ISK makes monsters of men.

For all the new players looking at running incursions, there is a downside when considering running them now, as I noticed yesterday.

Now, incursions ARE probably the safest way to make buttloads of ISK in EVE Online, yes. Especially if you have a group of friends to run them with every now and then, how you want to and how you feel like.

If NOT, if you are alone in your quest to make piles of ISK in your fresh shiny battleship or logistics cruiser, you’ll probably go looking for an established incursion community. This is where the problem becomes apparent.

Trust is so vital in EVE Online, all the more so because it is so scarce. Public incursion communities run a tight operation, with strict rules, mainly to ensure they have as little chance of being sabotaged as possible. It’s not so bad; the draw of making ISK generally keeps everyone in line and obedient.

It’s not like people don’t break rules, it just doesn’t seem to happen in a major way. But where there are rules, there are people who want to break them. Or in other words, there is tension between some, and the system. People who want to fit their ships their  way. People who want fleets to be flown that way. They clash with people who abide by the rules, when in the end both sides simply are thinking: “My way is the best way to make more ISK.”

Learning from the best

Mentioned before that I got started running incursions with The Ditanian Fleet. Well, I still am, and recently acquired my ‘Training FC’ tags. What this means is I’m at a stage where I’m asking as many questions as I can, trainers and current FCs throw hypothetical scenarios at me, and when I ask or an FC asks me to, I am to head what they call a training fleet. In TDF, an incursion training fleet (for Vanguard sites, which require fleets of around 10-11 people) includes one extra logistics pilot to the usual two for a little more safety, and involves a current FC/trainer to oversee the training FC as the ‘backseat’.

Basically, for the rest of the pilots involved, it’s business as usual (with an extra logibro), and in the event something causes the training FC to mess up, there is a safety net in the form of that extra logistics, and the ability for the backseat to take over.

New Megathron to FC incursions from.

What I learned on my excursion.

Trained Logistics IV a few days back and I head off to buy some tags to drag my security status back up to -1.9, allowing me once again wander all of high-sec without being harassed by faction police.

Then I went ahead and purchased  a Guardian (courtesy of the PLEX I won from EDU), and as I admired its glossy exterior, I decided to check out one of the best ways to make ISK in high-sec: Incursions.

I joined, admittedly, for the sole purpose of grinding out some ISK. What I’ve become interested in, though, is FCing in Incursions. Many people tell me from a PvP perspective that incursions are easy compared to fleet PvP. It’s kinda true; I’ve ran a few already and I was bored to death, and the FC rattled off a list of primaries that most of the fleet members already knew off by heart, tagged them, and away we went.

Then on my third day of incursions I accidently entered a site with a travel-fit Guardian. Instead of a 1600mm plate, I had an inertial stabiliser in.

You see, The Ditanian Fleet (the incursion fleet I am running with; The Ditanian Fleet is their in-game channel) has a standard for fits to be eligible for the replacement program. A 1600mm plate (Meta 4 or T2 which is replaceable on battleships with a clone that has a head full of high-grade Slave implants) and armour resistances that are >70% across the board.

I discovered why the hard way that day, when my Guardian limped away from that site at 20% structure. Thankfully, it was a training Vanguard fleet, which meant the trainee FC had to have at least three logistics on field, as opposed to the normal two. Without that extra logistics, my shiny new Guardian would be a wreck I wouldn’t get compensation for.

It really made me think, that close shave: The reason we can make ISK so easily is that the process to do so is so rigorously maintained, refined, and well-oiled.