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

IMHO, this makes their lives much more difficult, and deservedly so.

I think to a first order estimate, it doesn't matter. If we decide that it takes, and I'm just making up reasonable sounding numbers here because the actual numbers are not in front of me right now, nine thousand kills to level from 49 to 50, and we decide that therefore unlocking Alpha and slotting a common will take 27,000 kills of relative effort (although not necessarily that literally), then to a first order estimate, if a soloer takes ten times longer to do that, it takes ten times longer to do that. We don't go deciding who's time is more valuable than others. If you play three hours a week and I play twelve, who's to say that each of your hours should be more valuable than mine just because I play more. We can't play those games, so we assume everyone's hours are more important to them than anyone else's hours, which means we ignore how long anything takes, we only care what gets done in that time.

*If* after doing that we find there is an unacceptably large disparity between different players, we *may* attempt to narrow the gap with reward structure trickery, such as the "splinter" suggestion I made earlier**. But we *never* start saying, well, these people are very busy and their time is very important, we should let them earn rewards faster per unit time. That opens doors with simply unacceptable consequences. Our ability to address such issues without becoming the lifestyle police are extremely limited, and at some point disadvantaged people become disadvantaged players.


That's unfortunate, but the people who think City of Heroes is an impossible grind are no less, and no more important than the players who want the experience to take longer, and would quit out of boredom if it was significantly easier. DCUO is turning out to be embarrassingly easy to hit the level cap (albeit not the skill point cap) whereupon the options available at the end game are very limited. And its not the most alt-interesting game either. It seems very much to be "leveling is a formality to get to the end" type of game. And not everyone likes that. This really is a case where you cannot please everyone, and its risky to go too far in one extreme.


** Patrol XP is another limited tactic in this area. And since I'm mentioning it, I'll also mention that Patrol XP increases XP earning rates, but not drop rates. That's deliberate. Keep that in mind when contemplating leveraging Patrol XP to address Incarnate drop rates.

<tangent>

Okay, I just have to mention this. As much of a bad rap as Enhancement Diversification got, I honestly believe that had it not been implemented, this game would be long since dead. I really think everyone remembers the controversy on the forums and whatnot, but what you don't see very often is that back before Enhancement Diversification, the game had gotten extremely boring. Boring to the point where I actually stopped playing for around three months.

Just as a reminder and a bit of insight to the new kids who weren't here at the time, typical missions went something like this:

A fire/fire so-called "burn" tanker (which was around half of the game's population) would kick up his auras and go herd every enemy on the map into a tight, enclosed space, like a dumpster. Then he would sit there for a few minutes while all of the enemies' health bars ticked away from the damage induced from his auras. They were so ridiculously overpowered that nothing could make a dent in them, and there was no limit to how many enemies could be herded or held in one place at a time.

Meanwhile, everyone else on the team just sat at the door and waited. Some of them (even the tanker, who just sat there with auras a-blazin') might take a break and go to the bathroom or eat, I don't know. It didn't matter. If you were so audacious as to go try to help out in this process by blasting some of the lingerers around the edges, oftentimes you'd find yourself kicked from the team because it wasn't the "right" way to play.

Some of you have mentioned how "grindy" trying to earn the rewards for the Notice of the Well is. Well, kiddo, let me tell you, you don't know a damn thing about grindy unless you played the game pre-Enhancement Diversification.

So for all of the sounds and fury it generated, it really was one of the best things to ever be done to the game. I'll agree, it would have been much better had it been done before the initial release of the game, under the "it is better to never have had at all rather than to take away" philosophy, but still, I'm really damn glad and proud of the developers for making what had to be a hard decision and sticking to it.

At the time, a lot of people were convinced it was the end of the game, because it made their godmode characters suddenly vulnerable again. In reality, the subscriber base went up following Enhancement Diversification for almost a year. Did it make the game a little bit more challenging? Yes, it did, but it didn't make it hard by any stretch of the imagination. What it did do, though, was to break the stranglehold of monotonous tedium that the game had become.

So yeah, I personally think that Enhancement Diversification did turn out really swell in fact, and I'm not being facetious when I say it. I wish people would stop romanticizing the "good ol' pre-ED days," because the truth of the matter is that they sucked. Bad.

</tangent>

Ironically, paynesgrey's last post would have started an especially interesting discussion, because I think his question: "Inequity Aversion works both ways. How do you expect someone who mainly solos to look at Extra More Bigger Super Bonus Reward Just For Being A Joiner?" cuts to the very heart of modern MMO design theory. The question "how do soloers view MMOs" is one of the most interesting questions about MMOs since WoW launched. Even with all the bickering surrounding the end game, I still think its the most interesting question in MMO design theory, and its one that has occupied my MMO thoughts almost since I first started playing this game (I started as a pure soloer myself).

(Incidentally: rewards are presumably granted for team participation, not just joining, but it has been difficult to enforce team contribution in the reward system so door-sitting is still a degenerate case for now).

Not alwys! Ther's an alternate! Not a good one, admittedly...
I remember sessions with INV tanks (and an INV/BS scrapper, actually) where it was "Herd one floor up. One blaster nukes. Go to the next floor. Next blaster nukes."

Not a lot to do... though it gave plenty of time to chat with the rest of the team.

(Edit - mild curiosity. Talking about being bored with the game playing like that - I still have that Inv/BS tank on my friends list on my original Elec/Elec blaster, first 50. He hasn't been on in so long he doesn't have a global. Neither do four other people on that list. Might just be time to do some updating....)

That, though, I wouldn't call grind. I'd call it "boring."

You want grind, play Aion. Pay for gear. pay for spells. Kill X many something for Y items. Go purchase things to finish quests. Or, for "fun," try to get flash armor. Each character can only get *one* piece. You have to get *five* characters to 30, have each do the quest - then trade them all to the one character, who then has to have them modified or whatever it was for their class/gender. They're not tradeable on the market, you can't get them any other way.

