UberGuy

Ageless seems like it could be absolutely insanely useful for a Dark Armor. Werner, are you reading this? Alexi with DDR, plus a "gimme end and recharge mah Dark Regen" button? That sounds like fun, and if I ever get my MA/DA to level 50 (she's been 43 for like 3 years) I plan to try it.

I'd like to throw out here that a MMO has no imperative to both encourage teaming and discourage soloing. It's technically possible to just encourage teaming, and not seek to penalize soloing. Now it's all too true that what counts as active discouragement for soloing is likely to be subjective, as rewards for doing something are so often perceived as penalties for not doing it. We already know that at least some of this team's devs are keenly aware of that perception trap.

In this game teaming has always been encouraged in most ways as at least the potentially most effective way to earn progress. (Actual mileage always varies, depending on the players you team with and your own abilities, skill and interests.) Consider things like the XP/Inf bonus on teams, and just the nigh-invincibility of a team with buffs and controls on top of damage dealers.

I'd also like to point out that this game has not and does not always provide incentive to team. The major notable exception to promoting teaming that I always think of is how Inventions drop. I've never been sure if that was intentional or a side effect, but if you wanted to produce lots of Inventions-related drops, your best bet has been to use a strong soloist.

I do think that, as things go, the level of mechanical "encouragement" for teaming present in the Incarnate system exceeds anything we have seen in the game before. You might progress more slowly if you soloed prior content, but it was almost certainly not 30 times slower, and sometimes, depending on how you counted progress, you might actually progress faster than a team. I believe that the gap in rate of progress in Incarnate content is so wide that it was absolutely inevitable that it was going fall into the perception trap of being perceived as punitive for soloists, if for no other reason that it is such a departure from expectations set by prior design.

For myself and I know some other posters in this thread, this is about choice, not strict adherence to a single playstyle, solo or teamed. I like to do both at different times. For past content, I could make progress towards a variety of goals either way. Sometimes soloing was slower, sometimes it was faster, but I could feel that whatever way I played, I was within some band of performance that always felt meaningful. My subjective opinion is that the options currently in place for Incarnate progress anywhere but on a League Trial team are [edit: not] meaningful - anything else is so slow by comparison that I am compelled to ignore it. That's a change, and not one I favor. That's why I'm talking about it - to convey that message.

Edit: I'm not going to revise it at this point, but after re-reading this I want to apologize for the convoluted wording in this post. It's bad even for me. I wrote it while heavily distracted.

Only when stated as an opinion, which is not what was done.

We did not see:

• "I don't like how the devs made this."
• "I do, because I think it should work that way."

What we saw was:

• "I don't like how the devs made this."
• "You have no grounds to dislike that, because the devs made it that way. Additionally, here are other (not actually all that similar) examples that I feel illustrate that the devs have been doing this all along, indicating that you have no grounds to object based on change from past behavior."

There is a considerable difference in those two conversations.

I don't even that IO is strong enough to compare to Incarnate stuff, even at the optimal fit near the softcap. Someone at or above 45% takes 62.5% as much average damage over time as someone exactly at 42%. Someone operating at 40% can be softcapped by Barrier 3/4 of the time, get a crashless nuke, a combat pet and a 20% DPS increase. My BS/Inv, who can already saturate well above the L/S softcap will instead be able to add massive healing and significant +regen underneath his not inconsiderable defense through Rebirth. Oh, and it helps his team when he's on one, such as at Hamidon raids or on a TF.

I'm pretty sure no single IO really compares to even just one of these slots' contributions. You can make a lot of them pretty orthogonal benefits to anything set bonuses (or Global/special IOs) can provide.

I would immediately shoot down that rebuttal as factually inaccurate. Nothing else has the participation restriction that the trials do for equivalent rate of acquisition.

Let's imagine for a minute that you could have all the PvP foes you could ever want, and could actually defeat them very consistently (though not as consistently as just farming AFK characters). How many hours of play do you think it would take you to get, say, 12 specific PvPOs as drops? How long, on average, do you think it would take you to sell PvPOs you get on the market and use that to buy the PvPOs you actually want, but didn't get?

