Arcanaville

I wasn't offended. I was actually impressed. In a weird, twisted sort of way, but still impressed.

I didn't really think there was anything wrong with that assumption when I first read it, but I had to revisit it when I looked at my herostats statistics recently. Running tip missions at x8, I'm earning shards far faster than that: two to three an hour including downtime for travel and selling. Something is clearly wrong with the assumption that that represents a far upper limit on killing, and I believe its that it underestimates the contribution of LTs in a full mission, and fails to account for how "free" defeating minions (and LTs) can be in a full mission. Killing one boss per minute sounds like a difficult task, but killing three Lts in a minion sounds a lot easier, and they both generate the same shard drop rate. Moreover, many builds that can take on x8 can attack bosses and LTs at the same time, dropping the LTs (and minions) almost for free with AoEs while they are attacking the bosses.

Incidentally, the problem isn't killing bosses in a minute, its really finding them. In a high density mission, that's less of a problem. To kill one boss in *thirty seconds* leaving thirty seconds to move to the next one only requires about 90 dps, not counting resistances. All damage dealing powerset combinations exceed that level of damage.

Not all players can run x8, or even x4, but Leandro's estimate is actually not a high-end estimate. Its actually probably a very moderate one for someone that solos below x4. My MA/SR is probably near the *floor* of damage output of all builds capable of running x8. So my 2 or 3 an hour is probably closer to the *lowest* (average) shard drop rate of anyone deliberately attempting to farm these at x8.

I still haven't fully analyzed my herostats numbers yet, but clearly I can generate over a thousand combined defeats in two hours in x8 tip missions. If we assume a 1:2:4 ratio of bosses to Lts to minions as a rough estimate, then 1000 critters is about 143 Bosses, 286 Lts, and 571 minions. That is a kill rate of about 72 bosses, 143 Lts, and 285 minions per hour combined. And that calculates to a drop rate of 2.68 shards per hour. It also equates to an anemic 120 dps including AoE damage generated by my scrapper on average across the entire time period. My peak single target damage on the build is about 160ish dps, and with Dragon's Tail hitting multiple targets it should be slightly higher than that, so there's a lot of travel time in that number (or my targets are averaging about 25% damage mitigation, which seems a bit high for a total average across all targets).

I always believed that one intent of the WST was to reach the people on the sidelines: people who would be willing to team if encouraged, but reluctant to team because they aren't competent at running task forces or executing teamed tactics in general. I assumed the WST was intended to make them more comfortable with teaming, because they would be teaming with experienced players who, not to put too fine a point on it, didn't really need much from them. What I'm noticing is that not only is the WST encouraging players to team that clearly don't team often (given how many people I've seen that have never run any of these task forces before or even know what's in them) its also creating a generation of more experienced task force runners that are going from total ignorance to people who can actually explain the tactics of the TF to newer players after enough runs. What that does to teaming in the long run if it persists is something difficult to predict.

I disagree for two reasons, one practical and one philosophical.

First, the practical. Why, and this is a recurring question, are soloers special in this regard? Why should soloers have special rules to compensate them if they happen to be slower than teams but, say, (players who play) blasters don't get special rules to compensate them if they happen to be slower. Why shouldn't tanker/scrapper duos get the same benefit as soloers, and triple defender teams.

And why just team composition? If I want to solo, I should get the same rewards per hour turns into if I want to run newspaper missions I should get the same reward as task forces, if I street sweep greens I should get the same reward as newspapers. Why should I be penalized if I get the most fun out of blasting greens on the street?

The logical consequence of this type of reward system is that eventually, everyone earns the same amount of rewards under all circumstances, even if they are just standing around. You log in, do whatever you want, and get rewarded for attendance: for each hour you are in the game you get X XP and Y Inf. And Z drops. Even if you just dance in Atlas Park.


The second reason is philosophical. All games have an element of meritocracy within them. Its not always perfect, and its not always as fair as we'd like it to be, but we try to reward performance to at least some degree. Its antithetical to neutralize that by saying if these guys go five times faster than you, you should still get the same rewards if you spend the same amount of time logged in as they do, because we are not going to penalize you for being slower. All pretense of the game being an actual game disappears at that point. Its really just a sandbox with a farcical parody of a reward system. There's no reason you can't make a superhero sandbox like Sims Online, if there was still a Sims Online (and there's a potential lesson there in and of itself), but this is not that.

