TonyV

Um... Doesn't Prometheus pretty much tell you that after you've dealt with Tyrant, eventually you'll be dealing with The Coming Storm? Isn't this pretty much what everyone who has been semi-following the lore is expecting? I didn't read it as any claim to inside knowledge.

* Note about how although you were joking, it actually raises a relevant point that should be addressed.

* Explanation of how you have yet again missed the point.

* Analogy showing how what you are asking for will inevitably result in Very Bad Things™.

That's weird, I saw it mentioned on the forums.

...

I'm sorry, but you're being entirely unreasonable, and you didn't answer my question. How long do you intend to keep up this tirade? Months? Years?

If so, then this doesn't bode well for the CoH community. One of two things is going to happen:

1) The more likely: Soloable Incarnate paths aren't going to come down the pipeline at least for another year or so, maybe longer, and we have to put up with this endless grousing until either complainers quit over it or moderators start locking thread and putting the smackdown on people, or

2) The less likely: Devs do decide to bump up plans for adding soloable Incarnate paths, at which point the trolls come out of the woodwork and declare open season on the whole damn forums because, hey, it worked for those people griping about raids.

Either way, you are damaging your long-term prospects for being listened to by the devs, not helping it. And I can't help but notice how you continually frame "let things settle back down to normal" as "shut up."

It's not like anyone here is saying, "Shut up and raid."

What I am saying is that your opinion has been loudly heard by the developers, community reps, and by the community itself. It's been duly noted. Some day, you'll probably get what you want, just not right now. You know it's not coming in Issue 20.5. It's probably not coming in Issue 21. Both of those are pretty much in feature lock-down. Maybe Issue 22 or Issue 23.

It's not like posting yet more threads and hijacking others will make them work faster to please you. You've got to resign yourself to the fact--yes, the fact--that for at least the next six months or so, it ain't going to happen, come hell or high water. (Or that if it does, it was because it was already planned and is not being influenced by anything you're saying at this point.)

In any event, though, we are well past the point of yelling yet some more achieving anything productive. Even if yelling about stuff is the way to get the devs' attention, is that really the precedent we want to set going forward? Personally, I want all of the existing zones to be upgraded to use higher resolution textures and graphics. I've had a couple of golden opportunities to bend the ears of the devs and community reps, and I've taken advantage of them as much as I could. I feel like I've been heard, and thus I don't post much about it or bother people incessantly now. Should I instead start a months-long tirade on how the devs aren't listening to me? How long do we have to put up with more "No more team-only content!!! Solo Incarnate paths!!!" posts? Until Issue 22's or 23's feature lists are released? Longer?

I'm not saying, "Shut up and raid." I'm saying, "Okay, you've been heard. Now how about letting things settle back down to normal?"

Yeah, I agree with this, too. It's not that the OP isn't mildly amusing, it's just that there's still a lot of crap going on around this stuff, and it comes off as needlessly antagonistic.

Or it could be that we're really tired of this argument, we're tired of umpteen threads being created and even more being hijacked, and it's long past time to move on. The humor in the OP is based upon the premises that 1) the developers and marketing people don't care about us and only marginally care about the game 2) most people hate the trials, and 3) that the way it is will be set in stone forever, never to change. All of these are outright false, so it just doesn't really strike me as laugh-out-loud funny as it apparently does others who must think these premises are true.

Plus, it rubs me the wrong way that it's taking some cheap shots at people who are working extremely hard to make this a cool game.

Of course, you could also view it as making fun of the people who have these lampooned views of marketing and development. As a bleeding-heart liberal, sometimes I'll say, for example, something about our "agenda" of taxing rich people into poverty and giving it all to welfare recipients, or converting everyone to homosexual atheist environmentalists, or the like. I figure that nothing I will say will change die-hard conservatives' opinions of my beliefs no matter how rationally I explain and justify them, so instead, I just play up how stupid their caricatures of my beliefs are. Unfortunately, in such arguments, as may be the case here, more often than not people miss the point.

Also, I'd like to point out that if they err on the side of starting too high, they will figure it out via datamining and adjust prices down. It's not like they'll just sit by while 0.05% of the game's population gets the stuff and everyone else gives up. If they screw up and start too low, however, they can't exactly jack up the prices later. For one thing, everyone already has the loot, and they have it account-wide. For another, yeah, that would go over well with new players.

Any time there is a reward for anything, there will be haves and have-nots. And I agree that it can be taken to an extreme.

In this case though, even with the costs currently associated with the items, given that these unlockables apply account-wide, and especially given that the devs have a history of making things easier to achieve over time, it is a culture of haves and have-laters. That's not so bad.

I don't think that /e dice7 has anything to do with stopping a giant robot from being built, but there it is. I don't think that being able to re-pick your powers has anything to do with fighting Sky Raiders inside a red bubble. I don't think that having a witch hat has anything to do with fighting Red Caps in a Croatoan task force; I can buy one in any local costume shop. I don't think that fighting a big blob of Jello™ has anything to do with dramatic increases in multiple aspects of a power. I don't think that having a flaming halo has anything to do with opening presents that are, mysteriously, filled with candy canes. (Or for that matter, that it has anything to do with rescuing a hideous and annoying creature.) I don't think that getting a badge for exploration has anything to do with merely walking outside of the hospital in Steel Canyon from where you got mowed down by an Outcast, or for that matter, going to see Henry Peter Wong, a contact that you are deliberately steered to and that you'd have to actually go out of your way to avoid.

