Samuel_Tow

You can turn lead into gold, discover the missing link of human evolution, invent faster-than-light travel, prove the existence of God and travel back in time to ensure none of that actually happens.

I could, but all that would result in is people twisting my statements back into what they think is the easiest to argue against. Why bother typing up five paragraphs of explanation when all it would lead to is someone doing a monster-quote and responding with "So you're actually saying something completely different, then?"

To humour you, however: When you hit 50, all that you have to look forward to is a grind. That's by developer design. You have two trials which you are expected to run many, many times over. That we will get more trials is an empty promise, because with new trials will come new slots, and the need to repeat them many times will not change. This is my definition of a grind - repeating the same tasks over and over again with no alternative.\

I'm not arguing that this could have been done better, or accusing the developers of being incompetent. I'm well aware that this approach was the only reasonable one - this is why I used to argue against it as a concept.

We have what we have. But what we have is two trials gating rewards that require more than two trials to achieve. There really isn't much room for interpretation.

No.

I don't know. I know powers like Thunder Strike use a tiered effect system, where some effects have a range of 0 while others have a range equal to that listed for the power. However, since Cones are essentially AoEs focused on you and covering only a slice of their full circumference, setting their range to 0 will probably make these effects unable to hit anything. It's all fiddly under-the-hood stuff that we haven't been told much about. Arcana will probably know.

Really, when it comes to Stalkers, I have three major gripes that I feel make them feel bugged:

1. "Pseudo-cones" that are balanced as single-target attacks don't get guaranteed criticals.

2. Hide is unreliable, as ambushes see through it, and enemies on teams can still attack you even if you take no aggressive action just because you enter their threat list as part of the team which attacked them.

3. Placate is a crapshot. Sometimes it persists through multiple damage ticks if you placated after the enemy powers fired, so you can score a hidden critical. Sometimes you get interrupted before your unreasonably long Placate animation is even done playing. Plus, placated enemies will remember you and chase you down if you left a debuff on them.

Of those three, the first one is the only one that's relevant. Stalker multi-target attacks have a low chance to score hidden criticals, at least as compared to the 100% chance of single-target attacks. This is done so that Stalker AoE isn't overpowered as it would otherwise be, but it leaves many powers underpowered for the purposes of a Stalker.

Dragon's Tail is one such power. It looks cool, it adds a decent amount of AoE damage, but it would end up replacing a single-target attack, and thus compromising a single-target attack chain, which is really where Stalkers shine. Martial Arts is thus far the only Stalker set I've played that had this solid an attack chain this early in the game, and this persists even until later on. Compared to something like Electrical Melee, or even to something like Katana, that's pretty good. I wouldn't want to mess with that performance.

Though at the same time, I would like to see an alternate animation for Dragon's Tail to the effect of Zangief's Lariat

That's more or less what I do. It's why there's been less rage in my posts of late, now that I've simply settled into ignoring it. I'm saying that more in the general sense. The Incarnate system came out as a direct result of a mixed argument of two sides:

1. People who were asking for more things to do at level 50.

and

2. People who wanted more ways to progress their characters.

Group number two should find most everything they need in the Incarnate system, while group number one will find very little. This is a system of rewards, not content, which is what my disappointment centres on.

To be perfectly honest, Going Rogue just feels like a BADLY incomplete expansion. I realise the original City of Heroes didn't launch complete, missing the last 10 levels as it did (and having the 35-40 game left badly lacking even to this day, for being the "old end"), as did City of Villains, but by and large these were wrapped up within an Issue of their Launch, and didn't exactly present glaringly missing chunks of this magnitude.

It's very likely unreasonable for me to say this, largely due to opportunity cost, time tables, investments and so forth, but I'd have preferred to see Going Rogue released as an "expansionalone" like City of Villains, complete with at least most of a levelling experience AND a chunk of Incarnate content. I'd have paid AAA title prices for that without a second thought. $60? Absolutely! As it stands, it's a bit... Light. And not only is it light, but the rest of the game is currently largely on hold while the developers work on Incarnate content. It's already been how many Issues? I18, I19, I20 now... I thought forming a separate development team which would work on Incarnates and Incarnates only was so that the rest of the game didn't have to suffer for the end game.