Now, let's ask another question. What PvPOs provide functions that cannot be had any other way than to own those specific PvPOs? Even if one successfully makes the argument that PvPO earning progress is inextricably tied to PvPing (something I think the market and Alignment Merits both bring into doubt), can we really make the argument that not PvPing (and therefore ostensibly not having access to PvPOs) actually prevents progress? While it's true that certain build configurations may not be possible, how strong is the general argument that one needs access to PvPOs to meaningfully approach the best of the best builds? How does a high-end IO build that lacks PvPOs compare and contrast with the level of performance of someone who has the Rare Incarnate powers and someone who does not?

So no, I'm sorry, I find the rebuttal weak because the analogy you're using as its basis is so tenuous.

Isn't it obvious that many of the people objecting to the design object to this very observation?

I have a hard time seeing "the devs made it this way" as a useful rebuttal to "I don't like how the devs made this."

I did it in four days, three of which were work days. Yes, I do very much believe I was lucky, but I also played my butt off, playing the new trials dozens of times over those four days. If, for whatever reason, I were to have spent that time trying to earn that same progress solo, it probably would have taken multiple months. If I had run a bunch of TFs in there and not just solo, I might have take multiple weeks stretching into month or so. Those estimates are consistent with the factor of 10-30 that seems to be a "reasonable" estimate in the time difference in running the trial to not running the trial.

Whether we can or should get these rewards this fast from the new trials is, for the most part, a separate discussion from how large the time scale difference should be between earning them in the trials and earning them some other way. A factor of 2-5 is very large in my opinion. A factor of 10-30 is staggering, and it's this that I question almost more than the absolute time scales involved. Maybe four days is too fast, but even if it should be 12 days, I think 120 days is too slow.

My money is on this.

It was a full league pretty much every time, except for the Dual Blades last night we were short 2-3 people the last couple of runs. The majority of the trials were BAFs, both because those seem to be more popular and because it takes more of them to fill the Judgment and Lore bars, so most of them were 24 people.

The ping is also being routed.

A tracert is basically a kind of iterative ping. You're going one hop further each time, determining from hop A where it will send you next, then asking hop B (via passing through hop A) where it will send you, etc., and retrieving timing from you to each successive hop.

I had skimmed the thread and hadn't realized it was affecting both. Looking at the URL and the source for the English version of the game's home page, it looks like a static page, but I find it hard to believe someone manually edits in new news items - it seems likely that it's also created by server-side scripts, in which case it would also go after data that's probably in database. If so, and if that DB infrastructure is shared by the forums, it could be the same problem. Ultimately, I'm not sure we have enough info to interpret what it means that the game home page is affected too, assuming it's a back-end and not a routing problem.

Edit (Part 1): It looks like the game site and forum servers are probably in a common data center, as they have the same first three octets of their IP addresses (64.25.35.xxx). This lends some credence to the possibility that they share some back end infrastructure.

The home page does seem to behave exactly like the forums in the sense that I connect and send the request very quickly and then wait a long time for data, usually ending in a closed connection after 350 seconds.

Edit (Part 2): While trying to post the update above about the IP addresses, I got a very interesting result. I got a partial version of the "editpost" page. It had the header and footer, and the radio buttons for edit/delete, but not the actual body of the message. My "loading" icon was still spinning. So I connected and got some of this page, and then hung up waiting on the rest.

Also, check out this response delay from the main site page. I got data 158 seconds after I sent the request. Ouch! Better than never, I guess...

>>> getPage("www.cityofheroes.com",80,"/en.html")
Connected... (0.181)
Request sent. (0.182)
Receiving...
-> 1799 bytes (158.046)
-> 4719 bytes (158.101)
-> 10559 bytes (158.156)
-> 13479 bytes (158.210)
-> 17859 bytes (158.211)
-> 20779 bytes (158.263)
-> 23699 bytes (158.265)
-> 25746 bytes (158.315)
Disconnected. (158.316)

My DM/Regen Scrapper got enough Very Rare and Rare components to craft three Very Rare and one Rare slot. DM/Regen is hardly an AoE master if you take all it's AoE powers, and I only have one of two possibly PBAoE powers in the set. I started with two Very Rare components in my first four trials, before I had even unlocked Judgment.

