User:Cassiel Seraphim/Sandbox5

Timeline

Below is a timeline showing the various periods of Incursions as events, as well as highlights of important dates regarding our community.

"Introducing Incursions" January 2011 |

"Balance restored" June 2012 |

"Battlecruisers retired" July 2013 |

| April 2012 "The Dead Zone"

| November 2012 "Incursions wiki reborn"

History of Incursions

This is a collection of devblogs and patches documenting the history of Incursions and our community.

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

From the devblog The Sanshas Are Coming (January 14th, 2011):

“

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). One important note: If, on the 18th of January, you find yourself flying around New Eden unable to see any Incursions on the starmap, there is a good reason for it. Rather than just haphazardly throwing the content onto TQ, we’ll be opening it in what we hope is a spectacular-but-oh-so-carefully-staged manner, which means you won’t see it right away. Don’t panic - the spiky space zombies are still coming, but they’d rather jump out of a cake in lingerie, swinging assault rifles by the light of fireworks while singing whatever song space zombies sing, than simply “be there” when the server starts. Keep your eye open for events and just generally things being a little “out of place” following the Incursion deployment. Anyway, we’ve been working on the Incursion feature set for a while now, and I think I speak for the entire team when I say that I cannot wait for this to hit Tranquility. Incursions will bring you the latest in space-zombie technology, and we’ve put a lot of love into it. Enjoy! Toodles, CCP Soundwave

”

From the Patch Notes for Incursion 1.1.0 (January 18th, 2011):

“

Sansha's Nation is finalizing incursions, and they are making their last preparations. Get ready! CONCORD has set up a new LP store to reward players participating in Incursion. New implants and capital weapons relating to Incursions are available.

”

From the devblog Dear Incurserers(!) (January 28th, 2011):

“

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: Based on your feedback, we’ve cut the system control regain in half. That means Sanshas will regain control much slower than before. This is a first tweak of this value, and we’ll be monitoring the Incursions over the weekend to see if this was too much/too little. The journal, specifically the global report, was not updating properly. We’ve put in a fix that should make it update accurately. One of the things we found out initially was that sites were being kept “alive” for a long time after they were completed. The number of players in each system meant that you’d always have traffic going into sites, which means they didn’t de-spawn. Hopefully we’ve dealt with that problem by removing the beacon from overview when a site is completed. This should decrease the traffic going into completed sites. This, combined with optimization of the sites should mean the re-spawning of content is quicker and more graceful. 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.

”

From the Incursion 1.1.2 Patch Notes (January 27-28th, 2011):

“

Incursions? Based on feedback from the community, we have reduced the rate at which Sansha's regain control of the constellations. An issue where the journal was not updating properly has been fixed. Deepspace complex beacons have been changed and will disappear when a deepspace complex is completed. This should result in fewer empty deepspace complexes. FIXES Changed the Sansha NPC groups to automatically appear on the overview.

”

February - June 2011

Minor changes were made as CCP made fixes and fine-tuned some values.

Patches & devblogs

From the Incursion 1.2 Patch Notes (February 15th, 2011):

“

Exploration & Deadspace The Sansha Incursion sites no longer allow Rorquals to enter. NPC's Incursion sites are now taxed in the same manner as regular bounties. 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.

”

From the Incursion 1.4 Patch Notes (April 6th, 2011):

“

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.

”

From the Incursion 1.5 Patch Notes (May 19th, 2011):

“

Incursions The Incursion Global Report featured the label 'System Control', this has been renamed to the more accurate description 'Constellation Control'. Incursion Encounters reward graphs featured the label 'Reward payout ratio' which has been re-named with the more accurate label 'Reward Multiplier'.

”

From the Incarna Patch Notes (June 21st, 2011):

“

Exploration, Deadspace and Incursions Ihe Incursion site, Override Transfer Array, has been adjusted so that all NPCs warp away and despawn once the site has been completed. The Incursion site, Override Transfer Array, now correctly instructs pilots to hack into the arrays rather than destroy them. The journal will now update correctly on completion of an Incursion site.

