Ardrea

It failed, sure; but not so badly. We ran out of time is all. People were making mistakes, and were learning from them, too. Most of our second team was new to the trial.

Some of the directions weren't as clear as you might have thought. For instance, at first, you told team two to go to the training facility; then to the rear elevators -- the team got mixed up, and you snipped about listening. Then, what in heck is an 'add'? I knew what you meant, and the tank did, but not everyone did.

Leadership is hard, and you deserve a lot of credit for all the great stuff you did too -- too numerous to list, IMO. Failed on the timer, yes, but succeeded at having a lot of fun, and getting a lot of new people an experience on the Lambda Trial.

Thanks!

No, even the 40 isn't very reasonable. That's 160 to get the top-tier, when a solo player may get one a day, not counting the other salvage required. why should someone put in Half a year's play time into getting something someone else can get in a few days?

At least the path is there. And perhaps it will be modified downward to something where a soloer isn't treated so poorly just because of their preferred style of play.

I'm not a soloer, but I see a lot of injustice in this system and hope it'll be corrected over time.

Well, a few things to this.

First, Second Measure's post quoted here was entered into the forums while I was replying to another message, and was marked read by the forums, so no, I did not see it. My bad; the post is much more clear and very helpful, and had it not been marked read it would have changed my latter post greatly. However, my interpretation of the first post I quoted still stands -- the producers letter was ambiguous and reasonably interpreted as such. Fortunately, the dev staff clarified it, which was almost exactly what I was asking for.

And yet, only almost. Why caveat it on only those that are available via the Incarnate trials? Are there others? Will those be accessible to soloers? Surely by now after the many dozens of pages of discussion, that will be the case.

Finally, while my quoting did not preserve EvilGeko's snarky reformatting of the dev's post, that's exactly the sort of thing I think we need less of here.

What does "Incarnate Tree" mean?

Is "Incarnate Tree" the ten slots Alpha to Omega, of which having one of the low tier boosts slotted counts as having your "seat at the Incarnate table"? Or is this "Tree" the entirety of the system -- all ten slots and every possible boost within each can be attained from shards alone if one puts the solo time into it?

For those of you who just want to soloers to be quiet, of course you read it the way you want. But that isn't the only reasonable way it could be read.

As it stands, for a public marketing message on the main CoH website, it sounds pretty good, and I want to read it that way too. But it is not clear and unambiguous -- it -is- still marketingspeech. Considering the storm there's been over this issue, it is foolish of them to not just post here in these forums and state what it is unambiguously. Unless they can't, because plainly saying so would be a lie.

If you read what they said with the eyes of a believer, of course you read it that way. If one starts out with some skepticism, it's easy to read it otherwise. Is the "tree" the ten named incarnate slots alpha through omega, or the tiers within each slot; e.g., common to ultra-rare for alpha? It's not stated or defined. In this sense they're still being ambiguous, possibly because they're also writing from a "believer's" view.

I'm pretty sure they meant the entire system -- all the tiers of all the slots from shards alone, even if it'll take a long time to collect them all solo. They should just say so in those words and get this over with. And if they don't, shame on them for not halting a completely avoidable controversy. And if they can't say so because it isn't true, then doubly-shame on them for not making the system open and accessible like they keep claiming they intended.

A lot of us, evidently, didn't want just a "Raid System". And if that's all that it's going to be, I find it somewhat less impressive than what the hype over the many months had led towards.

However, I'm encouraged they've apparently at least made the decision to allow soloers the option to just continue to collect shards from older content to access the higher tiers of the incarnate slots. At least, I think that's what they said, and considering the storms in the forums over this, I think they should just say it: "you can eventually access all the tiers of all the incarnate slots by slowly collecting shards alone, if that's how you prefer to play." One extra-clear sentence now could halt a lot of confusion.

I have to agree, and hope this will make it easier for people who're not skilled at finding traditional teams to get into these new raids.

I'm looking forward to it, and I think the developers have been seeing the feedback from both sides of these issues and responding to it as best they can at this late hour in the end-game system's design. I just wish it were more than Raids.

There's this notion in a lot of posts that because the game is an MMO, that means people must team together. What is this, written in the stars? No. Is there an MMO Standards Committee that will shut the game down if there's people in it who don't like to team? No. This is just reading the meaning one wants out of the term. This is an online game that's scaled to support a lot of players at once. Massively Multiplayer, and Online. Whether they team cooperatively, merely chat, coexist quietly, or completely ignore each other is irrelevant. In a natural human community, there's a diverse set of roles and methods of interaction that are all healthy.

Let me turn the question around. This is an MMO, why shouldn't everything be obtainable solo? The people who like teaming will still team; and certainly don't need incentives to do so. The people who don't like to team shouldn't be "incentivized" to play any differently than they naturally prefer.

As I see it, the reward structure is already very much unequal, and without a lot of justification. Just because someone prefers to team, they level faster and gain other rewards faster, gain access to more content, and now, they'll have faster, easier, and less risky access to the highest rewards in the game. Why is a soloer's hours of play less worthy of reward and progression than a teamer's? Because if too many people solo, teamers won't find teams? Like that would ever happen. And even if it did, I feel incentivizing rewards and gating progress on that basis would be immoral -- treating soloers as mere tools to support teamer's game environment. The soloers aren't asking for anything that's unreasonable. And perhaps, the development staff will realize this is something important and distinguishing to their product and playerbase, and do the right thing.

I team quite a bit; and I solo a lot too. I'm a natural introvert, though not very extreme. For myself, I'll get the end-game rewards one way or another. But I understand the soloer's poor treatment, and moreso, I'm disheartened by a lot of the attitudes being displayed in these threads.