But, eh, we have what we have. I'm not going anywhere yet, I just have more to grumble about. I20 does nothing for me, but I eagerly await the Vanguard pack, which will see me reroll no less than two Blasters in their 40s (into what, I haven't yet decided) and update at least one Scrapper in her 40s to Vanguard weapons, as well as probably finally get me to make that technolion I've been meaning to. So it's not like I have nothing left to make, or indeed nothing left to do. It's just nothing left at 50, and Samuel Tow remains uninteresting to me for lack of things to do.

Sam's been 50 since January of 2005. Even if I don't tend to play my 50s much, it's been six years since then, so what little I've played him from time to time has still seen him run through everything at level 50 at least once. All he has left now is scanners, tips and repeatable missions. Well, and TFs, but I don't tend to have the patience to wait for those to form unless I have something else interesting to do in the meantime, which Sam no longer does, and I'm sure as hell not going to put those together or lead them. It's work, and it's work I suck at, to boot. I got tired of gathering people together just so we could fail and waste everybody's time.

Really, I'd just preferred to see more things to do, not more reasons to repeat what I've already done. After a while, it just starts feeling like these rewards are compensation for not having fun.

Any self-respecting villain should get a coffee machine, a candy bar dispenser and a water cooler for his secret evil lair. Considering how much a protonic fusion generator costs to run full-time and how expensive it is to provide storage space, spare parts and other supplies for hundreds of state-of-the art killer robots, a coffee machine should be pocket change. I'm sure you can spare that out of the ridiculous amount of money you earn robbing banks, selling super science secrets and extorting half the governments of the world. It's the little things, really.

If I could, I'd move my secret base off to an uncharted island in the pacific that know-one but me knows about and where ships never travel, possibly underground. Failing that, I'd like to move it entirely underwater. Or possibly underground AND underwater. Though I suppose that null space pocket dimension that the inexplicably purple Super Group entrance squiggly leads to will do for the moment.

Ah, what I wouldn't give for a door. And I don't mean in the sense of "gateway" or "portal." You know, just a door. A physical frame with a large physical barrier that blocks people from walking through it, but can be moved out of the way through a locking mechanism? Just a door. A vault door, ideally. But, no, can't have that. Oh, well. Purple squiggly it is.

They don't have to. The game already has enough content in it that I generally don't get bored. It has had more than enough content to where I never ran out since Experience Smoothing ensured I'd always gain enough experience to progress through the level ranges before I ran out of missions to do.

This has always been the cornerstone argument I've had against end game - because it disregards all previous content and includes a new "range" of content where only newely-developed such applies. This is as extreme case of shooting yourself in the foot as I can imagine, just about, because I'm well aware that the developers can't produce content faster than players can consume it. This reason alone is why I prefer my games to end with an end, rather than a slow, painful decline into boredom and grind. You CANNOT stretch a game into infinity. It is not possible. The best you can do is mire your players in repetition and lack of progress and hope they don't mind, which is exactly what we're seeing here, and part of what I don't like.

If something has to end - and all good things must come to an end - then I prefer this to happen on a high note. "You have achieved everything you hoped to achieve. Congratulations!" as opposed to "You no longer have the stomach to continue and must now give up." This isn't restricted to just games, either. I prefer movie franchises and TV series that end over those which drag on for years and year. Once upon a time, I was a rabid fan of Naruto. Up until about episode 100 or thereabout. Then the show died and its rotting carcass has been dragging for over 300 episodes since, and its uglier and uglier with each passing instalment.

