The real difference between Trial and non-Trial Incarnate Advancement

My earning rates in trials might actually make things worse. I'm one of those people getting a ton of uncommons (in fact, my main got exactly *one* common table drop, the rest all uncommons except for two rare drops).

I believe I can parse my logs to get actual exact earning counts, so I'll try to do that tonight. That should factor out any estimation errors on my part. In fact, it should also be possible to calculate the exact amount of time I've been spending on the trials themselves, minus organizational time.

Edit: preliminary looks at the logs suggest my thread drop rate per successful trial run is actually closer to 6 than 4, and the thread earning rate (just threads, not component breakdowns) is about ten per hour of actual trial running time. But I've only looked at day one; the later day logs would probably be more representative.

Well, to make the slots trival to get to T3 would just mean adding the ability to get a rare 'thread' component to the WST. This will allow you to increase the options for threads, give a more casual friendly stance on it, and allow it to take a week or two to get your t3 boost *granted, unlocking the different slots would be a task in itself, but you could atlest craft your t3 boost before then..*

Did you participate in the closed portion of the beta that you had to physically sign an NDA for?

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

No, just the part later (the last few weeks before it went live.)

Pretty much everything here about gating the content behind two trials was brought up in the Beta forums. Not a single comment from a Developer.

In five consecutive BAFs, which was about 2 hours of play time, I got four uncommon table, and one rare table.

I also got 22 threads, and hit two Challenge badges for two additional Uncommon components. Somehow, I got two empyrean merits. Not quite sure how that happened.

A bunch of astrals, too. I'm not sure how many times we hit challenge items, but I know it was more than once for one of them.

... I also went from 0% judgement to unlocked, and 50-ish percent towards Lore.


(By the way, for those of you keeping score, yes I was previously saying I couldn't handle events of this intensity for that long. That was true then. It seems no longer true now. Go go gadget pharmaceutical corrections.)

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

The harder to achieve challenge badges will award Empyrean merits (Not on my watch namely) when you first get them.

I know I got one when first award Not on my watch badge along with a rare salvage reward.

That's cool, I don't expect you to have results that match mine. The sample size is obviously too small. I just objected to the half-comparison.

Thanks for looking.

Again, just out of curiosity, are you running mostly BAFs? Or skipping turrets and courtyard spawns in Lambda? Because those thread drop rates sound similar to what I get for BAF, but not Lambda. BAF has a lot of non-thread earning potential (with people ignore adds and focusing on the AVs), and we clear the turrets and spawns on every Lambda I've been on. I'm curious if this is just random being random, or a difference in playstyle.

It would be interesting to find out that certain playstyles generate more Threads per time, but less Shards per time, and vice versa. I'm not saying that just knowing your results and mine are going to show that on the spot, just that it's something interesting to consider. It doesn't sound plausible based on how the rest of the game works, but if it turns out that they do use some kind of contribution algorithm to determine reward tables as is being discussed in another thread, it might end up that my playstyle results in a higher Trial vs. non-Trial reward ratio, while yours results in a lower one.

The question was never a question of "deserves." Who deserves what is completely irrelevant. No one deserves anything in this game more or less than anyone else, but every player gets something different depending on their nature, level and amount of play. Not because they deserve different things, but because they do different things. What you do determines what you get. That's always been true, and always will be true.


That's unfortunate, but to be blunt people constantly cancel for all sorts of reasons. There were people who canceled in the past that would have stuck around if this end game had shown up earlier. They were not more important than you, but you are not more important than them either. This change will cause some players to cancel, but it will cause other players to stick around longer or attract new players to the game. I can't really hazard a guess which number is higher. What I can say is that its unfortunate when people cancel for those people but for the game as a whole its just part of the reality it has experienced every day of its existence. And at no time are the people who stay more deserving than the people who leave, nor are those people less deserving. Because deserving has nothing to do with anything.

Precisely. Speaking for myself I canceled my sub after the Alpha slot was pulled from Going Rogue. There wasn't any malice on my part but I'd been getting somewhat bored with the game and the loss of the one feature in GR that I was really psyched about meant I didn't have any interest in playing at that time. I came back shortly before Issue 19, spent some time leveling characters and then when I19 came out I jumped into the Incarnate Content.

It might be more fair to say there were people in the past that might have stuck around if AN end game showed up eariler. We won't really know if this particular implementation of an end game is what could make those people stay.

And yes people subscribe and unsubscribe during CoX's existence and we don't know the exact number and frequency of either occurence, though the older the game gets, getting people to come back or getting completely new people in gets harder.

Keeping as many people happy and paying is always the goal since less revenue doesn't affect the people who leave, just the people who stay...affected in terms of quantity and frequency of future content development. Even if people come back after some months...that's still lost revenue between resubs.

And so far in recent forum flare ups not just on this subject, it appears discontent is becoming readily apparent. Not sure how the amount of repetition of these trials would affect player burnout yet...too early.

