I hate myself!

We can agree there.
Just my patience to wait for that will be long exhausted by the time that happens. And I firmly believe it could have been implemented better in terms of the lore/story links related to the mechanic. I expected more.

I'd like to think I'm not being hysterical. but my level of disappoint with this is a first through all releases and changes since I7 (about when i started). It really is likely to shove me out the door.

And I am sad about that.

I don't think you specifically are being hysterical. I am sorry you don't like the roll out. I do, and I'm also not going to apologize for that, but I do understand it. I don't particularly like that the tip mechanic is the only way to switch sides - I would love that the choices you make with regards to things like Trapdoor's fate would have an effect on it. It doesn't. That, to me, is frustrating.

But with all that being said, I kind of like them tying it to the current storyline. For the first time it really makes your character feel like a part of the bigger world, that what you do has some kind of an effect. I understand why people don't like it. I'm sorry that I don't have any arguments for them other than to say "give it time". If that means you have to unsub in the meantime, so be it.

Agreed, but that cuts both ways. The Dev Defence Force (they know who they are) are at least as one sided in their defence of the new system as those who dislike it are in their criticisms.

Also, when "an increasing segment of the population" is reacting this strongly, that's usually a sign that there's a genuine cause for concern.

A lot of this comes back to development time. I'm pretty sure we were told that Going Rogue would see the start of the endgame system, but now it's been pushed back to I19, I20 and so on. If most of this had been released with GR I doubt we'd be seeing this reaction. As it is we're looking at 2012 for this to be 'finished', although endgame, by its nature and contrary to its name, is never really finished.

Yeah, and they said they want to eventually add full power customization. That was a year and a half ago. They said they wanted to add more Dev's Choices. We haven't had one that didn't come from a contest in over a year. They said the i13 PvP changes were just the first step in revamping PvP. And yet, years later, PvP is still pretty much the way it was in i13.

Some of us are taking a "I'll believe it when I see it" stance on things the devs claim they "eventually want to do" because we have issue after issue of past experience to point to as precedent.

The increasing section of the population is still awfully small. They're just getting really frickin' annoying. And yeah, it cuts both ways. But the "dev defense force" is significantly smaller, and only come out to be annoying to the people who are currently annoying me.

I really should have said an "increasingly loud segment of the population".

Good. I recognize my hang-ups are my own, and the game isn't doomed because of them.

And I don't want you to apologize and sincerely am pleased that you (and others) like it.
You know, if I had written in the alignment system, I would have done it exactly like you suggest, too. I was disappointed, but short of having to re-write all the arcs to put action choices in them I lived with the compromise on that one.

Yeah, by itself that doesn't bother me either (if it was clearly in parallel rather than linked).
Ah, see I wish that was true. Being part of the raid/trial mob doesn't make me giddy with my sense of power. I've always gotten more out of beating Recluse as an EB than I have on Hami as a personal sense of accomplishment, regardless of the related reward.
Yeah. Then we are 100% agreed. And I doubt anything will change for a long time. I discuss it because I care and have loved the game.

This isn't hysteria.

If you called your landlord because the window was broken and they said "We'll fix it," but never showed up (legalities and such aside,) you'd be annoyed. If you got the same answer about the leak in the bathroom, and the growing water damage on the ceiling, and the door that never shuts right, would you keep buying the "We'll fix it, we'll get to it" excuse?

Would you say the person complaining about it (and saying "yeah, sure they will" when they talk about the landlord saying they'll add, oh, a new outlet in the kitchen to replace the one that doesn't work) is being "hysterical" or rightly cynical?

(And before you say "I'd tell them to move," every OTHER apartment/landlord is worse.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

Everyone on the forums is loud. That's why they're here. Most every thread about I20 or incarnates or any other controversy degenerates into bickering between rival groups of people with 4 and 5 figure post counts. Two very small groups of people.

I'll be the first to admit that the forums are not likely to be an accurate representation of the mood of the community, but that cuts both ways as well. The only people who will know whether this is worth it or not will be the devs when they datamine to find out who's doing what.

