Arcanaville

I'm afraid I'm going to have to reiterate that solo progress speed (which is what the other poster specifically referred to) is totally irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the trials are too grindy.

As you point out, the "solo path" can also be exploited by teams, but that has no bearing on solo progress speed, and the poster did not refer to the alternate shard path, but the solo progress rate.

And if you didn't hear people complaining about grinding WSTs, you were not listening closely enough.

I don't remember any serious discussion of the possibility except in general terms (i.e. "all end game raid systems eventually become a grind-fest") until I20 was in open beta, but granted I didn't read every single post. However even in open beta complaints about both trials being too hard vastly outnumbered complaints about people likely grinding them excessively.

I remember more individual threads talking about ten seconds being too short an interval to kill two AVs and network lag was going to make it impossible for all but the fastest internet connections to have a chance in hell at BAF than I do people talking about *specifically* BAF and Lambda quickly turning into rapid grind-fests that people would master within a few hours of launch.

I'm not saying *everyone* was complaining the trials were too difficult either. Lots of people were saying that once you got the hang of them, they were not hard. Lots *more* people were saying that was only because the closed beta testers were likely far more cooperative and stronger players than the average player, and PUGs with average players would have little chance of completing these things on a regular basis.

I'm talking about the complaints about the content that date back to Beta. I'm not implying. I'm stating directly. There was a direct shift from too hard to too grindy as the vast majority objection to the content. And I'm not saying individual people changed their minds. I'm saying the complaints themselves did: whether people changed their minds or some people stopped complaining and other people started is totally irrelevant to my point. And I'm not specifically talking about solo performance: I've given up discussing solo performance for the most part because its an emotionally charged train wreck.

The solo costs are completely independent of the complaint about grinding the trials. You can't solo the trials so I have no idea why you would think the two were even remotely related.

I could say the same thing in the opposite direction. I could say that anyone who claims to quit over the end game was probably dissatisfied already, and this was just the excuse to quit: if not the end game, something else would have pushed them to quit eventually, and soon, because they were just looking for an excuse. But we have to assume that if I20 has the power to cause people to leave, it also has the power to cause people to stay. To do otherwise is unfair to one side.

Most people don't "threaten" to leave. They leave when at some point they just lose interest in the game. There exists a finite non-zero number of players that quit in the last twelve months that would have stayed if I 20 released a year ago. I'd be comfortable asserting that the odds that statement is false is astronomically low. So long as that number is at least one, it allows me to make the point I made, which is that those people who left that would have stayed if the end game existed as well as all the people who would have left but are now staying are no less deserving of having the end game as the people who claim to be quitting over it are deserving of having something different - or nothing at all. I don't even need the numbers to be equal to make that point. I only need this number to be at least one. Does that one person deserve an end game that he likes, if he likes I20? If the people who want I20 radically changed or removed theoretically got their way, would that be because that person was undeserving?

I assert not, but I'm giving people the opportunity to refute that, and say that in fact, they deserve more than that hypothetical person, and why. In the absence of refutation, "deserves" has nothing to do with it, and should be removed from the discussion.


Getting back to the question of whether I20 could cause people to stay, people who might be bored with the game don't have to be especially fast. They might just not like rolling a lot of alts. They might want a variety of content in terms of combat situations rather than storylines. They might want more challenging content, content that allows them to progress their level 50s, or content involving more coordinated teams. None of those things requires that such a person be especially fast.

Conversely, even a very fast player who could get all four slots filled in a couple of weeks could likely do so to a stable of level 50 alts if they did have lots of alts. They could also want all four Lore pets, or be a completist and want all eight tier 4 powers in all four slots. These people would not exhaust the incarnate system on time scales of just a couple weeks in all likelihood.

Most people who wanted a change-up in the end game aren't actually likely to be speed demons, because most people aren't speed demons period.

That's a bit of an oversimplification. In between "will do *only* for the rewards" and "will do even without any rewards" is where most good games are designed, with balanced rewards.

I don't know what everyone else is saying, but *I* say that the level shift is in just about the right place (with one exception I will get to in a minute). Its the culmination of the common-uncommon-rare power progression tree for the slots that have it. Very rare is not a standard part of that progression tree: its a pursuit reward that has four times the cost and only one quarter more reward: perfect for players that want high-end pursuit goals, and a reasonable compromise to players unable or unwilling to pursue high-end pursuit goals.

