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

Not really to disagree with the main thrust of your post, but I find this a bit disingenuous. ED came bundled with CoV, which truly did bring new people to the game. It's vaguely possible that ED somehow managed to increase the player base on its own, but, frankly, I find that vanishingly likely. I find it far more reasonable to think that the game got new players due to CoV, and that offset any departures over ED. (We know it put at least a small dent in the game's population, given that Emmert mentioned it in a what I recall as a post-tenure interview.)

Realistically, none of us will ever know which part was responsible for what fraction of the population shifts, and it's possible even the devs could not clearly deconvolve the causes and effects completely. But whatever the obscured truth really is, what I quoted you saying here makes it look an awful lot like you're attributing the near-term population growth that followed it to the implementation of ED, and I don't think there's any reasonable way any of us could unambiguously draw that conclusion.

I first played with the release of CoV. But I didn't love the game and subscribe until after the Cryptic buyout.

One shot by a Peacebringer, IIRC.





No, not being facetious.

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Another clear sign that the devs hate soloers even more than they hate Villains.

I didn't mean to imply that the population went up directly due to Enhancement Diversification. I only meant that there are a lot of people under the mistaken impression that when Enhancement Diversification hit, people left the game in droves, and that simply didn't happen. Did some people leave because of it? Probably, but the net population spiked and stayed considerably higher for almost a year afterward.

If Enhancement Diversification were really the fun-killing change some make it out to be, the release of CoV wouldn't have made that much of a long-term difference. But it did. Were some people very upset? Sure, but not as many and/or not enough to keep the game from being very successful.

You may have missed my earlier post, which I think is what kicked off the 10M inf/hour number now being bandied about. I can earn that on my 50s, and I'm not farming, and I'm not including profits from selling things on the market. I'm not sure if you're aware, but since we had those "AT earnings/hour" threads, the earning rate of level 50s was doubled. So your cited low-end would now be closer to 1.2M/hour.

Honestly, these days I think a hard-core farmer would be a bit disappointed with 10M inf/hour.

I'm not mentioning that I can 10M/hour because I think it's typical, or because I think you're doing something wrong by not hitting it. The point in mentioning it was to explain why I think a 100M price is not unreasonable. Whether or not you personally can hit that kind of inf creating rate isn't actually that important, because other people are, and the fact that they're pumping that inf into the market system makes it easy for you to get them to do that work for you. It doesn't take any "marketeering", flipping or farming. Just look at the market long enough to find something that sells for close to 100M inf and see how many Alignment Merits it takes to make it. There are actually several things that will net you 90-110M inf/A-Merit, though some cost 2 Merits to craft (but sell for ~200M inf).

People like me are swimming in cash just from doing things we like to do anyway. We're willing to pour it on other people who will supply us with stuff we actually want. Don't be afraid to give it to us at prices we're clearly indicating we're willing to pay.

I heard Warshade but no, not facetious.

Apparently this person used the Kheldian respec bug to 68-slot one attack power and WHAMMO!

You can not do this any more.

Except, that the WST wasn't meant solely for the benefit of level 50s. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made the Sister Psyche TF one of the WSTs and given the double merits as an option. I view the reward of a NotW in the WST as an incentive to get the level 50s to do lower level content, possibly with lower level characters on the team.

I'm not sure if they had planned the exemplared shard drops before they ever mentioned the WSTs to us or not, but they mentioned that they added that incentive to get the 50s to actually exemplar and do lower level content. It could have possibly been because of all the whining, screaming, and ******** from the level 50s with entitlement issues. I don't know. I wasn't at any Dev meetings where this was discussed. Not that I have been at any Dev meetings at all.

The WSTs would still have value. Just, maybe, not as much to the level 50s.

I do not do many TFs. Mainly because I don't like teaming with random jerks. Some PuGs I have been on were great. Most were a test of my patience. Unfortunately for me, my regular group that I play with lost 2 members. We no longer have enough members to do the TFs that require 8 people. Not that we do TFs very often.

Just to reiterate, the WSTs would still have value.

I don't see the reason for complaint.

It's simple. They gave the soloers away to continue to get everything solo. They said it was going to cost more to do it solo.

If you're wanting to be solo all the time, then what's the rush anyways? Just to have it? To do...things...solo?