I'd be willing to bet the ultimate casual superhero sandbox which gave everyone everything they wanted at the rate they wanted it in, and had no specific requirements to balance rewards and activity, would fail immediately. I doubt, however, I will ever be able to collect on that bet, because I doubt there exists a game development team that will ever put that to the test in my lifetime.


In any event, the ultimate cost in real life is subscription dollars, not hours. So it begs the question: why not just hand out rewards based on subscriber time whether you even log in or not? Why is my money worth less than your money just because I don't log in? The non-rhetorical answer is that subscription dollars only pay for the privilege of playing the game. It does not buy in-game rewards. Only actions earn rewards (veteran rewards notwithstanding). Similarly, hours spent logged in are also not currency. The game doesn't directly ask you to spend time and exchange your time for rewards. It asks you to play and rewards results. How much time you take is essentially up to you, but short of exploitive behavior, the game doesn't care if it takes you an hour to kill all the critters in a mission or a minute. The reward is the same either way, and in a game it has to be.

Ironically, paynesgrey's last post would have started an especially interesting discussion, because I think his question: "Inequity Aversion works both ways. How do you expect someone who mainly solos to look at Extra More Bigger Super Bonus Reward Just For Being A Joiner?" cuts to the very heart of modern MMO design theory. The question "how do soloers view MMOs" is one of the most interesting questions about MMOs since WoW launched. Even with all the bickering surrounding the end game, I still think its the most interesting question in MMO design theory, and its one that has occupied my MMO thoughts almost since I first started playing this game (I started as a pure soloer myself).

(Incidentally: rewards are presumably granted for team participation, not just joining, but it has been difficult to enforce team contribution in the reward system so door-sitting is still a degenerate case for now).

I think to a first order estimate, it doesn't matter. If we decide that it takes, and I'm just making up reasonable sounding numbers here because the actual numbers are not in front of me right now, nine thousand kills to level from 49 to 50, and we decide that therefore unlocking Alpha and slotting a common will take 27,000 kills of relative effort (although not necessarily that literally), then to a first order estimate, if a soloer takes ten times longer to do that, it takes ten times longer to do that. We don't go deciding who's time is more valuable than others. If you play three hours a week and I play twelve, who's to say that each of your hours should be more valuable than mine just because I play more. We can't play those games, so we assume everyone's hours are more important to them than anyone else's hours, which means we ignore how long anything takes, we only care what gets done in that time.

*If* after doing that we find there is an unacceptably large disparity between different players, we *may* attempt to narrow the gap with reward structure trickery, such as the "splinter" suggestion I made earlier**. But we *never* start saying, well, these people are very busy and their time is very important, we should let them earn rewards faster per unit time. That opens doors with simply unacceptable consequences. Our ability to address such issues without becoming the lifestyle police are extremely limited, and at some point disadvantaged people become disadvantaged players.


That's unfortunate, but the people who think City of Heroes is an impossible grind are no less, and no more important than the players who want the experience to take longer, and would quit out of boredom if it was significantly easier. DCUO is turning out to be embarrassingly easy to hit the level cap (albeit not the skill point cap) whereupon the options available at the end game are very limited. And its not the most alt-interesting game either. It seems very much to be "leveling is a formality to get to the end" type of game. And not everyone likes that. This really is a case where you cannot please everyone, and its risky to go too far in one extreme.


** Patrol XP is another limited tactic in this area. And since I'm mentioning it, I'll also mention that Patrol XP increases XP earning rates, but not drop rates. That's deliberate. Keep that in mind when contemplating leveraging Patrol XP to address Incarnate drop rates.