The first day I had two successful BAF runs and two successful Lambda runs, plus a couple of unsuccessful ones and a couple of bounces. The numbers I quoted were for the four successful runs, two each.

One thing I'm pretty sure about is that rewards are still team-based, not league-based. That means there is some possibility for variability in rewards, and a potentially dramatic one in BAF: if you in a league that splits teams between the AVs and the adds, the add team is going to get potentially significantly higher rewards, because they get the far higher kill count. I've almost never been on the add team for BAF**.

Separate from that, every league I've been on has basically cleared Lambda (except the blinkie hunts of course) and not farmed BAF (meaning: pull together and go for the quick Siege->Double AV knockout relatively quickly; the one genuine separated run I attempted ended in failure because the adds quickly got out of hand).

As to the contribution table thing, we know the devs were playing around with that kind of tech, and considering I got literally one common table out of a ton of runs (that I recall, anyway) purely random chance alone seems less likely to me. If its random, it seems to be weighted towards uncommon. But here's what seems just suggestively fishy to me. My main is a blaster, and has the bulk of my runs. She's not a damage powerhouse being Energy/Energy, but she has a gigaton of recharge: Torrent + Explosive blast is almost an attack chain for me, so I put out decent damage. Uncommon almost every time, and more rares than commons. I recently started running my MA/SR through the trials. Dragon's tail or not, she's basically a pure single target killer. First four runs: two common and two uncommon. Small sample size, but it does make me wonder.


** I will be honest, though: once I figured out what was going on, I would position myself in such a way that I could shoot single target attacks at the AV, and then fling AoEs the other way towards the adds, whenever my team pulled ahead of the other AV team. That way, rather than just slow down I would be dealing damage to the adds. Just that one tiny change significantly increased the amount of iXP I was earning per BAF run, and that's extraordinary considering that was just a fraction of the damage of one blaster from a team of eight basically noticably changing the iXP earning rate of an entire eight player team.

Actually, my specific intent was to say that this specific implementation was almost certainly going to appeal to at least some percentage of the people who left earlier, and would have stayed for it had it arrived in time. That means this specific end game has kept some players that would have left and would have been able to keep others that did leave: we just don't know how many, and there is no reason to believe that number is higher or lower than the number of people for whom this specific implementation of an end game was the determining factor in them quitting.

I say that for a very specific reason: when someone says a feature is causing them to quit, that is a personal tragedy but not necessarily a problem for the game because the game cannot make that one person more important than all the other people who like the feature, and all the other people who did quit or would quit because the game *didn't* have it.

If a personal preference sentiment is shared by a large enough group of people, it can have special meaning that it doesn't have individually. However, I've been around long enough to know that even when someone says they are certain they are either in the majority, or representative of a very large percentage of the player population because of their personal observations, they are often proven wrong by unambiguous data downstream. That sort of estimation has historically been extremely weak.


Honestly, in my estimation at least as many people were upset about inventions and the Hamidon enhancement nerf. Vastly more people were upset about the GDN and ED. In all four cases, complaints about those issues began to decay exponentially after about a month after the changes went live. So to the extent that there is player discontent, I don't believe it is higher than the game has experienced many times in the past.

They do not: the rule is supposed to be every kill by the team has a chance to award a shard to every member of the team. Which makes you wonder if when the devs said the thread rate was five times the shard rate, did they factor that in? Do threads award the same way as shards: each kill has a chance to award a thread for every member of the team?

I thought my average shard rate for plow ITFs was something like 6-8 regardless of what I played, but I do not have hard statistics to prove it. Getting those would be a little bit trickier because I don't have logs that focus solely on ITF runs. Although that can probably be parsed also. I'll think about that one.

I've never PvP'd. Ever. At any point. I got PvP IO's in a reasonable amount of time; frankly faster than people woh do PvP got them as far as I can tell. If I never do Incarnate trials, it will take a minimum of.. I'll say.. 6 months to do it in any other way.

You're trying to compare apples to housecats. All they have in common is they both tend to spend some time inside someone's house.

And if the devs gave us nothing at all, how quickly do you think THAT would piss people off?

Yes, some people are pissed about the form the end game took. Just as many are happy or at least content with it.

If the devs wait until they are sure EVERYONE will like something they do, we will never see any new content ever again. It is a simple fact that the devs have to deal with: No matter WHAT they do, SOMEONE is going to be pissed about it.

All they can really do is release content and hope for the best. If they try to appease the people this issue pissed off, they will probably end up pissing off the people that were pleased by it.

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.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

For what it's worth, in 20+ Trial runs -- of which only about five were BAFs, because the low population on Triumph seems to favor Lambda at the hours I tend to play -- I've gotten one Very Rare component, five or six Rares, one Common, and all the rest Uncommon.