Its in the right place, but why have it at all? Because Incarnate content is designed with it in mind: Incarnate content is +4 like the LRSF, but unlike the LRSF player can work their way towards neutralizing much of the combat level advantage the critters have. They can progress against the content to make it easier This ability to work towards gaining a relative advantage over presumptively difficult content didn't exist in a meaningful sense when the LRSF came out, and level shift was almost certainly invented to address that specific situation (I cannot say this with 100% certainty, but the fact that I suggested level shift as a mechanic way back when LRSF came out specifically to address this issue, and level shift appears to be designed explicitly to address this issue, is something I assume is not a coincidence: either they remembered, or its coincidental reinvention).

Level shift wasn't invented to be bait: it was invented to be an integral part of power progression verses the Incarnate content. They didn't need to invent it: they could have just made the other incarnate features more powerful. But that is a far more difficult thing to balance: combat level shift is trivially easy to predict the effects of. Finding the correct strength for a barrier buff to have to equal the advantage of a combat level shift, or the correct design of a set of pets, would be a seriously complex undertaking. And keep in mind that's coming from me, who once said rebalancing all PvE powers for PvP was not a complex problem.

Given that level shift was going to be part of the Incarnate progress tree specifically to act as part of the power progress the players could work towards to improve their power relative to the Incarnate content, where should it have gone? It should be the end result of a progressional path, which suggests Very Rare. But if we reserve Very Rare for a long-term pursuit goal, it cannot be there because the level shift isn't intended to be tied to a long-term pursuit goal: its intended to be earned and then used in the trials, not the other way around (the reward for running the trials numerous times and mastering them). So Rare makes more sense.

And here is where I diverge from the devs. If the intent is for players to be able to earn them so that they can use them to make the trials easier, they *should* have been in Judgment and Interface, not Destiny and Lore. Gaining them as tier 3 in Judgment and Interface would be earning them in the first half of your progress through those four slots. gaining them as tier 3 in the Lore and Destiny slots means you're earning them close to mastering all four slots, not counting the long-term Very Rare pursuit powers. And that is backwards relative to intent, if the intent is to allow players to earn these to make the trials easier.

I think they made a mistake and knew enough to make level shift a tier 3 and not tier 4 reward, but didn't go far enough and make them part of the first slot of the two-slot physical and psychic trees.


In either case, since level shift is *part* of the powers, you can't say if the powers aren't good enough with level shift they aren't good enough without level shift. That's like saying if Nova is not good enough without the damage and only with the knockback, then Nova is just not good enough period. The Incarnate powers with level shift were designed with shift in mind. Blizzard doesn't do damage just to bribe people to take an otherwise expensive knockdown patch that is not worth its endurance costs. The damage is not a bribe, its part of what it is. Incarnate shift is part of what those powers are, and the devs expect the players to make a value judgment on whether to take those powers factoring in the benefits of incarnate shift (or level shift in the case of Alpha) The fact that the benefits of incarnate shift itself only accrue in Incarnate trials is irrelevant to that fact.

Its worth noting that the decision to make level shift part of those specific powers may have been an early decision. In other words, those powers may have had level shift *before* they had any other effects in a design sense. In that case, in no sense could they be considered an effect "slapped on" to make them more valuable. They were there before the other effects were even added, which means there was never a point where the devs looked at the tier three Destiny powers and said "we need to add level shift to them so players will grind for them." I suspect that never happened, because the level shifts were never not there.

I can tell you this much: the level shifting mechanic has existed in the powers team toolbox for longer than I think most people realize.

No offense taken, but I think you're oversimplifying my observation. Complaints of this nature begin dropping almost immediately after a feature goes live: within a week generally because it is at that point that the theoretical becomes reality for most of the playerbase. But only slowly.

For about two to three weeks, the complaints *change details*. For example, the theoretical complaint about BAF and Lambda was that they were so hard almost no one would do them. Now the complaint is that you have to grind them to get all the rewards you want. I should point out that this is a diametrically opposite complaint.

People predicted lots of things. No one predicted that the problem would be that people would be running twenty BAFs a day and getting burned out on it. Once again, forum crystal balls proved to be 8 balls.