”

April 2012 - The Dead Zone

In the Escalation patch CCP made many changes to Incursions. Perhaps too many, because things didn't turn out quite the way they expected.

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

From the devblog Carebearing 2.0:

“

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. As well as adjusting these triggers, we’ve also randomized the spawns based on feedback that Incursions had become too predictable. Now, when you enter an Incursion you will no longer be able to predict every spawn. Feedback and our internal statistics also confirmed that Vanguard sites had an excessive reward-to-effort-ratio in comparison to other Incursion sites, so we have reduced their reward by 10% to keep them more in line with the compensation expected for this difficulty of site. This should also have the fortunate side-effect of increasing the length of Incursions in high security space.

”

From the Escalation to Inferno Patch Notes that has since been removed (April 24th, 2012):

“

Incursions Vanguard and Assault Sites have been revamped with the following changes: NPCs have been grouped into waves and groups have been randomized; this will prevent blitzing and increase the random element within the sites. 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:

• Timed spawns and most triggers were removed in favour of the static wave mechanics (except for the Override Transfer Array, see below).
• Completion triggers were changed, forcing you to kill off the entire wave before spawning the next one. On average this change alone doubled the completion times, halving the practical payout, which made the -10% payout reduction seem trivial.
• The Nation Commander Outpost sites now spawned Romis and Augas, in addition to the frigates.
• Assault sites in general had slightly less snipers and more brawlers, increasing the potential alpha of new waves, making them slightly more dangerous.
• The Nation Commander Stronghold has its spawns moved further out, some spawning 150-200km out.
• The Overwhelmed Civilian Facility had more ships in some waves, potentially spawning up to five Deltoles, which drastically improved Sansha's alpha on smaller ships like logistics, due to the increased number of target painters. This change was on top of the general change of increased ships per wave.
• The Override Transfer Array site had several changes, on top of the general ones, making it a proverbial mine-field.
  • The Logistics Control Arrays were moved further out, which made hacking harder and more time-consuming.
  • The Mara (logistics ship) was added to the list of ships spawning.
  • Two groups of Tamas spawned with one group of Tamas triggering an additional wave of Niarjas. This could easily lead to having up to ten or twelve Tamas and five Niarjas on grid, at the same time if you made even the slightest mistake. Those spawns would of course be on top of the regular Deltole, three Augas and five or six Eysturs.

Effect on the community

People avoided Override Transfer Array sites like the plague, rightfully so given the changes. Without a hacker, good offgrid boosters, superior firepower and preferably even three logistics, you pretty much rolled the dice on those sites, risking losses everytime you went in there. It was not uncommon for systems to be deserted, fleets docked up, when you ended up with nothing but Override Transfer Array sites, much like the Nation Consolidation Network sites did and still do for assaults.

In many ways, this was the point in time where people were forced to up the minimum requirement for Incursions. You could no longer get by simply by surviving, you had to be able to quickly trim the waves which required good damage projection and webs to get enough applied dps. Applied dps was no longer simply a measure of how fast you could do sites, it raised the bar to the point where fleets who were too slow simply got overrun and killed.

For us it meant that we had to be a lot harsher when it came to fleet compositions. We stopped taking ill suited ships and badly fit ones, put limits on how many battlecruisers we could safely carry in a fleet etc. This led to less fleets, alumni flying with other groups and many people simply went back to level four missions for ISK, as they were actually more reliable and rewarding.

Many who didn't run Incursions, as well as some who refused to see the reality of what these changes brought, objected to upping the requirements. Quite a bit of drama ensued, people branding our community as elitist. To ensure we had a safe environment for people to learn and make mistakes in, we had to raise our standards.

It took a while, but eventually they came to see, just as we had, that this was the only way to go forward.

