Nethergoat

If you flatly cannot earn X without teaming, that's forced.

If teaming is the most efficient way to get X but you can still earn it by other means, whatever they may be, that's encouraged.

I'm fine with investing multiples of time over the teamed average to get whatever X is by solo means as long as it isn't just ridiculous, like trying to get the badge by killing that one Infected that sometimes spawned in Atlas, or wherever.

can I have your crystal ball?

soloing is a great way to make inf- you get to keep all the drops.

also, in our glorious modern era of Amerits 100m is chump change.
As noted earlier, if you want 100m, find something people are paying 100m for then buy it with Amerits (or regular ones, I guess) and voila, profit.

I don't imagine that'd take more than a few days of effort, even starting from zero.

Alternately, you can do what I was doing before my current hiatus- run MA missions, buy bronze rolls and craft the good stuff. Optimized (ticket farm map, fire/axe tank) I can cap the map in 15 or so minutes. Even non-optimized, you can earn dozens of rolls quickly just running story arcs.

Money really is the least of anyone's worries in the modern game. There are too many easy, fast, foolproof ways of making it.

It's not that I don't have stretches of time when I can play for an hour or so straight, it's that they are not in any way predictable. Basically, I'm perpetually 'on call' and might have to AFK for an unknown period at any time. So one two hours, one hour, 30 minutes....it's all the same. The vagaries of what happens in game are less a problem than the vagaries of what happens in my life while I'm trying to play.

Also, what some teams are capable of doesn't necessarily reflect on the efficiency of a PUG. I was on a team that took over two hours to finish a Katie one time.

And again, forced teaming is lame however they dress it up. Make anything achievable by anyone in the game- if you want to encourage teaming, make it more efficient than other methods. Encourage your players to team, rather than punishing them for not teaming.

All that said, I like the direction they seem to be going. Make it achievable for everyone who wants to invest the effort, just faster and easier for those who team. I've got no problems with that, as long as I can eventually get the goodies.

but, wonderfully, does not preclude ALSO farming while you marketeer!

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

a propitious number!

If you want to say "dabblers like to clear maps at -1", great.

Farmers aren't dabblers, they're fiends for efficiency.
Running a map at -1 is inefficient and wasteful. The only efficiency argument in favor of doing it that way is not being able to consistently survive +0, and any even marginally competent farming character should be able to handle that with no problem.

Judging by "some responses" is a fantastic way to justify any wild fantasy you dream up because "some people" believe all kinds of nutty stuff.

Not all that elusive- you can generally find me idling at the Sharkhead Black Market (much less crowded than Cap, conveniently located MA building one leap away) most evenings I log in. Although lately I'm playing catchup to some friends in That Other Big Game and haven't been on much....so maybe I am elusive after all. =P

But yeah, hero worship always welcome, my ego is a like a starving baby bird, ever desperate for sustenance! =P

"these sorts of threads" have been popping up as long as these forums have been operations.

Hawr!

Well played.

I'm commenting on the fact that you made an inaccurate statement, nothing more. It certainly exposed something, though.

More than comments about "what farmers do" that have no bearing on reality, I'd say.

Regarding the market/loot system, everyone can play. There are no barriers to entry. Whatever your play style, if you defeat enemies you'll get junk to sell or equip. You can choose to engage the market itself as casually or intensely as you like, there are no artificial hurdles.

Philosophically I'd prefer everything be marketable and I dislike BOP and BOE for the same reasons I dislike gated content- they carry the taint of orthodoxy. I don't like the proliferation of multifarious currencies (vanguard merits, amerits, tickets, etc) either.
But these are just my personal preferences- for the most part they've been handled well enough that I can mostly ignore them and carry on as I always have with minor adjustments.

I had a massive argument with someone back before they added the market, don't remember who anymore. But they were disappointed that the game was adding something as pedestrian as loot and wished for some kind of outside the box solution. My take was they tried something outside the box (Statesy's famous SSOOCS), it didn't do what they wanted so they fell back on a known quantity.

I get the same impression here. A gated 'end game' is a known quantity with no real risk involved- it's an easy sell, to most players and to the money men.

Of course this time I'm on the other side, wishing they'd taken a less orthodox approach.


I don't think we need an 'end game' in the traditional sense, we just need more stuff to do. But it makes dramatic sense to stick it at the end of the progress tree.

