User:Cassiel Seraphim/Sandbox5
This is a collection of devblogs and patches documenting the history of Incursions.
Timeline
January 2011 | |
June 2012 | |
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| April 2012 |
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):
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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 |
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From the Patch Notes for Incursion 1.1.0 (January 18th, 2011):
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From the devblog Dear Incurserers(!) (January 28th, 2011):
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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. |
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From the Incursion 1.1.2 Patch Notes (January 27-28th, 2011):
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Incursions?
FIXES
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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):
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Exploration & Deadspace
NPC's
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From the Incursion 1.4 Patch Notes (April 6th, 2011):
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NPCs
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From the Incursion 1.5 Patch Notes (May 19th, 2011):
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Incursions
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From the Incarna Patch Notes (June 21st, 2011):
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Exploration, Deadspace and Incursions
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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:
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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. |
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From the Escalation to Inferno Patch Notes that has since been removed (April 24th, 2012):
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Incursions
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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
June 2012 - Incursions 2.1
Balance was restored, somewhat, after CCP reverted some of their changes as well as finetuned some of their changes from Escalation back in April.
Patches & devblogs
From the devblog Incursions Update (June 12th, 2012):
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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:
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. |
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From the Inferno 1.1 Patch Notes (June 25th, 2012):
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Incursions
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Changes
Just like with the first set of changes back in April, CCP left out a lot. Additionally the following was changes:
- Spawns were rebalanced (
- The Override Transfer Array also had its Mara Paleo' spawn removed and Logistics Control Array moved much closer to the warp-in.
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.
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):
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Info panels
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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):
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Modules
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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):
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Modules
Ship balancing - Command Ships
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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):
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Ship Balancing
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