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

From the devblog Incursions Update (June 12th, 2012):

“

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 means the reward for vanguard sites will increase to the pre-escalation rate. We feel the iterations made to NPC grouping and triggers per spawn are enough to keep the isk at a sensible level. With Escalation, we decreased the influence gain per site as well as increasing the length of Incursions. The initial reason for these modifications was that the sites were being completed so quickly that the influence bar never decreased. However, these changes combined made getting the influence bar under control an almost impossible task rather than just the challenging one we had hoped for. This is now available for testing on Singularity and we will continue to monitor the feedback closely.

”

From the Inferno 1.1 Patch Notes (June 25th, 2012):

“

Incursions The following changes to Incursions introduced in Escalation to Inferno have been reverted: 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:

• Spawns were rebalanced (for the most part brought down to a reasonable amount).
• The Override Transfer Array changes were mostly reverted.
  • The Mara Paleo spawn was removed.
  • The trigger spawning additional Niarjas when shooting the Tamas was removed.
  • The delayed Tama spawn was removed.
  • The Logistics Control Array was moved much closer to the warp-in, making hacking easier.
  • This site now behaved much like the rest with static wave mechanics.

Effect on the community

Balance was restored, more or less, with these changes. Things became manageable again and the EVE University Incursion Community (as all the other communities) began running again on a regular basis.

Sites still took much longer to complete than before, due to the increased number of ships to destroy. Practically the income gap before and after the patches started closing as communities figured out better ways to achieve higher applied dps.

November 2012 - Incursions wiki reborn

The uniwiki-pages on Incursions was mostly out of date and incomplete. Much of the knowledge built up within the community or experiences shared by people outside our community was lost when people left EVE or the community.

A huge effort was made to rewrite the whole section on Incursions on the uniwiki as well as adding more information to it, in order to both preserve knowledge gained and in order to give people a good repository of information regarding Incursions.

In November 2012, a dozen new Incursions-related pages were published on the uniwiki, grouped together with a portal-like structure to ensure that people who came looking for information about Incursions would not only find it but also be guided to all the relevant pages.

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

From the Retribution 1.1 Patch Notes (February 19th, 2013):

“

Info panels Updated the Incursion Panel to make it consistent with other panels regarding visual style of icons, fonts and colors

”

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

From the Odyssey 1.0 Patch Notes (June 4th, 2013):

“

Modules Tracking Enhancers have had their Falloff and Optimal Range bonuses reduced. Large Energy Turrets have been tweaked to be easier to use as a whole: Capacitor needs on Large Pulse Laser Turrets has been decreased by 10%. Capacitor needs on Large Beam Laser Turrets has been decreased by 20%. Ships All Navy Ships have had their Rig Calibration increased from 350 to 400. All ship passive resistance bonuses have been decreased from 5% to 4% per level to make active tanking more viable in combat. Ship Skill Requirement Changes Battleships: All Racial Battleship skills now require Racial Battlecruiser at 3 instead of Racial Cruiser at 4. All Racial Battleship skill requirements have also been reduced level1 as they are no longer balanced by tiers. 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.

”

From the devblog The great ship skill changes of summer 2013:

“

What are the impacts of all of this? Cross-racial training will be slowed down for sub-capitals, as a pilot will now have racial Destroyers and Battlecruiser skills. However, since prerequisites have been lowered from 4 to 3 to hop into the next class, reaching a ship size you interested into will be faster. While this doesn’t mean much on its own as you need support skills to be effective, it follows ship balancing motto that no vessel in EVE should override another in role, or required another to be mastered to unlock it. Cross-racial training will be faster for Capital Ships, so you can more quickly adapt to your corporation / alliance fleet policy when you reach that level. 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.

September 2013

Odyssey brought quite a few changes that affected Incursions. The medium turret rebalance gave strategic cruisers a little boost in efficiency, warfare links lost some of their potency and command ships now benefit from bonuses to two racial warfare links with the new ship bonuses (accompanied with brand new faction mindlink implants).

