Thank you very much everyone for placing me on CSM 6 and now on CSM 7 where I am currently serving as the Chairman! If you would like to contact me directly, do not hesitate to just send me an eve mail in game. Keep your eyes here and watch for new posts.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Incursions - Who, what, how?

Dr. Documentation does not live in Iceland.
Knowing that Incursions are is basically an evolution of what was started in wormholes, I'm naturally curious to see what this is all about first hand. But I guess that's really the crux of it for me - after all of the build up and such, aside from this old dev blog, I can't find anything definitive or 'official' that tells me how the feature is actually intended to work or why it's :awesome:. So, it seems we have a failure to properly document a feature! (Never happens, amirite?)

Is there an official high level overview of how this new feature actually works?  Do you have to kill X of the Sansha to "win"?  All that most people I've spoken to know so far is "ZOMG EVIL NPC'S CONCORD LAG CAREBEAR TEARS!!"  That sounds pretty awesome (to me) but it really doesn't tell us much about the feature itself.  Unless you are an RP'er and hate the damn evil Sansha, there's nothing really out there that ties all the info together for normal folk.

Documentation is what's needed, yeah?  I spent a good part of my morning talking to random people who were all scratching thier heads and not interested in investigating the evil Sansha hi-jinks because all they know about this feature is that a bunch of noobs are getting killed by NPCs in high-sec and there is a bug with CONCORD involving remote repping.

What CONCORD bug, you ask?  Well, apparently you get in a fleet for an Incursion site, wait for the RR chain to get going and then accidentally shoot someone in the fleet... everyone gets Concordokken'd!  Isn't that lovely? So until they change this somehow we're going to see nonsense like this:

Seriously, why doesn't CONCORD stop the Sansha?!
There seems to be precious little information on Incursions unless you actively go looking for it or rely on third-hand speculation / reports.  As far as I can make it out killing Sansha NPCs increases the blue bar (players) and not doing anything makes the red bar (Sansha) slowly increase. I did find this handy bit of info on Scrapheap Challenge this morning with regard to how 'influence' works in the systems where there is an active Incursion:

[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] Good
[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] Bad
[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] Something


Apparently, the red and blue bits on the bars are important!  The more Sansha sites you clear out, the more blue the bar gets.  Blue > Red.  Got it?

The in game Journal is very helpful about the sites but there doesn't seem to be much general info about the feature mechanics themselves out there. The best thing I've found so far is this entry on Incursions on the EVE University Wiki website.

Here's one of the better depictions I've seen yet of the mass confusion and ~fun times~ being had by all:



To close - why should I do these sites?  Why should I fight the Sansha?  What's in it for me?  There are lots of confused people out there who ARE curious but are having trouble figuring out if they should bother and I'd certainly appreciate an official guide of some sort. Maybe if CCP explained it in terms like, "Guys, if you kill them, this happens and you get this nice hat!" there would be more interest. I think an awesome table or a graph is in order, CCP!

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