Last night I started working on a DB/Regen Scrapper. Much, much more AoE potential (though certainly small AoEs). Six trials: Rare, Rare, Uncommon, Uncommon, Uncommon, Uncommon.

I don't think either of us have data sufficient to indicate accurate representation of how the reward system works, but you're drawing very specific conclusions from yours.

I'm hearing of things like this enough that I'm starting to believe that there is at some activity detection mechanism that's used to give you this window. What's absolutely clear, though, is that either this mechanism is badly broken, or it's used on top of a random distribution. Someone got the 10 threads window who I know was actively participating. I was playing while on Skype with them, and was aware of where their character was and what they were doing most of the BAF where they got that reward.

So, some of the possibilities are:

• It's all random, and the apparent "leech" reward is due to skewed reporting (we aren't hearing from the leeches that got rares).
• There's leech detection, but it rides on top of random reward tables that let you get the leech reward sometimes, no matter what.
• There's leech detection, but it's broken and sometimes unfairly gives people the leech reward even when they were very active.

If there is any leech detection at all, we need to understand how to avoid it, at least in qualitative terms. (I don't see why we couldn't be told what sort of participation counts without giving us enough info to "trick" the system.) Otherwise, it seems possible that buffers, leaders typing instructions in League chat, and similarly active people are likely to run afoul of any algorithmic activity detector without understanding why, or simply thinking that they have bad luck.

Good luck with that. PR departments, campaign managers and other "spin" managers have jobs for a reason. It's because they get results. If you want to ignore people's (often irrational) responses to things, you're going to learn that, quite often, you will not get their support, money or sponsorship.

It's one thing to completely lose one's objectivity while worrying what people will think. It's another to ignore what people think all together, even if what they will think is illogical.

I know that 600-700 V-Merits per raid is pretty par for the course on Justice. I'm not telling that to brag or to be all like "you suck". It's obvious from your explanation that what's killing your ability to reach those reward levels is your game's stability issues in a raid situation. They mean you can't actually participate in large raids on a large team, and those raids are the ones that generate such high V-Merit reward rates.

I really haven't had a problem. I break down my uncommons and my Astral Merits. I've crafted a Rare and three Very Rares and I only got the Common window twice. I got the Uncommon window more times than I could count.

If it was harder to get threads, I would agree, but getting Astral Merits really seems to cover it.

Maybe they'll be good for something later where I'll want a bunch of Astrals, but by the time that comes along, I'll already have my two Incarnate Shifts, and will be earning them (much) more easily.

Ironically, Justice started with Pocket D, so everyone and their brother was in there. The zone actually has been unstable. Several groups who run the trials regularly have migrated to PD to the RWZ, because it was less crowded. (It helps a little that there are better stores there, as well.)

It's only a serious money sink if you buy Rare and/or Very Rare components with threads. If you don't have an absolutely immense hoard of Shards on hand to bulk convert into Threads, then you are going to have to earn the Threads to spend this way. Since you have to run the trials to earn Threads, you're going to earn Rares eventually due to random reward tables, or earn enough Empyrian merits to create the components you need. (Yes, this does take a while for Very Rares.) So basically, I can't think of a case where it makes a lot of sense to do this, unless one is bound and determined to not actually run the trial.

Now, buying iXP is fairly reasonable, cost wise. I don't see much value in it, personally, except to round out a few XP when you're shy after a trial run. The reason is that it can set you back quite a few Threads, and you likely need a fair number of Threads to create the many Common components required to craft Rare and Very Rare slots. There's a "Common" components table, but it actually doesn't pop very frequently compared to the "Uncommon" one. (I suspect it's actually considered a sub-par reward table, so giving it to us is the Incarnate Trial of rolling an Executioner's Contract at the merit vendor, and thus it was given a relatively low weight.) But unless you go absolutely ape and try to buy most of your iXP without really running the trials, you shouldn't have to spend that much. The most I've spent was around 25M on one character. That's a spec of mist in the ocean compared to what I burn in market fees, and I only ever have to buy my iXP once.

So basically, I really don't see these as much of a money sink. I think the high end costs are high enough that they aren't going to be spent except by a fringe of players, and I think the low end costs are too small to have a major economic effect, especially in the long-term.