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

Because, as I've said before, the developers don't want you sitting there three days after Issue 20 comes out saying, "Okay, what now?"

The simple fact is that there must be both short-term and long-term content in order for most players to be happy. The problem is that if the developers simply open all of the content up with a trivial amount of time or effort spent on it, the game gets really boring, really fast. That poses a much bigger threat to their long-term subscription numbers than anti-teamers ever could dream of.

This is also part of the problem. Most players are focused on one thing: They want the rewards, they want them now, and anything that stands in the way of them getting said rewards must be bad. Game developers know that this is not in the best long-term interest of the game. There are basically two solutions: 1) develop new content as fast as players can consume it, or 2) take measures to slow down players so that you have time for development cycles before everyone gets bored and goes away. Only one of those options is practical.

Also, here is an obligatory link to some of Positron's thoughts on timesinks, and also read his thoughts on cooldowns, which is arguably more informative in this context. He's not stupid, he knows that they can be frustrating. Still, I think it's naive and impractical to think that it's really easy to simply do away with them.

Team of three = 2.66666666666666666666666666666666 per person.

I believe its reasonable to have a balance between random rewards and predictable ones. I believe the original suggestion preserves that balance. You're free to disagree. But tell me this: is it ok if I refer to your preference as "this predictability bull-****?"

The point was to make the system offer something for the fast players to pursue, while balancing that concern with allowing the slower players to gain the majority of the benefit of the system relatively quickly. It takes only one week to get the one notice it takes to craft a rare alpha, which gets you probably 80-90% of the full benefit of any alpha slot. It then takes more than twice the total resources plus three more notices which takes three more weeks of pursuit to get the very rare alpha, which only adds about 10-20% more strength.

You're looking at it from the perspective of, since its not that much more power, why not let everyone have it quickly, since its not game breaking? You're not seeing it from the flip side, which is that the devs have carved out a deliberately small benefit from the total and allowing the fast players to go chase after it, and that benefit is so small it minimally affects everyone else. To me, the Very Rare Alpha is actually representative of the extreme care the devs have taken not to exclude most players from the vast majority of the system given nominal effort.

Seriously: games are supposed to be fun, but different people have different ideas of fun. Some people like pursuing long term goals. Some people like making model ships in bottles. Its not work: its fun. This game has to address both kinds of fun, and a lot of variants in between. This much is true: the more kinds of things you find fun, the more of the game will be accessible to you. That's not just the way it is, that's the way I want it to be. Something for each player not everything for every player. The latter sounds laudable, but its extremely limiting. What I want is not what you want. Making the game be only the intersection between the two, plus everyone else, is not in the best interests of the game.

I've always hoped, if any dev team would take the gamble to try it, this would be the team that would try to balance not against the top, but against a more reasonable middle ground, and actively allow the top to blow through things and completely ignore their complaints about being bored.

I thought I had caught them at doing so in other things (Side-switching and A-Merits, for instance; the implementation of Day Jobs; the Invention System in general) and am very surprised to see this not seeming to be so much the case with the Incarnate System.

I truly believe that trying to balance against holding back these top performers is actively detrimental to the MMO industry as a whole. Let them get to the top fast, and let them get bored. I think the game would be better for it; I don't think they're any more significant a potential player base than dabblers and other low-performing players.

In general, I don't have a problem with timesinks and cooldowns. They make sense. What I don't like is when they are seemingly pointless and arbitrary. Like spending A-Merits. The rate at which you can acquire them is already time gated, why also limit how many you can spend at a time?

If I take the time to amass 20 A-merits, I don't see a problem with spending them all on day 40(one every two days) compared to spending them as soon as I acquire them.

True, but i don't think it's the presence of a timesink that's at issue rather the magnitude of it.

[ Until Arcana comes back with a better number, i'm going to use the 400 hours for a very rare as a basis for this post. ]

400 hours is not trivial. One of my 50s has 130ish hours on it so let's say getting a very rare is considered "completing" that incarnate level, that would mean completing 1 incarnate level is on par with leveling 3 characters from 1 to 50 in succession.

