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

I take it you've never played Azuria's 'arc'. And I say that with sarcasm, because there is no way you can term that dross as anything honestly resembeling a story arc. The only thing that wasn't built from scratch in it was;
1) Hellions and Skulls (minus unique bosses)
2) Maps (obviously)
3) The fact the arc had the low level mobs in

Everything else had to be invented from square one to make it 'Non-dross'.

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.

I have no idea what you're asking about.

Not being solo-friendly! = Forced teaming

I think I may just go and smash my face in for a bit. It'll be easier than trying to get a point across in this thread.

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.

Nonsense.

The ability to set our own mission difficulty makes it much easier to find challenges as a soloist than as a member of a team.

If you're speaking from a game design perspective, also nonsense. Assuming a larger team gives the devs more flexibility in designing a challenge, but it's no harder to create a challenge for one player than for 8, or more.

You and me both, bud. There's no 'forced teaming' required anyway (once this conversion recipe goes live, that is) so maybe if I bash my head in too I'll be able to understand why 'forced teaming' is even an issue.

I'd agree that a lot of the Incarnate stuff isn't very 'solo friendly', but then again TFs have never been 'solo friendly' so I'm not sure why it would be an issue now but it never was in the past (at least, I never noticed it being one).

*shrug* The only person claiming the quality of the new work is you. Maybe a few others you've had to test it. Developer-created arcs need to be storyboarded, worked to fit within existing continuity, extend that continuity with committee approval, potentially new assets created, potentially new scripting created, tuning for proper challenge (and given that this would be intended to be an alternative to the teamed i20 trials, there would be a good deal of tuning needed to ensure the challenge was neither too easy that teams or IOed out toons couldn't just walk right over it nor too difficult that SOed support toons couldn't complete it), and, if I haven't forgotten any other steps, running it through quality control and eventual player feedback.

I'm not saying it can't be done. Ramiel's arc is proof that it can be. But it can't be done off the cuff when the resources on the Incarnate team are already focused on i20 and probably i21.

By contrast, the shard conversion for the Notice was probably knocked out in a couple of quick meetings, because that's all they had time for. I'm frankly shocked they made that time in the first place.

ETA: I'll add that I don't doubt the quality of your arc is miles above the low-level arc you revamped. The early work in the game is really kind of lackluster, mostly because Cryptic was winging it when they first created City. But Paragon has experienced story and mission designers now, and players are expecting quality. Something quick knocked out in the MA over the course of a week isn't going to cut it.

What rate of generation for the Notice of the Well for a soloist is practical in your view?

In terms of /week since we kind of have to contrast it against the WST currently.

I'll go out on a limb and say basically every arc the game launched with is unplayable garbage by today's standards, essentially bad MA arcs with (generally) better spelling and fewer bugs.

Tell you what then, when I20 goes live, the very next Notice you have to get, try getting it the conversion way. No WST, no BAF, JUSt the conversion way.

If you're not mashing your face into the desk by the wuarter-way mark, I'll back down

-

Also, TFs never stopped you getting any content that was being touted as much as the Incarnate stuff. And also, TFs have always had the arbitrary 'Must have X people' limit on them, whereas the first half of the Alpha slot didnt, before suddenly getting kicked in the fork with something similar halfway through.

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.

Oh no, no...

That'd be being generous.

And no. I'm not kidding.

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.

Trying to balance the cost of a recipe such that it is not used more than something with a time-gated mechanism built in is futile. Without time-gating the recipe itself, no ideal balance would be achieved. Just setting an arbitrary shard amount as "what a soloer can earn in a week" is not going to set a satisfactory balance. What soloer? How much do they play? How much more or less valuable is their play time versus that of those running Task Forces?

And we don't yet know whether the Incarnate Trials are offering faster access to Notices or not; the recipe is intended as an alternative to those, not the WST.

3 Weeks or so.


Current rate is between 52-200+ weeks.

The proposed rate for the discussion was 3 weeks actually.

If you were soloing at 0/x8 getting 1 shard/mission, it comes out between 2 and 3 weeks simply doing tips [closer to 2 weeks if you add in the morality mission].

I can certainly sympathize with the idea that not everyone can solo 0/x8. The problem being that if you use 0/x1 as the baseline with 3 weeks, you'll have the optimal performing at a much faster rate [I'd like to say less than 1 week, but someone else can better chart the rate difference in shard rate for 0/x1 and 0/x8], and that can create a potential problem with the WSF serving it's function.

As both Eiko and myself have said though, it's really awkward to compare against the time-gated method. I'd much prefer to compare against the Incarnate Trial method to be honest, but we don't know that reward structure, so we have to make due with what we have.

[ edit / add ]
There is also the alternative perspective to compare, and that's the time investment, but the time-gate on WST makes that a different beast as well.

1 shard/mission was based off older missions, not tips. Tips are shorter (less groups to fight); I'm getting a shard every 2-3 missions on tips. It comes out to about 1 shard an hour, no matter which metric you look at.

Because of the way shard drops work, this rate should be approximately the same whether you solo or team (teams probably are slightly higher simply because teams clear missions faster). I'm also willing to concede that, if you are not taking the WST/Trial path to Incarnates, that x8 is a reasonable balance point - whether you prefer smaller teams or soloing, running against full 8-person content should probably be the expected norm when balancing shard generation.

Not really. There is no reason they cannot time gate the crafting of the notice for once every 3 weeks and lower the shard requirements accordingly. They can do it for crafting a recipe with h-merits, they can do it with this.

