Pointless Padding or legitimate strategy?

To play Devil's Advocate here;

They could have waited till I20. But instead they decided to push the Alpha 2nd half out earlier to make sure people had something to play with. Since another chunk of that process had to stay in I20, there is obviously going to be some kind of stop-gate to make sure it isn't blasted through. It's a bit of a lose/lost phyric victory here; they get the content out to please people and get blasted whatever they do anyway.

I'm more mad that it went live with the bug it had, but massive kudos to a 'same 24 hour period' hotfix for it, I have to say. Other than that, I have alts that need love to, so having to wait a week just gives me time to bumble around on them and amass shards on my 50s, only one of whom has the Rare (when I get back in and craft it after the fix)

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This thread should have been titled: "Pointless Padding, or Perfectly Planned?"

An awesome alliterative alternative, agonizingly axed!

My personal view is just let us craft the damn thing.

It's a rare, so 16 Shard cost (4 for common, 8 for uncommon, 16 for Rare and 32 for Very Rare...makes sense). The cost to make the Very Rare through that method alone would cost a high number of shards as it is. 32 for two Notices (if you already have the salvage, if not it'll cost 40 per Rare) for both of the Rares, another 32 for two more Notices and then an additional 32 to upgrade that into a Favour of the Well. That's 96 shards!

That way people low on Shards or high on patience can simply wait it out and do the WSTs, I don't have 96 Shards knocking around so I'm in that category anyway, plus with the drop rate being...well luck based (sometimes you get 1 or 2 a Taskforce, other times you get 12) it's still going to take a while for people to save up and use the crafting method as an alternative anyway.

So the Notice isn't time gated but you'll still need to put in the large number of man hours needed if you want to go the Shard only route.

I don't think I'd mind it much if the padding didn't feel...so frivolous. In order to work up to the Very Rare, we have to craft a second Rare...why? It'd be handy maybe if you could use an Alpha boost from a different tree, but getting a slightly different secondary effect is just so...I dunno. It makes it feel like a timesink. They could just add a few more components to the time it takes to get a Favor and we'd have the same sink...but it wouldn't feel as much like you're sinking time just for the sake of sinking time, I think.

If I had the shards rolling around and no limit on how many you get. I could of had two rares right off the bat in under fours hours of gameplay.

I am fine with the gating, all end game content in general is a massive timesink for people that have min/maxed chars to stay around longer to be on more "difficult" raids/trails/TFs.

I would assume there is going to be multiple paths open up in the next issue or two for this. So to bid people's time with stuff release this and help people get nice trinkets as they work like hell in the background.

I must be missing something. What's with all the aversion to "padding" when it's been inherent since Day 1 of the game?

There are instant gratification rewards, and there are some that you have to work for. Sometimes that work is just waiting the proper amount of time, and sometimes you have to have so many widgets to make a cog. This thread is making it seem like the Devs have just swerved in an unexpected direction. From where I sit, it's par for the course.

If there's nothing to use an Ultra-rare slotted lvl 50 on (and there isn't, besides just doing something lesser toons can do, but faster), and there's at least a couple of months to wait before there might be something (don't know for sure at this point) to do, what does it matter if it's 24 hrs or a week or two weeks before you get your shiny?

If you read the dialog in the Ramiel arc, you'd know that it's gonna be a long, slow journey anyway. He told us that getting to full power in one shot was dangerous, and we'd be stuck doing it the hard way.

I'd rather the content be waiting for me to kit out my characters, rather than have uber-50s waiting on something that's challenging to do. Making the process of upgrading be non-trivial makes sense.

It's like a month isn't it for getting an ultra rare right?

Don't you need both rares in a tree to craft the ultra rare? So that's two weeks right there, then for the ultra rare you need something crafted from a notice of the well, and another notice of the well. So that's another two weeks right there.

It's the type of lame time gating that I'd frankly thought the MMO genre had evolved beyond, but maybe I20 will fix that.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like the half issue system if it wasn't so clearly a panic move from some one at Paragon's part "Oh no we've got to get something out! One of our rivals has gone free to play, and another rival just launched!"

I think Techbot has it about right.

We get given extra content early and the Devs get slated for "padding"?

There's a great up-side to this that I've not seen mentioned in this thread: Many of the TFs that don't get run will now be reinvigorated (for a week, at least.) It makes a refreshing change from ITF after ITF and actually works to get people to play more of the content more frequently than sometimes otherwise happens.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I'm actually kind of happy they did this. So far I've only had the time and motivation to get an alpha enhancement on three of my characters. It would make me feel I should play more if I could get my very rare as fast as I could get shards, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Can't speak for anyone else, but I like to keep things casual in the sense of time spent gaming.

Somewhere, every second of every day, a Game Developer is crying due to lack of appreciation.

I think the length of the padding is a bit extreme. I also am hopeful it's just a stop-gap until some better approach in I20. It does have an upside - it gives me a sense of breathing room to get my Notices on multiple characters, and to build out a second branch in characters who only had one Uncommon slot crafted (which was most of them).

So I'm not nuts about it, but I'm putting it to decent use for the time being, and I'm hoping/expecting it will change in I20.

I'm actually really happy about this. As a new player who likes TF's I was pretty thrilled to actually get to finally do the STF. Sure I face planted multiple times but I had fun and for folks who haven't done the old content it makes getting a team to do them easier.