The real difference between Trial and non-Trial Incarnate Advancement
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-04-11 09:25 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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That's interesting. When i think of people who left (no specific individuals since reasons vary) because of lack of end game (years past not recently), it always makes me think that there were more factors that came to play in that decision. Meaning, even though they technically can keep playing their 50, the existing game was no longer enough to maintain their interest to keep doing that.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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.
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So to me, the current implementation of end game might attract them but not so sure it's enough to keep them.
By end game i'm mostly referring to the trials...the incarnate slots are part of it but that's the reward for the end game...the method to achieve those rewards is where the "game" part comes in. And that part is two trials...let's say even four trials for reasonable progress...so i'm not quite sure how long that's going to keep them occupied when considering how long it seemingly taking to put these out...about 9 months since GR and possibly the same amount of time for the rest.
Then again this is all academic anyway since there's no clear numbers we can point to and people who didn't come back can't exactly chime in.
If these new incarnate levels are intended to be end-game content that makes people not quit the game for lack of anything to do, I don't think it actually does that. It's neither a large amount of content (two trials that take less than an hour each), nor is a large amount of grind/advancement/leveling up. It takes less than a week to be "done" if you just run the trials.
I don't think anyone who would be threatening to leave if the devs didn't add something for their level 50s to do will be distracted by this new system for more than a couple weeks. Unless they're somehow casual gamers while simultaneously out of things to do at 50.
Because let's be honest, if someone has a 50 that's IOed out and has done all the 50 task forces, and exhausted other things like badge hunting and raiding and wants some end game stuff to do, a new system that they can finish in a week isn't going to keep them around.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Except that it's not a new complaint. What you're counting as a shift is two seperate complaints, only one was louder immediately after launch. The concerns about advancing as an Incarnate while solo are old and predate the release of I20.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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.
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Here is a post from Black Scorpion addressing that they will be looking into ways for solo players to earn Incarnate abilities after questions were raised about solo players being excluded from the Incarnate system. Note that the date on that post is back in January.
The complaints about the rate of solo progress appeared when the first screenshots hit the forums showing the shard conversion rate. Again that was before I20 launched.
Immediately after launch, yes, there was a flood of "it's too difficult" complaints. But the complaint that non-trial progress wasn't exactly fair was present too. After a few days the difficulty complaints died down again, but we still are discussing the trial vs. non-trial incarnate gains.
It's certainly unfair to imply that what you're seeing is a fickle shift from "it's too hard" to "it's too grindy."
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That depends on how often you run the trials. I've been doing them for a week and am nowhere near done. I'm working on three characters at the moment, all have an Uncommon Judgement and one has an Uncommon Interface. At this rate I predict that I20 will keep me busy for several months yet.
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Originally Posted by Dispari
If these new incarnate levels are intended to be end-game content that makes people not quit the game for lack of anything to do, I don't think it actually does that. It's neither a large amount of content (two trials that take less than an hour each), nor is a large amount of grind/advancement/leveling up. It takes less than a week to be "done" if you just run the trials.
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I could say the same thing in the opposite direction. I could say that anyone who claims to quit over the end game was probably dissatisfied already, and this was just the excuse to quit: if not the end game, something else would have pushed them to quit eventually, and soon, because they were just looking for an excuse. But we have to assume that if I20 has the power to cause people to leave, it also has the power to cause people to stay. To do otherwise is unfair to one side.|
Originally Posted by Dispari
If these new incarnate levels are intended to be end-game content that makes people not quit the game for lack of anything to do, I don't think it actually does that. It's neither a large amount of content (two trials that take less than an hour each), nor is a large amount of grind/advancement/leveling up. It takes less than a week to be "done" if you just run the trials.
