Samuel_Tow

Maybe that's why I didn't get fooled by the necromancy - I remember those threads popping up way back when, and I remember being as outraged at their utter ridiculousness as I was now. Especially now that we've seen how baseless they are.

Then again, the Issue before that, people were asking "So what do I take in the next 10 levels? One of the powers I didn't want before? No, thanks!" so it's more or less a lose/lose scenario.

I can sort of agree with this comparison, but only in part. I'd map it slightly differently.

If we're looking to map the act of watching a movie multiple times (I've watched AntZ over 100 times, and I say that literally), then I'd map that to playing multiple characters, or in other words playing the whole game again from beginning to end. I have no qualms with playing a game twice and getting the same experience and story. As a point of fact, I prefer it.

Sideways of that is the act of replaying a specific task on the same character. To me, this is like watching a movie which just happens to repeat a scene several times, ala Baby Geniuses. Unless there's a reason for why a scene is repeated, it strikes me as odd and makes me ask meta-story questions that I really shouldn't be asking about any cohesive story.

Let's look at it another way - you have a story about time travel and destiny. Let's take the movie Triangle as an example. In this story, an event takes place, but the story revolves around reliving said event and changing it. In this case, the story itself justifies why a scene repeats almost as is for a second time, third time, or possibly even more. In fact, the series Daybreak examines one of those "repeating day" plots, where each episode consists several repetitions of the same one day, and the series' entire point is to change SOMETHING so as to make time continue instead of looping. In these cases, you have an excuse of repeating the same story over and over and over again, each time trying to do something new and each time not getting what you want.

We have the perfect plot device in the face of Ourobors. Twilight's Son even sets up the necessary narrative, when he explains that your assassination of Loc'Danon may or may not have had any effect on the future, because apparently sometimes these things don't take or produce unpredictable results. So how about this plot:

You've run a TF. Any TF. You've succeeded. Preventing/causing this disaster was supposed to help prevent the Coming Storm, but what the Menders see in the future isn't what they expected to see. Something's wrong. Something about what you did didn't come out as they expected it to, and no-one knows what, exactly. So they offer you an opportunity - try the Task Force again and see if doing anything differently will fix the time line while they gather a larger body of data to try and reason out the problem.

There's your perfect plot device. If you do every task once, you never even have to know about time travel. If you choose to repeat a task, you do so via Ouroboros flashback. You keep the spoils and experience, but the event doesn't occur more than once in the story's timeline. You just keep going back to retry it.

I know it's a silly thing to get hung on, but it's a silly thing I've been able to avoid walking into until the advent of the Incarnate system. Incarnates are already tied to Ourobors. Ramiel is in there, the letter writer guy is somehow connected, Cimerora is somehow connected. So go the extra mile and complete the connection.

That remains to be seen with the new IDF troops. More to point, then the question becomes when they'll introduce new groups

Personally, I've always found the speed of introduction of new costume editor content to be bafflingly slow. From the game's very inception, I always thought that this would be something that would receive a lot of focus, with many costume pieces and new functionalities added all the time. Instead, outside of a couple of large pushes (weapon and power customization), costumes seem to be stuck on a perpetual backburner, getting new stuff whenever they get around to it, or whenever they can sell a Booster.

I'm still not ready to cry foul since David Nakayama did go FAR out of his way to make peace with the playerbase and include them in the process, which makes him one of the few remaining developers I trust implicitly. And there's that whole Incarnate fad going on. Yet still I can't help but feel that costumes should have a higher priority than they currently do.

That's something I can respect, as well. Mistakes will always happen, even to the best of us. It's a fact of life. It's how we handle our own mistakes and how we treat the mistakes of others that determines whether we deserve respect or whether all we've earned is scorn.

I consider all player chat in all chat channels to be OOC all the time, even when players insist that it isn't. Other people talking about having done a task that the game is presenting as a first-time occurrence is no different from me running across spoilers on the 'net. Hell, I played through half of Dragon Age 2 with a walkthrough open in the background, yet this did nothing to impact my suspension of disbelief. All it did was inform me what consequences my choices would have in the future and what to pick if I wanted a specific result.

Gameplay and story segregation.

This is different, however, when a game requires that a task be repeated, yet makes no storyline provisions to account for how this makes sense. I can deal with it with TFs, because you never HAVE to repeat TFs (even if I prefer they'd assume Ouroboros flashback from the second time on) if you don't want to. There's no reward to them that you can't earn through the rest of the game, hence why there is no reason to argue repetition is NECESSARY. Encouraged, perhaps, but never necessary.