The one Common was on a Master-of-BAF attempt that went bad after our League messed up the timing for killing the two AVs, a raid in which I spent most of my time lagging out and running from the hospital. (You know the 9CUs are out of hand when you have Rise of the Phoenix and ~170% in global recharge and you die twice in every cooldown cycle.) That was almost certainly my worst run in a personal-contribution sense.

All of the above occurred on a Mind/Fire/Fire Dominator, which isn't exactly an AoE specialist, but it ain't no slouch either. As you say, a small sample size. Everyone I talk to seems to agree that Commons are anything but common, though.

I've done the same thing. Getting iXP on BAF when your team is not on the ambush team is painfully slow. In any case, I figure that tossing the occasional AoE control and damage power at the adds can't hurt anyone.

Ideally, the League lead would determine ahead of time which player on each team is both well-suited for reinforcement duty (good AoE damage and/or control), and isn't crucial for AV duty -- and then assign those players to the adds so that every team got a roughly equal amount of Threads/iXP.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

This would require that the League leader know this, and that they care. It's just easier and more convenient to split up the teams, probably. Yet another reason for me to dislike the BAF.

I wonder though....how many League leaders put team 1 on reinforcement duty?

Yeah - there are few people saying the same stuff in several threads

No offense, but the amount of complaints dropping after a month is the expected outcome no matter how it's resolved. It would be really suprising if that didn't happen.

After a month everyone who dislikes a feature would either have quit, resigned themselves to it being there no matter what they said about it, or changed their mind about how they felt.

The only reason for the complaints to continue after a month would be because a large number of people who couldn't stand some part of a game still decided to stick around even though they hated it. That would be something you'd want to look into and see why they bothered staying.

That's a bit off from what i was referring to but i suppose that would depend on which people you're talking about. If it's those who enjoy farming for rewards, probably not much since what they enjoy is seeing a number go up (inf/prest/xp/merits etc.) or getting a vast payout and they can and have made that happen with anything.

No offense taken, but I think you're oversimplifying my observation. Complaints of this nature begin dropping almost immediately after a feature goes live: within a week generally because it is at that point that the theoretical becomes reality for most of the playerbase. But only slowly.

For about two to three weeks, the complaints *change details*. For example, the theoretical complaint about BAF and Lambda was that they were so hard almost no one would do them. Now the complaint is that you have to grind them to get all the rewards you want. I should point out that this is a diametrically opposite complaint.

People predicted lots of things. No one predicted that the problem would be that people would be running twenty BAFs a day and getting burned out on it. Once again, forum crystal balls proved to be 8 balls.

A similar thing happened with the invention system. What many people were predicting was that it would create a huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots; that there would be a caste system where the ultrapowerful would run content in exclusive packs shunning the rest of the playerbase. Very few people predicted that the invention system would essentially eliminate influence scarcity as we knew it and I don't think anyone predicted that inventions would have the exact opposite effect: by making so many players more powerful, it created a lot more margin for error in running content: people could team with whoever they wanted, and play whatever they wanted, because the overall power level of the average player rose, making it easier to compensate for weaker builds or lower level team mates.

Then at some point the complaints just vanish to a slow trickle, almost falling off a cliff. It happens not just randomly or because of eventual acceptance, but because there is an initial burst of complaints that is self-reinforcing: people feel they are part of a far larger group of players and feel more free to complain. But on a time scale of weeks, the vast majority of players who are rarely emotionally invested in these issues sees what the reality of the situation is, and makes up their own minds. Usually, they go "meh" and adapt to the situation whatever that is. This starves the complaint engine of fuel: instead of people saying "yeah, that makes sense" they start saying "eh, upon reflection its not really all that bad." That then causes complaints to spiral downward.

Its easy to say you'd expect complaints to drop after a month, but in fact if it was just a matter of simple attrition, you'd expect complaints to fall roughly linearly and continuously.


This is also not a moot observation. There are lots of instances where it doesn't happen that way. Complaints about the architect *rose* and *continued to rise* after release, and were not dropping exponentially a month later. They decayed more slowly after more time had passed. And that was because honestly the problems were far more severe, and the devs far slower to react to them. The impact of the fast farms in the AE were probably he most destructive error the devs have ever made in the history of the game, and the complaint curve reflected that.

The I9 Hamidon was the opposite: the complaints were never extremely high, and slowly trailed off linearly - exactly as you'd expect if the primary driver was slow attrition of the complainers themselves (probably most through acceptance).

And one other exception: badge complaints. Until the "epic" badges were adjusted and a lot of the farming ones with them, complaints about badge requirements were at a constant simmering level: neither going up nor down. Exactly what you'd expect if the issue was a minor but nagging one that people were willing to temporarily accept but continue to work to a solution for.


So no, I don't think my evaluation of the most likely trajectory of the end game complaints is actually obvious or inevitable. This has nothing to do with whether they are valid or not, just my guestimate as to how they are likely to evolve over time.