UberGuy

I enjoy this game a lot, but I figured out that if I could not also see a reward, I would play it a lot less, and likely would not have maintained an essentially unbroken subscription for 7 and 1/3 years. I was winding down in ability to sustain interest until I9 and Inventions came along. Suddenly, I had new goals. Reward does get people to play. Not everyone certainly, but certainly a considerable number of folks.

Reward alone is not sufficient motivation to play, but part of my fun involves doing things for a reward.

For the record, I rather enjoy Lambda, BAF and UGT. (I actually like Lambda best.) I do rather dislike running them ad-nauseum, but I do find enjoyment in it, because I want the reward. The good news for me is that getting Keyes and the UGT have broken up the monotony some, and more are coming.

For the record, I still rather dislike Keyes, because I still think the nature of the AV fight is rubbish. Note that I don't think it's hard, I just don't enjoy the litany of run away, be held, back off, run back, etc. It over uses those things, IMO. All that said, I still run Keyes because it's now short enough to make it worth the reward. I don't like it that much, but I don't have to endure it for very long. Not the model we want to see for future content to be sure.

I doubt the announcement channel would announce Adamastor in the echo, which would make hunting for him there annoying.

But in any case, we already know it's not an issue. The zone isn't gated.

For an extreme counter example, consider what happened when the AE first came out and was a wilderness of exploits so amazing, nearly anyone could PL at some of the best rates ever seen to date, not even including the handful of things that could get people to 50 in hours.

People poured in the doors. Do we think that was because they really liked the AE missions better? I don't think that. I think they did it because what they all really liked was the rate at which they dinged, because seeing the XP bubbles fill in and the level counter go up that fast makes a lot of people giddy.

Replace that with seeing Threads drop and reward tables appear, and of course tone down the insanity about 10 notches, and we still have the same kinds of behavior. People will go wherever they think they'll progress fastest, and how much they enjoy the window dressing becomes a largely secondary concern.

The devs have to think about these things. In an ideal world, yes, they should make the iTrials and the DA content both as fun as possible. I want them to do that, too. But if they don't also pay attention to the relative reward rates (and perhaps more importantly, the perceived reward rates), people will flock to the perceived winner in terms of fastest rewards.

Irrespective of whether iTrials are a good idea or not, they rely on a certain chunk of players participating, or they won't form often enough. If they don't form often enough, people will stop trying to form or join them, and we get a death spiral. For the people who hate iTrials for their very intrinsic nature, I'm sure they'd love that to happen, but the devs don't share that hate, and neither do all the players.

That's where you're getting into "glass half empty", and also where perhaps I disagree with Kitsune about whether the "solo" route has to "suck" compared to the iTrials.

The solo can't be as rewarding/time as the trials, or the devs have avoided robbing Peter by pulling the rug out from under Paul completely. Does that mean the solo route has to be crap? No. It should be permissible that it's good enough to draw some people away from iTrials, but not all of them, or probably even most of them. Most of the people who hate iTrials will go to the solo route unless its reward rates absolutely atrocious, and I think that's OK.

I am like this. I level my characters up solo. It's the only way I can control what content they get to do without constantly messing with my XP on/off switch. It also gives me a strong feel for whether I like the AT/powerset combo, and how well it can perform solo, which is a critical determinant in whether I enjoy the character. (My best soloists are fun to team with, but if I had a strongly team-focused character, they would not be fun to solo when a team isn't around. That's a non-starter for me.)

I get my social interaction in global channels, on Skype with other players and whatnot. I also do participate in team and league activities, but I also spend a lot of time soloing while communicating with others.

Broadly, I agree. Well, I don't know that I agree that either end of the scale should "suck", but I agree with what I take to be your general point. And I think it likely the new zone can hit those targets. The iTrials right now are raining progress on us, and I seriously doubt any mission progress will match that. I actually wonder what the implications of that will be for the costs of the next tier of slots, however.

I think you have to be careful here. There are a lot of reasons people may not run iTrials, and it isn't all about the content itself. Some people don't like the very idea of teaming with that many people. Many people dislike the effort it takes to form one and are not satisfied with forming one solely via the LFG (and wouldn't be statisfied even if it worked better). Some people dislike the content.

If the "solo path" is good enough to replace running iTrials, then the people who have any concern with the above will likely divert to the solo path. Not always because they hate the iTrials, but because the solo path is intrinsically simpler to deal with. That undercuts the people who actually like the iTrials and are willing to run or even lead them.

