 coherence), with no penalty for failure.

==== Effect on the community ====

Hacking the can in the Override Transfer Array became harder to do quickly. What was once something that could be done with a cycling of four analyzers now needed active attention to the minigame board, and a bad setup could force restarts. This made it especially harder to multibox the hack and an ongrid ship at the same time. While the Uni's Incursion Community still runs the hack, some groups have opted to forgo the hack completely and focus fire through the entire site.

== October 2019 - Warp Drives Active ==

CCP gives all cruiser, battlecruiser, and battleship size hulls a significant warp speed buff. In the meantime, Emerging Conduits, a significantly easier version of [[Triglavian Invasion (Chapter 1 & 2)|Triglavian Invasion]] Minor Conduits, were introduced to all areas of high security space.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/pyuth5/patch-notes-for-october-2019-release patch notes for the October 2019 Release] (October 15th, 2019)

Hail S, M, and L ammo reduced tracking speed is now 25% (previously 30%)}}

A small nerf to the Machariel (after a uniform warp speed increase the month before) and a small buff to T2 autocannon ammo didn't make a significant impact on Incursions.

== February 2020 ==

CCP successfully implements the anti-''sponging'' mechanic that was attempted in [[#August 2017|August 2017]], and tiericides away meta capacitor transmitters from Incursions.

==== Patches ====

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/q5jak4/patch-notes-for-february-2020-release Patch notes for February 2020 release] (February 11th, 2020)

New attributes for changed modules:

}}

==== Changes ====

* Pilots in an Incursion fleet now must do some damage or repping in site in order to qualify for payout

* The transfer amount for large capacitor transmitters has been normalized at the meta 3 level, a nerf from the meta 4 capacitor transmitter amounts.

==== Effect on the community ====

With the anti-sponging change now working as intended, padding a fleet with members to sponge a payout would now require each character to do some damage or repping in addition to the previous requirements of being uncloaked on grid. In fact, it made it slightly easier to include ore dropping or secondary boosting alts in fleet without having to worry about them taking pay away from other pilots. This change did not cause significant issues in of itself, but the update it came with did break contesting for about a week. In a situation with multiple fleets contesting a site, nobody would be paid at the end. That means that groups that would normally contest other groups steered clear until this was fixed.

From the [https://www.eveonline.com/article/q8tteh/patch-notes-for-18-04-release Path notes for 18.04 Release] (April 15th, 2020)

{{quote|

''[...]''

''[...]''

==== Changes ====

==== Changes ====

* The third chapter of the [[Triglavian Invasion]] begins, with Incursions not affecting any constellation with an invaded system

** Triglavian captured systems lost CONCORD protection, while Minor Victory systems posed the risk of scramming roaming fleets

Due to the third chapter of Invasions and Incursions were kept distant such that the two never overlapped, the Invasion did not have much of a direct effect initially. It just meant that pilots choosing to take part had to take precautions when moving. Similarly, the shield hardener changes did not have a major effect, since it did not Pithum deadspace multispectrum hardeners, which were the line prominently used for bling shield tank due to higher resist over its Gistum counterparts. The Veldspar in NMCs were not treated as anything more than cosmetic by groups, so its removal also did not affect Incursion groups at-large.

[[Command Ships]] were broken up such that each hull became more specialized for boost strength and firepower, or for strong, long range boosts and survivability.

* The Eos received trait changes to give more emphasis on the use of sentry drones

Boosting roles for Incursion groups had already been focused around the Claymore and Sleipnir for shield and the Eos for armor, due to the importance of Skirmish bursts to increase ship speed, mitigate damage through lower sig, or increase web range. This update did not shift that paradigm, though the buffs to tank and targeting was a nice quality of life change.

The system of Niarja falls to the Triglavian Collective, causing major ramifications on highsec [[Topology|topology]] and Incursion moves.

The number of jumps from Amarr to Jita while staying in effective highsec increased from 10 to 45, causing significantly longer travel times when going between Amarr and Caldari/Gallente focuses. This has led to some people buying a second set of ships to avoid the move.

* Battleship range buffs from April 2020 are backported to Marauders, and their weak sensor strength shored up

This update caused the biggest shift in the Incursion ship meta since Into the Abyss. No longer were the [[Vindicator]], [[Nightmare]] (for shield/VGs), or [[Leshak]] (for HQs) top tier anymore. Marauders could now exceed all of them with ease. Even the Leshak - the crown holder of DPS since it was introduced - was now left in the dust by ships that could deal 2,5-3,5k DPS and do so immediately. As such, people with the skills and ISK to fly the gun-based Marauders flocked to them immediately. The Marauders went from an expensive HAW Dread wannabe to a force of its own, with its prices doubling from ~1B ISK to 2B ISK, though this was also commensurate with a "Starvation Phase" of minerals and an industry rework by CCP.

Eventually, groups changed their strategies to fully take advantage of a Marauder's bastion cycles. Even though the ships can't be repaired while in bastion, Incursion rats' use of rigid one-minute aggro cycles means that it is easy to time bastion activations such that a ship is never aggroed while in bastion.  

Vanguard groups, not having to deal with as much DPS as the HQ groups, could instead active tank with armor or shield using a deadspace armor repairer or shield booster. So long as waves are killed at a decent click, this allowed for Marauders to remain in bastion even while aggroed. Not needing a MWD and MJD, that meant that shield groups (e.g. the Uni) could apply an extra tracking computer and sensor booster onto their Marauders, improving their ability to shoot the frigates that comprise the majority of Vanguard Incursion rats. Thanks to this, a fleet largely comprised of T1 ships with one or two Marauders could still clear sites much faster due than a comparable fleet with pirate BSs due to the Marauders' outstanding DPS output. This, combined with other doctrine changes, brought the Uni from a group that could expect a baseline of 10 minute sites (60 M ISK/hr) to one that could reliably reach a baseline of 6 minute sites (100 M ISK/hr).

[[Category:Incursions]]