There is nothing special about that stuff that screams give me this totally unrelated reward.

Is that why people bother working their way up to level 50? So that they can sit there on their towers casting down upon the people who are only level 49? Of course not. They do it because they enjoy the cool stuff they get by earning those 50 levels. It has little to do with pleasure in lording your loot over other people. It has to do with earning rewards, having goals to work towards and things given to you for actual effort, not just having everything handed out on a silver platter.

Why? Because you don't care so much for tier 3ing out a character but you do about costume pieces? Okay, swap it around. Oops, now you have the "character progress!!!" screamers agitated. In the end, it's all just rewards. It could have just as easily been market slots, inventory slots, character slots, costume slots, a piece of swag they put in a box and physically mail to you, Matt and Melissa recording your voice mail greeting, whatever. No matter what you gate, people are going to complain, and I'm sorry, but I simply disagree that gating nothing is a reasonable solution. If there's nothing to earn, there's no reason to play.

Then use Empyrians for that stuff instead of wasting them on the stuff you can unlock with Astrals.

If the cost were per character, I'd agree with you. As it is, with it unlocking it account-wide on all characters, I think this is unreasonably low.

I'll say it again: long-term content. Plus, once you've put in those 134 days (or 250, or 365, or whatever), you never have to do it again. Not for any of your other characters, ever, period.

Plus, speaking of strawmen, it's not like you have to put in 134 days to see any progress. That's 134 days to completely earn everything, starting immediately after it's added to the game.

For perspective, how long did it take someone immediately after Issue 11 launched to completely "purple out" their character? Keep in mind, a lot of those recipes and/or enhancements didn't show up on the market for a while. And once you were done, how long did it take you to "purple out" your second character?

I'm thinking 134 days, even of constant farming, would have been generous at the time. And, of course, then if you wanted more purples on other characters, that would have been even more time sunk into the system, where as here, it's immediately unlocked.

Plus, I'm not a mechanics guru, but does that 134 days calculation take into account the fact that you can earn both Empyrian and Astral merits during trials, plus any conversions of Shards/Thread/whatevers you earn along the way too? Or is it based on one trial = one and only one reward?

This is one of the most intelligent and well-thought-out posts I've seen from someone I've been arguing against. I understand your concern. Believe it or not, I've had some of the same concerns. Just because I want end game content doesn't make me oblivious to the thought that they could go overboard. I wish I could show you incontrovertible proof that it won't happen.

What I can say, though, is that we have a history of getting long-term rewards in the game, and eventually, alternate paths and shortcuts are rolled out as new long-term rewards are released. I pointed out some above: experience "smoothing" to make the journey to 50 shorter. The Statesman Task Force to avoid grinding Hamidon trials. Merit Rewards and Alignment Merits to avoid have to spend billions on the market for purple IOs.

Also, so far, the little nuggets of information about Issue 21 have had exactly zero mentioned additions to the Incarnate system; what little we know is about a new zone (presumably not an Incarnate-only zone) and improvement of low-level content. I'm thinking that since the last two issues have been Incarnate-heavy, the next one will be Incarnate-light, and hopefully that will help assuage the concern that City of Heroes is becoming a purely Incarnate-focused game.

That's precisely what offering this stuff for sale would do. As it is, when you see someone kitted out with Incarnate stuff, you know they've put a lot of time and effort into their character. Offer it for sale, and let's be honest. Everyone and their brother is going to buy the stuff because it's just so damn easy to fork out some cash instead. Hell, I'd buy 'em, and I do like the trials.

This completely throws the concept of Incarnate shinies in the trash, and it would become just another Booster Pack. What people keep missing and/or ignoring is that these are intended to be long-term rewards. It's also intended to be completely optional. I'm pretty sure the devs are smart enough to not make it a matter of, "Shell out $10 and this reward that we designed to take months will only take you the 30 seconds your computer requires to log in." This whole thread is moot.

I swear, first people complain about how the Incarnate trials gate their character progression. "I HAVE to have fully level-shifted 50s!!! Waaah, unfair!" Okay, so here's some stuff that has diddly to do with your character progression, it's completely cosmetic. "You can't even gate non-gameplay stuff!!! Waaah, unfair!" Let's just get to the point, why don't we? You don't like Incarnate trials, thus you want absolutely nothing gated behind them. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Because no matter what long-term reward it is that they put back there, someone's been slapped in the face, someone's getting ignored (god forbid anyone has to tolerate doing anything they don't want to do!), someone's going to whine and moan.

Even more generally, I don't even think it's the Incarnate trials that have people all astir. It's the whole concept of any long-term rewards, period. I've seen these same arguments break out every single time the devs add something to the game that takes more than two or three weeks to achieve. Every. Single. Time. It's been going on ever since launch, when people were complaining that it took too long to get to level 40 (soon after changed to 50). People complained about the number of Hamidon trials they had to run to trick out their 50s. People complained that some of the badges "required" farming to get. People complained that it's "impossible" to get purple IOs on their characters. And so on, ad nauseum.