So if that 400 hour number holds true and the rest of the incarnate levels have the same requirements, that means to "complete" all 10 incarnate levels would be equal to making 30 level 50s and 4 billion inf (400mil per very rare x 10 levels) *from the OP.

Even if the actual number turns out to be half that (200 hours), that's still means 10 incarnate levels equates to getting 10 alts to 50.

If the gap between payouts is too long, that's also bad for the game, or at least for that part of the game. I mean the devs put in the XP smoothing curve because some levels "acted like brick walls" according to Positron in that interview. And i didn't have much of a problem with the XP level progression back then (or i was distracted by other things...not sure)



[Snippet from your link]

So why not program it so you cannot do both and can only craft once every 3 weeks instead of putting in badly?

While I'd personally put it to nearer 30-40 shards, one solution to the above is put it on a shared cooldown with the WTF - you can get a Notice from the WTF *or* the recipe each week, but not both.

Still takes a good 10+ times as long (in-game) to get a Notice from soloing the recipe (and about 4-5 times as long running random non-WTF tfs) so the WTF remains by far the easiest and fastest option for those willing to do it, and nobody is getting it faster than they do just now.

Dunno. It would make sense to have it set up that way, but according to Arcanaville it's not (currently). Who knows if that will change.

I'd like to draw your attention back to Arcana's post directly above yours.

As an anecdotal example, on one character alone, I got 17 shards tonight. I attended a Hamidon raid, went on both the Apex and Tin Mage TFs, and ran a Kahn TF. (Total time for all those activities, around 180 minutes, including time taken to form the Hamidon raid, but not including time taken to form the TFs. That was probably another 15-ish minutes for all three.) I took Reward Merits as my reward from Hamidon, so I also earned something like 133 Reward Merits, a Notice, and a Dimensional Keystone.

Right now there are no examples of anything that works that way. That's not to say it's impossible, but I take that to mean they would have to add tech that allowed two unrelated activities honor the same reward time gate.

As examples: You can buy an Alignment Merit the same day you get one from a Morality Mission. You can buy a Gr`ai Matter with Vanguard Merits the same day you can buy one with Shards. The STF and the RSF are on independent Hamidon Enhancer timers, even though both offer you the same type of HO. All TFs and trials are on independent Reward Merit timers. (I actually wonder if the Abyss and Hive Hamidon instances are on different timers - it wouldn't surprise me.)

Just because they can't do it now doesn't mean they can't add it, but adding it may not take trivial time. If it did, I bet we'd have it already.

I'm not sure the other systems it could be applied to have as strong a motivation on the devs' part to limit rate of acquisition, but you could well be correct. To my layman's mind it'd be a case of having both recipe and WTF completion both set and check the same no-more-this-week flag, but I know it's rarely as simple as that in practice.

But as with all suggestions I'm just throwing it out there without worrying about what's involved to implement as that's not something any of us can really judge with accuracy - if it requires too much work/resources then fair enough, if not it seems a good solution to me.

To be fair >.> Apex and Tin Mage give you 2 shards as well as 40 Merits(?) upon completion.

Did a Kahn and ITF myself tonight, 30 merits, 7 shards and a Ancient Nictus Fragment, took a little over a hour (not counting the time it took to form teams for both considering it was Valentines Day). 25 shards and two Notices to go for my Very Rare

I know. And Hamidon Mitos have a huge chance to drop a Shard if you spit on them before they die, even if you're solo. The only reason I can think of that you'd raise this point is that you think I was trying to make a point about shard drop rates for soloists. I wasn't. I was responding to a mention of how fast some people can earn shards, and giving an example to reinforce the point. In that context, the means I used isn't as important as the result.

They didn't even put a check in to see that you get one notice per week.....

That actually sounds rather painfull. And how did they get in there in the first palce...

We call that bad programming as it was intended to only allow you to get one a week.

Which might be what you'd want out of an endgame system, except that that's just the first slot...



btw it took me 400 hours to level my first 50, referenced in my sig.

It makes it easier for AoEs.

