The endgame grind, perceived or reality?

I was fine with the way the alpha slots worked.

"Oh I need this, I'll run that"

But having it so I can complete a task force and not get the reward I want from it is bull ****.

Keep than random reward **** in WoW please!

Where are you getting this Random Reward thing from?

The beta forums.

This. Is. Not. WoW. We do not care what WoW does. Nobody cares if our endgame is less grindy than WoW's. I care that it's grindier than this game has ever been thus far.

Successful completion of an Incarnate trial gives you a chance at a rare component. If you get lucky and get one, you'll only have to do it like 10 times. If you don't get lucky, you'll have to do it 30 times.

Back off. Seriously. This is the internet and you're not about to intimidate me or make me change my opinion.

I'm thankful this game isn't as grindy as WoW and used it as an example of what the devs COULD do with the new systems/trials. I would much rather have an hour of BAF than a week of Ulduar. I will be thankful for how FAST this system is compared to other games in this market.

I'm allowed to do that. I don't need your permission.

Given the next set of incarnate advancements and their rules, you could be looking at three to four weeks of BAF's just to advance on one character.

I'll wait and see it, then. But I repeat, if the trials at MAX take an hour, then I can manage that. If they took a week to complete I'd probably be a little more ornery.

That's an hour per day/week/playtime per character you are trying to progress.

The game up until now has encouraged making alts, why has it changed so suddenly?

That aspect hasn't changed. At least, it hasn't for me.

It hasn't - the endgame system is an optional system, just like all the other systems in the game.

I'm not sure at all that the game is discouraging alts. If adding something extra to do at 50 is discouraging them, then the only encouragement was the lack of progression once you did hit 50.

Is a system you can't breeze through with 20 alts the same thing as discouraging their creation? I don't buy that.

More that to progress Character X I must play as him, different to the IO system where I could transfer inf/recipes/IO's over to him.

So to progress I need to spend an hour on this character, fair enough, but oops the piece I needed didn't drop today, despite a successful run, I'll need to spend another half hour - two hours on this character tomorrow, despite my other 35 alts.

Ok, I see what you're getting at although I think my point still applies. Getting better stuff is a part of playing CoX but I don't see it as an investment. If I run a trial I am, at the end, more advanced than I was before (in incarnate XP, threads, incarnate components and the new merits) so I'm making progress. I really do not care about my progress or rate of progress relative to anyone else my interests are having fun playing and making progress as long as I'm doing both it's good.

I get it. We'll have to agree to disagree on whether this is a bad thing.

If I didn't want to cut down trees, I wouldn't join the lumberjack club. However, when my sewing circle starts asking me to cut down trees, it's time for a different sewing circle.

And the example was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. No actual puppies or grandmothers are in danger.

I'm not actually criticising the meat of the new Trials. I haven't tried them since I personally have no interest, but I'm sure they're great. I don't want to take away from that. But at the end of the day, they're still two Trials that take around an hour (or so they say), and this is expected to keep me hooked on the game for months? "An hour or so" is about the length of a movie, and I can't say I could watch two movies for months. Gone are the days where I'd watch AntZ once a day every day for months at a time until I could recite the dialogue along with the characters.

And four Trials aren't the answer, either. Two Trials, Four Trials, Six Trials... These do not represent enough of a content mass to avoid turning the game into a grind, because TFs, Trials and Raids are not main content body material. They are supplementary material. They are something to do BESIDES normal content, something which is harder, grander and more rewarding than normal content. But a game system which only ever has raids will be a grind pretty much by definition.

Let me paint a picture for you:

I come home 2PM my time, 4AM "American time." I decide I want to make Samuel Tow an Incarnate, so I run the Ramiel arc with him. It takes me an hour, give or take, so it's now 5AM and I want to start working on my Incarnate powers. What are my options?

TFs? None are forming right at that very moment, and probably won't be for another couple of hours.

Scanner missions? No, those were a grind the moment they came out, and Samuel Tow has run most of them anyway.

Tip missions? Not a bad idea per se, but there really are only around 10 of those in the 40-50 range, and I doubt these would give me many Shards.

Shadow Shard, Borea or Marcus Valerius missions? Samuel Tow has done all of Marcus', like, five recurring missions, every repeatable mission in the Shadow Shard multiple times and done many of Borea's missions, to the point where what's left won't account for much progress.