A similar thing happened with the invention system. What many people were predicting was that it would create a huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots; that there would be a caste system where the ultrapowerful would run content in exclusive packs shunning the rest of the playerbase. Very few people predicted that the invention system would essentially eliminate influence scarcity as we knew it and I don't think anyone predicted that inventions would have the exact opposite effect: by making so many players more powerful, it created a lot more margin for error in running content: people could team with whoever they wanted, and play whatever they wanted, because the overall power level of the average player rose, making it easier to compensate for weaker builds or lower level team mates.

Then at some point the complaints just vanish to a slow trickle, almost falling off a cliff. It happens not just randomly or because of eventual acceptance, but because there is an initial burst of complaints that is self-reinforcing: people feel they are part of a far larger group of players and feel more free to complain. But on a time scale of weeks, the vast majority of players who are rarely emotionally invested in these issues sees what the reality of the situation is, and makes up their own minds. Usually, they go "meh" and adapt to the situation whatever that is. This starves the complaint engine of fuel: instead of people saying "yeah, that makes sense" they start saying "eh, upon reflection its not really all that bad." That then causes complaints to spiral downward.

Its easy to say you'd expect complaints to drop after a month, but in fact if it was just a matter of simple attrition, you'd expect complaints to fall roughly linearly and continuously.


This is also not a moot observation. There are lots of instances where it doesn't happen that way. Complaints about the architect *rose* and *continued to rise* after release, and were not dropping exponentially a month later. They decayed more slowly after more time had passed. And that was because honestly the problems were far more severe, and the devs far slower to react to them. The impact of the fast farms in the AE were probably he most destructive error the devs have ever made in the history of the game, and the complaint curve reflected that.

The I9 Hamidon was the opposite: the complaints were never extremely high, and slowly trailed off linearly - exactly as you'd expect if the primary driver was slow attrition of the complainers themselves (probably most through acceptance).

And one other exception: badge complaints. Until the "epic" badges were adjusted and a lot of the farming ones with them, complaints about badge requirements were at a constant simmering level: neither going up nor down. Exactly what you'd expect if the issue was a minor but nagging one that people were willing to temporarily accept but continue to work to a solution for.


So no, I don't think my evaluation of the most likely trajectory of the end game complaints is actually obvious or inevitable. This has nothing to do with whether they are valid or not, just my guestimate as to how they are likely to evolve over time.

Its basically a tie between people dismissing the concerns of the players not in favor of the current system or unable to fully participate in it, and the people claiming that content that other players are enjoying is intrinsicly poorly designed, bad for the game, and objectively counter to the fundamental principles of the game to this point.

The fact that you and others (on both sides) are characterizing this discussion as "hateful" only serves to prove the point that actual objective discussion about the end game system is elusive.

The only thing I will say about that is something I said in both I18 and I19 beta, and actually even farther back than that. If your sole objective is to argue with other players none of which have even the tiniest ability to change anything in the end game at all or vent at no one in particular, you can say whatever you want however you want. If, on the other hand, at least part of your motivation for expressing your opinion is to sway the opinions of objective observers including presumably the devs who actually make the end game, then the question is not what is "fair" but rather what presents your opinion in the best possibly way.

In a tie, the people advocating change lose. The last time I said this, a remarkable number of people objected saying that wasn't true. I don't know if they are still visiting this planet, but rest assured on Earth this is still true. I'm not saying I think its true or I think it should be true. It is true, period. The people who have no desire to see anything significantly change still have an obligation to act civilly, but there are no harsh consequences for them not doing so as long as they do not violate the EULA of the boards. The people who do desire to see something significantly change have the same obligation to act civilly, but the penalty for failing to do so is to risk the strong probability of being ignored, nullifying their advocacy. A rational person would take that fact into consideration when expressing their opinions publicly.

Err, no. 30/30 def/res is 72% damage mitigation vs base 50% tohit critters and 62.8% mitigation vs base 64% tohit critters. 47% defense is 90% mitigation vs base 50% critters and 73.4% mitigation vs base 64% critters.


This doesn't reflect my experience running the trials. Barriers uptimes make them excellent burst buffs and supplemental buffs, but the on-paper objection of them making buffers moot is not materializing. Even moreso debuffers: debuffs are still in demand and interface is not coming close to scratching the surface of what they can do.