Of course, this doesn't loop back into the problem of giving us things to do at level 50. By its very nature of end game, we're not going anywhere, so those who want to play their 50s perpetually will indeed be stuck in limbo. But I've always seen this limbo as acceptable, as it was what you did after the end, after your adventure is over. I can stand having repetitive content, or running out of content after I've received closure on a game. Once I've beat it, I feel no compulsion to hunt down all the achievements after the end. But the Incarnate system now moves the goal posts. The game is no longer over. There's an entire second game tacked onto the end. Suddenly, my feeling of closure is gone, and the acceptably repetitive post-credits gameplay is now judged much less unacceptably-repetitive, because the credits will instead play ten "level" later than normal.

And so I'm left with the choice of entirely ignoring the system like it never existed, or engaging in the game's single most deliberate time sink and single most obvious recycling of developer resources. Four Incarnate slots and their assortment of tiered powers all tied to just two Trials is just... Bad. I understand they can't do more. I'm not that big of a fool. But I remain unconvinced they expressly needed to go down this route to begin with, especially since it should have been clear to everyone involved that it could not be done right.

But then I guess that deliberate time sinks that try to stretch less content over more time are a staple of MMO design. Call me conservative, but I preferred the old system of more content to less reward.

*edit*
I'm not saying that the Incarnate system is evil, or that the rest of the game is GRRRATE! Far from it. But it isn't until Incarnates that the time sinks really start to show. That's all I'm saying. At no time before are you asked to repeat the same one task over and over again unless you choose to ignore the other options you are given.

And what's wrong with that?

I prefer to play the game on my terms and indeed have all the advantages of being the player. You clearly disagree, but that doesn't mean I'll appreciate ambushes more because of it. Any game element which has consistently done nothing more than to irritate me is not a game element that will ever get my support under any circumstances.

I don't care about challenge or difficulty when it's annoying, that's what it comes down to. I'd rather play a game that's boring to one that makes me scream bloody murder at my screen and punch my keyboard.

I am intrigued. Tell me more.

I'm not actually criticising the meat of the new Trials. I haven't tried them since I personally have no interest, but I'm sure they're great. I don't want to take away from that. But at the end of the day, they're still two Trials that take around an hour (or so they say), and this is expected to keep me hooked on the game for months? "An hour or so" is about the length of a movie, and I can't say I could watch two movies for months. Gone are the days where I'd watch AntZ once a day every day for months at a time until I could recite the dialogue along with the characters.

And four Trials aren't the answer, either. Two Trials, Four Trials, Six Trials... These do not represent enough of a content mass to avoid turning the game into a grind, because TFs, Trials and Raids are not main content body material. They are supplementary material. They are something to do BESIDES normal content, something which is harder, grander and more rewarding than normal content. But a game system which only ever has raids will be a grind pretty much by definition.

Let me paint a picture for you:

I come home 2PM my time, 4AM "American time." I decide I want to make Samuel Tow an Incarnate, so I run the Ramiel arc with him. It takes me an hour, give or take, so it's now 5AM and I want to start working on my Incarnate powers. What are my options?

TFs? None are forming right at that very moment, and probably won't be for another couple of hours.

Scanner missions? No, those were a grind the moment they came out, and Samuel Tow has run most of them anyway.

Tip missions? Not a bad idea per se, but there really are only around 10 of those in the 40-50 range, and I doubt these would give me many Shards.

Shadow Shard, Borea or Marcus Valerius missions? Samuel Tow has done all of Marcus', like, five recurring missions, every repeatable mission in the Shadow Shard multiple times and done many of Borea's missions, to the point where what's left won't account for much progress.

So I have my Incarnate slot, but my question remains as it always has been: Now what? What do I do now? I ran out of content with Sam, that's why I haven't played him in years. There's nothing left for him to do, other than grind repeatable missions. What does the Incarnate system offer him that he couldn't do before? Tin Mage and Apex, I suppose, but even if I chose to run those, THEN WHAT? It's not like they constitute all that much content, or indeed all that much progress. That's IF I find one forming, and am not, instead, left with a game with nothing to do in it.