Here, we have long-term rewards with a bonus. Once you unlock them, you're done. You don't ever have to unlock them again for any of your characters, ever. Instead of thinking, though, "Hey, that's awesome, a LOT better than the old way of having to run these things on every character!", no, we're all so tunnel-vision focused on how awful it is to have any long-term rewards, we sit here and wallow in misery, posting a constant litany of complaints in every thread. We want everything there is to have in the game, and damn it, we want it NOW!

Most of the time, the devs put the stuff in the game anyway. Then within a few weeks, farmers start earning it. Within a few weeks after that, avid players start earning it. Within a few months, average players start earning it. Within a year or two, damn near everyone has it. And you know what? Somewhere around the few months mark, it just doesn't seem like a big deal any more. "You don't have it? Well, I have it, so it must not be so impossible to get it after all. All you have to do is work a bit on it, and you can have it, too." The day will come, I promise, when people who are just casually doing Incarnate trials now will be decked out in their Incarnate armor shinies. Of course, by then, we'll probably have other long-term shinies to earn, and we'll have to go through this same damn exercise in forum frustration yet again.

Edit: And you know what's particularly frustrating to me? The fact that there's a firmly established precedent for the stuff people are bemoaning to be made easier eventually. Remember experience smoothing, which made getting to level 50 a lot faster? Remember the Statesman Task Force, which made it relatively easy to earn Hamidon Enhancements? Remember Reward Merits being added, which gave you a guaranteed path to the purple IOs you want? There's no doubt in my mind that at some point, it will be much easier to get Incarnate shinies once the newness has worn off and other long-term rewards are added to the game, but make no mistake; there is no compromise on that NOW! part.

What server do you play on? I'm not being facetious, I really want to know. On the servers I've been playing on, this is patently false, and it boggles my mind that any of the servers are like this. I want to make a character there and see this phenomenon firsthand.

You cannot be serious. It was an extremely relevant and valid point. So-called "compulsory" (your word, not mine) Incarnate trial "raids" have been in the game less than two months. That's a demonstrable, provable fact. Maybe you didn't like the Incarnate stuff in Issue 19, but if so, that has absolutely zero bearing on the issues you mentioned.

This is pretty much the sum total of what we know about Issue 21:

You know what kind of sticks out at me? There is no mention whatsoever about the end-game experience. In fact, if you read his whole post, the word Incarnate appears in it exactly zero times. Will there be nothing Incarnate-related in the issue? Meh, I dunno, maybe. But still, it seems odd to me that he wouldn't have at least stuck a quick, "We've got some cool new Incarnate stuff in the pipeline, too!" in there. It seems to me that despite your melodrama and alarmism, Issue 21 is probably not going to be heavily on the end-game/Incarnate content.

I've read his post a few times, and I don't see that quote anywhere.

"Oh, but that's what he meant!" No, thats what you have already made up your mind that they're thinking, so no matter what he or anyone else says, this is how you were going to hear it.

See, Steel_Shaman? This is what I mean.

It depends on what you mean by "see any results." If you literally mean that you will have exactly zero change in your character for several months, I'm inclined to agree with you. However, there are a LOT of people posting that are defining "see any results" as "kitting out my character to the gills with all the top-tier stuff." In that case, with all due respect, I cannot disagree more strongly. As an end-game system, this Incarnate stuff is specifically intended to take several months, even doing it the running-trials way. For a solo player, the rewards need to be few and far between, because I guaran-damn-tee you that whatever the max level of progression that is possible, people are going to be farming it at that rate.

And this is a compelling reason for the devs not to implement a solo path to Incarnate stuff. They are absolutely committed to Incarnate trials not becoming like Hamidon raids. Part of the fun in them is the fact that everyone is doing them; you are part of a massive team working on Really Big Things™. If Incarnate trials get to be eight or nine people once or twice a week working on them, they will lose their appeal even to those of us who like doing them today. I am absolutely certain that whenever the topic of solo Incarnate stuff comes up in meetings and hallway conversations between the devs, this is the elephant in the room, the prospect that it might destroy the appeal of the system they have worked so hard to design and that, contrary to popular belief in threads like these, most people actually like.

I'm not against the ideas presented in this thread. However, it's not just a simple matter of putting it together and throwing it in. A lot of thought would have to be put into making sure everything is balanced well, that it's not exploitable, and that it doesn't inadvertently affect the existing and future plans for Incarnate trials.

DO IT ANYWAY!!! We like you and all, but hiring another developer to replace your lifeless carcass is worth us getting some tidbits to salivate over!

<QR, so sorry if this has been said already>

Never!!? You play six to eight hours a week and you don't think you'll ever be able to get an Incarnate tricked out? Man, I play maybe four or five per week, most of which is not spent on trials, and while I don't have one completely finished yet, I'm making durn good headway. A couple of more months at the outside most, and I should have at least one character done.

That's because you have way too high a standard for what you consider "upper echelons." I'm genuinely curious what you consider that level.