Unless you're going for a master run, any trial leader trying to cherry pick a team of 16 or 24 is honestly just too inexperienced to know any better. The best teams I've seen have been balanced teams: some melee, some control, some buff/debuff. If you're kicking one defender to make space for one scrapper on a team of incarnates, in my opinion you're really just being a jerk or an idiot. What you need are 16 or 24 players that can hit a green button in sixty seconds - something that isn't a 100% thing apparently.

They do not: the rule is supposed to be every kill by the team has a chance to award a shard to every member of the team. Which makes you wonder if when the devs said the thread rate was five times the shard rate, did they factor that in? Do threads award the same way as shards: each kill has a chance to award a thread for every member of the team?

I thought my average shard rate for plow ITFs was something like 6-8 regardless of what I played, but I do not have hard statistics to prove it. Getting those would be a little bit trickier because I don't have logs that focus solely on ITF runs. Although that can probably be parsed also. I'll think about that one.

Actually, my specific intent was to say that this specific implementation was almost certainly going to appeal to at least some percentage of the people who left earlier, and would have stayed for it had it arrived in time. That means this specific end game has kept some players that would have left and would have been able to keep others that did leave: we just don't know how many, and there is no reason to believe that number is higher or lower than the number of people for whom this specific implementation of an end game was the determining factor in them quitting.

I say that for a very specific reason: when someone says a feature is causing them to quit, that is a personal tragedy but not necessarily a problem for the game because the game cannot make that one person more important than all the other people who like the feature, and all the other people who did quit or would quit because the game *didn't* have it.

If a personal preference sentiment is shared by a large enough group of people, it can have special meaning that it doesn't have individually. However, I've been around long enough to know that even when someone says they are certain they are either in the majority, or representative of a very large percentage of the player population because of their personal observations, they are often proven wrong by unambiguous data downstream. That sort of estimation has historically been extremely weak.


Honestly, in my estimation at least as many people were upset about inventions and the Hamidon enhancement nerf. Vastly more people were upset about the GDN and ED. In all four cases, complaints about those issues began to decay exponentially after about a month after the changes went live. So to the extent that there is player discontent, I don't believe it is higher than the game has experienced many times in the past.

The first day I had two successful BAF runs and two successful Lambda runs, plus a couple of unsuccessful ones and a couple of bounces. The numbers I quoted were for the four successful runs, two each.

One thing I'm pretty sure about is that rewards are still team-based, not league-based. That means there is some possibility for variability in rewards, and a potentially dramatic one in BAF: if you in a league that splits teams between the AVs and the adds, the add team is going to get potentially significantly higher rewards, because they get the far higher kill count. I've almost never been on the add team for BAF**.

Separate from that, every league I've been on has basically cleared Lambda (except the blinkie hunts of course) and not farmed BAF (meaning: pull together and go for the quick Siege->Double AV knockout relatively quickly; the one genuine separated run I attempted ended in failure because the adds quickly got out of hand).

As to the contribution table thing, we know the devs were playing around with that kind of tech, and considering I got literally one common table out of a ton of runs (that I recall, anyway) purely random chance alone seems less likely to me. If its random, it seems to be weighted towards uncommon. But here's what seems just suggestively fishy to me. My main is a blaster, and has the bulk of my runs. She's not a damage powerhouse being Energy/Energy, but she has a gigaton of recharge: Torrent + Explosive blast is almost an attack chain for me, so I put out decent damage. Uncommon almost every time, and more rares than commons. I recently started running my MA/SR through the trials. Dragon's tail or not, she's basically a pure single target killer. First four runs: two common and two uncommon. Small sample size, but it does make me wonder.


** I will be honest, though: once I figured out what was going on, I would position myself in such a way that I could shoot single target attacks at the AV, and then fling AoEs the other way towards the adds, whenever my team pulled ahead of the other AV team. That way, rather than just slow down I would be dealing damage to the adds. Just that one tiny change significantly increased the amount of iXP I was earning per BAF run, and that's extraordinary considering that was just a fraction of the damage of one blaster from a team of eight basically noticably changing the iXP earning rate of an entire eight player team.

