Grey Pilgrim

I'd get some player notes on that jerk and remind myself never to play with them again. No reason for that whatsoever.

I can't agree to this suggestion enough: either we are working together as a league, or not. No need to separate things out, so give rewards to all.

Hmmmm, that could be it. Oddly enough, the prisoners seem to jump all over and lag for me more than other portions of the BAF Trial.

Doesn't really help much in the meantime, though. And there weren't any issue with the Alpha slot in saying "wait for more!" Mentally, I can tell myself to do other stuff. But then I would like to have more players with the fun new powers... it's the way the game is: and I really hate that this new system works so strongly against the alt system the game has encouraged up until now. Meh, I've said that more than enough, don't want to get too broken recordish.

Of the two trials, I find Lambda to be more fun and interesting. There is plenty going on in a BAF, of course, and I have lucked out in being on Masque and MP led teams for those (which means they're well-coordinated and usually have a bunch of good players on them), but Lambda seems to be a lot more dynamic and interesting, kind of like Des mentioned. It feels more... l33t or something, like Apex and Tin Mage do. BAF starts out interesting, with a feeling of being on a covert op, but it kind of drops away from that. I dunno, I might find it more fun when people feel tough enough to take on the AVs where they spawn in, though getting the "Strong and Pretty" badge seems a good challenge no matter where you do it.

For people who DC, the nice thing would be to wait a few minutes, just like everything else. If I don't see someone for a few minutes while forming for a TF, I assume it was a big crash and they couldn't recover: I'm not going to make a bunch of people wait longer when we have no clue what is going on for just one person.

I can see what you mean about the time for the effort of forming for these, Masque, but at the same time, it's kind of nice that they don't take hours to do. CoP would probably feel more worth it if it rewarded more as well.

Yup, teams really need to stick together: that's really the ticket for these. There's a lot of buffing and exotic damage flying around against you, so they are really not go it alone ventures. Once you figure out where things are for Lambda, make sure you coordinate with team members... on the one run I've done (on my Fire Tank) we had a few people know where things were in the warehouse, and they basically ditched people that didn't know where things were as well, which made it more difficult than it should have been.

Reading up on strategies and working with team leaders helps with all that, too.

This was discussed to death in the beta forums. Saying "for now" doesn't mean squat for a long time in the foreseeable future. We have no clue when more trials or more content will be allowed to let threads drop (and issues are months apart). And considering they sprang a new currency and gated content for this round of incarnate slots, I am guessing they are going to do it yet again for the next round.

And don't get me wrong, I'm an optimistic person. But after the setup for threads that is live went through, I'm not going to think positively about how they are going to gate this future stuff.

Again, "for now," really isn't helpful when it means this is it for months and possibly even longer. That's like someone complaining there was no really loot system for CoH at launch (or even I3 or whenever they mentioned stuff about the system that was scrapped before IOs), and someone saying "for now." You can't develop and expect players to be hopeful that more stuff is coming down the pike.

I disagreed with Statesman on just about everything, but he has said in interviews more than once that "you are what you have at launch." That first impression can be killer.

You need far more threads than shards, so if you expect to progress using shards and the conversion rate, expect your progress to be rather miniscule. Assuming you don't want to get hit with the conversion penalty, your 10 shards will get you half of a component. Compare that to Gra'i Matter, which has a similar timer but gets you an entire component.

I'm sure a few people have a bunch of shards banked and can use more of them to help out, but you have to be kidding yourself if you think getting shards will allow you to progress on the new stuff even close to what you could for the alpha. The math just doesn't support it.

We tossed out numerous ideas to get around this issue in the beta forums and nothing budged after they upped the transfer rate. Maybe they will eventually bring in threads to more content, but that gets the same reply as the "for now" above. It doesn't help now, and it doesn't change the fact that I have to run much less content to get anywhere with the new slots. Even if I 100% love the new trials, I don't want to run them as much as I will need to on all the characters I want to go incarnate with.

Globals are back and I can still see open slots for me, so I guess it is unrelated to the global issue they had earlier. Not sure what is up.

D'oh! I was so hoping, especially when there were seven of them and all, what with the upcoming anniversary.

Thanks for the update at least. You should pass it on that we would be... extremely happy customers if we had some more slots sent our way, though. My jaw dropped when I saw this and I was extremely happy... even though the man in me of Swedish descent and Midwestern upbringing told me not to hope for too much.

*added*

Dromio, I have used all the slots I have earned via GR and vet rewards, so it's not a matter of redeeming. It might just be the number of slots you have earned over the years. Seven might be right for my vet rewards and how many I earned through GR.