Incarnate trials don't share the same out. They ARE necessary, because there are more rewards tied to them than can be earned in a single playthrough of them.

Take something like Assassin's Creed. Few things in this game make sense. If you fail a mission and the person you were supposed to guard gets killed, well, no big. It's just a memory anyway, you can just rewind it and try again. If you want to retry an old unique event, such as the defence and escape from Villa Monterigioni, you can. It's physically impossible to relive that event, because it's already passed, but this being nothing more than a memory, you can just jump back to that memory and experience it again. The guards you were supposed to kill covertly spotted you and ran away? Meh. You desynchronised from how the memory REALLY happened and you got kicked back to an earlier point in the same memory.

It's a cheat, but it makes sense. I don't see why such a narrative cheat cannot be introduced to repeatable tasks in City of Heroes. Once you have the badge for a TF, you henceforth get an extra line of dialogue at the top, rendered in blue, telling you "This is a task you have already accomplished. If you wish to experience it again, you can travel back in time and experience it once more. Are you sure you want to?" Simple as that.

I don't need explanation for inter-character mechanics like Global Mail or Global Chat, but for mechanics which persist within the same character, such as repetitive tasks, tip missions, Inventions and so forth, I would indeed like to have one.

Blame my rotten memory, then I didn't double-check my numbers, for which I apologise, but it's thereabout. Or should be.

Well, you're right, a direct port of Assault sets wouldn't work for Stalkers. For one, they'll need Build Up. For another, they shouldn't have Snipes. For still another, they'd need to emphasise melee more, which, yes, means including "final melee powers" in there.

When I say "assault," I mean that in the general sense, which is to say a powerset which combines range and melee. Assault sets play in a bit of an... Interesting way. Dominators being squishy, I ended up kiting my enemies, which may or may not be a decent strategy for a Stalker, but I do know I'd use them to scrap with given Stalker level resilience. I just feel that Stalkers should be "dirty trick" fighters, and that includes harassing the enemy from afar.

More than anything else, though, going into a mix melee/range set would have forced developers to re-evaluate their powersets and build them from scratch specifically for Stalkers, rather than doing the least possible to retrofit a Scrapper set to an AT that isn't a Scrapper.

Not really. Epic pools are still unique to the AT and have been unique to the AT since they were introduced. Incarnate powers are not.

Not necessarily. Most of this discrepancy comes from AT mods, as ATs that have access to both tend to have lower ranged damage mods. A typical Scrapper/Tanker tiering of attacks tends to be scale 0.64 (Jab, Thunder Kick), 1.0 (Punch, Energy Punch) 1.64 (Bone Smasher, Cremate) and 1.9 (Disembowel, Heavy Mallet). This is not too unlike Blast tiering, which goes something like 0.64 (Power Bolt, Snap Shot) 1.0 (Burst, Lightning Bolt), 1.64 (Slug, Lightning Blast) and then all the way up to 2.2 (Power Burst, Cosmic Burst).

The reason Blaster melee attacks are so strong is because they "cheat." Regular Energy Punch is 1.0, while Blaster Energy Punch is 2.2, and regular Bone Smasher is 1.64 while Blaster Bone Smasher is 2.6. However, when given equal AT mods, there's no reason why ranged attacks can't keep up with melee.

I don't disbelieve you've grown comfortable with Stalkers and enjoy the playstyle. I have, as well. But in large part, this is the function of status quo. That's how the AT is, that's how it always was (more or less) so we adapted and learned to play it like that. But it just seems to be to be too... Faceless, and at the same time errant to design Stalkers this way. They could have been their own AT incomparable to others in the same way Dominators are, or indeed the same way as Masterminds, but instead they came out playing like Scrappers with more criticals and less AoE.

Not that there's anything wrong with playing Scrappers, mind you, but it just seems like the AT was rushed so as to use existing assets when its own unique assets, designed with its own unique gimmicks in mind would have made for a much more robust and a much less bugged AT.

It should. If you hear rumours that it's not possible to customize both weapon AND effect for a specific power, don't believe them. This has never been suggested to be true. The only reason our weapons lack power customization, as per BABs, is that they had to shepherd their resources and so they focused on powers which didn't have customization options beforehand like weapons did.