---

Technically speaking, the Incarnate system does indeed give our 50s something new to do. My complaint is that what it gives is very, very little. I know people have justifications for why they want to run the same two Trials over and over again. I'm the same way with some games. I've replayed the same damb campaigns in L4D2 quite a few times now. But even then I got bored of that after about the tenth time going through all of them, once I learned where everything spawned. What helped me not drop the game like a hot potato was the massive amount of good custom campaigns I've found online, which just about tripled the content mass of that game, to a point where it just doesn't feel like I'm replaying the same things over and over and over again. I have enough breadth of content that I can diversify. I can let things I've played too much sit idle for a while while I play other things, so that they feel fresh by the time I go back to them.

That's why I talk about volume of content. Sure, after seven years, we all know where everything is and what everyone says, but as it stands right now, the pre-50 game on both sides has enough content to where you can take different routes and avoid doing the same missions too often. In fact, I haven't done the low-level hero game in... A few months now. Probably not since 2010. I know the low-level hero game by heart, but it will still feel fresh next time I go back to it, because it's simply been a while.

If I get bored of the hero game, I can play villains. If I get bored of the villain game, too, I play Praetorians. By the time I'm bored of that, as well, I've usually forgotten about the hero game and I can go back to that, and cycle through them one more time. But heroes, villains and Praetorians all have the same end game, and don't have much content to it, anyway. If I get bored of Lambda Sector and the BAF, then what? Zilch, because that's all there is. I don't even have the illusion of variety that exists in the rest of the game, much less real, actual variety.

The Incarnate system NEEDS more content. And I'm not sure it was ever in the plans to supply it with that.

This is how multiple missions describe it in their entry pop-up. "The building above was abandoned, but you found a secret trap door which led to the sewers." In most cases, one should assume that where the instance starts isn't where the entrance door ends. You usually go through some distance of the interior of whatever you entered before you get to where your instance begins.

Because it looks cool, and because it adds more attacks to an attack chain without requiring me to sacrifice slotting for recharge or dealing with the right headache that is Inventions.

Because Stalkers lose one attack for Assassin's Strike, which is generally not useful in the middle of combat, they also lose out on the number of attacks they have to their name.

Aside from Disembowel being a scale 1.9 attack and Head Splitter a scale 2.6 attack, it's a matter of principle. A Stalker's greatest power is his ability to deliver massive front-loaded damage, so it makes sense I'd like to deliver that with my strongest attacks for massive criticals. However, many Scrapper sets' strongest attacks are cones or AoEs, which shoots that idea full of holes.

I've said it before - I want to see Stalker cones guarantee a critical on JUST the enemy you have targeted, with the rest of the targets sharing the standard 60%. I'm not sure if that's technically possible, but it would go some way towards making Stalkers feel bugged than they do now. Placate bugs, aggro distribution bugs, awkward Hide mechanics, demoralisation effects fizzling if your target dies...

The AT is solid, more or less, but only when it comes to numbers balance. When it comes to the mechanics which make the AT work, it honestly feels like a half-***** job, which is a shame because Stalkers ARE fun to play. And I say this as a fan of AoE. Even as single-target strikers, they're still fun enough to make it worth the play.

*edit*
On the "just use Disembowel" side of things, Electrical Melee has no decent hidden critical power. Jacob's Ladder is a cone, Thunder Strike only has a guaranteed critical on its smashing damage part (which is about as much as Havoc Punch) and Lightning Rod doesn't score criticals. Best guaranteed critical damage the set can pull off is an even split between Havoc Punch, Chain Induction's initial jolt and Thunder Strike's smashing damage component. That's pretty bad for guaranteed criticals, to be honest, especially with how hard it is to get in a position where those are viable, and especially with how often Placate gets interrupted before you're done animating it.

That's assuming the point of ambushes is to make fights tougher by throwing more enemies at you, in which case it's trivial to turn the question around - why not just make spawns bigger? Because that's all ambushes do - make for longer fights with more spawns without giving you the option to pace yourself. To me, this overriding of the difficulty I've chosen is what I hate about ambushes more than anything else.