I don't think anyone who would be threatening to leave if the devs didn't add something for their level 50s to do will be distracted by this new system for more than a couple weeks. Unless they're somehow casual gamers while simultaneously out of things to do at 50. Because let's be honest, if someone has a 50 that's IOed out and has done all the 50 task forces, and exhausted other things like badge hunting and raiding and wants some end game stuff to do, a new system that they can finish in a week isn't going to keep them around. |
Most people don't "threaten" to leave. They leave when at some point they just lose interest in the game. There exists a finite non-zero number of players that quit in the last twelve months that would have stayed if I 20 released a year ago. I'd be comfortable asserting that the odds that statement is false is astronomically low. So long as that number is at least one, it allows me to make the point I made, which is that those people who left that would have stayed if the end game existed as well as all the people who would have left but are now staying are no less deserving of having the end game as the people who claim to be quitting over it are deserving of having something different - or nothing at all. I don't even need the numbers to be equal to make that point. I only need this number to be at least one. Does that one person deserve an end game that he likes, if he likes I20? If the people who want I20 radically changed or removed theoretically got their way, would that be because that person was undeserving?
I assert not, but I'm giving people the opportunity to refute that, and say that in fact, they deserve more than that hypothetical person, and why. In the absence of refutation, "deserves" has nothing to do with it, and should be removed from the discussion.
Getting back to the question of whether I20 could cause people to stay, people who might be bored with the game don't have to be especially fast. They might just not like rolling a lot of alts. They might want a variety of content in terms of combat situations rather than storylines. They might want more challenging content, content that allows them to progress their level 50s, or content involving more coordinated teams. None of those things requires that such a person be especially fast.
Conversely, even a very fast player who could get all four slots filled in a couple of weeks could likely do so to a stable of level 50 alts if they did have lots of alts. They could also want all four Lore pets, or be a completist and want all eight tier 4 powers in all four slots. These people would not exhaust the incarnate system on time scales of just a couple weeks in all likelihood.
Most people who wanted a change-up in the end game aren't actually likely to be speed demons, because most people aren't speed demons period.
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I think they mentioned something about solo incarnate stuff. They would naturally reward Astral Merit Salvage and Empyrean Merit Salvage.
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Speaking for myself, I never said they were too hard. I pointed out bugs in beta (such as the abnormally long queue times) and I mentioned that I kept getting kicked out of trials. It goes live and we see people talking about abnormally long queue times and players getting kicked out of trials.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
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.
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I also said that I'm ragingly disappointed that we can only use Incarnate bonuses inside Incarnate trials and can only get said bonuses inside trials. It's starting to look like this whole "Ouroboros" thing was just a joke perpetuated by the Devs, like they were going for the title of the gaming world's greatest Easter Egg ever.
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| 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. |
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I'm talking about the complaints about the content that date back to Beta. I'm not implying. I'm stating directly. There was a direct shift from too hard to too grindy as the vast majority objection to the content. And I'm not saying individual people changed their minds. I'm saying the complaints themselves did: whether people changed their minds or some people stopped complaining and other people started is totally irrelevant to my point. And I'm not specifically talking about solo performance: I've given up discussing solo performance for the most part because its an emotionally charged train wreck.|
Originally Posted by Oldeb
Except that it's not a new complaint. What you're counting as a shift is two seperate complaints, only one was louder immediately after launch. The concerns about advancing as an Incarnate while solo are old and predate the release of I20.
Here is a post from Black Scorpion addressing that they will be looking into ways for solo players to earn Incarnate abilities after questions were raised about solo players being excluded from the Incarnate system. Note that the date on that post is back in January. The complaints about the rate of solo progress appeared when the first screenshots hit the forums showing the shard conversion rate. Again that was before I20 launched. Immediately after launch, yes, there was a flood of "it's too difficult" complaints. But the complaint that non-trial progress wasn't exactly fair was present too. After a few days the difficulty complaints died down again, but we still are discussing the trial vs. non-trial incarnate gains. It's certainly unfair to imply that what you're seeing is a fickle shift from "it's too hard" to "it's too grindy." |
The solo costs are completely independent of the complaint about grinding the trials. You can't solo the trials so I have no idea why you would think the two were even remotely related.
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Who, the devs? |
Originally Posted by Hydrofoil_Zero
I think they mentioned something about solo incarnate stuff.
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Because the solo costs (and I use the term solo loosely, since they can be earned on teams as well) are the only alternative to grinding the trials. If more alternatives existed, people wouldn't complain as much. I didn't hear anyone complaining about having to grind the Reichsmann TFs for Dimensional Whatsit components, because nobody had to. There were reasonable alternatives.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The solo costs are completely independent of the complaint about grinding the trials. You can't solo the trials so I have no idea why you would think the two were even remotely related.