So I have my Incarnate slot, but my question remains as it always has been: Now what? What do I do now? I ran out of content with Sam, that's why I haven't played him in years. There's nothing left for him to do, other than grind repeatable missions. What does the Incarnate system offer him that he couldn't do before? Tin Mage and Apex, I suppose, but even if I chose to run those, THEN WHAT? It's not like they constitute all that much content, or indeed all that much progress. That's IF I find one forming, and am not, instead, left with a game with nothing to do in it.

---

Technically speaking, the Incarnate system does indeed give our 50s something new to do. My complaint is that what it gives is very, very little. I know people have justifications for why they want to run the same two Trials over and over again. I'm the same way with some games. I've replayed the same damb campaigns in L4D2 quite a few times now. But even then I got bored of that after about the tenth time going through all of them, once I learned where everything spawned. What helped me not drop the game like a hot potato was the massive amount of good custom campaigns I've found online, which just about tripled the content mass of that game, to a point where it just doesn't feel like I'm replaying the same things over and over and over again. I have enough breadth of content that I can diversify. I can let things I've played too much sit idle for a while while I play other things, so that they feel fresh by the time I go back to them.

That's why I talk about volume of content. Sure, after seven years, we all know where everything is and what everyone says, but as it stands right now, the pre-50 game on both sides has enough content to where you can take different routes and avoid doing the same missions too often. In fact, I haven't done the low-level hero game in... A few months now. Probably not since 2010. I know the low-level hero game by heart, but it will still feel fresh next time I go back to it, because it's simply been a while.

If I get bored of the hero game, I can play villains. If I get bored of the villain game, too, I play Praetorians. By the time I'm bored of that, as well, I've usually forgotten about the hero game and I can go back to that, and cycle through them one more time. But heroes, villains and Praetorians all have the same end game, and don't have much content to it, anyway. If I get bored of Lambda Sector and the BAF, then what? Zilch, because that's all there is. I don't even have the illusion of variety that exists in the rest of the game, much less real, actual variety.

The Incarnate system NEEDS more content. And I'm not sure it was ever in the plans to supply it with that.

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.

Ummm, leveling that character works the same way. Unless you know of a way you can play one character and transfer that XP to another that I am unaware of?

You're progressing your character again, and while you're not actually gaining real levels, it works the same way: You have to actually play the character you want to progress. From a storyline perspective it makes sense. The Well is not going to make Super Awesome Guy an Incarnate because Ultra Mega Dude did something impressive. If Super Awesome Guy wants to be an Incarnate, he has to do it himself.

I'm sorry if you got used to being able to farm with one character and send the stuff you got to another, but the game was never intended to work like that. The fact that we could was a side effect of other things. And unless you have 2 accounts, you couldn't level one character while playing another before either.

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.

Level pact.

Swap character, team with your level pacted partner?

They don't have to. The game already has enough content in it that I generally don't get bored. It has had more than enough content to where I never ran out since Experience Smoothing ensured I'd always gain enough experience to progress through the level ranges before I ran out of missions to do.

This has always been the cornerstone argument I've had against end game - because it disregards all previous content and includes a new "range" of content where only newely-developed such applies. This is as extreme case of shooting yourself in the foot as I can imagine, just about, because I'm well aware that the developers can't produce content faster than players can consume it. This reason alone is why I prefer my games to end with an end, rather than a slow, painful decline into boredom and grind. You CANNOT stretch a game into infinity. It is not possible. The best you can do is mire your players in repetition and lack of progress and hope they don't mind, which is exactly what we're seeing here, and part of what I don't like.

If something has to end - and all good things must come to an end - then I prefer this to happen on a high note. "You have achieved everything you hoped to achieve. Congratulations!" as opposed to "You no longer have the stomach to continue and must now give up." This isn't restricted to just games, either. I prefer movie franchises and TV series that end over those which drag on for years and year. Once upon a time, I was a rabid fan of Naruto. Up until about episode 100 or thereabout. Then the show died and its rotting carcass has been dragging for over 300 episodes since, and its uglier and uglier with each passing instalment.

Of course, this doesn't loop back into the problem of giving us things to do at level 50. By its very nature of end game, we're not going anywhere, so those who want to play their 50s perpetually will indeed be stuck in limbo. But I've always seen this limbo as acceptable, as it was what you did after the end, after your adventure is over. I can stand having repetitive content, or running out of content after I've received closure on a game. Once I've beat it, I feel no compulsion to hunt down all the achievements after the end. But the Incarnate system now moves the goal posts. The game is no longer over. There's an entire second game tacked onto the end. Suddenly, my feeling of closure is gone, and the acceptably repetitive post-credits gameplay is now judged much less unacceptably-repetitive, because the credits will instead play ten "level" later than normal.

