Djeannie

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

Because the half-a-year player can also get it in a few days?

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but I heard a rumor that all high level TFs give you a component at the end, so you save on having to make them from Shards.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

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.

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

See e.g. Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Team of three = 2.66666666666666666666666666666666 per person.

I believe its reasonable to have a balance between random rewards and predictable ones. I believe the original suggestion preserves that balance. You're free to disagree. But tell me this: is it ok if I refer to your preference as "this predictability bull-****?"

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

The point was to make the system offer something for the fast players to pursue, while balancing that concern with allowing the slower players to gain the majority of the benefit of the system relatively quickly. It takes only one week to get the one notice it takes to craft a rare alpha, which gets you probably 80-90% of the full benefit of any alpha slot. It then takes more than twice the total resources plus three more notices which takes three more weeks of pursuit to get the very rare alpha, which only adds about 10-20% more strength.

You're looking at it from the perspective of, since its not that much more power, why not let everyone have it quickly, since its not game breaking? You're not seeing it from the flip side, which is that the devs have carved out a deliberately small benefit from the total and allowing the fast players to go chase after it, and that benefit is so small it minimally affects everyone else. To me, the Very Rare Alpha is actually representative of the extreme care the devs have taken not to exclude most players from the vast majority of the system given nominal effort.

Seriously: games are supposed to be fun, but different people have different ideas of fun. Some people like pursuing long term goals. Some people like making model ships in bottles. Its not work: its fun. This game has to address both kinds of fun, and a lot of variants in between. This much is true: the more kinds of things you find fun, the more of the game will be accessible to you. That's not just the way it is, that's the way I want it to be. Something for each player not everything for every player. The latter sounds laudable, but its extremely limiting. What I want is not what you want. Making the game be only the intersection between the two, plus everyone else, is not in the best interests of the game.

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

Please pass along that some of us relish the added difficulty of the Praetorian content and greatly wish that it would be extended to the upper levels.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

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.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

I'm pretty sure it's only half done
If you were in the GR beta, you mgiht remember what Imperial City and Neutropolis looked like before they were opened up for players to test



I was meaning more from the point of view that if the area between the battleship, the hosptial and Statesman's ship was turned into a sort of Longbow/military area, then having brawling Tsoo and Family inside the compound might be a bit silly

Originally Posted by Necrotron

One hundred MILLION dollars.



That is a whole lot of cash. That means a top tier Alpha, with its one Favour and two third-tier Alphas (one Notice each) in the recipie, will costs 400 million influence.

Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards

Welcome aboard the Battleship Half-Done.

Originally Posted by Second Measure

About That Accessibility Thing
For our more casual players, we have added an option for you to continue to build your way up the Incarnate Tree by collecting Incarnate Shards without doing any Incarnate Trials--you will even get Incarnate Shards when you are exemplared down. It will take longer than it will take by participating in Incarnate Trials, and you’ll miss out on some epic storylines, but you will be able to claim your seat at the Incarnate table nevertheless.

Originally Posted by Bosstone

I don't think I've ever had a problem getting in on a Mothership raid.

Originally Posted by Carnifax_NA

That's pretty cool. I'll be trying this later.



If you want to nick my toggle buff commands from earlier in the thread to stick them in here feel free (link in my sig). Seems like a logical place for them.*

Originally Posted by Zombie Man

The feather Costume Changes look great because of the physics of the falling feathers. The fur Costume Changes, however, look mushy grey, more like a dirty water splat. The falling fur is just an animation which doesn't look that good. I realize the physics engine can't do hundreds of falling individual hairs, but maybe clumps of hair, like the ones when getting a hair cut? If it remains just an animation, then it need better animation... have the fur fly up a bit before drifting down.

Originally Posted by Alexander_Drako

Its not the face itself... is the color pattern The shades are even there, we just need to be able to control one of the layers better I think? A pattern of two colors on the grey wolf head would be the easiest way to deal with people that want fox-ish heads.

Originally Posted by New Dawn

Do an attack chain eps workout, include toggles on for a roughly average fight duration, allow a few secs of recovery between attacking mobs and see where ya end up. To conserve energy I would use a cone attack on 2 targets+ and aoes on 4 targets+ to get the dam per end equal to a ST attack.

Build up should save endurance because you do more dpe and so attack less particularly vs numbers imo, so with aoes. Against tohit debuffs or +def, useful.

Air sup is good for -fly and kd. I'd swap pulverize for it, never thought about jawbreaker for it. Sometimes -fly can help. Lets say a flying sniper badly pulls GW and Scirroco. They might attack whilst being in mid air. Someone should ground them. I like tanks to pull anyway but you should find your own reasons.