From the Odyssey 1.1 Patch Notes (September 3rd, 2013):

“

Modules All Medium Railguns get the following changes: 15% increased rate of fire (fires more often). 15% increased damage multiplier. 15% decreased tracking speed. All Medium Beams get the following changes: 25% increased damage multiplier. 10% decreased tracking speed. All Medium Artillery get the following changes: 10% increased rate of fire. 5% decreased tracking speed. Warfare links (other than mining links) can no longer be activated inside a starbase forcefield . Powergrid need of all warfare links modules decreased by 100. Significant changes have been made to the strengths of bonuses provided by Warfare Link modules: All defensive (Siege and Armored) links: T1: 4.8%. T2: 6%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 25.9%. Former max bonus: 35%. Information Warfare: Electronic Superiority bonuses to ECM and Target Painters: T1: 6.4%. T2: 8%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 34.5%. Former max bonus: 35%. Information Warfare: Electronic Superiority bonuses to Tracking Disruptors and Sensor Damps: T1: 4%. T2: 5%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 21.5%. Former max bonus: 21%. Information Warfare - Recon Operation: T1: 6.4%. T2: 8%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 34.5%. Former max bonus: 35%. Information Warfare - Sensor Integrity: T1: 9.6%. T2: 12%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 51.75%. Former max bonus: 53%. Skirmish Warfare - Evasive Maneuvers: T1: 6.4%. T2: 8%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 34.5%. Former max bonus: 35%. Skirmish Warfare - Interdiction Maneuvers: T1: 6.4%. T2: 8%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 34.5%. Former max bonus: 53%. Skirmish Warfare - Rapid Deployment: T1: 5.6%. T2: 7%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 30.2%. Former max bonus: 35%. Mining Foreman - Laser Optimization and Harvester Capacitor: T1: 6%. T2: 7.5%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 42.2%. Former max bonus: 42.2%. Mining Foreman - Field Enhancement: T1: 13.6%. T2: 17%. Max bonus per link with all modifiers: 95.7%. Former max bonus: 95%. The Information Warfare: Sensor Integrity link will now provide its bonus to both sensor strength and lock range. Ship balancing - Command Ships ABSOLUTION / DAMNATION: Role Bonus: Can fit up to three Warfare Link modules. Command Ships Bonuses: 3% bonus to strength of Armored Warfare and Information Warfare links. NIGHTHAWK / VULTURE: Role Bonus: Can fit up to three Warfare Link modules. Command Ships Bonuses: 3% bonus to strength of Siege Warfare and Information Warfare links. ASTARTE / EOS: Role Bonus: Can fit up to three Warfare Link modules. Command Ships Bonuses: 3% bonus to strength of Armored Warfare and Skirmish Warfare links. SLEIPNIR / CLAYMORE: Role Bonus: Can fit up to three Warfare Link modules. Command Ships Bonuses: 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.

• Federation Navy Stasis Webifiers dropped down to 18,83km (previously 20.78km)
• True Sansha Stasis Webifiers dropped down to 20,18km (previously 22.28km)
• Siege bonuses like cycle time reduction and resist bonuses dropped down to XX,XX% (formerly XX,XX%) while being increased to 18,75% (from).
• Solo boosters are now able to give both bonused siege and skirmish links with the appropriate implant bonuses, thanks to the new command ship bonuses and faction mindlink implants.

Effect on the community

While it was an overall loss of efficiency, the changes to command ships and offgrid boosts made it possible to give perfect boosts with just one offgrid booster. This had the fortunate side-effect that we had less of a problem ensuring that all fleets ran with a perfect booster backing them up.

The changes to medium guns also made some strategic cruisers and command ships more efficient. While they cannot match the power of pirate faction battleships, many of them end up performing slightly better than regular tech one battleships. This allowed us to open up our community to people who like flying those kind of ships, like wormhole dwellers or people who simply don't like large, bulky ships.

