Kitsune9tails

I also beleive content should stand on its own merits.

I do not beleive that other aspects of the game should be dragged down.

I do beleive that each aspect of the game should be optimized for appeal to its' target audience.

I also beleive that if the solo path has too many elements that appeal to iTrial organizers, that will be bad for the game overall.

I beleive that should be kept in mind as the content is produced.

The idea is to have two healthy, appealling, parallel methods of advancement, instead of one that is healthy at the expense of the other ...the exact opposite of what you take me to mean.

iTrials: Speed of Incarnate Advancement, strategic difficulty that requires teams, foes that require a variety of powers and large numbers to face, a minimum of text reading/exploring, closely timed tasks that require team coordination, etc

solo: Large, beautiful areas with lots of hidden easter eggs, npc interaction with long and complex dialogue trees that affect their future actions and attitudes, lots of things to click for backstory, multiple missions that fit together to solve mysteries, moral choices, zone-affecting player triggered events, one-on-one duels with powerful foes, etc

I disagree (naturally).

Killing iTrials by introducing solo content that sucks up all of the people who organize Leagues would be robbing Peter (iTrials) to pay Paul (soloists).

Moreover, it would be bad for the game: content that leads people to form 24 seperate instances of a mission is apparently harder on the servers than content that leads those same 24 people to work together in a single instance, hence the Atlas Park rework.

I (obviously) don't see any harm in having solo content that is optimized and enjoyable for soloists as well as team content that is optimized and enjoyable for teamsters.

Feel free to enlighten me.

I disagree. Not everyone is into iTrials. Content for people who absolutely hate iTrials should be created and maintained. This same content should not kill iTrials by being more attractive to the people who are needed to form Leagues.

I would think that you could manifest a pseudopet, then manifest several other pseudopets around it in a circle, set not to clip with anything. The have all of those surrounding pets fire very narrow cone smashing attacks with kb toward the central pet.

Troy Hickman and David Nakayama are both popular and celebrated comic book creators (writer and artist, respectively) who are fans and players of this game and have at one point or another been employees thereof.

I think the important thing is to keep a focus on what we are trying to acheive.

The solo path should be great for those people who would otherwise give up completely on post-50 content because they will never, for whatever reason, do iTrials. At the same time, it should, by design, suck for people who can, will, and enjoy doing iTrials. It should be an alternative and at most an emergency supplement for when iTrials are not forming at all.

So it would be important to look at the reasons that people who hate iTrials hate them and build remedies for those into the solo path. For instance, iTrials are not a good environment for random exploration and reading text boxes to get story. The new DA should excel at that nearly to the point of overload. iTrials are not a good place to feel stronger than the environment; the opposite should be true in DA.

Of course, it is also to remember that the reason team content exists is not at all to have people blowing up npcs fast together. It is to build bonds between players due to shared fun, harrowing, and interesting experiences.

Even solo content should feed into this sense of community somehow.

For example, there could be a series of environment items around the zone that can be interacted with. Interacting with them in a certan order causes critter A to spawn, Interacting with them in any other order causes critter B to spawn. Maybe messing with the objects grants buffs or debuffs according to some esoteric scheme. The kicker? Whenever the server reboots, the rules change randomly. There would be hours of community and fun in that; figuring out what the rules of the day were, let alone how the critter, buffs and debuffs could be actually used...

I agree.

This is why I think that the next big focus of the game needs to be 'player community'; SGs, Bases, Pocket D, Emotes, Dev Events, more badges and incentives for ingame mentoring, etc.

In Star Wars Galaxies, you could play actual music as a band. There was a variety of musical instuments you could acquire, each could play the scales with different appropriate sound. So you could meet with friends online, practice and learn songs together, then go to a Cantina and stand in a line, doing different songs. You could even emote while playing, so you could act all rock-and-roll or big-jazz-band-like while playing.

You know those dancers you see around Jabba? Not only could you play a dancer (and get gigs to go dance in various places for xp), you could pull off various emotes while dancing so you could dance differently than other dancers. If you did this in a Cantina, players could emote that they were smiling at you specifically, which gave you xp. Not only that, but players in the presence of a dancer in a Cantina got bonuses to heal rates. I don't think that exact thing would fly in this game, but you can imagine the kind of community it built.

Those are some rather extreme examples, but suffice it to say I think there are a lot of things that could be added to this game to build community and get Freems to become Preems/VIP beyond Incarnate stuff.

MMO designers want people to team, because one of the biggest factors in a player maintaining (or purchasing) a subscription is whether they have friends who play.

The devs want you to make ingame friends.

You can get these of your own characters by request? Who is this Layla Rei, and how do I get her to

Sounds awesome!

Now about our beloved Dark Astoria fog...

Anytime anyone on the Dev team wants to create, present or sell us anything, please give us a head's up while it's still on the white board. We will be glad to argue out the proper form for it so you guys don't have to go to so many meetings.

I'm serious.

Hmmm...

What do you think about solo-only content with a special badge (like a duel with Recluse) that was time limited; say once per character per 20 hours?