As to my lower end test numbers, I tested my Energy Blaster at 0x2 with bosses off, and my Illusion/Radiation controller at 0x2 with bosses on, and in both cases I completely deslotted my Alpha. I then normalized the kills to one hour and carefully counted them up in herostats.

Blaster kills per hour at 0x2 with bosses off (rounded to nearest whole number)

Minions: 214
Lts: 86
Bosses: 2

Estimated shards per hour given Paragonwiki drop rates: 0.83 shards/hour

Controller kills per hour at 0x2 with bosses (rounded to nearest whole number)

Minions: 232
Lts: 63
Bosses: 12

Estimated shards per hour given Paragonwiki drop rates: 0.89 shards/hour


A couple of notes.

1. That's not a misprint on the Blaster boss numbers. Even with bosses off, there are lots of odd ways to actually get a boss in a mission anyway. In fact, it would be a good trivia question and test of game mechanics to figure out how many there are (I can think of four). In this case, the boss came from a merging Herc

2. In both cases, the number of shards per hour is less than one. That would be pretty slow to get 480 of them, assuming you had to literally get everything with shards, and could not solo above 0x2.

3. 0x2 is not a good setting to get bosses. The boss ratio is 1:5 Bosses to Lts. At 0x8 its much better. Somewhere between the two bosses start to gain in ratio, which improves the shard rate substantially. If you can defeat them without dying. My guess is that you have to solo at or above 0x4 to have a decent shard drop rate.

4. The blaster number actually includes two deaths. Factoring that in, the Blaster and Controller had almost exactly the same kill rate. Which is what you'd expect, actually, at such low numbers. Illusion is not a good AoE damage controller, its not high damage in general, and 0x2 is too low a target count to efficiently deploy radiation debuffs. And when you are averaging only three or four targets, deceive has nothing to work with.

5. The difference between my best measured rate (MA/SR in 0x8) and my worst (En/En in 0x2 no bosses) is a factor of over three to one, and that's not the widest possible range in performance for solo players by far. My guess is that the best solo performance is at least twice as fast as my MA. Balancing just the solo earning rate around a performance spread of six to one or better is non-trivial.

6. Assuming the critical target is Rare for a casual player that doesn't team and only solos at low difficulty, 128 shards at these rates comes out to about 150 hours. That's actually probably within a factor of two of the correct number in my opinion, considering we're talking about the absolute worst case scenario of someone that doesn't convert Vanguard merits, doesn't run the WST, doesn't run task forces that drop components, doesn't team, solos exclusively, and while solo cannot run at higher difficulty. This is the limiting case of someone that has by circumstance or design eliminated every possible way to gain heightened rewards and can do nothing except essentially kill targets one at a time.


I'm guessing this will provide some ammo for both sides of this debate, but its a data point regardless. I think its fair to say that the range of solo shard earning (on average) is likely to be somewhere between 0.75 shards per hour at the low end and 8 shards per hour at the high end, discounting people that are unusually slow in combat.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Main difference is that IO's are not the next evolution of my characters and the next way of leveling my character up and doesn't have content designed around it and could still be bought at the AH.

If the devs want us to do it that way, fine. I have no problem calling them out on a horrible decision that ignores a large portion of the playerbase in exchange for doing a reptitive task over and over again just like EVERY MMO END GAME EVER.

Well that clearly failed.

I solod Hamidon when he was bugged to die after being hit once. It was with my energy blaster. The bug at the time had nothing to do with procs or slotting. The Hamidon itself Despawned after being hit just Once. If you could get close enough without dying you would be able to do it with Brawl, but I used an Energy Blast of some kind.

I don't have pics.

I also don't remember if I got a Hami O....I have a vague recollection that I did, but that could be bogus.

It's like you've bugged my living room or something

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My general conclusion with the entirety of the Incarnate system for pretty much the entire year has been "Sod this! I'll do something else." Earning times and gates aside, until there's something entertaining to actually DO with these Incarnate powers, earning them is pointless. It's like working a job to make money that you never get to spend on anything other than job expenses.

I'm a patient man. I'll give this game a couple of years to see where it goes with it, and provided the rest of the game isn't kneecapped to account for Evil Geko's "greater challenge" mentality, it should all be good.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.