Honestly, I don't think its reasonable to balance medium and long-term pursuit rewards around a three hour a week activity rate. I think the proper normalization is to look at average time to 50, and scale Incarnate earning activity in terms of either fractions of or multiples of that time, regardless of how many hours a week an individual player plays. That way, the time it will take to earn Incarnate abilities will be comparable (meaning: actually comparable to, not equal to) something else they are already familiar with and probably have made peace with. If we say that the average player takes, say, 200-250 hours to level 50, and we then say that some particular Incarnate task (I'm not specifically picking any one in particular) takes 100 hours because its intended to take about half the time it took to level from one to 50, then if some players play 50 hours a week they'll get it in two weeks. If another player plays 1 hour a week, it will take them two years. But they also took four years to get to fifty, and that's just the way it goes.

Just for a data point I think to within an order of magnitude the effort to unlock an Incarnate slot should be somewhere around the amount of time it takes to earn a new power at the high levels: i.e. about three levels in the high 40s. So say three times the time it takes to get from 49 to 50. If it takes the average player ten hours to get from 49 to 50, then 30 hours to unlock one Incarnate slot, plus or minus, would not be out of bounds. Or to be more precise, 30 hours to unlock, and then craft one common ability within that slot, would "feel" right to me if it took about 30 hours on average. The other slots would then take some multiple of that time.

Unlocking all of the Incarnate system from Alpha to Omega would be the rough equivalent of earning thirty levels, not ten, at the same or higher costs as level 49 to 50.

I'm sure other people have different ideas, but those are the numbers I feel most comfortable guestimating, with large margins for error, as appropriate for the Incarnate system, given what I know about its intentions. Most of which is deduced from its structure, not from conversations with the devs. Positron has not shared his insight into whether I'm wildly right or wildly wrong about the Incarnate system intent to this point. Some sort of hint would be nice at some point, but they are pretty busy right now and I'm not going to bother them with that particular question.

1. I said theoretically craftable because the player just still make a conscious decision to craft them, and perform the game play actions to do so. If they are incapable of doing so, the game will not craft them automatically once the requirements are met.

2. I did not say you would be able to avoid combat. I said that the requirements would not involve, not what they would be besides that. You should therefore assume that the content may or may not require combat at release, and that requirement may change over time.

3. I did not specify how you were supposed to earn shards.

4. No purchase necessary, see posted information for further details, offer void where prohibited by law, some assembly required, for recreational use only, keep out of reach of children.

There was also the Hamidon enhancement thread, the loot and marketeering threads surrounding I9 (anyone remember the "Cornering the market for Freebird" thread? Kinda funny now), the name purge threads, the market purge threads, and of course the I13 PvP threads.


I have survived your predecessors, and I will survive you.

I called all those mistakes from many of those games, including both in our specific genre. I was in the beta for both, plus many more MMOs. I respectfully disagree the CoH end game is a mistake. I think its one of the better additions to the game since the Invention system. To be honest, although there are lots of things I have issues with in terms of the details of the end game and the Incarnate system, I think the devs overachieved in this case. Time will tell if the majority of the playerbase accepts and participates in it, but from a design perspective more things in the end game are designed well than the invention system before it. Its actually far better in terms of what it does and tries to do than I expected it to be.

Many of the implementation decisions are still questionable, some highly so, but that's peanuts compared to making foundational errors in design that can never be fixed or would be a massive undertaking to fix. They could still screw it up, but it won't be because the design forced them to.


And you know, allowing the competition to dictate your actions is just as dumb if you do what they do, as it is if you do the exact opposite of what they do. Sometimes your competition is right, sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes it doesn't matter at all. And often what is right for one game is not right for another, or is right but for completely different reasons. Doing the opposite just for the sake of doing the opposite is just as quick a path to failure as emulation.

On the character that has the most Incarnate stuff, my MA/SR scrapper, I have one rare, two uncommons, two components, and about 60 shards. I play her about three times a week. When I'm not running task forces, I'm soloing tip missions at +0x8. I know I've earned more than a hundred actual shards on that character, and in shard terms the net Alpha abilities on her is on the order of two hundred or so.

