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

Yeah, but ED actually destroyed the forums. Now *that* was an epic fail on the Devs' part, not seeing that fiasco coming. We even told them it was going to and they still did it.

So if you play an hour a day you'll have it in about three months.* That sounds pretty reasonable.

* Assuming you don't get any good drops in that time, which seems unlikely. Chances are you'd get a purple, or at least one of the good rare recipes, and that'd cut into your time considerably.

I can make a lot more than that in an hour. At 10 million an hour (conservative estimate) you can have the Inf for it in 10 hours, or about 3 days playing 3 hours a day. Maybe you can't put that much time into playing in one week, but that just means it takes you 2 weeks, or 3 weeks, instead. This is an end-game, long-term reward system, anyway.

I wouldn't actually disagree with that, but in that case I'd double or triple the influence cost.

500 million is my suggestion.

I think something like the following would be more appropriate:

<those same various incarnate salvage pieces>
20 or 25 shards
250 million Inf

That would bring the total amount of shards needed down to 68 or 73, which is still enough to incentivize the WTF, I think.

Sometimes you just have to let the children cry before they realize that it ain't so bad, after all.

You're wrong.
And Black Scorpion has already verified that Incarnate Trials are an alternative to the WST.

Honestly, I don't think its reasonable to balance medium and long-term pursuit rewards around a three hour a week activity rate. I think the proper normalization is to look at average time to 50, and scale Incarnate earning activity in terms of either fractions of or multiples of that time, regardless of how many hours a week an individual player plays. That way, the time it will take to earn Incarnate abilities will be comparable (meaning: actually comparable to, not equal to) something else they are already familiar with and probably have made peace with. If we say that the average player takes, say, 200-250 hours to level 50, and we then say that some particular Incarnate task (I'm not specifically picking any one in particular) takes 100 hours because its intended to take about half the time it took to level from one to 50, then if some players play 50 hours a week they'll get it in two weeks. If another player plays 1 hour a week, it will take them two years. But they also took four years to get to fifty, and that's just the way it goes.

Just for a data point I think to within an order of magnitude the effort to unlock an Incarnate slot should be somewhere around the amount of time it takes to earn a new power at the high levels: i.e. about three levels in the high 40s. So say three times the time it takes to get from 49 to 50. If it takes the average player ten hours to get from 49 to 50, then 30 hours to unlock one Incarnate slot, plus or minus, would not be out of bounds. Or to be more precise, 30 hours to unlock, and then craft one common ability within that slot, would "feel" right to me if it took about 30 hours on average. The other slots would then take some multiple of that time.

Unlocking all of the Incarnate system from Alpha to Omega would be the rough equivalent of earning thirty levels, not ten, at the same or higher costs as level 49 to 50.

I'm sure other people have different ideas, but those are the numbers I feel most comfortable guestimating, with large margins for error, as appropriate for the Incarnate system, given what I know about its intentions. Most of which is deduced from its structure, not from conversations with the devs. Positron has not shared his insight into whether I'm wildly right or wildly wrong about the Incarnate system intent to this point. Some sort of hint would be nice at some point, but they are pretty busy right now and I'm not going to bother them with that particular question.

I just got a purple about a week ago. I think that was my 6th or 7th one ever.

That hour I posted I earned:

Sleep Duration 41,115k @ WW
Snare Duration 32,005k @ WW
Endurance Reduction 61,500k @ WW
Recharge Reduction 64k @ WW
Hold Duration 41,115k @ WW

Doctored Wounds End/Heal 500k @ WW
Perplex Confuse/recharge 0 @ WW, 5k @ store

Temp Power: Plasmatic Taser 0 @ WW, 1k @ store

5 pieces of salvage, all of them common, no bidders. 4 enhancements, about 20k each. This is a typical haul, with the Doctored Wounds being an exception. I'm much more used to getting things similar to the Perplex that are worth more at the store and then only for a few thousand.

So that's around 850k Influence more. Okay, total take is 1.85 million per hour.

That 1 million an hour is me playing at a brisk pace the way I prefer to, including dropping a radio mission for 35k finish bonus. There's no way I'm going to earn 10 million an hour without it being a grind. Hell, there's no way I can earn 10 million an hour solo period, and I rather doubt anyone else can, either. If I'm playing missions that are new to me or I've only played once before, I slow down and read the text, because that's the whole *point* of the game, not grinding like a gerbil on a wheel and blowing past the story.

I'm a casual gamer and you're a power gamer. I'm also unlucky when it comes to drops, always have been. For instance, I never got one of the cool costume drops until after the Devs significantly increased the drop rate. By that time they were no longer going for 100 to 200 million but rather 10 or 20 k. Now most of them have zero bidders. Only Draconic Wings and Rocket Boots have bidders, at 50 and 120 k respectively. I've never gotten Rocket Boots and one Draconic Wings. Lots of Piston Boots, though, for nothing.

I don't have a problem with that in and of itself, except that we're not looking at soloers in a vacuum but compared against people who have computers capable of teaming and earning these same things in under an hour.

Do you really see 100 hours solo as equal to 1 hour teamed?

I used to play with a bunch of parents who rarely had an entire hour to play at one go. The times they did were few and far between, on the order of once a month when their spouses had the kids, so that's another group of people who ought to be considered. To a one, they all left because of the leveling grind. (In fact, one asked me recently if that had been fixed. I assured him it had, but he hasn't returned to the game.)

10 million an hour? I've never had a character make that. Then again, I don't farm. And I think I've had one purple drop in the last few months. I think the last time someone had an "AT earnings/hour," my 50s went between 600k to 1.1mil or so.

I foresee... AE farming, and rare salvage dropping dramatically in price (again. See also monkies.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

WTF indeed. That guarantees I'd never get it.

Yeah, I'm going to have to resort to farming to be at all competitive.

That's not what he meant. He meant, using only shards and inf, it would be possible to craft every incarnate power. He did not say it would necessarily be an attractive option. He did not say every player would be likely to do it.

Barring a lucky drop, which in aggregate doesn't raise the figure very much, I probably get between 3-5 million a mission, and it takes me about an hour to do most missions. And I do farm, on x8.

EDIT: I also get about 1 shard a mission; as I admitted many pages ago, I will definitely reach the influence price before I'm even in sight of the shard price.

Honestly? It feels like the guy who knows he's got you over a barrel and gouges you just because he can.

It's not helpful and frankly most of the people who like it, like it because they don't want it to be helpful. And please, let's not pretend that's not the case.

Rationally, it's obviously just a starting point. But it does come off as a kind of "Take That, soloers!"

Moderator05's comments in locking the Soloability and End Game thread were not helpful either, IMHO.

Preface: I do not believe this is actually the case. I believe Vanden is extremely wrong about this.

However, if you're right, Vanden, then we're looking at a situation of the Devs more or less actively trolling their solo players. Do you really think that is healthy behaviour for a game?

BS quite openly stated that teaming was going to be given preferential treatment.

As said, I'd actually prefer it if they lowered the shard-cost and upped the inf-cost, but you have your soloable path.