In theory, it should be possible to alter the animation for firing a gun, as long as it's still the same length and the damage ticks take place at the same times. It should furthermore be possible to customize not just the muzzle flash, but also the type of effect the rifle fires, as well as the sound it makes. I don't see any real reason why Assault Rifle can't be made to fire the effects of Robotics Pulse Rifle attacks, outside of the time and resource commitment required to do this.

What this CANNOT change, however, is the rifle's damage type, so even if a power looks like it's shooting lasers, it'll still do Lethal damage. Or fire damage, depending on the attack.

But, yes, this should be doable within the confines of the engine as they've been explained to us and in accordance with precedent.

Because you being on the same maintenance schedule as the US players will mean less playtime for you?

I intend to reserve judgement until... You know what, here's what I can offer. I'll reserve judgement until December 21st, 2012. After that, we'll see. This should fit into my "another couple of years" ballpark estimate from before.

You normally can't repeat the same mission and the same story arc on any particular character, that's what I'm saying. Samuel Tow never has to worry about why the Director 17 he arrested in 2005 is still leading the same Operation World Wide Red while being opposed by Crash McGuire, because both characters belong to me, and they will never run the same arc together.

So why does this happen when I team with other people? well, because I... Generally don't, and when I do, we run my story arcs anyway. There are ways to see past it, because the game itself doesn't allow me to run a mission twice unless I go out of my way to do so. Not so for "repeatable" content, which is so designed as to be repeated.

Here's my proposition: If content is intended to be repeated, why can it not be designed so as to make sense that it is repeated? This isn't exclusive to the Incarnate system. Any of the game's TFs and Trials can suffer from it, especially those that rely on specific unique events or the presence of people whom the TF's resolution makes "absent." I can kind of see that the Freakshow or the Rikti might make a habit of attacking the Terra Volta reactor every few days. It's not a unique event. I'm rather less convinced that I can defeat Archus day after day and yet it never seems to take with him.

I want to point out an instance of repeatable content done well (even if the content itself is bad): The Shadow Shard. Why is there always a patrol to save for General Hammond? He has many patrols, the Shard is a dangerous place, so his men keep getting in trouble. Why does Dr. Boyd have an endless supply of obelisks he needs examined? He's conducting research and needs a very large sample size. Especially if he's trying to translate a language. Why does Dr. IForgotHerName always need more Kora Fruit? I don't remember exactly, but I recall her saying "I can always use more Kora Fruit" at one point, and I'll take her word for it.

Or take paper and scanner missions - they all come down to about one of four different missions with instance, enemy faction and flavour text swapped around, but they're designed to make sense regardless. They're random unrelated occurrences, not the same one occurrence. Well, they make sense up to a point, until the game runs out of McGuffin and Boss names, but those are pools that should be easy to expand.

Tip missions, on the other hand... Aren't as easily repeatable. Every time you pick up a smooth metal cylinder or see a Scrapyarder sobbing in a corner, it's the same mission. It doesn't even pretend it's different. It's the same exact mission. Again.

So how could the lessons learned from previous repeatable content help us for the future? What could be done to, say, the Tin Mage TF that wouldn't take massive developer resources to institute? Not much, really. Have Tin Mage explain that attacks on Primal Earth have become common, but THIS ONE is especially big. This leaves the door open for people to repeat the TF and say not "Didn't we do this yesterday?" and instead ask "They're doing this again?" Neither is really all that much better, but at least the latter pretends to make sense.

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The less of the game's setting and plot I have to ignore, the better, in my eyes. And I firmly believe there is more the developers can and should do give storyline grounding for trials.

A couple of points:

First of all, I don't disagree with you. I never wanted to claim that repetitive content was inherently evil, more than that it was, well... Repetitive. As per the topic. I equate repetitive with grind, but again - some genuinely like that, and that is A-OK.

Secondly, it's only partly about how well a game tries to hide repetition and how much it CARES to hide repetition. Games like Lineage II are evil. They know they're evil, you know they're evil, I know they're evil, yet we've tried them anyway. They don't even pretend to be interesting or novel. They beat you over the head with the boring, monotonous grind punctuated only by instances of backsliding and losing progress.

City of Heroes I can respect, because the game makes more than a token effort to pretend we're doing more than just fulfilling a kill count. The game's writers want (or wanted, once upon a time) to convince us that "No, no! You're not just killing Skuls! There's a story behind all this! It has meaning!" I'm not simple enough to be blind to the truth, but I appreciate the effort more than I can express.