I'd love to see those numbers. Not the numbers when it goes live, but the numbers in a year's time.

Dev Defense Force - I like that. 3 come to mind.

Yes, but the current segment that's being loud are also really annoying to me. I'm loud. I talk a lot. I hope I'm not being annoying, and if I am, I hope it's not due to hysterical comments. Chyll, for instance, is loud, but not annoying.

Before you come down hard on the raid content please try it out. It's not hard to join, it's not particularly difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do. The hardest part is figuring out how to play as a team on the fly and following directions. But the LFG feature make sit easier than ever before to form a team for trials.

So going in my signature.

I learned how to follow directions in kindergarten. I don't play a video game to just do what someone else tells me. It's why I dislike the CoP and Hami raids. (No, I can't lead one myself, my computer is old and the lag is insane.)

The LFG feature will make it easier than ever before to form a blind and likely unbalanced PuG for trials. The trial completion rate of these PuGs remains to be seen, but it's telling that the successes on test have come from pre-formed leagues.

Which is why I ask people to try it. The trails aren't hard because you need a specific make up for them. Actually they're uniformly hard despite who you take with you partly because of the sheer numbers you're up against and partly because of the time limits and partly because of the mechanics.

And seriously, do you think the devs shouldn't make it important to have team tactics in team content?

Actually it's just the same few people - the problem with vocal minorities is that they tend ot get overlooked, which just makes them all the more vocal

IIRC, you were my first troll, Bill, back in 2005. Having been in the game for all of a month or so, and seeing all of the funky stuff that ought to be addressed, I made a few posts on the forums.

I called for a revamp of the search / team building GUI, and illustrated how it could be made more useful. I recommended replacing the useless origin icon with a colored dot that would indicate player status, and changing the default setting for players to "not looking for team" so they'd have to change it if they wanted to participate in the search-oriented team building system.

Years later, when it has become mostly irrelevant (the number of channels a player can subscribe to has been greatly expanded), the devs finally addressed this in some degree but maybe not in a very good way. I don't know, I don't use the search feature, but I've heard complaints.

I mentioned the need for a revamp of the content in the game. There was a problem where it was difficult for teams to share contact text, and the mission objectives were so generic it was difficult to get a sense of what the missions were about ("defeat villains in warehouse"). The clues we received were like fossils indicating development intended to go in different directions than what we received (Coralax hints, Magma Master hints, back in the Hollows). Interesting characters weren't developed (Greased Lightning, Electric Eel, Frostfire, etc.), groups were introduced and dropped (Hellions, Skulls), there were mysterious mob placements that weren't really explained (Family and Warriors in the Hollows, which aren't explained in the Hollows stories), and the Cavern of Transcendence story didn't really make sense (it looked like it was changed once or twice before publication). Outside of the Hollows we had all of these contacts that gave duplicate sets of missions. Why? Shouldn't there either be more sets of missions or fewer contacts? And we had contacts that I expected would give a type of story, but they instead gave something quite different. For example, the Atlas coroner, Mansfield, sent me off to fight the Circle and to recover an artifact that the Circle had stolen from a museum. Huh. And I'd picked him as a contact because I thought he'd send me on missions against the Vahzilok, because they were stealing bodies from the city morgues. (Yeah, that was early enough in my experience that I thought I might WANT to fight the Vahz. lol)

I commented that it would be relatively easy to assign 1-3 developers to go in and add some new content, fix it so that contacts and their arcs matched, explore some of the NPCs and fossilized trails, and repair the Cavern trial. The change in the search GUI I estimated would take about 20 minutes, but knowing how programming tasks often expand, I allowed that it might take as much as a day or two.

You responded in defense of the devs. You told me that I needed to cut them some slack. The game had just been introduced (well, out for a year), and they'd surely be aware of the shortcomings I mentioned and would get around to it. Just wait. It would be done before the year's end.