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I don't remember any serious discussion of the possibility except in general terms (i.e. "all end game raid systems eventually become a grind-fest") until I20 was in open beta, but granted I didn't read every single post. However even in open beta complaints about both trials being too hard vastly outnumbered complaints about people likely grinding them excessively.|
Originally Posted by Ironik
I did.
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I remember more individual threads talking about ten seconds being too short an interval to kill two AVs and network lag was going to make it impossible for all but the fastest internet connections to have a chance in hell at BAF than I do people talking about *specifically* BAF and Lambda quickly turning into rapid grind-fests that people would master within a few hours of launch.
I'm not saying *everyone* was complaining the trials were too difficult either. Lots of people were saying that once you got the hang of them, they were not hard. Lots *more* people were saying that was only because the closed beta testers were likely far more cooperative and stronger players than the average player, and PUGs with average players would have little chance of completing these things on a regular basis.
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I'm afraid I'm going to have to reiterate that solo progress speed (which is what the other poster specifically referred to) is totally irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the trials are too grindy.|
Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
Because the solo costs (and I use the term solo loosely, since they can be earned on teams as well) are the only alternative to grinding the trials. If more alternatives existed, people wouldn't complain as much. I didn't hear anyone complaining about having to grind the Reichsmann TFs for Dimensional Whatsit components, because nobody had to. There were reasonable alternatives.
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As you point out, the "solo path" can also be exploited by teams, but that has no bearing on solo progress speed, and the poster did not refer to the alternate shard path, but the solo progress rate.
And if you didn't hear people complaining about grinding WSTs, you were not listening closely enough.
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Just for the record, I still don't like Notices being gated behind either the WST or a stupid number of Shards. But at this point it's like complaining about a hangnail when you have a broken leg.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
And if you didn't hear people complaining about grinding WSTs, you were not listening closely enough.
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My impression is that you're axiomatically opposed to singular gating of any kind for almost any reason. That's more of a personal preference than a debatable design question.
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Originally Posted by Eva Destruction
Just for the record, I still don't like Notices being gated behind either the WST or a stupid number of Shards. But at this point it's like complaining about a hangnail when you have a broken leg.
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Yep, that's pretty much it. I like my options, and I don't like when there aren't any.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My impression is that you're axiomatically opposed to singular gating of any kind for almost any reason. That's more of a personal preference than a debatable design question.
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A personal preference is precisely a debatable design question for a game. It's usually not for how a car should be built, but for a game it's completely germane. No game can be all things to all players, but it should at least strive for being most things to most people.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My impression is that you're axiomatically opposed to singular gating of any kind for almost any reason. That's more of a personal preference than a debatable design question.
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Most things to most people, good lord how many people do you think are working on this project?
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Originally Posted by Ironik
A personal preference is precisely a debatable design question for a game. It's usually not for how a car should be built, but for a game it's completely germane. No game can be all things to all players, but it should at least strive for being most things to most people.
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I believe that there should be a balance between congruent options and reward/action associations axiomatically. On what basis would you propose Eva and I resolve that in a debate?|
Originally Posted by Ironik
A personal preference is precisely a debatable design question for a game.
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| No game can be all things to all players, but it should at least strive for being most things to most people. |
There is some limited areas upon which this can be debated, but unlikely in an internet setting. If we were actually making a game, this debate would come down to practical compromises among members of the design team. However, in an open-ended setting, this is essentially arguing over favorite flavor of ice cream. There is no right decision here, although that's not to say there aren't many ways to pick a specific decision and then implement that specific decision wrongly.
If I were on a design team, I would assert my intention to actually design a game where a fundamental guiding principle was that a certain subset of player decisions have non-trivial consequences. A non-trivial consequence is a consequence not easily reproducible if one makes the contrary decision. That means not all results will be achievable by all possible combinations of decisions. That means not all possible options would be valid or exist. That's fundamental to what I think makes a good game. If it was my decision to make, that's the decision I would make. If it was not my decision to make and I was ordered to do it differently, I would; I would also be considering whether that was the place I wanted to work in the long term. Perhaps over time I would be convinced that approach was acceptable to me upon seeing it actualized. Perhaps not.