This, to me, is where the Incarnate system and TFs in general falter. Regular missions get to pretend they're not repetitive simply because there are so many of them. TFs do not have that luxury. If the game made at least a token effort to make the different cycles of the same event different in words, at least, I would appreciate it much more.

For all my hatred of paper/scanner missions and how thinly veiled of a grind they represent, they are nonetheless at least veiled at all. The game isn't out-and-out rubbing your nose in the pathos of running the same ONE TF over and over and over again. It at least pretends that each mission is something new, even if we can see it's just a form letter with the names swapped out.

I would honestly have had a lot more respect for the Incarnate system if at least the superficial storyline made some attempt to either explain why this needs to be done multiple times (and it NEEDS to be done multiple times), or otherwise included superficial variations to where I could pretend I wasn't doing the exact same thing as I was the last time times that will somehow never take.

I'm not sure if the tech for this exists, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what I'd make swap out. I do know, however, that in the regular game, the game's structure doesn't expect us to grind the same content. We CAN, and it won't stop us, but we have options. If the Incarnate system expects us to grind the same two bits of content, was it too much to ask that it at least pretend like repeating them made sense? Even minor dialogue changes would be appreciated.

It's just... This kind of enforced repetition takes me - me personally - out of the experience because it reminds me that this is a game. I can shut my brain down and pretend that thousands of people haven't already captured FrostFire before me, because I don't have to see them, but I HAVE to see what I've done before. And if I HAVE to do it again, I want the game to pretend it makes sense.

That's not entirely true. There are several powers which are, in practice, cones, but are actually balanced as single-target attacks, and Head Splitter is one of them. It has the damage-to-cost and damage over time ratio of a single-target attack, not an attack with its cone range and angle. The same holds true for both Dark Maul and Jacob's Ladder. You can argue that that's not the case for Stalkers, and that with Stalkers, these powers suffer for being cones, but that just means Stalkers get even more gimped versions of Scrapper primaries, which I don't think is an argument that they really need.

Powers like Head Splitter/Golden Dragonfly have always been both described and treated as single-target attacks for which the ability to hit multiple targets is a secondary effect, and this is coming from developer commentary and in-game resources. This is true across Scrappers, Brutes, Tankers and really anyone else who has access to melee.

Additionally, powers aren't and don't have to be balanced against each other one-on-one, so there's no need for Eagle's Claw to be equal to Head Splitter. It's a question of set-to-set balance, which I actually feel favours Martial Arts on a Stalker.

It's not a I don't know if it's intentional, but you complete to miss or ignore the point. I'm not saying that Thunder Kick is so great. What I'm saying is that having ANOTHER ATTACK is great, and Thunder Kick is still significantly better than Kick and Boxing. I don't and can't use Cobra Strike INSTEAD OF Thunder Kick, but I can use it IN ADDITION to it, which is what I do. Show me a way to take Cobra Strike three times and I will gladly lose both Thunder Kick and Storm Kick. Be like what Genin get with their upgrade - "Another Shuriken" for a total of two identical powers that amount to one power which can be used twice.

Again, I'm sure you can make an argument for massive recharge slotting or Inventions or Incarnates and how the game has been moving into the realm of skipping attacks and focusing on global recharge, but that's really not the point. Inventions are not the point, and Incarnates are stuck at 50. Recharge slotting does work, but again - when slots permit, and that still doesn't happen until the later levels.

I like Martial Arts for Stalkers as it is and feel no particular desire to have Dragon's Tail. You can choose to try and convince me or ignore me, but you're still arguing about the status quo, and "it doesn't break anything" has never been a successful argument as far back as I remember.

Because I don't want them to keep doing what they're doing. I'm happy that people apparently got what they wanted, but I'm not happy with the manner in which they got it. I've avoided many games for having what we now have, and this isn't going to change just because we have it. Arguing to remove or radically redesign a system which is already done is foolish, and I wouldn't want to do foolish things (too often).

However, there still ARE things the developers could do to satisfy me, they're just things that they WON'T do, at least not any time soon. And not because they're stubborn, mind you, but because they've chosen to go into a direction that is incompatible with what I'd have wanted. I can accept this, obviously, but it doesn't mean that I have to like it, or that I have to keep quiet about it, and it certainly doesn't mean that I will refrain from suggesting how things could be changed even if I know it's pointless.

Moreover, this is not a thread about the merit of Incarnates and how good the game is or isn't with or without them. It's a thread about grind, and grind Incarnates are. How much of a grind and how much you're willing to tolerate isn't really my place to speak about, but we're doing the game no favours by denying this.