As far as Stalkers go, getting the drop on an unaware spawn makes a far greater difference than picking which corner to pop out of. Not only does it allow you to rest and let your powers recharge, but it also lets you open with a larger attack - Assassin's Strike - which is otherwise rendered completely pointless with enemies who auto-aggro on you.

What's the point of ambushes? None to my mind. I would have no problem with removing them from the game entirely where they aren't vital to the proper functioning of missions, such as when they're used as triggers. And even those can usually be reworked or at the very least toned down.

No, I see your point and I don't disagree with it. Which is why I said that I won't get a Controller to that level. I'm only using this as an example, since you seemed to ignore the Final Fantasy XIII one (was it FFII? The one that has you run down linear corridors). I wasn't even bringing up the example as an accusation of game design, since it's mostly people making it.

The developers have never claimed that Controllers were in any way intended to be good at solo play at all, much less before level 32. The addition of Containment may have implied intent, but I don't believe it proves it, nor do I believe that intent exists. Controllers are what they are.

However, when a player exposits that his Controller cannot solo, the playerbase response is ALWAYS at least in part "It gets better at level 32." Again, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It makes no difference when a player likely to complain about this isn't likely to have the iron bladder to make it that far.

Perhaps not officially, but you wouldn't know it listening to players. I've had low-brow insults tossed at my face over refusing to come out of my comfort zone and try something new for the past seven years, since long before this current situation existed even as a possibility.

You can't get all players to like all aspects of a sufficiently large MMO (by which I mean one which has many aspects), but you can't deny that developers still like to try to encourage us to do so anyway. Sometimes with more taste than other times. Whether OUR developers do or not... Probably not. Positron has told me that "If you don't like it, you don't have to use it." pretty much in those words, on those forums (well, the old ones), so I don't have reason to believe he's hell-bent on making me play something I don't want to.

Not confining ourselves to MMOs, developers do that all the time. This is most of what EA do these days, and most of what EA have done for some time now. Aggressive advertising on the one hand, Skinner box games on the other, shoving in money and RPG elements in games that don't merit those, all draped over the husk of a mediocre game. We've all been there.

Do our developers do that? I want to say "no," but given the quality of polish of the last few additions, I don't know. They've certainly been pushing for rewards over content for quite a while now. I know rewards are an important part of gaming, but they are not THE most important part. They just seem to be one of the cheaper ones to make.

Take achievements, for instance. You make a game, all spick and span. So what do you add onto it at the end? Achievements for random tasks, like not disturbing any witches, or killing 100 000 aliens or what have you. Does this add to the game? To some, yes, but fundamentally, it doesn't constitute any more game. It constitutes more reasons to play the same amount of game. Surely you can see that.

I don't disagree with you, and I've said as much in the past, myself. Rewards are a vital part of gaming, because they represent progress. Without progress, a game is only a gimmick - a novelty toy which quickly grows boring. Progress gives us a goal and keeps us focused, offsetting the waning lustre of novelty with the satisfaction of fictional achievements. There's nothing wrong with that. But this really isn't "carrot on a stick."

The phrase "carrot on a stick," as I'm sure you already know, refers to that old caricature of tying a carrot on a stick and holding it in front of the donkey you are riding, with the belief being that the donkey will walk forward, chasing the carrot. However, like a dog chasing its own tail, it will never reach it, because the carrot hangs on a stick which is held by the man sitting on its back, so it never actually moves closer.

It is an approach to game design which is, in my own opinion, evil in its inception, because it goads people with promises of achievement and progress, but never actually delivers to any satisfactory degree. Yet still it conditions people to try ever harder for ever less reward, all because it's an underhanded way to keep people playing longer.

A game without rewards is an empty sandbox - fun for a while, but ultimately fleeting. A game of all empty reward chasing is boring and tiresome, and ultimately just as pointless. The purpose of rewards, as I see it, is not to make the player play, but rather to offset and enhance the enjoyment of the act of playing, itself.