That dynamic does not exist between Eva and myself, so I do not see how this otherwise gets resolved through pure logical debate. Its a difference of opinion which can be expressed but I doubt can be resolved. I'm more than happy to *explain* the details of my opinion, which are not simple. And perhaps explaining that might convince some people my approach was preferable. But I'm conceding that is unlikely in the case of Eva, because she seems to have consistently expressed a strong contrary opinion.
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I think you're misappropriating an argument here, if ever so slightly. I've somehow ended up with a reputation as a rabid hater of raids, and have indeed talked about quitting the game (but having nowhere else to go) and even I'll tell you that this is disingenuous at best.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
I could say the same thing in the opposite direction. I could say that anyone who claims to quit over the end game was probably dissatisfied already, and this was just the excuse to quit: if not the end game, something else would have pushed them to quit eventually, and soon, because they were just looking for an excuse. But we have to assume that if I20 has the power to cause people to leave, it also has the power to cause people to stay. To do otherwise is unfair to one side.
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I can only speak for myself and at most a couple of other people, but the complaint in itself was never about the specific Trials, themselves, or the specific implementations or the specific numbers. Those can be changed and tweaked as time moves on. My biggest complaint and biggest fear lies elsewhere completely. It lies in a very pertinent question: Where is this game headed?
Years ago, I'd never have stopped to ask that question, because even when I didn't get what I wanted, it was still at best a mild irritation and the game still seemed to accommodate me as a player. The rollback of the I4 boss buffs was a happy happy joy joy time for me, if for no reason other than that it reaffirmed the direction of the game as one which didn't hate players. The ability to scale AVs down to EBs was one, as well. So I knew that even if they added ugly red electricity or time sink story arcs or PvP and such, "the game" as a general concept was still heading in the right direction.
I'm not sure about that any more. I've already been told once to stop holding on to the past of what the game was, and that was not a pleasant thing to consider, seen as how what the game WAS is what I originally bought, and it seems like everything City of Heroes used to stand for in the past is slowly phased away in favour of what I can only describe as lowest common denominator fads. I used to see City of Heroes as a game being made by people who actually liked the game, whereas now it feels more like a game being made by people who like the revenue but aren't terribly particular about how that happens.
The game's complexity increases, and increases, and constantly, but the game's quality has - and I'll be frank here - not been this low for a very long time. And I'm not just talking about the numerous ugly bugs that have cropped up. The writing is "they just didn't care" bad, content is cutting corners and giving us ever less and less of a volume, "luxury" items like customization additions, costumes and environments are at a premium, developer communication has never been less frequent... It feels like I'm playing an EA Games product these days, and my concern is starting to turn frighteningly real. And that's saying something, considering how many years I spent being called a "fan boy" by people discontent.
What concerns me the most, however, is this apparent drive to sweep said discontent under the rug by discrediting the people feeling it, and vilifying them as some kind of intellectual vandals seeking to take parts out of the game down seemingly out of sheer malice.
This is a major change for the game, and I don't think you can afford to ignore its effect on the community as a whole.
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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.
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I have done and tested this... 18 threads on a week tf's?! WTF!|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My red flag alarm dinged on this. Something is wrong with the assumptions, because there's no way a player that runs 15 to 20 task forces over a week ends up with 18 shards. I would expect such a person to end up with about 80-150 shards, and thus (eventually) about the same number of threads. Which makes the trial content - counting all of the extra drops besides direct threads - about fifteen times faster than task force content on average.
The drop rate for threads cannot be five times higher than shards. I would be more inclined to believe its the reverse. Also, higher task forces drop components that can be broken down into shards. 15-20 runs should earn at least 15-20 of those, which would be more than 18 shards right there. Factoring everything in, my ballpark estimate is that trials might be earning ten times the equivalent thread count as task forces drop from thread/shard conversions, not a hundred (and certainly not a thousand like some people have been suggesting). One more thing: counting optimally for the trial drops adds an additional skew. I've been getting the majority of my reward tables as uncommons, not commons. If uncommon really is more likely than common on successful runs, which is possible, the uncommons are actually *hurting* earnings, because if you need commons you cannot count uncommons as their *creation* value, but rather their *breakdown* value. And every uncommon is actually only worth 9 threads on average when broken down - less than half of one common. |
I do one +1 ITF.... if it is not the Weekly tf it gives me a max of 10 shards. once every 20 hours I can convert those to 10 threads. This means I can have 7 x 20 hours = 70 threads in a week. Now.. the ITF last week was the Weekly TF. And as such gave me a Notice I couldnt use anymore. Breaking the Notice down gave me a good bunch of Shards I could convert to 10 other threads. I end up on 80 Threads doing ITF alone!