The Incarnate system lacks content. This needs to be understood and accepted. What is done about it in the future is not relevant to the fact that this exists. I know this may turn me into a pariah (again), but I do not accept the arguments that the existing Incarnate content is not repetitive, when common sense demonstrates that it is. You need to repeat it if you want to progress through the system, and you have no alternatives. I also do not accept the arguments that any new TFs, Trials or Raids the developers may have planned to add with make the system any less repetitive, since they will certainly come with even more slots, and require even more repetition, not less.

I have no problem with discussing preferences and beliefs, but we need to discuss them within the context of facts, and that you cannot earn all Incarnate rewards without repeating Incarnate content is a fact that I don't think anyone can really argue with. And that's by design.

It is unquestionably a "grind" as I define the term, and my definition is fairly simple - any game system which requires me to replay content I've already played on this specific character by virtue of giving me no other option. This was the case with the old 38-40 game where you would run out of unique missions and would be forced to either streethunt or, later, rerun newspaper/scanner missions.

"Grind" as a term doesn't have one uniform definition that transcends personal subjectivism, so I don't claim to define it for other people, but to me repeating content is a grind. I'd repeat it when I felt like repeating it, but repeating it out of necessity I would not like to, if possible.

Not necessarily. I class the content as a "grind," but time and again people have proven that they do, in fact, enjoy grinding. Well, some people, anyway. And that's not "enjoy something which I feel is grinding but they don't." No. I've seen and indeed know a fair few people who fully admit that what they do is grinding, and then they do it anyway, and end up having a jolly old time of the whole affair. I certainly don't want to take that away from them, nor do I have a problem with this approach to gaming, so long as I'm not roped into it, myself.

But at the same time, I'm a firm believer of splitting controversial issues into as many discernible parts as possible, so that when solutions to them are sought, they only "solve" the particular parts that proved to be offensive and don't ruin the parts which were not. When it comes to Incarnates, the issue is many-fold. Difficulty is one separate issue, the time commitment is another, teaming and socialisation is another still, and repetitive content is quite distinct from all of the above. Different people give each part a different weight. I just feel that the repetitiveness of content is one of the easier targets at the very least point to, even if it's one of the hardest ones to actually solve.

In this case I'm repeating an argument from years ago. Possibly from the time of Inventions, possibly from before. I don't remember exactly. It had to do with the clash between those who wanted more progress, with or without new content and those who wanted new content, with or without more progress. To avoid using long-winded explanation, I tend to divide those ideas between things to "do" - those being content that you can take part in, actions you can take, plots you can follow - and things to "earn" - those being the results of the content, actions and plots.

As I explained before, I don't necessarily believe that a game can do on just one or the other. Doing things is, ultimately, why we're here playing a game, but doing things gets old, and fairly fast. Earning things by doing helps provide milestones and helps rejuvenate the allure of the doing, but just earning things with little to use them on and little heart in the process of earning them turns a game into a hollow experience. My chief concern as regarding "the grind" is that the Incarnate system provides a great many things to earn, but provides us with almost nothing new to do to earn them. It's just about the same game, just with more rewards.

More specifically, though, my argument was that the Incarnate system doesn't constitute something NEW for people to do. I wouldn't dream of claiming that it doesn't constitute much doing, but not much of it is new. As it stands right now, I20 seems to be focused on doing said Trials more than anything else, which excludes existing content and needlessly narrows the scope of the gameplay. However, broadening said scope to include the existing 45-50 content doesn't change much, because that's still content I've likely already done.

And this isn't an argument about how long I've been here and how tired I am of the game. That's a separate issue. It's an argument that any specific character I take to 50 is likely to have already done this content, and even if not, will have done this content long before he can even sniff the Well of the Furies. I can stomach repeating content, and a lot, as long as I'm repeating it with new characters. "I wonder how THIS one will do against Baphomet?" I think to myself, and my enthusiasm is intrigued. By contrast, when the question I ask myself becomes "How do I make the event faster for THIS iteration?" my enthusiasm dies in a fire, to be replaced with pessimistic stoicism, and that's rarely a good thing.

Even if I believe this, it's not an argument I want to make. Outside of the trite argument that working on it means not working on other things (another argument I don't want to make), there really is no denying that it was good for the game. Just HOW good is a matter of opinion, but it is good either way.

