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

I don't think so. This gives a path to the goodies for achiever soloers who enjoy an intensive, highly efficient grind.

For casual soloers like myself, it's a message that these items are not meant for me and I should abandon all hope of getting them. But I expected that.

I'm sorry, but this statement doesn't even make sense.

Bolded the part I added.

As this is a business transaction, I agree you don't owe them anything(well other than the sub fee obviously). I agree pissing off large amounts of customers is a bad thing.

But, there is not a shred of evidence to even suggest that the shard conversion rate will piss off a large amount of customers. Just sayin.

Pretty much. If you are a casual soloer go to your main and then find a civilian with a name that begins with M so that it gives you your total playhours.

You'll need several hundred hours to get one notice so if you have, say, 200 hours on your main, double the entire time you've spent on your main and you'll be close to a notice.

It goes both ways, they offer a service, you pay for it, they can deny you service, you can cancel your account.

edit: I would assume "biting the hand that feeds you" would result in your account getting banned >.>

Yes it goes both ways, but the customer is the more important factor. Always.

I hate farmers too.

I hate how they supply the market with recipes. I hate how they make a ton of influence then spend it on my drops.

I hate how they make it a lot easier for me to make billions upon billions on the market.

Time will tell. Hope those quarterly earnings don't drop lower!

For this thing, it never has



I thought giving a solo path counts as a compromise?

"Large" and "massive" seem to have a different meaning on your planet

A goal that is unachievable for casual players is not a compromise. What happened to "casual friendly end game?"

So not offering an option is not acceptable, but offering an option is also not acceptable?

Offering an option that is so insane it makes Korean grindfest MMO's look casual friendly and then touting you have a casual friendly end game is not acceptable as it's a lie.

What she said. Casual doesn't automatically equal solo.

hm? as far as this game goes, 2010 was fairly stable in sales (with a increase due to GR release), at least that's the impression I get from their report, though it is down from last year overall. I believe it'll remain stable through 2011.

2009
Q1: 6837
Q2: 6673
Q3: 5471
Q4: 3928

2010
Q1: 3348
Q2: 3491
Q3: 5709
Q4: 3239

On the character that has the most Incarnate stuff, my MA/SR scrapper, I have one rare, two uncommons, two components, and about 60 shards. I play her about three times a week. When I'm not running task forces, I'm soloing tip missions at +0x8. I know I've earned more than a hundred actual shards on that character, and in shard terms the net Alpha abilities on her is on the order of two hundred or so.

It "feels" like tip missions spawn a lot of bosses at 0x8, which might help. I'm averaging like one or two shards per mission. I don't have time to do an average over many days right now, but I'm looking at my herostats numbers for the last session I played my MA/SR. They look like this:

Time: 2 hours 45 minutes (estimated)
Defeats: 1134
Influence Earned: 12,507,027
Shards: 9

I'm actually kind of embarrassed by that influence rate. But hey, its Martial Arts: my AoEs are Dragon's Tail and Sands of Mu. And there's travel and selling in there. And I'm not as young as I used to be. Of course, that could have been a lucky day: lets pick a random session from last week:

Time: 2 hours 2 minutes (estimated)
Defeats: 1056
Influence Earned: 11,811,021
Shards: 5

I was really cranking on that day: 26% faster kill rate (or 26% less goofing off in Wentworths). But statistically speaking, about the same Inf/Kill, which means the mix of critters is about the same. In this case, 211 kills per shard, as opposed to the obviously much luckier day when it was 126 per shard.

Still, that's a solo player earning shards at a respectable rate without a farming optimized build. Someone running missions at my not-fast and not-slow rate and running task forces here and there would, if they focused on one alt, have several hundred shards by now easily, basically without even trying.

(Note: if the paragonwiki drop numbers are correct and the average spawn is something like two bosses, four LTs, and eight minions in the average x8 spawn, then you should expect a drop every 194 kills across all ranks.)

My personal position is that offering an option is acceptable, because some players will want to take advantage of it, regardless of how much time and effort it costs.

The Incarnate system is meant as a typical MMO end-game, team-intensive gear grind that even takes a well-organized team a long time to fully complete. Trying to accommodate us casual soloers (or even the casual team-lite crowd) isn't going to work too well for that kind of end-game.

Of course the danger is that the casual playerbase is fairly large, and many of those players may lose interest in the game's direction. The devs are hoping to attract more of the achiever crowd in exchange. We'll see how well that works down the road, as those achievers will regularly need to put together effective level 50 teams.

It is perfectly achievable for casual players. Run a WST.

It's long and cumbersome for casual *soloers*, but that's a different matter entirely.

Which customer?

Me....duh

3239 is lower than 5709 by alot. And lower than 6837 by ALOT.

And I'm sure soloers are just big mean grumpy people who refuse to team.

I'm sure none of them...

Have an illness that requires them to leave at random times
A slow computer that disallows them from running large teams
Kids


Soloers are players.

So far the system seems to be oriented a lot more towards the casual team-lite crowd instead of the hardcore-min-maxed-team crowd. Admittedly the incarnate trials (I will not call them iTrials) might change that but even those seem to be more about coordination instead of having an uber build.

The devs are making the same mistake that doomed certain newer games.

Trying to compete with the big boys when you aren't going to be able to lure them away from their game.