I jousted with Statesy one time over one of his more ridiculous ideas, front-loaded missions.
The one that pushed me over the edge was a Lost mission in Skyway which had a hot door- Unlucky Pete was the boss, I think. This was a long time ago, and a substantial spawn with a few red Headsman Swordsmen (who could and would one-shot you) was a massive challenge to new players who's characters were kitted out with a patchwork of training enhancers in various states of decay.

We eventually beat down the resistance, after multiple team wipes and trips back from the hospital. We'd figured out some tactics, and our blood was up- we stormed down the hallway and were somewhat surprised to find that subsequent spawns were much less challenging- by the time we found Unlucky Pete, he was gray. The whole thing was profoundly unsatisfying and left a bad taste in my mouth.

His argument was it's good to mix things up, and while I agree to some extent it ISN'T good to mix them up in a way that upends archetypal structure and expectations. Or rather, if you DO mix them up in that way it had better be a carefully considered act within a larger framework, not something you do "just because".

Sort of a long winded way of saying it makes sense to put most of your added content at the end of your game, whether or not you format it as some sort of traditional 'end game'.


It's impossible to make a wholly uncontroversial system.
As the saying goes, give people free gold ingots and they'll complain about how heavy they are.

I agree entirely.
But in this case I find myself aligning with my long-ago sparring partner, who wished they'd been able to create an original system instead of just plugging in a proven workhorse like loot/economy.

I'm not antithetical to an 'end game', but I'd like it to be in the iconoclastic spirit of the game. As it is still largely unwritten, perhaps my concerns are unfounded. But I don't like the scent on the breeze.

All true, and I will defer to you from this point on as I am veering perilously close to debating something I know very little about- I have had minimal experience with the Incarnate system so far.

Teaming definitely opens up a lot of design possibilities. Hearkening back to my pen and paper gaming days, you had a lot more flexibility with your encounters when six people made it to the session than when two made it.

I'm just against it being the ONLY way to progress through the 'end game'.

I understand this, and I'm hoping they come up with a compelling alternate route for those who can't/won't/prefer not to team.

It's a rare opportunity, but a satisfying one.


I wasn't trying to give the impressions of inveterate soloists being a mammoth block of the population, or even one that should be catered to. As you note, there aren't likely to be many players THAT opposed to teaming. But I believe there are a fair number of people that like to solo, prefer to solo and who would be annoyed to some greater or lesser extent by this level gating.

The devs have a better grasp of the numbers involved than I ever will and I'm sure they'll use their best judgement. I'm stating my preference and presenting what arguments I've made in the spirit of contradicting the rythmic chant of "deal with it losers" coming from the Purity Police in the bleachers.

And speaking only for myself, a game design trend line drifting toward industry norms is cause for concern. I play this game because I like this game, the more it hews to MMO orthodoxy the less appealing it becomes.

As I noted somewhat obliquely, the volume of content available to soloists is less relevant that what sort of content is gated off.

When you gate the penultimate level of character development with teaming requirements, there goes your 7 years of accumulated goodwill with the portion of your playerbase who prefer to solo.

Your opinions about what they ought to feel are quaint but irrelevant.

In a game where you yourself claim 97% of the content is soloable?
How so?
In a game where soloability is the status quo, exceptions to that reality require justification.

Justification beyond "uh, MMOs are for teamers!" and "JUST CAUSE, that's why!", which is the basic level of argumentation on display from the it's no big deal, suck it up losers crowd.


To avoid another round of pointless jousting with your cloud of irrelevancies, I will summarize:

if the devs want contented, happy soloists there needs to be an avenue by which they can achieve all levels of incarnate power.


If they think this seeming change in direction is going to bring in more players than it alienates, they'll pursue it regardless. But neither they, nor anyone else, should comfortably assume the established community of soloists will choose to 'suck it up' when there are numerous competing options available to the discerning MMO player, with more arriving monthly.

As of now we don't really know what the plan is and this could all end up being a pointless detour when I20 hits. But if the gate stays up, there's going to be a rumble.

there's very, very, very little of this game that can't be soloed by a determined player.

it wouldn't surprise me if that made up number was fairly accurate.

The justification "this shouldn't be soloable because lots of other stuff is" still doesn't work, but oh well.

I was gonna say, kids like involvement, they don't much care how it happens, but the article beat me to it.

their justification for the blanket ban ("uh, it's too hard to know what's an MMO and what isn't, so no talking about any games!") was laughable in the extreme.

LAWL!

maybe they've extended their imbecilic policy of not letting us talk about games to not letting us show pictures of this one? =P