It "feels" like tip missions spawn a lot of bosses at 0x8, which might help. I'm averaging like one or two shards per mission. I don't have time to do an average over many days right now, but I'm looking at my herostats numbers for the last session I played my MA/SR. They look like this:

Time: 2 hours 45 minutes (estimated)
Defeats: 1134
Influence Earned: 12,507,027
Shards: 9

I'm actually kind of embarrassed by that influence rate. But hey, its Martial Arts: my AoEs are Dragon's Tail and Sands of Mu. And there's travel and selling in there. And I'm not as young as I used to be. Of course, that could have been a lucky day: lets pick a random session from last week:

Time: 2 hours 2 minutes (estimated)
Defeats: 1056
Influence Earned: 11,811,021
Shards: 5

I was really cranking on that day: 26% faster kill rate (or 26% less goofing off in Wentworths). But statistically speaking, about the same Inf/Kill, which means the mix of critters is about the same. In this case, 211 kills per shard, as opposed to the obviously much luckier day when it was 126 per shard.

Still, that's a solo player earning shards at a respectable rate without a farming optimized build. Someone running missions at my not-fast and not-slow rate and running task forces here and there would, if they focused on one alt, have several hundred shards by now easily, basically without even trying.

(Note: if the paragonwiki drop numbers are correct and the average spawn is something like two bosses, four LTs, and eight minions in the average x8 spawn, then you should expect a drop every 194 kills across all ranks.)

The point wasn't whether it was possible or workable, but more whether it was reasonable to see such a feature in a "quick and dirty" solution. Even if the actual programming was straight-forward, tampering with the reward system would likely force a Q&A cycle for that change that would not be speedy. In fact, given the devs were just burned on a ginormous bug that made it to live due to insufficient testing, I would expect such changes to be even harder to make without extra vetting.

"Elsewhere" I suggested the possibility of adding a special reward that soloers could actually earn significantly faster than teamed players could, and which would then have a path to crafting Incarnate abilities that could be independently balanced from shard conversions.

Is there such a way to create a reward that soloers could earn faster than teams, so that it could not be trivially exploited by teamed players? There is: make a drop that drops on mission complete that only one player can get. If you're solo, you'll get them all. If you're in a team of eight, you're only going to get one every eight missions on average. It won't matter, because the shards you earn will be so much better anyway.

For psychological reasons, I suggested each mission drop sixteen of these. Why sixteen? Because in a team of one, you get all sixteen. In a team of two, rather than the RNG sometimes hating one player and having one player get three in a row while the other player gets none, you're far more likely to have each player getting *some* with each mission complete. By the time you get all the way up to eight players on the team, each player will average two, but some might get more and some might get less or none. For solo players, this would be a dependable reward. For teamed players, the bigger the team the more random and unpredictable that reward becomes. For people that both team and solo, the teamed drops become a "lucky/unlucky" lottery ticket, and the solo drops become the dependable path.

The nice thing about this idea is that it automatically scales to small teams: its not a "solo vs teamed" solution. Its an autoscaling teamed solution where solo is just the special case of having one person on the team. Shards and this other reward become counter-balancing rewards based on the size of your team. Call these things "splinters." The smaller the team, the more splinters you'll get and the less shards. The larger the team the more shards you'll get and the less splinters.

Now you can balance the crafting costs around splinters, without worrying that large teams can farm splinters. They can't. But they won't complain, because they will be swimming in shards, and the crafting costs for splinters will still be far higher than shards.

Personally, I think even with the cost of introducing Yet Another Currency, this is a better solution than the quick and dirty one. But contrary to popular belief, the devs don't always do what I tell them to do.

Also, while I've put a lot of thought into this idea over the last several weeks, I can only say I think its 90% certain there aren't balance complications lurking within it. I'm pretty sure its one of my more brilliant ideas. I'm not certain its not also one of my more unworkable ones.

Edit: I need to add that when I formulated this idea originally, there were some caveats to address exploitability pointed out by myself or others. Its possible that splinters would have to be restricted to only certain mission arcs, ala the WST. Otherwise, it could be exploited by picking arbitrarily short missions. And it would likely need something like the ticket tracking system in the AE to make sure that you only earn all sixteen splinters if you do enough activity in the mission, rather than ghosting it in thirty seconds. If you only kill two LTs and the boss a the end, you might get only four splinters, for example, whereas if you defeat at least half the foes in the mission, you'll get the maximum sixteen.

The problem is that Notices are not gated at one per week even now. Its the WST that is so gated in terms of its rewards using task force diminishing returns code, so far as I know. Unfortunately, the evidence I have for this is against the forum rules to discuss.