This I had done last week aside of the odd Trial. The inf needed to do these conversions drop also during the ITF. So you dont need todo anything else.
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This is an MMO! Therefore teaming in encouraged and solo discouraged. There is no other way to put it. For me it is logical.
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Hmm. I kinda see where you're coming from..|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The game's complexity increases, and increases, and constantly, but the game's quality has - and I'll be frank here - not been this low for a very long time. And I'm not just talking about the numerous ugly bugs that have cropped up. The writing is "they just didn't care" bad, content is cutting corners and giving us ever less and less of a volume, "luxury" items like customization additions, costumes and environments are at a premium, developer communication has never been less frequent... It feels like I'm playing an EA Games product these days, and my concern is starting to turn frighteningly real. And that's saying something, considering how many years I spent being called a "fan boy" by people discontent.
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I mean, I HAVE gotten the feeling for a long time that Paragon Studios is being micromanaged by NCsoft more than they used to be, but I disagree on some of the symptoms.
I mean, yeah. The recent crashes? That's pretty peculiar. Some balls have been dropped somewhere.
But when it comes to the other points.. I've been enjoying the I18 and later writing FAR more than most of what came before it. In fact, I've been running more of the late-game older content lately, since I've been working on things like accolades (for the first time since I joined back in.. 2006? Just never cared before), and I've been getting exposed to things like To Click A Thousand Glowies. Wow. That.. was phoning it in, compared to newer stuff. (Edit: Also, I can't stand pretty much any of redside's mainline writing that I've seen. I keep trying to play redside and I just can't do it, I always stop by late teens/early 20s, and go do something else... except for the redside tip missions. THOSE are fun to do when I dip redside for things like patron power access. Funny that.)
When it comes to content quantity.. As far as I can tell, I19 as we got it was a stopgap issue slipped into production schedule because of I18 closed beta responses. I suspect the I19/I20/I21 content distribution was originally planned differently, and some things in I20 would have been in I19, and some things that would have been in I20 probably got nudged to 21.
... and yet, I18 was a huge content infusion, I19 had an exceptionally large amount, and I20 itself is at LEAST comparable to most of the post-acquisition pre-I18 issues between playable content and new toys. And that's putting it pessimistic, I think.
I will concede that communication has... changed. We're not getting the personal touch from the people actually developing the game like we used to, and ... I miss that. On the other hand, while there was a drought in ANY communication for a while, we're getting a steadily increasing amount of responsiveness from the studio in general, between our new CM's presence on the forums and the semi-regular posts from Second Measure and developers by way of the community folks.
It's a change. I don't know how I feel about it. But they didn't just shut the door on us (albeit it was perhaps pushed to for a while), and I don't think it's fair to suggest that's the case.
That said, I do have other concerns. I'm still irate about the ncsoft launcher thing for instance (And I'm not going to consider switching to it until I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO, and even then I may have to make a decision about how I feel about the game), but everyone has hot buttons.
I still think the lack of anything that could remotely reasonably be called a 'solo path' for Incarnate stuff is a problem, but I'm willing to trust some additional options will be coming in time.
In the meantime? I'm going to occasionally run TFs, occasionally run trials.. and keep solo-slaughtering romans with my blaster and giggling at the massacre. Because that doesn't look like it's going to stop being hilarious any time soon.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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On the subject of numbers, here are my preliminary estimates for earning from April 6th through April 9th (on the 10th and 11th I switched to a different character, and that would complicate things a bit)
Lambda Starts: 4 Completes: 2 Av complete: 2931.0
BAF starts: 5 Completes: 2 Av complete: 1063.5
Threads: 34 Astral: 22 Empyrean: 2
Lambda Starts: 1 Completes: 1 Av complete: 2176.0
BAF starts: 4 Completes: 4 Av complete: 957.5
Threads: 21 Astral: 22 Empyrean: 2
Lambda Starts: 5 Completes: 5 Av complete: 1717.2
BAF starts: 0 Completes: 0 Av complete: 0
Threads: 25 Astral: 20 Empyrean: 1
Lambda Starts: 1 Completes: 1 Av complete: 1756.0
BAF starts: 7 Completes: 5 Av complete: 1190.0
Threads: 37 Astral: 31 Empyrean: 3
That is 117 threads, 95 Astrals, and 8 Empyreans in four days over 27 trial starts and 20 completions. Seven failures break down to 2 crashes and 4 failures. Of the four failures, two were BAF escape failures, one was a BAF separated attempt that went south, and one was a failed Lambda.