But they released CoV at the end of 2005, and they appended the level 40-50 content in 2006, and they added mayhems and safeguards and so on, and more or less never returned to the basic problems I outlined.

People complained in the forums about the limited number of mission maps, and I agreed that while it was a problem, I thought the devs could improve play by making better use of the game mechanics that were available to them. We are now finally seeing a partial degree of development in this area, mainly in content introduced over the last year. In 2005 I was asking for more chained objectives and narrative captions and so on, and five years later they have arrived in a fashion.

I also suggested the devs put forth a toolkit so that players could make their own content.

I wanted to turn the information terminals into a form of arena-like booking for task forces. (At the time if I wanted a task force I either had to form it, or leave my toon near the TF contact and just log in periodically to see if a team was forming.)

Anyway, the gears of the devs grind slowly and incompletely.

In the time since I first made these suggestions, the devs have introduced a variety of systems, but very little content aside from the expansions. They have not revamped the content. The early blue side content is still in disrepair. What they've done instead is they've revised the leveling curve so players spend almost no time at the early levels (which to me is a sad solution), and new players are expected to play the Praetorian content which is so different in theme and structure from the rest of the game it is like a completely different game. AE is no solution either, because the devs borked the search function and upset themselves so much over their own design flaws that they don't want to revisit the feature any more.

So here it is, 2011, and the problems I cited in 2005 are largely still present and what the devs have done in response hasn't been adequate.

My first impressions of the game still stand. I still say the devs could do their game a world of good by hiring a small team of 1-3 developers to revise / create new content for the game, renewing the canon. I think they've covered the whole powers / systems thing fairly adequately (yes, there's room for more proliferation, but really, there's a lot in the game right now). Content does have an appeal that should not be dismissed. I know game designers must look at Ms Pac-Man and Frogger and express a belief that reward systems are more important than content, but I'd point to the book, film, and television industries to illustrate the enduring success of content, and storytelling has its own system of rewards. A game can have both.

One last shot, for now, at the devs: for some years now, I have been calling "The Coming Storm" the "Nevercoming Storm." I expect to be able to continue doing this for a long time.

You have over 55,000 posts. I don't mind what you post, and I use the smiley icons a lot myself, but I think you qualify more than most as a "vocal minority."

Just sayin'.

As for the vast majority of players who don't put their voices on the forums ... when they see the game isn't living up to their expectations, they leave. The forums should have some dissenting voices to help the devs understand where their ship may be leaking.

Team tactics doesn't mean "follow the leader." Team tactics mean "think about how to best use your abilities to the benefit of the team." Lately I've noticed that team tactics have taken a backseat in favor of everyone bringing characters who can solo everything, then doing so. To my mind, team tactics means that if I bring a character who can solo everything, I should be using that ability to help those who can't. I don't expect the prevailing "every man for himself" mindset to go away any time soon, and trials that you have to repeat ad nauseum with spikeable objectives only encourage it.

Wait, what in the world are we arguing about here then? When I say "follow directions" I'm not referring to some strange "You must stand here and do this and heal that this particular time or we're all doomed!!!!!!!" I mean simple things like "Don't go underneath Lambda if we're killing in the courtyard. Wait until we're all ready". I mean, seriously, that's what destroyed any chance of having a semi organized trial the last time I'd done it, because suddenly we were on a time crunch that the majority of the league wasn't ready to deal with. But you know what? Most of the trial was still a lot of fun.

If you want team tactics, then what exactly is the problem with the raids? They're set up for team tactics and for the team to not act like soloists and instead accomplish goals.

If by acting as the sky is falling you mean expressing concern in a rational, level-headed manner I might be tempted to agree with you.

This isn't hysteria, there's no "I hate incarnates ragequit" but there is a legitimate amount of disquiet about the content thus far delivered and that which is imminent.

What would you have us do: STFU and quit if we don't like it, or express it in the only legitimate place where we can at least give some feedback to the Dev team?

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I didn't mean to indicate that everyone who complains about it is automatically hysterical. But what there is, however, is a tendency to not be interested in discussion. Some people are indeed being hysterical.