Everyone who thinks they can write two lines of pseudo-code thinks they know how the engine is written. While you are thinking about how easy or hard it is to add this feature to the game, let me give you another problem to think about. Back in I9 I discovered a bug in Pool B drops. Pool B drops were supposed to have a 10% chance to drop per mission complete. So I'm sure somewhere in the game, using your pseudo-code logic, there was a statement that said if random > 0.1 then DropB.

The bug: the drop was actually happening 7.14% of the time. The devs confirmed the bug, never told me what it was, and never told me what the remedy was. But they *did* tell me at the time that it was tricky enough that they were leaving it like that for the time being. So I don't even know if it was *ever* fixed.

Must have been a really busy week, that they couldn't just change the 0.0714 to 0.1 in the code. And that was a really strange typo to make.

And I'm the spreadsheet-psycho?

I tested the defensive strength of the SR passives in I5 over a period of twenty hours of testing. I triple-box farmed Empath by finding the optimum arena farm, and it took seven months. I collected seventy million tohit rolls to test the random number generator. I spent two months analyzing demorecords frame by frame to figure out arcanatime server lag. My main took 908 hours to reach level 50, most of it solo. That same character debtcapped herself many times - under level 50 - testing things like whether total focus could stun a mito. I once tried to defeat Envoy of Shadows as a +2 AV on my controller 39 times in a row and wrote a thread detailing each attempt. I spent four months on test figuring out which of the RV AVs my Ill/Rad could solo with a Heavy (with enough luck: all of them). I once raced someone in-game from Atlas to Portal Corp on a level one alt without using the trains on a bet.

This is a whole different epic quantum level of crazy.

The people who team could easily earn one NotW from the WST, and a second one from shards, and end up earning them twice as fast as the devs originally designed the notices to be earnable at. That's not a hand-waveable concern.

40 shards is a lot for a low activity soloer. Its trivial for someone who teams a lot to earn in a week. The problem is that at the moment there is no actual "solo path" there is a path that doesn't require teaming. Its a path everyone can theoretically use, and in fact teamed players are always on automatically, on top of whatever else they might be doing.

It actually is not as easy as it looks to get this right.

In my opinion, in some respects its a bit too high, but its not a totally outrageous first cut at it. There's a wide range of soloers, and that is not out of the reach of all of them. Probably most of them in the case of Very Rare, but its not clear that Very Rare needs a quick achievable path for all slots. In the case of Alpha, its Rare that is arguably the "core" peak achievement, and Very Rare is a long term pursuit item. If there are diminishing returns in the other slots, a similar calculus may apply: the compromise between giving fast players something to gun for and giving slower players access to the system is usually to front load: the first 20% of the effort gets 80% of the value, and the last 80% of the effort gets the remaining 20%. To make the system reasonable for the widest possible set of player capabilities, both side will likely have to compromise in some fashion like this.

Moreover, the problem with making a solo path that is embedded in the normal teaming path is that its exploitable (lower case e, not upper case E) by teamed players. They can run task forces and trials for components, and also simultaneously hoover up shards far faster than solo players can. The net result is that the "solo path" is also a teamed path accelerator. If its too quick, the teamed people can do both and go faster than intended.

That's one of the many gotchas in trying to do things the "quick and easy" way. A more dedicated solo path would be easier to tweak, so that the disparity between earning can be more moderate. But at the moment, its no small irony that the solo path is bounded in part by the speed of the fastest team.

And that's why I don't generally approve of the quick and easy way. The slow and proper way tests people's patience, but the quick and easy way tends to test people's nerves more.

Both the telecommunications industry and the power generation and transport industry have to have plans to deal specifically with CMEs due to the potential for significant electrical disturbances associated with them.

There should probably be a slightly more moderate path in the middle.

I'm not going to repeat my position on that score, since you know what that is (and I yours). Regardless of the fact that it was inevitable that "any path is better than none" would turn into "what lunatic designed this path" its probably objectively safe to say that exactly as I warned would happen the quick and dirty solo path would have to be scaled initially too high, just because of the rule that its easier to scale down than ramp up. The best thing to do is probably to let the inevitable venting occur because it is inevitable, while the system's balance is analyzed more carefully.

