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

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I had come up with an alternative reward mechanism to do that:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I always believed that one intent of the WST was to reach the people on the sidelines: people who would be willing to team if encouraged, but reluctant to team because they aren't competent at running task forces or executing teamed tactics in general. I assumed the WST was intended to make them more comfortable with teaming, because they would be teaming with experienced players who, not to put too fine a point on it, didn't really need much from them. What I'm noticing is that not only is the WST encouraging players to team that clearly don't team often (given how many people I've seen that have never run any of these task forces before or even know what's in them) its also creating a generation of more experienced task force runners that are going from total ignorance to people who can actually explain the tactics of the TF to newer players after enough runs. What that does to teaming in the long run if it persists is something difficult to predict.

Originally Posted by Pebblebrook

It doesn't even have to be a blaster if you prefer scrappers. I'm mostly curious if there's any time:shard differences between x8 (which is essentially equivalent to a TF capable team short of the componet end reward) and those that play on a theoretical "average intended use" meaning someone with average builds playing average difficulty with whatever radio/tip/contact mission they come across. Of course assuming farmers/min maxers aren't the majority of the current playerbase.

And yes with accumulated incarnate boosts, it will get better. But seeing a baseline helps and we can always just take that baseline and assume we can shave off time because of increased capabilities.

Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood

Yeah I saw that when you originally posted it (although I had forgotten about it), I think that would also work although it doesn't really address the difficulty issue. If the intent was doing a hard, but soloable arc as an alternative to TFs then simply reducing the rewards for teams solves the reward/time issue but not the reward/difficulty.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU

It's certainly true that the more mobs you fight at once, the faster you can collect shards. Thus, +0/x8 is better than +4/x1.

Originally Posted by Pebblebrook

That's likely, but since this thread is mostly about the reasonable requirements of the conversion method versus through TFs/trials, i'd like to see an Arcana estimation on the time:shard with something other than activity comparable to a full TF capable team which is what x8 represents...(in terms of shard drops, not the end of TF reward).

So it would be nice to see an Arcana estimation on that to get some perspective.

Originally Posted by Pebblebrook

That's likely, but since this thread is mostly about the reasonable requirements of the conversion method versus through TFs/trials, i'd like to see an Arcana estimation on the time:shard with something other than activity comparable to a full TF capable team which is what x8 represents...(in terms of shard drops, not the end of TF reward).

So it would be nice to see an Arcana estimation on that to get some perspective.

Originally Posted by reiella

I have a minor point of contention there. While the mission rate [ie, per mission] should be effectively the same, the rate at which the mission is cleared should also be faster with a real team, as opposed to be a solo-diff 0/x8. Since, I'm pretty sure that Shards don't get split amongst the party like other loot drops. If that's wrong, then I hope I do get corrected so I know better .

Originally Posted by Coolio

Erm, don't forget you can swap out the Alphas...

So you could build up to all 8 v-rare Alphas or even all 4 complete Alpha trees, and thats just one of the Incarnate slots, Judgement ETC.

Originally Posted by EU_Damz

I suddenly feel an urge to count how many missions i can run without dying now

Originally Posted by TonyV

This is a major attitude problem: Some people keep thinking that this is a "stick" and it's not. They're so bothered because the devs aren't specifically catering to them enough that they've lost all perspective on the difference between reward and punishment.

Originally Posted by Sermon

I would prefer a lower cost with a cooldown. Maybe 24 incarnate salvage + 100 million inf on a 1 week cooldown.

As is, this will be more useful to those who run TFs than those who don't.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

A full team steamrolling 0x8 would probably also be bored out of their minds. Solo, I could (and occasionally do) die, so there's real risk and tactics involved. I don't fall asleep in those missions.

Originally Posted by Twisted Toon

You are correct. It is a carrot. It just happens to be a moldy carrot that had been left in the compost for 6 months. But, it is still a carrot.

Originally Posted by Atomic_Woman

If it only cost 24 shards to convert to a Notice then I gaurantee you people are going to be doing that was well as the WTF, getting 2 shards per week. For high-activity players 24 shards is not a lot.

Originally Posted by Void_Huntress

Anecdote. I see a LOT of full teams steamrolling +0/x8 in the communities and PUGs I've been with over the years. It's been pretty common in my experience on Virtue.


(This was supposed to be posted an hour and some ago, but real life intervened)

Originally Posted by Atomic_Woman

If it only cost 24 shards to convert to a Notice then I gaurantee you people are going to be doing that was well as the WTF, getting 2 shards per week. For high-activity players 24 shards is not a lot.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

The point wasn't whether it was possible or workable, but more whether it was reasonable to see such a feature in a "quick and dirty" solution. Even if the actual programming was straight-forward, tampering with the reward system would likely force a Q&A cycle for that change that would not be speedy. In fact, given the devs were just burned on a ginormous bug that made it to live due to insufficient testing, I would expect such changes to be even harder to make without extra vetting.

"Elsewhere" I suggested the possibility of adding a special reward that soloers could actually earn significantly faster than teamed players could, and which would then have a path to crafting Incarnate abilities that could be independently balanced from shard conversions.

Is there such a way to create a reward that soloers could earn faster than teams, so that it could not be trivially exploited by teamed players? There is: make a drop that drops on mission complete that only one player can get. If you're solo, you'll get them all. If you're in a team of eight, you're only going to get one every eight missions on average. It won't matter, because the shards you earn will be so much better anyway.

For psychological reasons, I suggested each mission drop sixteen of these. Why sixteen? Because in a team of one, you get all sixteen. In a team of two, rather than the RNG sometimes hating one player and having one player get three in a row while the other player gets none, you're far more likely to have each player getting *some* with each mission complete. By the time you get all the way up to eight players on the team, each player will average two, but some might get more and some might get less or none. For solo players, this would be a dependable reward. For teamed players, the bigger the team the more random and unpredictable that reward becomes. For people that both team and solo, the teamed drops become a "lucky/unlucky" lottery ticket, and the solo drops become the dependable path.

The nice thing about this idea is that it automatically scales to small teams: its not a "solo vs teamed" solution. Its an autoscaling teamed solution where solo is just the special case of having one person on the team. Shards and this other reward become counter-balancing rewards based on the size of your team. Call these things "splinters." The smaller the team, the more splinters you'll get and the less shards. The larger the team the more shards you'll get and the less splinters.

Now you can balance the crafting costs around splinters, without worrying that large teams can farm splinters. They can't. But they won't complain, because they will be swimming in shards, and the crafting costs for splinters will still be far higher than shards.

Personally, I think even with the cost of introducing Yet Another Currency, this is a better solution than the quick and dirty one. But contrary to popular belief, the devs don't always do what I tell them to do.

Also, while I've put a lot of thought into this idea over the last several weeks, I can only say I think its 90% certain there aren't balance complications lurking within it. I'm pretty sure its one of my more brilliant ideas. I'm not certain its not also one of my more unworkable ones.

Edit: I need to add that when I formulated this idea originally, there were some caveats to address exploitability pointed out by myself or others. Its possible that splinters would have to be restricted to only certain mission arcs, ala the WST. Otherwise, it could be exploited by picking arbitrarily short missions. And it would likely need something like the ticket tracking system in the AE to make sure that you only earn all sixteen splinters if you do enough activity in the mission, rather than ghosting it in thirty seconds. If you only kill two LTs and the boss a the end, you might get only four splinters, for example, whereas if you defeat at least half the foes in the mission, you'll get the maximum sixteen.

Originally Posted by Djeannie

When did everything get so bogged down in time spent to do x?