MrCaptainMan

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

If you go in with the bias that you're "forced" to do anything, it's going to affect how you feel about the behavior and how you engage in it. You already come in feeling anxious and angry, it's no doubt you don't feel very interested in social behavior.



Now before anyone says, I was assuming anything above, the poster confirms it right here.



How do you know? I'll have you know I often chat with people during the trial, after, and often wait around to see if something else is going on unless I need a break or have somewhere to be.



You emphasized the wrong word here. It is your experience. Not everyone else.

Originally Posted by LISAR

Double posting here.

I was wondering if any of the forumites who support casual progression would be opposed if Mender Ramiel's arc (including the Trapdoor fight) was used as reference for the bare minimum difficulty for casual incarnate progress.

Originally Posted by Rodion

I suppose that's how a lot of people do it. But I don't think the devs want us to play that way. You're "supposed" to use the trials to see how other people play, and use that as a basis for inviting them to supergroups, or private global channels that have superseded supergroups (because of hero/villain teaming).

People in those supergroups and private channels do natter on after the trial is over. They help each other out with missions and set up things like TFs, hami and mothership raids, etc. You might not have discussions with players in the game, but you obviously have a sense of community with players in the forums.

Originally Posted by Rodion

Here's my take on why they're doing this.

There's a common perception that City of Heroes is "dead" because there aren't hordes of people roaming the streets hacking wolves to pieces.

We play almost exclusively in instances. And frankly, it's a whole lot easier to play in those instances with just a couple of people. People you already know. Even with TFs, where you need 4-8 players, you can almost always fill the team with acquaintances.

That means you don't really need to meet other people. When I started out I was in a SG with 20-30 other people. Over time all but three of us quit the game. And we never really needed to meet other people to do the content we wanted to do.

By having large trials the devs are forcing us to be more sociable. They're creating spaces where people congregate to form trials. (That isn't strictly necessary, but that's how we're choosing to do it.) We're forced to meet new people, and expand the number of acquaintances we have so that we can fill trials with people who have similar goals.

The other aspect of this is that by giving better rewards for certain content, they are gating lots of people through the same content (trials and weekly strike targets). The devs are creating more opportunities for large team content to be done.

Games like this are social experiences. The more people you know, the greater the sense of camaraderie, and the more likely it is you'll stick around. If all your friends up and leave, and you've only got a few friends, you'll probably follow them.

Originally Posted by Aura_Familia

Which is why I suggested that some of the level 50 content get an Incarnate mode where every mob can scale to 54, and come with new tricks if necessary. Level shifts anyone?

Boom, there's you additional Incarnate content.

EDIT: Yes I know that mode will take some time to created.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

The argument that "People do raids, therefore people WANT to do raids," aside from being a logical fallacy of a pretty obvious nature, is slowly being proved wrong by the many people who are starting to make the counter-argument of "I like to team and I like raids, but I'm getting burned out and I want something else."

What people want is more content. I don't know what Paragon Studios' deal is, but the rate at which they've produced content is somewhere between slow and "mid-air stall." In the past year, we've gotten all of three Trials, two TFs and two arcs, and I21 is promising a new zone that's all of 6 levels in range - 20-26. I don't know if they're holding content back to sell with Freedom or if 3/4 of the studio are working on Freedom content or if they just fired everybody, but I've not seen content introduction this slow during the dark days of the Post-CoV 15.


When Cryptic Studios sold the City of Heroes franchise to NCsoft, along with their entire City of Heroes team, I could tangibly feel the re-investment. Suddenly, there were no more talks of "This would take too much work." or "We don't have the manpower to do that." The studio hired new people, stepped on the gas and started not just releasing "biggest bang for the buck" additions, but actually releasing what I call "luxuries" - additions that make the game better but aren't always Issue showpieces or likely to score high on banner ads. We got several ATs revisited and - in my opinion - fixed up, we saw power customization, we saw lots of things of this nature. Even if you didn't like one particular aspect of a new Issue, there was always something else interesting for you.

These days it feels like we're back down to 15 people working on the game, picking only the highest-value targets, focusing on only one thing and working as though directed by marketing, rather than good game design. The thing is, what people want is raids AND solo content, and there's no reason that it has to be JUST one or the other. We paid Paragon Studios a significant amount of money recently - $20 for an expansion, $10 for the Booster that came with it, another $10 for the Animal Booster, another $10 for the Steampunk Booster. They should have had the money to work on more than one raid per Issue, so it becomes a question of what, exactly, it is that I'm paying for. Freedom, though, is the most likely answer.