Just because people got what they asked for, doesn't mean they got what they deserve. Reward systems should be arbitrated, as Ross says in A Few Good Men, without passion or prejudice.

No, I'm saying very specifically, in answer to your specific question, that in any game that answers the normally rhetorical question "why should anyone else care what someone else gets, so why can't everyone get whatever rewards they want" with a "why not" everyone will eventually quit. The thing about inequity aversion is that even when people explicitly state they don't care, and even when the inequity breaks in their favor most people know something is intuitively wrong.

Why then doesn't the entire world of MMO players reject the notion that teams typically earn rewards faster, on an normalized adjusted basis, than players working solo? Its because the vast majority of players don't see that as an inequity, even those that prefer to solo. Intuitively, they know that regardless of their preferences, teaming is a separate activity that can be rewarded, provided the reward isn't too extremely high.

When we talk about playstyles soloing and teaming can be seen as two distinct and equal subclasses of playstyle (albeit "teaming" is a far more broad term than soloing). However, when we are talking about activity teaming is not just the lack of soloing and vice versa. Teaming is a separate, distinct activity over and above soloing. Combat is an activity. Not fighting is not an activity: its a choice. But its not the act of not fighting that has the same right to rewards. If it is rewarded, it will be by special case only. In the same way, teaming is an action: it can be rewarded in an MMO. Not teaming is a choice, but its not a rewardable action. The devs of many MMOs honor the choice to choose to team, or choose not to team, in the design of content. However, all to my knowledge decide that participation on a team is an action, while avoiding teams is not for the purposes of deciding which actions to reward. The perspective that the lack of an action is itself an action is frankly ludicrous: it begs the question why reward defeating things more than not defeating things.

And if you're going to keep presenting strawmen, I'm going to start attacking the construction of the strawmen directly. And I'm going to pre-empt one starting now. This covers the general topic of soloing as it pertains to the reward system, but it is addressing the meta-topic of whether what I was saying in the first place is relevant, and not reducible to trivial sound bites. Its a justification for why any differences in reward rates exist at all. If you're going to segue into railing on me for being prejudiced against soloers or arguing against the existence of solo options for the end game, I would suggest you go look up my stated opinions on both first. I will not look kindly on ignorant assumptions about either.

If you had actually read it, and understood it, I addressed that specifically. I said its irrelevant. People are always saying "why should it matter what I get in an MMO if it doesn't affect anyone else?" And the answer is: nobody cares. Find a dev team that does, then come back. MMOs are not single player games connected by chat. They don't offer customized gameplay experiences disconnected from everyone elses. You don't get to decide what rewards you deserve to have. You get the rewards that the content you play awards. Those rewards will vary based on circumstance to a degree, but they will ultimately be based on a reward system that applies to everyone, and is systematically consistent across the entire game given the precise methodology that the reward system was constructed under. No exceptions for people who don't want to spend the time learning why.

Don't like it, don't play MMOs. All MMOs follow the same rules. All MMOs are likely to continue to follow those same rules indefinitely. It would be idiotic to do anything else. Tamper with the global expectations that on average groups of people have that the rules apply to everyone, and you play with fire. Put simply, since apparently you need it put simply, if a team of eight runs the LRSF and ends up getting the same reward that a single player gets running Smoke and Mirrors, just pack up the servers and put them on ebay now, while they still have resale value. No MMO can survive that sort of screwed up reward system.

See: Inequity Aversion.

Deal with it or go read something else.

Did you stand next to the vendor at the back of the store that is next to the counter, log out, and then log back in? You should see yourself not back where you logged out, but entering the door at the back of the store, which puts you behind the counter.

I just tested this on test, and /stuck did in fact knock me out of there. In fact, it didn't just put me on the other side of the barrier, it warped me to the far side of the store near the entrance. I don't recall that working for me the last time I tried /stuck, but that was a long time ago: whenever I found myself back there more recently (as in: the last few years), I would just teleport out. Maybe /stuck started working after I had given up on it.

