Experience of Incursion Event before it was pulled
APAC servers were the first to experience the much hyped Infinite Incursion. However, as everyone knows by now, the incursion event, although a good idea, was poorly executed. What could have been a fun event turned out to be frustrating for the players.
Here, I will list what was seen during the event so those who have not experienced it can have an idea what to expect and plan accordingly.
The Events
The first 4 events are all day events whereas the last 2 events are 6 hourly events that are repeated 4x during the day.
Note: for the last 2 events( All Out Attac k and All Out Defense ), you only score if you defend when your server is supposed to defend or you cross-over and attack when your server us supposed to attack. If you do the reverse (which was what I did to try to catch the other server off-guard), you cannot score for those events. The reason is this, you are required to PVP in the Yaruba system. Defenders must PvP in their own server's Yaruba system while attackers must PvP in the rival server’s Yaruba system .
How to cross-over
1.It costs 10 Incursion Conduit to do a cross-over. These conduits can be obtained from the “Incursion Preparation: Server MS” event which provides 20 if your server completed the event. Just go to the "Infinite Incursions" event and click on the crossover button at the lower right corner (see image)
2.Once you activate the cross-over, the game will restart. Once the game has completed loading, you will find yourself in the rival server
What you will see
1.The Galaxy Chat will show the rival server’s chat. You will no longer see your own server’s Galaxy Chat.
2.The Alliance Chat will be that of your own alliance. You can post location links to any location. When a player clicks the link, they will see what is in that location in the server where they are in.
3.You will be able to see systems in the new server as per your experience in you original server. i.e. you can see systems in normal space but you cant see DS systems unless you have a ship there.
This image shows your base or other bases (with a blue hexagon ring) from your server that are in the rival server.
Ships have similar rings as well.
This image shows a base (red hexagon ring) from the rival server that has crossed over to your server.
Ships have similar rings as well.
The Experience
The crossover experience was pretty smooth. A restart of the game and you are in. A red frame around your view and other visual ques let you know you are now invading another server. You can continue to chat with your alliance mates via Alliance chat. However, for us there was no way to pre-plan anything as the events only showed up upon event start and there were players who crossed-over and started attacking immediately.
F
or those of us who were supposed to defend but jumped over to the attacking server, everything was peaceful. We could fly around and clear all ships in every system and barely anyone from the server attacked us. That was probably because all their active players jumped over to our server to attack us because we can see in our Alliance Chat that our guys were really busy fighting the attackers.
Within half an hour, all ships in DS were cleared (both defending and attacking servers crossed over and cleared each other). That was the fun part. Once the systems became devoid of ships, base attacks started...and that was when everything went downhill. The moment a base was attacked, we were all confused and realized this was never tested (see the bug s below). It eventually led to frustrations and logging off and going to sleep.
The bugs
1.Ships in bases are immortal. They just wont die even though your battle report shows you’ve killed all ships in the base. This made it impossible to raid any base with ships in them. It is super frustrating to find rich unprotected bases only to be hampered by this bug.
2.Base resources are infinite. This is probably a positive bug. If you do find a base without a ship in then you can raid it. The bug here is that your ship can carry the resources back to your base and you will get an increase in resources but the target base will not lose any resources. So you can raid all day fill up your base and the target base still has not lost a single bit of resources.
3.Resources raided from bases did not count. No amount of resources raided contributed to either your personal resources raided score nor the Infinite Incursions – Raider XSLB .
Epilogue
After the event was canceled, Scopely decided to pull all bases back to their respective server. However, by then most of the players that crossed-over were already asleep and this auto return can only happen when you login to the game. The moment you login, the system will automatically return you to your server. This made it very clear to everyone that any base that lingered around meant that the player was offline and can be raided. Unfortunately for these players, the infinite resource bug did not work for them (either Scopely fixed the bug or cross over bases never had the bug in the first place?) and we can see their resources reduce as they were being raided.
This event could have been really fun if Scopely did not screw it up. More details should have been provided up front to allow players to plan accordingly. The cost of incursion conduits to cross-over should have been reduced to 5 instead of 10 so that people can jump once for each of the 6hours events instead of allowing them to jump when they are the attacking server.