CCP Paradox organised a 'not-mass' test last night and for once it was in my TZ. By holding the test at 17:00 GMT I had time to join in before retiring for my beauty sleep.
I fitted up a Golem with twin ASB and being on SiSi a full high-grade crystal implant set complete with omega implant cost me 600 ISK! 100k EHP and reps 7k every 5 seconds? That will be fine for normal Drifter DPS but obviously it'll still get one-shotted by their super-weapon.
It was chaos to start. Everyone streaming X's and forming fleets before CCP Paradox could get things moving. I just sat at the undock and took some screenies as local chat was full of "CCP Paradox XXXX pwease!!!!111!!".
Finally we got moving. Well, I say moving. CCP Paradox activated an incursion in system. However the Sansha space-zombies were nowhere to be seen. This was a Drifter incursion! We warped to the first site which was a small drifter influx and found a spacial rift there. It looks like a wormhole, acts like an acceleration gate. However you drop out 30km from the rift and I had only fitted a MJD. DOH!
However I was not the only one and there was a conga-line of slow ships heading to the rift. I was too late into the first two and just watched fleet chat as "ZOMG I WAS ONE-SHOTTED" kept scrolling up. I got in the third by warping to 70 and then MJD'ing the rest (although it didn't work exactly as I came side-on to the warp in and therefore wasn't exactly 100km from the rift).
Inside there was a wormhole thingy with stuff around it and a load of Drifters. We spanked them and that was that. I went back to station to find seven Drifters there and we killed them too.
The normal incursion effects were on. Whether this is just CCP using the Sansha mechanic for testing or the Drifters will use the same when it comes to TQ, who knows. However, we do know that the Sansha have been using Drifter/Sleeper/Jove tech for their incursions (the wormholes) and that they got into Jove Space (that screenshot for years ago). So it is possible the incursion tech used by the Sansha originally belonged to the Drifter/Sleeper/Jove.
As it's likely to be the Throne Worlds the Drifters invade I'm probably not going to get involved in the TQ version, but it will be interesting to see if the incursion runners move over to Drifter incursions. I guess it'll depend what the rewards are.
What makes you think the incursion runners will have a choice?
ReplyDeleteSince they are more difficult and feature that doomsday, no one will run them if they have similar rewards to the Sansha. CCP already thinks incursion income is too high (see the 2014 CSM minutes) so the only option is to cut Sansha payouts or remove them completely.
I am betting Sansha will be lowsec/nullsec only while Drifters will be the new highsec incursion.
"I guess it'll depend what the rewards are."
ReplyDeleteAnd how fast it takes to do them, and how much competition there is, and if they are in hisec or not, and what the odds are of being one-shotted off the field.
The gold-plated incursion communities will not go after these if they make less ISK/hour, or if they are in low/null or if they cannot be made so "automatic" the runner can do them over and over and over again in the same system. As soon as system jumps are involved, runners will want to stay away. They are 100% about ISK/hr with zero risk
Hopefully, CCP has learned some things from the Sansha incursion beast, so as to make the incursion lot less of a printing money exercise.
I think you are missing my point. CCP has no choice but to remove the Sansha ones from highsec or no one will bother to run the new Drifter incursions.
ReplyDeleteThe incursions communities will then have to run the new, riskier ones, or disband and do something else in the game. It is really the end of the line for them, at least the blinged-out, zero-risk style of incursion farming they currently do.