EVE Search - Incursions

Inspiration wrote:

The real issue (in my opinion) is that while there are some good FC's (in terms of Teamspeak control and knowing the sites), standing policies with regard to fittings is what makes composing fleets so slow and frustrating. There is little to no trust in other peoples knowledge and abilities, even if they played 5 years more and are much more experienced and better equipped for their job.

Anything but cookie cutter fits are quite plain rejected or lead to endless discussions with no resolve. Meanwhile anything with gaping flaws is accepted if it just looks like a known cookie cutter fit. One example is religiously requiring 1600 plate instead of a certain amount of armor and resists, which can be reliably be expressed in effective EHP. You can have a slave set and more armor then a 1600 plate fit without and you will get rejected as there is no trust you really have that slave set (even after a picture of the fitting screen). So you can have more armor, more speed, more repping and less dependency vulnerabilities as standard fits, and you end up being rejected in favour of a low skilled pilot with a weaker standard fit and no bonus alt ready to boost the whole fleet to new highs.

In short there is a lot of arrogance, knowledge holes, insight holes, politics and mistrust and elitism in armor incursions. This is the real reason things go so slow, from forming fleets to finishing sites.

Some FC's also firmly believe in combat tactics and modules that seem to been copied right from the successful shield fleets without regard to the differences in respective ship differences and abilities. In the process, wasting slots that could be used for the much needed offensive power in the armor fleets. This is quite a bit different from when incursions where young, but even then there were quickly hothead ego driven maniacs acting like unsure children because they were known FC's from HQ sites. I think this is the fundamental design flaw in incursions...your need to form large a groups, making it unable to keep politics and religion and ego players out. Below Vanguards sites, there is nothing worth doing with two friends you trust and that are also prepared to go the mileage on investments. There is no path to improvement at the moment!

Anyway, I tried to affect it all for a while for the better and ended up deciding to turn my back to Incursions as it is pointless to fight a religion, let alone based on copy paste behaviour without understanding. Now I consider it purely a newbie profession as for those type of players it is lucrative enough and better suited to making ISK then going at something yourself.

Incursions really need a 3-5 man style of sites that pay enough for casual buddy fleets. It would cut out the painful processes and king of the hill style of mentality that is so painfully abundant now days. This is what finally did me in...politics and unfunded authority. At one point an FC formed a HQ fleet tp take out the sansha super carrier for an incursion that was barely fresh. Here were ego and politics played out over other peoples heads and against their fun and financial interests. And any critique at that moment was directly met with authoritative channel banning threats. Then I new for sure, incursions are rotten to the core and simply left with a final statement. A wise thing to do for anyone that wants to play for fun and some ISK if you ask me.

I will even go as far to say this whole experience made me lost faith in EVE players in general, and realized that if you strip the needed grinding and politics, there really is not much left underneath in terms of game play.

As an off-topic side remark and example for those that followed the tourney with more then spectacle interest.

Take a look at PL's flagship fit for back then if you can still find it. It was just a thrown together Bhaalgorn with some of the most needlessly expensive modules at the expense of balance or clear advantage in true combat. The best web for example where a 2nd best would sufficed in practical effectiveness and the ISK saved could then have bolstered the tank by using the most expensive passive armor modules available, instead of T2 comparable active resists with folded in seconds. At least it would not have dropped like a sack of...well you know ;). In short it was horribly balanced and it showed in its effectiveness on the field. This bad balancing seems to be pervasive, and if such an old good reputation group as PL makes such terrible errors, what about the rest?