The question was never a question of "deserves." Who deserves what is completely irrelevant. No one deserves anything in this game more or less than anyone else, but every player gets something different depending on their nature, level and amount of play. Not because they deserve different things, but because they do different things. What you do determines what you get. That's always been true, and always will be true.


That's unfortunate, but to be blunt people constantly cancel for all sorts of reasons. There were people who canceled in the past that would have stuck around if this end game had shown up earlier. They were not more important than you, but you are not more important than them either. This change will cause some players to cancel, but it will cause other players to stick around longer or attract new players to the game. I can't really hazard a guess which number is higher. What I can say is that its unfortunate when people cancel for those people but for the game as a whole its just part of the reality it has experienced every day of its existence. And at no time are the people who stay more deserving than the people who leave, nor are those people less deserving. Because deserving has nothing to do with anything.

My earning rates in trials might actually make things worse. I'm one of those people getting a ton of uncommons (in fact, my main got exactly *one* common table drop, the rest all uncommons except for two rare drops).

I believe I can parse my logs to get actual exact earning counts, so I'll try to do that tonight. That should factor out any estimation errors on my part. In fact, it should also be possible to calculate the exact amount of time I've been spending on the trials themselves, minus organizational time.

Edit: preliminary looks at the logs suggest my thread drop rate per successful trial run is actually closer to 6 than 4, and the thread earning rate (just threads, not component breakdowns) is about ten per hour of actual trial running time. But I've only looked at day one; the later day logs would probably be more representative.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Geko here. In terms of accessibility, the CoH endgame is so radically different from the traditional endgame MMO raiding system that if you scored accessibility of all other end game raiding systems of all other MMOs on a one to ten scale before I20 released, I20 wouldn't have been able to muster a zero on that scale. You'd have had to invent negative numbers on the scale to represent I20.

It usually takes me months to level an alt to 50, something that theoretically speaking someone could do in hours. It usually takes me months because I don't focus on a single alt, even if I'm specifically leveling them, and because my time to play is not unlimited, and because I do not specifically focus on leveling-optimal activities. I'm also often leveling them solo. This all conspires to make leveling much slower for me than it probably is for the average player.

No one would argue, though, that this obviously implies a game design error somewhere. So your statement, taken on face value, is not true. That's completely separate from the fact that comparing "hours" and "months" exaggerates the difference in a word-smithy way. For one thing, it doesn't take months of actual effort: that's due to the timer on shard to thread conversions using the optimal method. If you were more aggressive, and could earn more than 20 shards a day, the suboptimal method would be faster (but more work). Conversely, "hours" to unlock all four slots and slot them with uncommons? Again also possible, but only by people sitting on tons of shards and willing to convert them with the suboptimal path. Or someone willing to run trials non-stop for most of a day.

A while back I estimated that my MA/SR running 0x8 tip missions was averaging about 2.5 shards per hour. That's a calculated estimate from herostats statistics averaged over several dozen tip mission runs. It would take about 336 hours to earn the 840 shards mentioned in the post. Assuming that a really fast player might earn the same slots and powers in 12 hours of continuous trial running, that's about a factor of about 28: the difference between a day and a month. That's about the difference between a soloer running standard content and a team running incarnate content of at least moderately comparable spawn sizes.

(Incidentally, that's also why I believe the shard per hour rate for something like a plow ITF has to be higher than 3/hour on average across the entire playerbase, or it wouldn't even outpeform what I can do all by myself, which is all but impossible given the mechanics of shard dropping).

Someone running solo at 0x1 would of course be earning at a far lower rate. But at that point you're comparing the earning rates of a full league of players playing the top end content explicitly designed to award those rewards, to someone playing solo, facing the lowest possible fraction of the content strength, playing content that is of much lower difficulty and not explicitly designed to award those rewards directly. That's like comparing the leveling speed of a player that teams constantly and runs task forces and trials from level 1 to level 50, to someone who plays b y hitting their keyboard with a pencil between their teeth. Of course the earning rates will be vastly different. They cannot be anything but in any game that rewards anything besides attendance.


