Want a Notice of the Well solo? That'll be...

No, that's not an ideal balance point. It would devalue the WST and potentially the new trials.

Honestly for me personally that problem wouldn't exist. If the WST is a TF I don't like to run (more than once) I simply won't run it (more than once). NotW or not. Luckily I'm mostly a villain player and I like all the villain SFs.

That being said, I do think 88 shards is a bit on the high side of reasonable. I wouldn't mind if it's brought down some.

Borderline pedantic I may be, but I'm also not arrogant enough to argue with The Arcana

I never pretended to understand the code, though. The pseudo-code line was just an example of intent.

If it is honestly that difficult, then fair enough. That doesn't detract from it being a method of ensuring balance of Notices, however. I doubt any method of balance would be an easy one, t'be honest. And I still think that current itteration is not exactly realistic to achieve for those it is supposedly aimed at.

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.

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

With some reservations, I'd actually have to say that, yes... in some ways it is.

Mostly because with this in place, no matter how out-of-balance the numbers really are (And for the record, I do think the shard requirements are pretty high on the "Are you guys NUTS?!"-scale, even though I don't disagree with the idea behind craftable Notices itself.), the devs and team-only enthusiasts can point at it and say "Here. You have your solo option. Now sit down and shut up." without giving solo and small-team Incarnate options much, if any, additional thought.

I do wish people would keep this in mind. The Alpha Rare has the big payoff. The incremental benefit of the Very Rare is quite small.

Just as purple IOs aren't required to build a high performing character, the Very Rare isn't either.

Every time someone says this, I just hear "I deserve to get better stuff because I team." I get the whole reward/action paradigm and so forth, but most arguments in favour of it (Arcanaville managed to make one that did not do this) just sound like "I team for shinies; if I can get shinies another way, no teaming."

Having the WSTs and the Trials be the most efficient way of gaining these rewards is reasonable; I can understand why that would be the case. Having to set up the rewards such that only an insane person would opt to try to do it without doing the WSTs/Trials is not reasonable.

(And if you're one of those people that's already gathered up several hundred shards, yes, I consider you insane.)

And this hasn't changed. You can still team or solo as you so wish. Even for your Incarnate stuff (not this very second, but we know it's coming).

However, expecting the 'anti-teaming' option to be anyway near as fast as the option that the devs are actively trying to encourage is pretty much folly.

I don't think the request is for anyway near as fast.

Let's say it's 40 shards for a Notice. I can probably get 4 shards an hour, running spawned for 8.

10 hours vs. 1/2 hour for the WST (If a team exists when I want it).

I'm willing to do the 10 hours. That's nowhere near as fast as the team option.

*sigh* This isn't about me, or you. It's about the long term life of the game. That's the devs angle. And it's quite obvious from the recent course and Black Scorpions post that they believe that to be in teamed end game content. And I happen to agree.

So they want things that encourage people to play the teamed end game content (incarnate powers!). If you give the same rewards for easier farmable actions, a subsection of the playerbase isn't going to bother with all your nicely designed end game trials in order to get those rewards. They're just going to stay in 1 spot and farm their rewards quickly, get bored with the game and quit. It's not a healthy for the game in the long term. See the AE exploiting mess.

That is why the cost for crafting needs to be so high.

My main has about 60, maybe 70 not sure. Mostly from 3 failed MoSTF runs I did over winter holidays and the 2 STFs I did last week for the NotW/badge credit. My other incarnate 50s have less than 20. I have 2 characters with rare alphas, and 2 with uncommons. 3 of my 7 50s aren't even incarnate yet. I'm in no hurry. As I said I'm a fairly casual player.

Setting things up such that alternate paths aren't at all viable (and at 88 shards, this is not a viable alternative) will lead to those that cannot or will not do Task Forces or Trials - for all the very many reasons very many people have outlined - feeling like they're spinning on a treadmill making no progress, and they will get bored with the game and quit. It's not healthy for the game in the long term.

This is why I asked why balancing for those that run too fast - those that "stay in one spot and farm", those that exploited AE, etc - needed to be the focus. Focusing on making sure they don't go too fast can also lead to the slower players feeling like they can make no progress at all, and leads to all the same difficulties.