There's a glass half full/empty thing going on here. We can't look at the above and say "yep, see, that means the iTrials suck". It's more nuanced than that. The devs (if they're smart) can't ignore those nuances, and I think they really do logically compel them to keep the "solo" path slower on average than the iTrial path. The really tricky part is what does "slower" mean? To create a wholly fabricated example, they could set drop rates be be 1/3 of those in iTrials and accidentally create faster average progress by failing to account for time people spend standing around forming leagues.

I dislike this, because it makes AS less effective under additional damage buffs, such as inspirations, Musculature, damage set bonuses, etc.

I dislike this, because it degrades any use of BU that is not combined with interruptable AS. Currently, if AS would be interruptable (such as when many foes are around with damage patches), I would use BU with a high-damage standard attack, and this change would make that take longer. Also, with the pending buffs described, this would include using BU with the unhidden version of AS, since it is going to have a very low activation time.

I would like to see BU made 100% damage, though, instead of the +80% it has now. (Whether this should just be a change to the scale of Stalker BU or a change to the Stalker melee damage buff modifier I haven't thought much about.)

Really, no, I don't need to go read the Illiad. I should point out that the interpretation you are providing is not the only version of the story. For example, check out the Wikipedia page on Diomedes. In the version of the story presented there, the weapon that wounds Ares is Ares' own spear. The spear was thrown at Diomedes, caught by Athena, thrown back at Ares by Diomedes, but guided to its target by Athena. Given Athena's double intervention, that's a far less impressive account of Diomedes' feat. (There are other versions as well, such as Ares actually being injured in a collision between the two warriors' chariots, which certainly doesn't make Ares sound that impressive. Then again, he wasn't a very popular god among the Greeks.)

But lets focus on the version of the myth you started with. I think it still takes some explaining, and explaining requires us to get back to simple questions. Is Ares really just not all that much tougher than a human? If so, then anyone could theoreticaly have hurt him with an arrow, really. Is Ares instead really pretty tough, but has some vulnerable spot that Diomedes hit, a-la Achilles? Or is Ares nigh-invulnerable in mortal terms, but Diomedes is just ridiculously bad-*** with a bow, and able to do things with it few other mortals ever could hope to?

Casting the "weak Ares" example in CoH terms, if your, say, Archery character is fighting alongside, say, Beam Rifle and a Fire Blast character, and they're fighting an aspect of Rularuu, and that aspect of Rularuu isn't actually all that much tougher than a human, why isn't the aspect being clobbered by the energy beams and sheets of fire? Do we assume that this phaser-like beam rifle is actually no better at zapping people than an arrow is at stabbing them? Something in this example has to be setting the three powersets on approximate par. Either that or we have to ignore the numbers and assume they really aren't on par.

So maybe instead the aspect has some vulnerable spot that only the archer is hitting. Why is only the archer hitting it, and not the beam or fire blast user? Is it that only the archer can hit it? Doesn't that start to sound like the archer is preternaturally good at that they are doing?

Ultimately, I think it's a bit of a distraction to go after examples in myth and legend where "gods" weren't that much beyond peak humans. That's kind of cherry picking, in my opinion, because honestly, we can find stories that are all over the map in terms of the capabilities of their mortal heroes and the gods themselves. And ultimately, it's easy to conclude that this is just because they were just stories. People retold them over the ages and embellished here and there, tweaking the hero up and the antagonists down to suit the narrative.

There's at least one one tale which has Beowulf claiming he did things that no ordinary human could possibly do - fighting sea monsters in full arms and armor while dragged to the bottom of the sea. Despite this, he supposedly wins a swimming race, ultimately pulling his contestant behind him (while in full armor). So was Beowulf a nigh-supernatural bad-***? Or was he just spinning a grand tale? The truth is someone else was spinning the tale of Beowulf relating all this, and what he said and did fit the narrative the teller needed it to.

Everyone playing CoH is free to take that narrative role - the spinner of the tale, reinterpreting what's happening on screen into their character doing something that ignores all the numbers, effects and sometimes even the in-game lore, and just doing whatever makes sense to the player to explain how their character is achieving what we all see on the screen. It's a bit like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes imagining his classroom as an alien landscape. But then translating those intensely personalized interpretations of the game into an argument for something on the forums is always going to be ... lively, because by definition it's incredibly subjective.