However, good as it may have been, it represents a shift in game design philosophy - and this is one of the statements that's likely to incur me some Arcana wrath. It goes back to something Positron said recently in relation to the recurring "AT Respec" threads, and something many people have inferred over the years - that City of Heroes is intended to be played over and over again with different characters. One of Jack's original design goals was to introduce so much content into the game that a player could never see it all in one go, and would need multiple characters to do so.

Why is this important? Because it produced a game player philosophy here that is something of a conundrum in other games. When asked "Who is your main?" many will respond with "I don't know." or "I don't have one." Sure, some will have two or three, instead, but then there are those among us who genuinely don't have one or a few favourite characters, but instead treat them as our flock to which we are the shepherds, favouring no-one in particular, but enjoying our collection as a collection, itself.

Where end game enters into this is that it seems purpose-designed to be inviable for too many of a player's characters to engage in. As a point of fact, many players have stated this as a fact and taken great pleasure in doing so. I don't want to discuss issues of pride in exclusivity and feelings of achievement, so much as to paint what I see as the consequences of that - the Incarnate system encourages us to focus on our 50s, and not just focus, but do so to the exclusion of our non-50s.

This isn't just a case of wanting to have a zillion Incarnates, but the time and effort investment into the system creates a sort of backwards logic: The longer I spend playing my "alts," the longer I spend NOT playing my "main" and thus the more I miss out. Even absent of the desire to have too many Incarnates, the kind of focus this system breeds does go quite some ways to take away from the enthusiasm of making alts. For some, I'm sure this is welcome news, especially those who used to make alts for lack of anything better to do. For others like myself, however, who made alts because we genuinely enjoyed the creation process, this incentive comes off more like a chore than an opportunity.

So is the game worse of for having it? Of course not. Not because of development focus, not because of shifting game design ideologies. But the real question is "is it better?" That's not as easy to answer. It was good for the game, but what's good for the game isn't always a better game. I know it hasn't made the game better for me, and it has had the unpleasant consequence of turning my fellow players into intolerant jerks, though I don't know how much of that I can attribute to game changes.

What it is for the game is "different." I don't consider City of Heroes with the Incarnate system to be better or worse than City of Heroes without it. Oppinions on who likes which version will obviously vary, but I really don't think the options are comparable. It comes down to what each of us prefers. I, myself, prefer a replay-centric, alt-centric game, and to that effect the Incarnate system's shift towards focused gaming has been a detriment. Others prefer focused gaming and praise the system for it, dreading the times of replay-centric, alt-centric gaming.

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I've said it in the past that I prefer a game I can replay ten times then one that's ten times as long, and this hasn't changed. Any game I play through and end up feeling like I never want to do that again, no matter how much fun I may have had along the way, I consider to have ultimately been a failure. There are games that I can pick up months, years, sometimes even decades after the fact and still have the desire to play them.

There's 1999's Oni, there's 1993's Flashback, there's 1994's Loderunner: The Legend Returns. All of those are games I could still play, and would, in fact, still play, were they compatible with my system (I'm aware of DOSBox and Oni's XP patch), all because they were games I was inclined to replay even back then. Compare that to something as great as the original Mass Effect, which was a great game... But I will never, EVER play through that mess of bugged gameplay and inventory management nightmare ever again. Same with the Dragon Age games. They have replay value, yes, but they have a replay cost that I'm not willing to pay again. In fact, they have a first playthrough cost that I'm not sure I would have wanted to pay had I known what it was ahead of time.

To me, City of Heroes has always been the former - a game that I can pick up, get to the end, reflect on how awesome I was and look forward to starting it all over again. This... Will no longer be the case. I'll have to redefine my own artificial end somewhere along the line and decide that this is where the game ends FOR ME, and draw some closure from that. But in the spirit of rewards and a sense of accomplishment, getting to the unambiguously branded "end of the game" carried a much more satisfying sense of achievement than concluding that I don't want to play the game past a specific point.

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I've made my piece with the Incarnate system and wish it the best of luck in the future. People like it, people flock to it, they deserve to get what they paid for. And I'm a patient man. I can wait for the current Incarnate craze to pass and see where the future takes us. To more reasons to make new characters, I would hope, but that's always on the list, I think. The recently-announced server list merger reminds me of another thing which could score high in my book - a single-server environment, so I don't have to be marooned from my friends on Pinnacle when I play one of my 30 or so character on Victory. But that's unlikely to happen, cool as it may be.

Incarnates are here to stay, and we should all do our best to help them grow, or at the very least keep out of the way. But I still feel that part of that process is pointing out and putting into words the areas left wanting. No more, no less.