If the choice comes down to having to tell those that run too fast or those that run too slow "F- you", why should the balance always be in the favour of those that run too fast? From a purely economic standpoint, unless there are a lot more of them than the slower ones, they're not even the most profitable choice. The slower players make less demands on development time and are naturally inclined towards long-term patronage.

I think I have two characters who have earned over 100 million, and just barely at that. I look at some of the prices on the market and realize how much I hate farmers.

I've never said that. I was in fact giving someone a light grilling in the announcement thread because they basically were asking for the Alpha slot to not only be soloable to have it faster than team players....which is pants on head retarded, frankly. Teaming has and always will be the faster option in game. Of that I do not doubt and do not contest.


That does not mean I accept 100mil and 88 shards as anything near 'Reasonable', though. I'm hoping that it is indeed a case of 'Test, then scale down' here.

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.

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

The point wasn't whether it was possible or workable, but more whether it was reasonable to see such a feature in a "quick and dirty" solution. Even if the actual programming was straight-forward, tampering with the reward system would likely force a Q&A cycle for that change that would not be speedy. In fact, given the devs were just burned on a ginormous bug that made it to live due to insufficient testing, I would expect such changes to be even harder to make without extra vetting.

"Elsewhere" I suggested the possibility of adding a special reward that soloers could actually earn significantly faster than teamed players could, and which would then have a path to crafting Incarnate abilities that could be independently balanced from shard conversions.

Is there such a way to create a reward that soloers could earn faster than teams, so that it could not be trivially exploited by teamed players? There is: make a drop that drops on mission complete that only one player can get. If you're solo, you'll get them all. If you're in a team of eight, you're only going to get one every eight missions on average. It won't matter, because the shards you earn will be so much better anyway.

For psychological reasons, I suggested each mission drop sixteen of these. Why sixteen? Because in a team of one, you get all sixteen. In a team of two, rather than the RNG sometimes hating one player and having one player get three in a row while the other player gets none, you're far more likely to have each player getting *some* with each mission complete. By the time you get all the way up to eight players on the team, each player will average two, but some might get more and some might get less or none. For solo players, this would be a dependable reward. For teamed players, the bigger the team the more random and unpredictable that reward becomes. For people that both team and solo, the teamed drops become a "lucky/unlucky" lottery ticket, and the solo drops become the dependable path.

The nice thing about this idea is that it automatically scales to small teams: its not a "solo vs teamed" solution. Its an autoscaling teamed solution where solo is just the special case of having one person on the team. Shards and this other reward become counter-balancing rewards based on the size of your team. Call these things "splinters." The smaller the team, the more splinters you'll get and the less shards. The larger the team the more shards you'll get and the less splinters.

Now you can balance the crafting costs around splinters, without worrying that large teams can farm splinters. They can't. But they won't complain, because they will be swimming in shards, and the crafting costs for splinters will still be far higher than shards.

Personally, I think even with the cost of introducing Yet Another Currency, this is a better solution than the quick and dirty one. But contrary to popular belief, the devs don't always do what I tell them to do.

Also, while I've put a lot of thought into this idea over the last several weeks, I can only say I think its 90% certain there aren't balance complications lurking within it. I'm pretty sure its one of my more brilliant ideas. I'm not certain its not also one of my more unworkable ones.

Edit: I need to add that when I formulated this idea originally, there were some caveats to address exploitability pointed out by myself or others. Its possible that splinters would have to be restricted to only certain mission arcs, ala the WST. Otherwise, it could be exploited by picking arbitrarily short missions. And it would likely need something like the ticket tracking system in the AE to make sure that you only earn all sixteen splinters if you do enough activity in the mission, rather than ghosting it in thirty seconds. If you only kill two LTs and the boss a the end, you might get only four splinters, for example, whereas if you defeat at least half the foes in the mission, you'll get the maximum sixteen.

I really have to respond to this. It drips with what I consider horrific ignorance of what's really going on.

I'm not a farmer. I mostly play characters who who are not remotely built for farming, and would never be good at it no matter what I did with them. I am simply a player willing to invest the time and focus in making a relatively few characters extremely good, for no better reason than that playing characters against things I know they weren't expected to win against gives me personal joy.

I can sit down, log in, play essentially normal content on high difficulty settings solo, at settings my "extremely good" characters find challenging, and earn 10M inf per hour.