---

If you think that what the players want is "raids, raids and more raids," you are provably wrong. Even the people who want raids are starting to ask for other things as well, and more raids won't alleviate these desires. If we keep seeing mostly just new raids, this will only get worse and those browbeating fans of practically anything else will just lose more of their support.

Originally Posted by Venture

My best arc "Splintered Shields" is down partly because of this. (And, IIRC, it doesn't like the name "Victor Praetorius", which is funny because it's one of my PCs.)

Originally Posted by Aggelakis

Nope. The longer and/or harder the target is, the more bonus XP it awards. Conversely, if they select a really easy target (say, Katie Hannon?), they can make it award less bonus XP.




Also: For the OP: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Weekly_Strike_Target
Paragon Wiki is a great place to stop for simple questions like these.

Originally Posted by Pacur

Wait, wait wait. Back up. You've only ran one lambda trial, and one BAF trial?

Originally Posted by Pacur

Incarnates are not related in any way shape or form to AE. If you want incarnate abilities, you have to run incarnate trials. You can also go do the slow route and do shards.

I personally don't understand why people expect the same amount of effort and man-hours to go into trial incarnates and not solo incarnates.

Originally Posted by Furio

That seems to be the most side-stepped question. *Currently* (it may well change in the future when they release solo incarnates stuff, which I believe will happen in some form) there's nothing in the game designed for the level of power that high-end incarnate powers grant. They're expressly designed for the Incarnate trials...not even just teams....but for the trials. If one isn't doing the trials for *whatever* reason, where is the *need* for solo incarnate power acquisition at a faster rate?

edit- and granted there are people that do amazing things solo..I'm talking from the dev standpoint, though. What need is there for a non-trial player to have the abilities that were expressly designed for use in the trials?

Originally Posted by Hyperstrike

You're laboring under the misapprehension that people ARE asking for this. They're NOT. Some of this stuff can be completed in a few days by relentless grinding of the trials. Great, fine and wonderful for those that want to do it that way.

But those that don't wish to grind trials, or are simply unable/unwilling to play them (for whatever reason) are being given a alternate system that kicks up the time necessary to generate similar rewards by an order of magnitude or more.



Do the math from Bill's original post. See how long and expensive it'd be to unlock each of the 4 tiers simply by relying on random shard drops.

Then tell me it's a load of crap.



And how much Inf did you burn in the shard-to-thread and thread-to-exp conversion? Is it realistic to tell someone to save up for 7+ months, then spend a few hundred million?



What'd be nice would be a series of missions (like Tips) that'd generate an Astral or two every day you ran the set of missions, then would generate an Empyrean at the end of an arc with an "alignment mission" type finishing mission. That and random thread drops here and there. Or better yet, if the missions are multi-objective, thread drops for completing the objectives.

It'd be SLOWER than relentlessly grinding trials, but not "a few days vs 7-12 months" slower.

Originally Posted by JuliusSeizure

That's a lot of polarized points based on comparing hard core grinders against what amounts to soloers or VERY casual players. Why can't you play a few iTrials a week while generating shards solo and converting Notices to threads? That's certainly on the casual side and it wouldn't take very long to augment a character with incarnate abilities. Solo content contributing? Check. Task Forces contributing? Check. And of course iTrials are the bread and butter-- as they should be.

Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect

Okay....come up with a definition of "fun" that every single player in the game will agree with, and they might get on that for you.

One person's fun is another person's horrible waste of time. That isn't going to change, because it's human nature. No two people in the world will enjoy exactly the same things to the exact same degree, and have the exact same opinion on what is fun about it. It just won't ever happen.

"Make the game fun" is a ridiculous demand, simply because what is fun varies so widely from person to person.

If everyone enjoyed exactly the same thing there would only ever be one kind of entertainment in existence. One kind of video game. One genre of movie, one sport, one type of music, one book. It might even go even further and there would only be one example of any of those things. If everyone liked the same movie, and didn't like any other movies, what would be the point of making any other movies? If everyone liked WoW, and nothing else, it's unlikely that anything would exist BUT WoW.

The very fact that there is such a wide variety of things you can do to entertain yourself is, in and of itself, concrete proof that "Make it fun" is a completely impossible demand to meet.