OK, but that seems fairly orthogonal. Back when CoV came out, Cryptic still published subscription numbers, and subs did spike with CoV and remain above the previous baseline for a considerable period. There's no question that it added subscriptions, and apparently a fair number of lasting ones at that.

definitely more of a life than me lol, im in college as well, but i still average around 6-14 hours a day of this depending on how much homework i have in the week (yes i know i have no life lol)


now for the topic at hand:

i dont mind the weekly target, but its sucks you are only alotted one per week per toon, one of my toons atm has about 70-80 shards leftover after he crafted 2 rares and all the salvage he needed for a very rare, so anything to get him those notices faster would be nice

from my experience the shard drop rate while solo on the standard diff (+0x1) is extremely low, i manage *maybe* 1 shard every 3-6 mishs (depending on the length of the mish). from the teaming experience, my average amount of shards goes from around 1-4 shards a mish, thus earning around 6-12 shards over the course of a tf (the tf im using for this is the ITF, but it really depends on the tf, on LRSF ive only averaged 3-6 shards and BSF ive averaged 8-18 shards a run)

while this is very pricey from the solo standpoint, from a teaming/tfing standpoint it may only take about a week to earn all of what you need for it, or even less if the RNG smiles on you or you farm a lot

what its currently listed as would be fine if its not time gated, but i agree that if it is lowered even by half or requiring only shards, then it would have to be time gated, so that poeple could earn no more than 2 per week if they were really teaming but still had extra shards to spare

in any case ill most likely continue doing weekly tfs, but im glad that we at least have another option to work towards

That's not the story I know of. The one I know of (and saw a screenshot of) was someone using the Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative Energy damage at a time when it dealt something like six million points of damage.

There's no way that even 68-slotting any attack in the game would one-shot Hamidon, even before ED. That's only 23.7x damage, and he withstands 30-50 well-buffed people beating on him for several minutes.

I always love it when the truth of history gets sifted out from the hearsay of rumor.

And I'd love to see that screenie.

I probably don't have a copy. It was posted in the Inventions forum on the old boards, back before it was merged with the Market forum.

I'll look, though. I save oddball things like that sometimes.

Edit: You can find several people reference the occurance in this thread. Arcanaville also separately references the Kheldian slotting bug.

This is really what it boils down to. Apparently some people think getting their Incarnate stuff completely solo shouldn't be much slower than doing it via the WTF. Considering that the entire Incarnate system is described as an end-game, team-based system, I think the devs are being generous giving the 'soloists' a second option at all, but it seems proponents on the other side don't feel that's enough.

There's a number of us that think designing it as an "end-game, team-based system" is a bad idea. That number would be smaller if the target team size was 2-6 instead of 8-12, though.

You're free to disagree, but at this point I sincerely doubt they plan to overhaul it.

They're not - from day one of the Incanrate system, they've been telling us it's raid-based - The Incarnate content is in the form of zone events/raids.

I think--emphasis on think--that what may be going through their head is that they don't want the farmers to trivialize earning this stuff as they have so many other things. In other words, they don't want to unintentionally make it stupid easy to get this stuff, so they are shooting for making the fastest of farmers to take longer to earn the Notice of the Well than an average WST team.

I really do believe that they are acting in good faith to try to prevent people from sitting around a day after Issue 20 hits moaning, "Okay, I'm done. Now what?" Bearing in mind that Shards will start dropping for more types of enemies, I imagine that they set the numbers as they did knowing that if they were lower, farmers would just zip through a few Shard-dropping enemies missions in 30 to 60 minutes, fork over the chump change that is the influence barrier, and within a day have all of their übers kitted out with everything.

This will at least slow them down some.

I just wish that once - just once - some MMO designer would decide that, instead of trying to slow those people down, they'd just tell them "Nothing, sorry, we'll get new stuff when we do. Maybe slow down a bit, try to enjoy the ride instead?"

Because I really am truly, deeply, intensely tired of having my progress robbed because they need speed bumps.

It doesn't matter, because even if there were no 'speed bumps' on the Incarnate stuff you still wouldn't be able to get it because you refuse to team and/or do TFs. Nobody is 'robbing' you of your 'progress' except yourself.

But aren't you cancelling in a few months, so it doesn't really matter to you?