And so I'm left with the choice of entirely ignoring the system like it never existed, or engaging in the game's single most deliberate time sink and single most obvious recycling of developer resources. Four Incarnate slots and their assortment of tiered powers all tied to just two Trials is just... Bad. I understand they can't do more. I'm not that big of a fool. But I remain unconvinced they expressly needed to go down this route to begin with, especially since it should have been clear to everyone involved that it could not be done right.

But then I guess that deliberate time sinks that try to stretch less content over more time are a staple of MMO design. Call me conservative, but I preferred the old system of more content to less reward.

*edit*
I'm not saying that the Incarnate system is evil, or that the rest of the game is GRRRATE! Far from it. But it isn't until Incarnates that the time sinks really start to show. That's all I'm saying. At no time before are you asked to repeat the same one task over and over again unless you choose to ignore the other options you are given.

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.

The Incarnate system is still optional though. You can play as much or as little as you choose, or ignore it completely, and you still have all the other options that were available to you before it's existence.

If you feel like you must do it or the game isn't "complete", I can understand that. But that mentality is self-imposed and not something you are required to do to enjoy the game.

Previously, you were being asked to either repeat the same tasks over and over again, or quit playing that character.

The difference between them is we had 7 years worth of tasks to repeat, so it didn't feel so repetitive. They just can't give us as much variety in the new stuff all at once. It is the same two tasks because that's all they have finished thus far.

Personally, I'm willing to be patient and see what happens in the future. If it goes like I'm anticipating and they add a significant amount of stuff to do with Incarnate characters, I'll be happy with it. If we end up with 4 trials and never get anything else, I may start looking at it more like you are.

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.

That's more or less what I do. It's why there's been less rage in my posts of late, now that I've simply settled into ignoring it. I'm saying that more in the general sense. The Incarnate system came out as a direct result of a mixed argument of two sides:

1. People who were asking for more things to do at level 50.

and

2. People who wanted more ways to progress their characters.

Group number two should find most everything they need in the Incarnate system, while group number one will find very little. This is a system of rewards, not content, which is what my disappointment centres on.

To be perfectly honest, Going Rogue just feels like a BADLY incomplete expansion. I realise the original City of Heroes didn't launch complete, missing the last 10 levels as it did (and having the 35-40 game left badly lacking even to this day, for being the "old end"), as did City of Villains, but by and large these were wrapped up within an Issue of their Launch, and didn't exactly present glaringly missing chunks of this magnitude.

It's very likely unreasonable for me to say this, largely due to opportunity cost, time tables, investments and so forth, but I'd have preferred to see Going Rogue released as an "expansionalone" like City of Villains, complete with at least most of a levelling experience AND a chunk of Incarnate content. I'd have paid AAA title prices for that without a second thought. $60? Absolutely! As it stands, it's a bit... Light. And not only is it light, but the rest of the game is currently largely on hold while the developers work on Incarnate content. It's already been how many Issues? I18, I19, I20 now... I thought forming a separate development team which would work on Incarnates and Incarnates only was so that the rest of the game didn't have to suffer for the end game.

But, eh, we have what we have. I'm not going anywhere yet, I just have more to grumble about. I20 does nothing for me, but I eagerly await the Vanguard pack, which will see me reroll no less than two Blasters in their 40s (into what, I haven't yet decided) and update at least one Scrapper in her 40s to Vanguard weapons, as well as probably finally get me to make that technolion I've been meaning to. So it's not like I have nothing left to make, or indeed nothing left to do. It's just nothing left at 50, and Samuel Tow remains uninteresting to me for lack of things to do.

Sam's been 50 since January of 2005. Even if I don't tend to play my 50s much, it's been six years since then, so what little I've played him from time to time has still seen him run through everything at level 50 at least once. All he has left now is scanners, tips and repeatable missions. Well, and TFs, but I don't tend to have the patience to wait for those to form unless I have something else interesting to do in the meantime, which Sam no longer does, and I'm sure as hell not going to put those together or lead them. It's work, and it's work I suck at, to boot. I got tired of gathering people together just so we could fail and waste everybody's time.

Really, I'd just preferred to see more things to do, not more reasons to repeat what I've already done. After a while, it just starts feeling like these rewards are compensation for not having fun.

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.

Okay, so because the Incarnate system is not something you'd enjoy doing on your 50s, Issue 20 has nothing for 50s to do. Did I get that right?

No.

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.