In the latest blogpost, called the nation strikes back, CCP Ytterbium explains a bit how the Sansha Invasions in the upcoming Incursion expansion will work. It looks somewhat interesting and it reminds me a lot of Warhammer’s public quests. Only there is one big exception:
To players in the fleet that participated the most in the site in question; if there is more than one fleet in a site, others won’t be paid. CONCORD only rewards the most effective capsuleers. If you are not ready to face the competition, we recommend you either merge your fleets together, or spread out to other unchecked sites.
The fun of the public quests in warhammer (if I remember correctly, it’s been a while) was that you could just join in and everybody got rewarded according to some sort of formula of who did the most damage and a random draw. In the Eve system, the fleet that did the most damage will be rewarded, other people who happened to join won’t get anything. So basically your fleet has to be there first, other wise there is no point to participate. I don’t really like that design descision.
On the other hand, I never thought an experience in Warhammer Online would be relevant to Eve. The rewards will likely be interesting, a Concorde LP store ! Only capital mod blueprints are mentioned in the blogpost.
This was one of the first blogposts that actually dealt with incursion gameplay. I assume more will follow as the release is getting closer (soon ?).
I too am ambivalent about only the most-damaging fleet getting the rewards. Seems counter-intuitive but could lead to some unexpected gameplay.
I thought this was going to be cool, but this is going to be a disaster. Who is going to want to do this? Run multiple sites, with sleeper AI, no immediate rewards all for a CHANCE at being the top fleet for a portion of 25M reward? It sounds like there will be many sites to clear through out a constellation over many days before the invasion is repelled, what fleets are even going to stay together through the whole thing. They want bring players to join ad hoc fleets to repel the invasion, but who gets the BPC? This is going to cause wars, not bring players together. In low sec it will turn into get the ship with the BPC and it will end up getting destroyed.
You bring up some interesting points. I don’t think it will take that long to clear out an invasion though. But 25mil for a fleet of 5, where the whole thing takes 1 or 2 hrs (no idea at this point) sounds a bit on the low side. Ofc there is the LP thing though. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Hope it doesn’t fall of the ccp radar once it has been released like so many things.
It’s 25mil plus LP per person. CCP cleared that up in the comments thread.
Ah that’s a lot better :). Besides that there are a lot of rich people in Eve that would do these things for fun *gasp* :).