Except, the first week of the WST, I tried to get on a STF team. No-one was available for most of the day. I even used the server TF channel. No dice. Once I finally got on a TF team, the TF was a horrible failure. No NotW for me.

Sometimes, its less aggravating and less of a waste of time, to do things on your own. Except for crafting a NotW in I20.

Except, this "option" to craft NotW isn't anywhere near "halfway". Disregarding the Inf cost, crafting 4 NotWs for the Ultra-rare requires over 300 shards. That doesn't count the components used in the commons, uncommons, and rares. You are telling me that that number of shards is a reasonable number? If you are and you are serious, then I'd have to doubt your sanity, along with everyone elses that agrees with you. Which, in many cases, I already do.

I am not saying that a solo-er, of which I do for a vast majority of my play time, should be able to craft a NowT after an hour of playtime. I just think, and I belive that most of the people that have stated that they disliked the current proposed crafting costs actually said, that the costs are excessive. As in, way too freaking high. You know, unreasonable.

Most of us are not asking for a freebie. We're just asking for more reasonable costs. If we can only get 4-6 shards from breaking down a NotW, and 2-3 shard from breaking down an uncommon, I think it reasonable that a NotW should cost considerably less than 88 shards to create. Granted, it should cost more than 24 shards, I agree. I would agree with Techbot Alpha and say 40 shards is not unreasonable, if still a little high.

Most of us are not making unreasonable requests.

They can claim it. Doesn't make it so.

The claim that a TF is not 'solo friendly', is about an ingenious as the claim that standing on the surface of the sun is a tad warm.

Exactly. So why is it an issue now, all of a sudden, while it hasn't been an issue for the last 6+ years?

Because the rewards previously locked behind Task Forces have never been "the next level" of character advancement.

So it says a lot that that is no longer the case...

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.

Well for me personally it has been an issue. Being able to start a TF solo would be a great thing that I really really want.

That fits my average - often at +0x4 and getting a shard every couple of missions.

Ah, thank you that rate is a bit less generous, and more probable. One side remark however, there is a distinction between a team doing a TF and a team doing paper/radio/farm missions. And that is part of the difficulty in creating a 'soloist' method that does not remove the value of the TF method [for those who are teaming].

Back to my earlier point, however. Let's consider a play time of 2hr/day, 5d/week. That'll generate roughly 10 shards a week, so we come out to 9 weeks. That is a significant time difference. Both in terms of /week, and in /hour. And it certainly feels grindy .

However, consider if we change the parameters a bit, and consider what that rate does to the 8 man farming team. They're going to still generate about the same base rate, but clear faster, at least in theory. Let's consider a Brute farm. 8 Brutes, one mission, much death. In theory, if they split up [optimally and efficiently, which is prolly far less likely than the aforementioned 8 Brute Squad happening ], they'll clear the mission in 1/8th the time. Again, this is a comical min/max scenario . So with that, we approach the situation, that for those 8 Brutes it's near equitable with doing the WST every week instead. Of course, it's still a 2 hr commitment per day/5 days a week. Which is a significant increase in time. For normality, I'd suggest that the clear rate would probably approach triple or quadruple that solo. It is hard to judge though, and while I think the numbers exist in the Market forum, I'm too lazy .

Then there's also the possibility of simply increasing the rate, jumping up to 3 hours, 7 days, for instance, and you're looking at a little over a month.

Again though, I do much prefer the hour rate, it's a bit more effective at conveying the big problem with comparing the rate with the time-gated WST. Especially when you're looking at something that's such a grind solution. And it introduces the incredible awkwardness of deciding if it's the solution is 'solo unfriendly' or 'casual unfriendly'.

With Toony, for instance, with my presumed 2 hr/5day format, you're looking at 30 shards [total] to make a Notice. Which, unless you introduce another time-gate (which was suggested), will make it something you could farm through in a few days with a team, and then have to question the value of the WST. Whether it impacts will, of course, vary from individual to individual.

On the matter of time-gating combines, that works a bit different. There's an 18hr time-gate on Vanguard Merits to Gr'ai Matter, that doesn't mean I have to run a Mothership raid every day to get a Gr'ai Matter, just run it once, and log in on subsequent days to pick up the rest that was already earned. It becomes a 'login game'. WST is much the same, but at least, it's login and do something more substantive than click combine.

Personally, I do feel a 30 shard count total would be low, but that's my view . Somewhere in the middle may be a better point, or perhaps even a non-grindy method, but I have no suggestions for a non-grindy method that really work.


Not you alone, a lot of the lower level TFs have that. In fact, I knew a few folks who got folks to pad a team just to start one solo [and oddly enough, that tended to make old-Positron easier iirc].

Outside of the super bosses that got added for a few weeks in I3 I can't think of anything that was an addition to the game that hurt soloers more.

In both cases the soloers weren't hurt for very long and the price of crafting a notice is minor compared to the two other things I mentioned.

Here's a thread from all the way back in 04 about the conflict of teaming vs soloing.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/archi.../t-112249.html

There's more threads in the archive on the subject, this debate has being going on a long time. Even though we are "debating" solo vs forced teaming I think the larger root of this conflict is how the Incarnate system is not very friendly to people who have a ton of alts. Having a whole stable of alts that you are constantly rotating through is going to make Incarnates a lot less appealing then to someone who has 1 or 2 mains. I don't think the problem is totally about I'm being forced to team, a big (maybe major) portion of the angst is being forced to pick which of your characters to invest the time into turning incarnate.

This is the only time in the games history that Alters have been locked out of a system in this way. IMHO of course.