As an aside, several lines of thought I've contemplated all seem to be converging on this 30:1 ratio of Incarnate trials to non-incarnate content. My guess is that for the three areas of unlocking slots, slotting commons, and slotting uncommons, that ratio might be close to the truth. The ratio jumps dramatically for rare and very rare, but given they are the higher tiers of the system that's not intrinsicly a bad idea. Its also exactly in the range of reward target the devs normally aim for to be conservative, so they can tweak downward later if datamining shows it to be too high. The devs have said to me on more than one occasion that its easier to tweak downward than upward (in the context of reward requirements). Had they aimed and hit too low on the requirements, it would have taken an act of god to tweak it upwards for balance. But dialing it in lower, dropping the ratio from 30:1 to maybe 15:1 would be a lot easier, since few players would complain about that.

The important distinction though is that I'm not offering up my anecdotes to make a specific statement about the difference in earning rates for the trials and the standard level 50 TF content. I'm offering it up to show that your anecdotes may not be anywhere close to the average, since they are radically different from mine. If the difference between my anecdotes and yours swings the numbers by a factor of five or more, that implies these calculations have an error bar of at least that much. So when you say that a factor of ten error is so high you don't see how that's likely, I'm just showing how easy it is just to account for a factor of five. I'm not specifically saying my experience is average, just that it shows levels of variability that are not just small, but enormous.

Resistance is already mostly an equal partner. At equal proportional strength, Resistance basically always has the same relative performance under all conditions outside of unresistable resistance debuffs, while defense is sometimes equally strong at mitigation but with the advantage of also deflecting secondary effects (which is sometimes a very strong advantage), and sometimes massively weaker at mitigation (any time you experience higher tohit, tohit buffs, autohitting attacks, or defense debuffs that punch through DDR - which is most of them outside of SR scrappers).

What everyone doesn't say about defense is that the strategy for maximizing defense performance is a two step process, not a one step process. The first step is to get soft-capped defense. The second, unspoken step is to avoid everything that would tear through soft-capped defenses, or run away from them as fast as you can.

It is the second step more than the first that makes defense look really really good.

In the days before DDR, the argument that defense was better than resistance and suggested resistance needed strengthening was bordering on ludicrous. For every situation you'd see high performance, there was a different one where you'd see bad performance. At one point, it was actually easier to list all the places defense would look good than all the places it would look bad.


Pre-I7, the best that defense could do was an effective 94.7% damage mitigation: that was taking something with 95% tohit or better (which the game would reduce to 95% tohit) and reducing it all the way down to 5% (the floor). 5/95 = 5.26% admittance, 94.74% effective mitigation.

But that was an academic point, because that defensive mitigation level was not stable: defense debuffs and higher tohit could rapidly crumble that protection which was impossible for resistance due to the mechanics of resistable resistance debuffs.

If you believe you must pursue these rewards as fast as possible, and you're complaining you're being forced to pursue these rewards as fast as possible, I'm afraid you probably have an intractable problem.

I'm averaging four threads per trial run. For threads to drop five times faster, even if I were to assume for discussion purposes that trials are twice as fasst as ITFs I would have to average less than two per ITF. That's far, far, far less than my average. So I'm disinclined to believe that the ratio is five to one in favor of threads over shards.

I have also never gotten zero in an ITF of any kind. Not even speeds that fail on Romulus and never bother to attempt to clear the end. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it has to be highly uncommon if I've never seen it at all in a lot of runs.

And as I said earlier, a speed run isn't a reasonable comparison for the ITF due to the fact that it earns far less shards. It earns more *if* you're counting the drop table at the end in terms of its *creation* costs - if you want that component for Alpha. But we're not counting the component in terms of its creation costs, but in terms of its breakdown costs to get to shards and then threads. And if we are, we should assume people run the ITF to optimize shard drops, which are not speed runs if the component counts as only one.

I honestly don't know what the kill ratio is for ITFs verses trials, especially because I'm not sure the rank ratio is the same either. Since shards (and I'm guessing threads) drop faster for higher ranks - minions have very low shard drop rates relative to LTs and Bosses - even if the numbers in BAF and Lambda are lower, its unclear if you end up killing more bosses as a ratio of the total in the trials or the ITF. I'm not in a position to collect that sort of statistics at the moment: I'll probably try to do so later this week when I'm back on a more powerful computer (I've been on a laptop since Wednesday).