However, there is very little actual substantive debate or discussion on the topic. We are judging a completely new system based on the merits of a game that has been rolled out over almost seven years now.

I'll say that again because it bears repeating: We are judging a system based on the merits of the rest of the game that has been rolled out over almost 7 years.

When they gave you the ability to get to 50, once you completed the missions how much was there actually left to do? We had all the arcs. We had the 44 - 50 Shadow Shard TF's and the LRSF for villains, and that was it for a really freaking long time. Even when I signed up in i9, when they finally even gave a reason to play after 50 (IO's as character progression), there was one new TF rolled out - the STF (and by the way, no new villain SF's at 50). Now we could do the STF, Justin Augustine and Faathim. It was only after the next two to three years that the LGTF (and all the vanguard missions), ITF (and Daed's Sister Arlia's mission), and Kahn/Barracuda came out.

This might be the second issue dealing with incarnates, but the system they roll out will be halfway through by the time i20 is done. I'm not trying to say you don't have any claim to be frustrated with the "slow" roll out. I'm not even trying to say that people who are frustrated with the Lore Power have nothing to complain about (although I think that they're simplifying what it would take to "fix" the perceived problem). I'm trying to say that we're judging an entirely new system that hasn't been rolled out yet on the rest of the game which took several years to get to that point.

And yes, some poeple - And I'm not saying you specifically Scarlet - are over reacting to this entire thing. And there's nothing that grates on me more than pointless histrionics. Between that - and to be fair it is on both sides - and the fact that there's a lot of complaining by people who admittedly haven't wandered over to the Beta server and tried the trials, and the fact that there's very little, if any, actual honest debate is extremely annoying. Seriously. How many times have we seen people that won't do the incarnate trails because they hate Hami raids and MSR's (either because they hated the lag, or because they hated putting the team together)? I did test them out because I wanted to see what it would be like. You know what I found? It was absolutely nothing like Hami or MSR. Nothing at freaking all. And they're easy to put together, and should remain that way even on relatively low pop servers. There's other things that I would complain about for sure, but that's not one of them.

Which is what I mean about hysteria. If you don't like it, that's all well and fine. But don't pretend that there should be a breadth and depth of content for incarnates at roll out if you want the roll out to happen any time soon. I'm fairly confident it'll happen, and I'm fairly confident because they've explicitly said that it'll happen, and this is a dev team that rarely operates in absolutes. Whether it will come in a way you'll be satisfied with is something else. But let's complain about that when we get to it, all right?

We have trials now - the ship raid and the Hamidon. Both are entirely optional and fun and I love doing both. But they aren't something my friends and I do as a group. That's because when we do show up - especially for Hami and I fear for these new trials as well - we end up split across multiple teams and feeling like we are each alone among strangers doing different things... so what was the point of doing it on group night?

And if we don't do them on group nights it'll have to be something we participate in as individuals on nights when I'd normally be in a small 2-3 man team running normal content. Of the current trials, I've done exactly 1 Hamidon and 3 ship raids in the 15 or so months since I got my first 50. Now the new trials have some extremely good reasons to run them, so I'll end up in them more often than the current trials, but probably not often enough to actually progress much along what appears to be a very grindy road.

I am hopeful that my fear of the unknowns of the LFG and Leagues and the Trials themselves in general will prove to be totally unfounded. I.e. the leagues will tend to be led by people who know what they are doing, multiple people aren't barking conflicting orders, that they aren't always mass confusion and chaos, that a team of friends don't end up on different leagues, that the trials will still be popular enough 6 months down the road that you aren't waiting hours for a critical mass of folks to LFG for the same trial, that you won't end up on an all-defender BAF of 12 toons, that the rewards are sufficient to make you feel like you are making progress with each one, etc, etc, etc...

But even if it is the greatest thing since sliced bread I will STILL keep hoping for smaller tasks for team-sized units that give the same rewards because that is the stuff I find the most fun.