November 2013

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

Patches

From the Rubicon 1.0 Patch Notes (November 19th, 2013):

“

Ship Balancing Paladin Role Bonus: 100% bonus to large energy weapon damage, 100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams, 70% reduction in Micro Jump Drive reactivation delay Amarr Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to capacitor capacity, 7.5% bonus to Large Energy Turret optimal range (instead of 10% bonus to the velocity factor of stasis webifiers per level) Marauder Skill Bonus: 7.5% bonus to Armor Repair amount per level, 5% bonus to large energy turret damage per level Slot layout: 8H(+1), 4M, 7L; 4 turrets, 0 launchers Fittings: 16500 PWG (+3000), 530 CPU (+30) Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 6900(+100) / 8800(+600) / 8500(+1200) Shield resists: 0% EM / 62.5% EX / 47.5% KIN / 20% THERM Armor resists: 50% EM / 40% EX / 34.375% KIN / 35% THERM Capacitor (amount / recharge rate / cap/s) : 7500(+1875) / 1000s (+76.1s) / 8 cap/s (+2) Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 100 m/s(-5) / .119(-0.009) / 92,245,000(-12,955,000) / 15.22s Drones (bandwidth / bay): 25(-50) / 75 Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 91km(+10km) / 120(+39) / 10 Sensor strength: 12 Radar Signature radius: 420(-80) Kronos Role Bonus: 100% bonus to large hybrid weapon damage, 100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams, 70% reduction in Micro Jump Drive reactivation delay Gallente Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to large hybrid weapon damage, 10% bonus to large Hybrid Turret Falloff per level (instead of 10% bonus to the velocity factor of stasis webifiers per level) Marauder Skill Bonus: 7.5% bonus to Armor Repair amount per level, 7.5% bonus to large hybrid weapon tracking per level Slot layout: 8H(+1), 4M, 7L; 4 turrets, 0 launchers Fittings: 14000 PWG (+2000), 580 CPU (+30) Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 7300(+500) / 7900(+600) / 9500(+1300) Shield resists: 0% EM / 50% EX / 55% KIN / 30% THERM Armor resists: 50% EM / 10% EX / 51.25% KIN / 43.125% THERM Capacitor (amount / recharge rate / cap/s) : 6900(+1275) / 1150s (+226.1s) / 6 cap/s Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 105 m/s(-15) / .114(-0.0038) / 93480000(-8320000) / 14.77s Drones (bandwidth / bay): 50(-25) / 125 Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 90km(+3km) / 120(+39) / 10 Sensor strength: 13 Magnetometric Signature radius: 420(-80) Vargur Role Bonus: 100% bonus to large projectile weapon damage, 100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams, 70% reduction in Micro Jump Drive reactivation delay Minmatar Battleship Skill Bonus: 5% bonus to large projectile turret rate of fire, 10% bonus to large projectile turret falloff per level Marauder Skill Bonus: 7.5% bonus to Shield Boost amount, 7.5% bonus to large projectile turret tracking per level Slot layout: 8H(+1), 6M, 5L; 4 turrets, 0 launchers Fittings: 12900 PWG(+5000), 625 CPU Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 8300(+700) / 7300(+500) / 6900 (-400) Shield resists: 25% EM / 50% EX / 40% KIN / 30% THERM Armor resists: 70% EM / 10% EX / 25% KIN / 43.125% THERM Capacitor (amount / recharge rate / cap/s) : 6200(+575) / 1100s(+176.1s) / 5.6 cap/s (-0.4) Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 110 m/s(-20) / .112(-0.004) / 96520000(-9580000) / 14.99s Drones (bandwidth / bay): 50(-25) / 75 Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 81km(+6km) / 145(+60) / 10 Sensor strength: 11 Ladar Signature radius: 360(-65)

”