If I wanted to tell you to deal with it or go play something else, I would do so. The fact that I didn't do that should tell you that I wasn't thinking that.

Also, I embrace all attempted insults that accuse me of being more than minimally functionally literate. I use words. And I string them into complete sentences. Those sentences express complex thoughts. I freely admit this. I don't specifically do it to impress people, but if it seems like a lot of work to you, well, it just takes practice.

Because there exist Incarnate abilities currently not acquirable by the trials, or for that matter by any means. If Second Measure said all Incarnate abilities will be craftable in I20 by shards and inf you'd have people saying he was a liar because Omega wasn't craftable in I20 with shards and Inf.

This is why I keep telling the devs to let me translate, because I actually have the patience and the foresight to say:

All Incarnate abilities which exist within the crafting trees associated with Incarnate slots unlocked within I20, and which have any means to acquire the components to craft within I20, and which can actually be crafted within I20, will be theoretically craftable by using some combination of shards and influence provided the player character meets all other minimum requirements for accessing the Incarnate system, unlocking the slot, and crafting abilities, none of which said requirements will require completing content which has a game-enforced team size higher than one player or requires running content within an instance that requires the game-enforced presence of any other players.

This excludes:

1. Incarnate slots not available in I20 (not all are)

2. Powers the devs elect not to release in I20 (Alpha was originally released with only common and uncommon powers craftable by any means).

3. Player characters that have not yet reached level 50

4. Player characters that have not yet run Mender Ramiel's arc.

It specifically includes the possibility that those slots may, at release, have other prerequisites other than shards and inf, provided those prerequisites do not require mandatory execution of colloquially teamed content.

This also makes no explicit promise about future content, which neither Second Measure nor any of the red names is normally authorized to make. That particular caveat will always exists, and frankly I'm disinclined to honor the assertion its not inevitable with any shred of credibly worthwhile acknowledgement.

Not really. We don't reward voluntary risk that doesn't parallel the game's reward system thresholds. Nor do we reward perceived risk. Its more correct to say that we base rewards partially on threat not risk. Threat is how strong the foes are, risk is how well we can mitigate that risk. Blasters don't get more rewards than Scrappers do per kill. Solo players do not get a bonus for not having help.

Most of the "risk/reward" arguments proceed from a false assumption: namely that rewards should always be proportional to the perceived threat of failure, and that proper game design always includes this as a rule. In fact, both beliefs are false. Its not a rule that this game does or has ever followed, and its not a good design practice in any case. When game designers talk about "risk/reward" they are using extreme short hand to refer to an extremely complex subject, almost none of which deals in an actual direct relationship between "risk" and "reward."

The simple truth is that teaming generally has rewards because its a promoted activity. Combat has rewards because this game promotes combat. Travel generally has no rewards associated with it (exploration, on the other hand, does - to a very small degree) because the devs have no interest or desire to promote travel in and of itself. Teaming bonuses nevertheless influence the upper limit of acceptable reward earning, and the higher the teaming bonus, the lower non-teamed reward earning ends up automatically being.

You could argue that makes all teaming bonuses also soloing penalties. However, that semantic argument goes nowhere. It doesn't change the functional reason for their existence, which means calling it that doesn't change whether it will happen or not. We don't do things or avoid doing things just because someone can figure out how to call it something bad. We can do that for everything. We can say, and someone actually did not long ago, that improving the graphics in the game is a deliberate penalty levied on players with weaker computer systems. For everything, there is a way to give it a bad name.

Incidentally, the argument "what other people see or do shouldn't matter if it doesn't affect you" is a null argument in MMO design. Its a design axiom that everyone has to follow the same set of global rules, particularly when it comes to rewards. You can't say since soloers don't interact with anyone else, they can have whatever they want. They're bound by the combined constraints of the interrelationships between all reward earning by all players collectively. I say this is a design axiom to say this: you can argue against this rule, but all such arguments will fall on deaf ears, not just for the developers of this game, but for all MMOs. People have all sorts of reasons for playing MMOs, but there's only one reason anyone decides to make one: to make consistent collective shared realities. That's why this axiom is written in ink on page one of everyone's design manual, and why its one of the few rules no one, not even our development team, ever breaks, or ever contemplates breaking.