Dear Incurserers(?)

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.

What I’d like to do now though, is start a feedback thread with your impressions of the Incursions. Some of the things I’m specifically interested in:

• How is the balance of the sites within their own tier? For example, is there any Vanguard site that is considerably more difficult/time consuming than the others?

• What set-ups are you successfully using for what sites?

• Are there any objectives/functions within sites that are working poorly?

• What general issues would you like to point out at this point? Anyway, we’ll keep looking at the feature (and the thread). Please note that changes don’t happen over night, but they will continue coming!

Toodles,
Soundwave