You're saying you ran 15 to 20 trials; I compared that to running 15 to 20 task forces as the standard content equivalent. But even if I use your numbers and say that running 15-20 trials is equal to running only 5 to 7 task forces (and that is *wildly* skewed towards the incarnate trials) you're saying that in 5 to 7 task force runs you'd only get 18 shards, averaging 3 per run.

That is treating the Incarnate trials as optimistically as possible, and the task forces as pessimistically as possible, which is why my calculation red flag tripped. It invalidates the conclusion.


My average shard drop rate for ITFs is closer to 7 in about an hour plus the component (plows, not quicks - nobody running for shards runs quicks), and my trial run time average has been close to 35 minutes: some faster, some slower. If we assume my trial drop rates were similar to yours per trial (because I don't have those numbers in front of me) then 18 trial runs (taking the average estimate for number of runs) would take about 630 minutes, the equivalent of 6.5 of my ITFs. That's 52 shards including component breakdown. That's a difference of a factor of three just in the shard earning estimate alone. And that's a slow ITF average: I haven't run a plow yet with I20 Incarnates plowing it. I would imagine the teams I've been running trials with would obliterate an ITF plow in about a half hour: I've seen really fast teams get close to that without I20 incarnate powers. That's effectively accounting for a difference of over 5.5x the shard/thread estimate in your OP. That's already a huge discrepancy that isn't likely accountable to anecdotal anomalies.

If you're going to make an extraordinary claim like the standard earning rate is one hundred times slower than the trials, you have an obligation to be conservative on your estimates. If you're highly aggressive, and it seems every single one of your calculation decisions was highly aggressive, it makes the conclusion very shaky. Its entirely possible the trials are twenty times faster, maybe even thirty times faster. To assert they are a hundred times faster I would want very strong evidence.

My red flag alarm dinged on this. Something is wrong with the assumptions, because there's no way a player that runs 15 to 20 task forces over a week ends up with 18 shards. I would expect such a person to end up with about 80-150 shards, and thus (eventually) about the same number of threads. Which makes the trial content - counting all of the extra drops besides direct threads - about fifteen times faster than task force content on average.

The drop rate for threads cannot be five times higher than shards. I would be more inclined to believe its the reverse.

Also, higher task forces drop components that can be broken down into shards. 15-20 runs should earn at least 15-20 of those, which would be more than 18 shards right there.

Factoring everything in, my ballpark estimate is that trials might be earning ten times the equivalent thread count as task forces drop from thread/shard conversions, not a hundred (and certainly not a thousand like some people have been suggesting).

One more thing: counting optimally for the trial drops adds an additional skew. I've been getting the majority of my reward tables as uncommons, not commons. If uncommon really is more likely than common on successful runs, which is possible, the uncommons are actually *hurting* earnings, because if you need commons you cannot count uncommons as their *creation* value, but rather their *breakdown* value. And every uncommon is actually only worth 9 threads on average when broken down - less than half of one common.

It also has +regen (albeit in rooted), which means it not only has high resist and high defense, it also can have significant regeneration. The combination of all three makes stone tankers in granite very difficult to kill except with psionic attacks.

I'm currently of the opinion that like other previous changes to the game, like the addition of the invention system or the creation of content like the LRSF, its one of those discussions that just has to play itself out before it gets left behind. Like essentially all other major changes to the game, there are lots of details that could be improved, but the question of whether they should fundamentally exist at all was mooted the moment they were introduced and most players accepted them and moved on. There's no question to me that the incarnate trials fall into that category. Its not the will of the devs that makes the question of whether they should exist generally as they do moot, its the will of the playerbase, and as an entity it has spoken.

That's not to dismiss the complaints some people have over some aspects of it: its just to note that while things are tweaked constantly, to reverse course on anything requires overwhelming player opposition, and that opposition simply doesn't exist. And while I love game design discussions normally, the arguments over whether the incarnate trials are a grind or an affront to soloers or contrary to the fundamental nature of the game seem to me to have not just no practical end, but no theoretical end either.


They also take away valuable thread-earning time.

(That's a joke: even now I'm still splitting time with leveling other alts nowhere near level 50: I love the trials personally, and I'm working hard to unlock slots, but its not taken over the entirety of my playtime)

To be honest its because like everyone else I've been running trials like crazy and haven't had time to do a lot of testing. What was your previous assumption?