That's brand new inf, created by me, for me to use, adding money to the system that was never there before.

If only 5% of players can do what I can do, that's still thousands of people who could be churning out 10s of millions of inf per day.

Don't have characters like mine? Still not a problem. Run an ITF with +2 mobs in it and fight most of them, a-la "Shard Run" that's vogue these days? That'll earn you around 20M inf. (Get everyone else on the team cranked up with a level shift and you can turn it up higher and earn the even more money in exactly the same elapsed time.) [Edit: I am not suggesting you go on ITFs to earn a lot of money. I'm pointing out that having high-end characters is not a prerequisite, meaning more people than just those with such characters are doing it.]

Farmers contribute large amounts of inf to the in-game economy, but they are not so solely responsible why things cost 100M inf that they deserve anyone singling them out for hate on that basis. Things cost 100M inf because everyone playing a 50 is not just printing money, they're spewing it like confetti on new years.

Yes, it is. Simply saying that it isn't doesn't make it (not?) true.

Normally I'd be willing to meet you in the middle here and say something to the effect of me being okay with the requirement being lowered to 60 or 65 shards, but experience has shown me that doing that just gets people saying "60 is still too much, it should be 30!" or other similar things.

That wasn't meant as a personal attack, by the way.

You don't have to farm at all to make 100 million. I can probably make than in 2 hours of normal play with one of my high-level characters, easily.

Probably. I wouldn't mind if the shard count was lowered to the 60-65 range. Perhaps with the Influence doubled to make up for it. Because 100 million Inf at the point we are talking about is pretty laughable. But I don't make the decisions, so who knows?

I have 9 50s, all of which are incarnated, all of which have at least one rare crafted, and at least 30 shards left over. One, the one I've played the most because I was in the process of earning a high-end IO build for her when all this started, still has 200 shards.

All I do is play existing 50s several hours a day, 5-6 days a week. I run a lot of TFs with friends, and I solo on high difficulty settings when I'm not on TFs.

What's insane about that?

I actually think that's kind of a lowball estimate. I may have exaggerated a bit in my last post when I said 100m in 2 hours, but when you figure in recipe drops and invention salvage and Wentworth's it's pretty common. Most recipes aren't worth anything but vendor trash, but you end up with a surprising number that cost maybe 400k to craft and sell for 8-10 million at auction. And salvage can get up there pretty well in price, too.

It's honestly really, really easy to make Influence at 50. Like the man said, it spews out like confetti.

No, it's not. Simply saying that it is does not make it so.

Glad to see you have nothing else to contribute to the discussion, then.

Content: I reactivated my subscription after a 2-year hiatus a few days before the last 2XP weekend (so around Jan 20). I had one level 50, who wasn't even kitted out with IO sets, and my total liquid assets were in the 300k Inf range. As of today I've spent roughly 1.5 billion Influence on her IO sets (all earned by me, and none of it farmed), although she still only has an uncommon alpha boost (but 2 Notices) since I've got characters at 45, 47, and 48 I've been pushing to 50. Making Inf is not hard at all.

Well, I guess I'm glad that, for the past two years, I've been paying for the development you're now enjoying. At least someone paid for it, and someone is enjoying it, I guess?

Wow, you're just looking for things to be angry about now, aren't you?

In a way, yes. As it basically feels insulting to me and it seems is being used as a method to say "Heres your option! Now you can't complain anymore! HAHAHA!"

However it won't shut us up because it isn't a realistic option.

So yes, I'd of preferred no option over an insulting one.

So it's 1% better?

Considering it was in a PVP zone

You needed a hundred of them

Villains who could NOT get the badge could camp there to kill that one infected to deprive heroes of getting it

It was pretty bad.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Serious question: If they had never said they planned a way for 'anti-teaming' people to get rare incarnate salvage, that it would always and forevermore be a WTF-only thing from the beginning, would you have been okay with that?

Nice hyperbole at the "anti-teaming" statement.

The devs are not my mom and dad. They are not the hand that feeds me. The customers are the hand that feeds them. This is a buisness, not a lovey dovey family.


And no, though they essentially stated that originally and had to go back on it after a massive backlash.

I'm willing to compromise but it appears the devs are not. I do not owe them anything as I am a customer. If they wish to keep their customers, they should not work toward pissing off large amounts of them.