Take the original Soul Reaver, for example. This is a very fun game with a good story, but there's only so far that gameplay and story can take it. So, instead, the game relies on rewards and progress to rejuvenate the fun of playing the game from time to time, as well as to give people the satisfaction that "Good, good. It looks like things are improving."

One cannot afford to allow rewards to overtake a game, to the exclusion of good gameplay, just as one cannot design a game with no rewards in it and expect it to last. And far too many contemporary game developers rely on this "carrot on a stick" approach to goad people into playing their bad games. MMOs are particularly susceptible to this, because contemporary developers seem to see them as a collection of reward structures with some kind of game attached to them to be decided after the fact. And that collection of reward structures always ends up suspiciously like that of WoW.

I've suggested this before. Plenty of games have given us time bombs, proximity mines, remote detonator mines and so forth launched out of a gun over a longer distance, such that the character doesn't need to squat down while the team goes to grab lunch.

Time Bomb is one of the game's primary examples of "balance by annoyance," where you have a genuinely good power which is made so inconvenient to use that it turns into a very crappy power.

Again - I'm not against a timer. And again - you can watch the bomb light blips, because they ARE a timer of sorts, with a collapsing interval between the flashes.

I'm sorry, but Lineage II is evil, and a game in which the grind CANNOT be approached in any positive way. That game will lead you by the nose, drag you though endless time sinks kicking and screaming, and then laugh at your misfortune when your valued chest piece breaks into crystals upon upgrade failure, and then again when your treasured pants drop off your body in a PvP fight. The entire game is nothing but endless, mindless, pointless hunts, and if it weren't for the hot Orc ladies, I could never have forgiven myself for ever setting foot in that accursed game.

I do not want ANYTHING from Lineage II, good or bad, in this game on pain of death. Sorry, NCsoft, but it's just that bad.

To be honest, I'm a lot more receptive to the ret-con of the Well of the Furies than I am to the Origin of Powers heresy. The Well is A source of power, be that for the Gods, for the planet, for the stars or what have you. Where it wins out over Origin of Powers is it isn't explicitly stated to be OUR original source of power. If I was a super-smart genius before, I'm a super-smart genius with God on speed dial now, but my original powers remain, they are just enhanced. This is FAR superior than trying to explain why my 7-billion-year-old alien insect queen from another planet got her powers from an event that took place on Earth within recorded history.

I've seen the arguments for why the Well is "magic," but given no other intrusion, I can reason the origin of the Well's power to be a pointer to our own origin. What is the origin of my Incarnate Powers? Well, the same one thing that my primary, secondary, pool and epic powers point to. Simple as that.

We'll see how the story develops, but this I can swallow a LOT easier than that mistake which came out of Powerset Proliferation.

I didn't bring this up to criticise levelling curves or teaming viability, but more to illustrate an often-cited justification for people's complaints on Controller performance which come up from time to time. Whether people are right to complain and whether they're good players is irrelevant to the larger point at hand - that some can and will justify a horrible gaming experience for a prolonged period of time if it leads to a better gaming experience later on in the game.

This is a stance I find repugnant, and the stuff of horrible games. It loops back into my belief that the worth of something is not just a question of how valuable it is, but also a question of how much its cost subtracts from its value. I don't care how good Controller performance is post level 32, because I will never get a Controller to level 32. It hurts too much to do so, and it horrifies me that some could stomach this. Not for their sakes or for their opinions, but because of what this means for the game. It excuses game design that is simply and genuinely not fun along the way.

No-one sets out to make a game people will hate, but invariably, developers do just that, if just by accident. Gaming history is full of bad games. More often, game developers will make a good game that nevertheless has horrible elements, such as Mass Effect 2 and its planet scanning mini "game." In such occasions, "fixing" these parts of the game could prove impossible, impractical or outright undesirable, but in an MMO, people are still expected to engage in everything, so rewards are put on these activities to encourage people to have some diversity. I hope and pray that one day the Dr. Quaterfield TF with be made the Weekly Strike Target, just to serve as an example of this kind of game design.