Stuff like *that* is part of why I'm not playing there... and that's actual grind.

As far as the rest of the post, yes, getting through ED and GDN did help - it would have been better if we'd had the invention system sitting there ready to go (at the time, it was the SSOCS and it died off, with the universities being built, getting everyone excited - and then having nothing happen with them.) Only character I really regretted it on (and still do, somewhat) is my emp/rad. Hit that one hard.

See my Guides and Tutorials

All of this is irrelevant because I rarely get those drops. As I just sold a Doctored Wounds for a whopping 500k (which I consider an awesome night, frankly), I suspect your other numbers are totally out of whack, as well. I got 22 million for the purple I got last week, but I haven't had a purple in months and months, with about 7 or so since they were added to the game. So it's not like I can count on those as a source of Influence.

So what are you guys doing Saturday? Playing CoH? At 10 I'm taking a partially crippled homebound woman to get her medicine and then shopping at Wal-Mart and the grocery store, then out to lunch. Takes about 5 hours, all told. After that I have to stop at the animal shelter for a couple hours to help with an event. Sunday morning I have to do some pick-ups at the TV station, then I'm heading to NYC for a few days. (Westminster.) When I get back, I have a volunteer luncheon at the library to attend, then, of course, back to the day job. Hope you all earn your 200 gajillion bucks while I'm out. Maybe send me a couple billion, hey?

Did that come across as annoyed? Well, good, because you sent me there. Grats.

My bad.

Carry on as you were...

Don't you have like a billion alts? I'm surprised you even have a 50 to get annoyed at the system as-is.

The fixed cost of real life is in hours. So if a team is earning something in an hour, it is unreasonable to demand that a soloer earn it in 100 times that. They should determine in hours how long it takes the average player to earn something and adjust earning that same thing while teamed accordingly. If that ends up making each enemy worth 5 Inf while on a team, so be it.

How do you think that would fly? Based on her current attitude of "Nyah nyah, sucks to be you," I would expect Atomic Woman would have a screaming fit and everyone like her would follow suit. That's kind of what's going on here, but I'm trying quite rigorously not to let it go past "annoyed."

Anyway, I've got to get to take the dogs out and then get to bed, so I'm out.

a propitious number!

I couldn't agree more. ED saved the game IMO.

I'm not going to try to address the MMO industry as a whole, but this does give an opening for my opinion about the comic book/super-hero genre in particular.

I believe that every genre has what I like to call a Fundamental Unit of Awesome. That is, this is the number of leading characters around which stories in the genre are optimally built. For most ensemble stories, the Five-Man Band is the fundamental unit of awesome. For military stories, the unit is the fundamental unit of awesome. For the mythic hero or super-hero, the individual is the fundamental unit.

In support of this, I cite the comics industry. What's the sign of a marginal character? They're relegated to a supporting role in a team book. An average or so-so character? Featured role in a team book. A strong character? Solo title. Flagship or signature characters of the line? Multiple solo titles. When a strong solo character is added to a team, it raises the team up. When a team becomes a dumping ground for marginal characters, it brings the team down.

CoH came about during an era when the fantasy archetype quad (Fighter, Thief, Mage, Cleric) was the design standard for MMOs and they followed suit. I always have and always will believe that was a fundamental error. A Certain Other MMO almost broke away from that mold but buckled in the end; but their self-inflicted problems were legion anyway. I have yet to try out the Distinguished Competition.

So I honestly do think that as a genre convention, a super-hero (or villain) needs to stand on their own two feet as an individual character first and then teaming takes it to the next level, as opposed to the team being the fundamental goal and soloing considered the side activity.

I've done it both ways, just for the record. I've soloed and I've played TFs like it was my second job.

I think when CoX broke away from the five-man band design philosophy the game improved. I think turning the Incarnate System back towards that is a design mistake, not from a MMO perspective but from a genre perspective.

congrats on having a life and what purple was it? sounds like a Fortunata Hypnosis or the Absolute Amazement proc if you got 22 mil for it.

I'm going to visit a friend and check out her new apartment on Saturday, rest of the day is up in the air

but, wonderfully, does not preclude ALSO farming while you marketeer!

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That's multi tasking. That doesn't come until lesson 4, assuming people get that far.

If a team of 8 does X in Y amount of time, then it is entirely reasonable to expect an anti-teamer to take roughly 8Y time to achieve X themselves. It's simple math. Nothing in this example is penalizing the anti-teamer other than his or her insistence/inability to join a team. But then again, it's not the game's fault that they won't/can't, either.

Let's refrain from attacks here, please.

And that has what to do with anything?

250-some alts. 21 50s. Several more close.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Nothing, I'm just surprised to see it even affects him.

Really? So which team do we calculate this reasonable time by? The one that takes 20 minutes to (for example) run an STF, or the one I had last week that took 3 1/2 hours? Or, since few people solo the STF, the team that takes 500 hours to get from 1-50 together, or the ones that steamroll everything and take 50?

"Simple math," indeed. More like a smokescreen.

See my Guides and Tutorials

I can see where it wasn't clear, because I didn't state it explicitly, but I was being careful to talk about what I was creating, and not at all what I could earn off the market. The whole point was about how much inf level 50s are injecting into the system from whole-cloth fabrication, because that's what actually enables people to pay 10s and 100s of millions of inf on the market, which is what would make my estimate low-ball when we include earnings from selling things there.

Somebody soloed the STF?

I think everything's been soloed in the game at least once - apart from the Hamidon

It's been done.

I've heard that's been done as well, though it was a bug exploit rather than a genuine (i.e., WAI) attempt.