Incursion

The deployment of the new Incursion expansion started last night (I'm in Australia so downtime is at 10pm at the moment) and as a result downtime was longer than normal. Deployment of the Incursion expansion appears to be in three parts:

1. 30th November 2010
2. 14th December 2010
3. January 2011

for items 2. and 3. they are what I've seen reported and may be subject to change. Details of all proposed changes in Incursion can be found here.

This first deployment, CCP have dubbed this the ‘player patch’, contains a plethora of CSM/forum-inspired fixes, wants and must-haves. Not only that but the new dedicated salvage vessel the Noctis: 

Most people will already have the majority of the skills to fly the Noctis, as it only needs basic skills in salvaging, mechanics, survey and electronics. However there is a new skill that is required and that is ORE Industrial but requiring only level one means no more than 30 minutes to an hour to train this.

As with all new things getting hold of a Noctis is going to be expensive and hard, at the moment only four stations have the BPO's for the Noctis and apparently the gates to/from these locations have been heavily camped resulting in more than eighty kills so far. BPC's are available but you're looking at 800 million ISK for a 15 run copy and prices for single ready-to-buy ships range from 150 million ISK to 400 million ISK, compared to the CCP stated RRP of 10 million, the Noctis is over priced and definitely going to be the target of pirates, gankers and griefers for the very near future.

December 2010 will see the second part of the Incursion being deployed, this update sees more stuff but little information is publicly available on what this stuff is, the one thing we do know is come the release Learning skills will be removed.

As for the final update in January 2011, again not much detail but looking at the feature list here, you can see that there is a lot to come in the final update.

Incursion is coming, and it's going to be fun.