My own subjective spin is to take the presentation on screen as less abstract and more actually representative. A level 50 Martial Artist really is doing as much damage to that for in powered armor as the teammate with the katana, the mastermind pets with the machine guns, and the girl in back hurling blasts of radiation. In my game-view, that calls for a degree of bad-a<Samuel-L-Jackson>-er that other people just don't have ... even if you're completely natural.

I do that too, and it's fun, but I have to say, I'll willingly give it up for my own Stalkers, because (having secondaries other than Ninjitsu or EA) it's too fragile an event. It's great when I pull it off, but all the times it is instead interrupted or I would just plain be unable to AS something mean that I will likely come out well ahead on average if this change causes me to lose that.

I understand the cool factor, though. I lament its loss on the one hand, but welcome its replacement on the other.

It does, thanks a lot for that. I am sure people's final opinions will be shaped strongly by what things like XP and drop rates turn out to be, but that sounds very comprehensive overall, and I'm looking forward to (testing) it.

PS: Please tie someone to a keyboard who can fix the copy tool.

We already know that they can give badges for doing certain things solo, even if you can run the same content with a team.

I don't object to the idea, per se, but I do wonder if it would be "worth" creating content with that solo focus.

They said that's the current plan at the summit.

Something was posted over in the main unoffical feedback thread that I agree with strongly. If they want to sell stuff repeatedly, sell stuff we have ongoing desire for. One example of this is enhancements, which they do already sell some of. Now, I have no intention of buying the sets they currently sell, because there is a close enough approximation to them in game already that I can get without spending "real money" above my subscription. But they sell other things that I can see myself buying more of over time: Enhancement Boosters and Unslotters. Why will I buy more of these over time? Because I will make more characters who they could benefit. These are the same the fundamental things that drive the in-game auction house - the need to supply new characters or make ongoing changes to existing ones.

ATIOs are a fine example of that. If they have a good price/utility ratio (something I realize is highly subjective - I can only speak for myself), then not only will I buy them once, I'll come back and buy more of them again later for additional characters.

That's closer, but I still don't think I would do it. Not for "real money". I just don't like random stuff.

Let me give an example. In game, when Reward Merits were new, I spent them on random rolls. It was kind of like playing an in-game lottery. Sometimes I got something great that financed buying lots of other stuff. Most of the time it wasn't so hot. Then I figured out how to use the market better, and figured out that, even if I was passing up on the chance to win big in the short term, I far preferred the near-deterministic behavior of spending 10 times more Reward Merits on something specific that sold well, then selling that on the market, and using those proceeds to buy what I really wanted.

Now, Reward Merits are much more a form of play "money" than Paragon Points are. I get Reward Merits doing stuff in game that I enjoy doing anyway - playing TFs with in-game friends. I can't produce Paragon Points in any way akin to that - I either have to wait for them to accrue naturally, or spend real money to buy them. I'm even less inclined to do spend something like that for a random reward.

Making me less dependent on additionally needing to trade with other people does remove a significant element of unknown beyond the pure random aspect, but for me the random aspect remains a barrier all its own.

Quoted for being a lot like what I think. I am still not sure I would mess with it. Having to go trading with people after I spend (proxy) money to buy something is about a hundred miles from where I want to be. But the above suggestions make the system sound like something I just wouldn't want to participate in as opposed to something I felt dirty about being in the game.

Nothing.

Offering to sell me random new things will simply make me not buy anything. I don't buy random products or services at stores. I don't want random in-game goods either.

If they want me to keep spending money at the store, they have to keep giving me new things. And I realize that's a problem for Paragon Studios, because that takes time and money to produce new things. But that's exactly what Freedom was sold as. A way for the studio to make more money so that they increase investment in making more new things.

I'm not willing to subsidize a stream of new deterministic things both by spending money on some of the deterministic things and spending money on random things.

I have never heard anyone before ask for "solo only" content (as opposed to content which can be soloed).

Frankly, I don't see the point. It doesn't seem like something that makes sense from a time development perspective. Anything they make for small teams can be run solo, but the converse is not true. If there are more people who prefer to team than would prefer to exclusively solo (which seems likely to me), then building content that can be run by 1-8 is far more efficient.

I find the stand you are taking here incredibly bizarre.

Which I mentioned they are are doing, and you went on to quote what I was talking about.

Impressive.

That sounds as if, should they not choose to gate the zone completely, it could be a very rough neighborhood for a non-incarnated person to wander into.

That sounds awesome in a way that makes me jealous on my existing Dark Miasmas.