More realistically, think back to the old debates about Hamidon enhancements and their percentages. People INSISTED that they raided the Hamidon because they loved doing it, but when asked to do so for weaker enhancements, many explained that it wasn't "worth it." The raid itself is a cost, especially ye olde lag feste, yet many people at the time insisted on putting huge rewards at the end of it to justify the horrible gaming experience.

Players - especially of MMOs - will often seek ways to hurt themselves, because of the trained belief that the more something hurts, the more it should reward. This is a mentality bred in us by game designers who use rewards as compensation for pain, when they should take care not to design pain in their game to begin with.

I feel games, and this one in particular, should be about the "journey," because ideally, there should never be a point in the game where it isn't fun and the only reason I'm playing it is for compensation down the road. These will nevertheless invariably still exist, but slapping rewards on them cannot and should not be considered a fix.

Reward Merits did not "fix" shoddy TFs. They just made them rewarding. And so, people these days do indeed play the occasional Shadow Shard TF. Through grit teeth and with much swearing, because not one of those TFs is good in any sense of the word, but BECAUSE they are horrible (read: god-awful long), they get greater rewards, and so people do them DESPITE the player experience, not because of it.

This is a fundamentally flawed approach to game design, because it "encourages" people to drag their ***** through pain and torment in pursuit of reward, and this has the nasty tendency to build up over time into serious bitterness.

No-one sets out to design a bad game, but bad games keep being designed anyway. Most developers' reactions is to cover their ***** and coerce players into playing said games anyway. I made the mistake of playing Time Shift through to the end, always convinced there was a point, only to be sorely disappointed and swear to never touch that trash ever again. It is an all too familiar feeling.

It really comes down to content. It always does. This has been the argument about "end game" since the game's very beginning, poetic as it might sound. The old argument against it remains true to this day: They cannot produce enough content for an end game to subsist on without it being slow, hard and repetitive, or in other words, "a grind." This was as true then as it is now. They cannot and could not produce enough content, so they didn't. Instead, they gave us rewards on the cheap, relatively speaking, for which we would repeat the same small pool of content, saving art team resources, writer time, mission designer load and so forth.

This isn't the cop-out solution, however. It's the ONLY solution which exists to make end game a reality, so I don't blame Positron and his team for going with it. I blame myself for expecting something else, but that's my egg to stand on. However, it does nothing to dissuade me from believing I was right all along - end game in this game or any other MMO hurts. And it does. And I don't foresee it ever being any different.

Including existing 45-50 content would be a nice gesture, but it would not make the Incarnate system much less of a grind. As it stands now, it takes about half the 45-50 content to get to 50 hero-side, and about 3/4 to do so villain-side. I cannot expect what remains of it to be sufficient for Incarnate advancement. This would require its own content, but this content doesn't exist and cannot exist, short of a paid expansion.

And it seems Paragon Studios blew their load on a new player's experience, instead, though judging the difficulty level of said experience, one has to wonder if it was not originally intended to BE Incarnate content. 1-20 Praetoria could possibly have been enough content to bring us through at least one, maybe two slots if the earning curve weren't evil.

But this does put things in perspective - what it takes to introduce sufficient(ish) content for a brand new game progress bracket is a paid expansion. And, frankly, I think we may have paid for the wrong thing. Can't eat your cake and have it, too.

I just want to point out that this doesn't constitute new things to do at level 50. Even on the off chance that we haven't, in fact, done all of those things on the way up to 50, there's a finite amount of those available. Once you run them all, you have no option but to repeat, and I know for a fact that all the game's level 50 content is not enough to make meaningful progress in the Incarnate system. That was intentionally designed.

There can be no argument about whether the end game system is a grind. It is. It's built around repeating content many, many times. This is different from the pre-50 game which allows you to play different content the entire time. It's not a question of whether it is or isn't a grind, it's a question of how much of a grind it is and how much "we" are willing to accept. This, clearly, differs from person to person.