9 completed Lamdas averaged 2042 seconds per run. 11 BAF runs averaged 1231 seconds per completed run. I believe thirteen threads and seven astral merits were awarded during failures. That means 104 threads, 88 astral merits, and 8 empyrean merits were earned in 20 completed runs totaling approximately 31919 seconds, or 8.87 hours. That then means my average earning rate on *successful* runs was about 13.2 threads per hour, 10.7 astral merits per hour, and about 0.9 empyrean merit per hour.
I also believe I earned 1 common, 21 uncommon, and 4 rare drops total across all runs. That's 26 drops, more than the number of successful runs, because you can earn random drops at certain times. I think the count is correct.
If I break everything down in the same manner as Liquid did into threads, that's a bit tricky because as you can see I was uncommon-overloaded. Here is what I have currently slotted:
Ion Core Judgment
Reactive Interface
Barrier Total Radial Invocation
The uncommon judgment took 5 commons and 1 uncommon. The common interface took 3 commons. The rare barrier took 7 commons, 1 uncommon, and a rare.
So, I ended up using 15 commons, 2 uncommons, and a rare. However, I only had one actual common. So I had to convert stuff to make those commons. The exact way you do this, and what you decide to keep and breakdown changes what things are worth. Rather than trying to figure out the best way, I'll just state what I actually did. I broke down 20 astral merits for a total of 80 threads. I also broke down 7 uncommons for about 63 threads (I don't have the precise count, so I'm taking the average here - I know I broke down 10 by counting what's left). I also converted some shards into threads: 40 total.
I ended up with the equivalent of using 15 * 20 + 2 * 60 + 340 = 760 thread-equivalents, using Liquid's methodology. I'm left with the equivalent in breakdown of:
14 actual threads
13 * 9 = 117 threads from uncommon drops
75 * 4 = 300 threads from astral merits
8 * 20 = 160 threads from empyrean merits
3 * 340 = 1020 threads from rare drops
Total: 1611
Grand total: 2371 thread-equivalents. That's across all successful and unsuccessful runs. Eliminating the 41 thread equivalents from unsuccessful runs leaves 2331 thread-equivalents in 20 successful runs over 8.87 hours. That's 263 thread-equivalents per hour.
Interestingly, that is almost exactly one hundred times the *solo* shard earning rate of my MA/SR scrapper running at 0x8. Very roughly, that is about 30 times my guestimate for my ITF earning rate for plows (about 9.3 shards per hour). Nearly *half* of that multiplier comes from rare trial drops.
None of these calculations include iXP. At the moment that character has Judgment, Interface, and Destiny unlocked and Lore about 82% unlocked. That is, very roughly, worth about 142 threads. That's actually small potatoes compared to the rest of the numbers.
Getting back to the issue of rares. Its obvious that the non-trial earning rare is more competitive for common and uncommon incarnate powers than for rare and very rare powers. If the rare incarnate components are valued at breakdown rather than usage and the aim is to get common and uncommon powers, and iXP is put in, then my thread earning rate becomes something much closer to 1250 threads in 8.87 hours or 141 threads per hour: fifteen times my ITF estimate in shards (I still need to figure out a good way to extract those statistics). Its a distinct question, I believe, if its fair for the non-trial costs to escalate the higher the tier power you're going for becomes. I think to at least some degree that's not unreasonable.
In any case, for me to get to the same place my main is now running nothing but ITFs, my rough estimate is that I would have to run about 180 ITFs to get to the roughly the same place if I didn't care to reach rare incarnate powers, and about 360 of them if I did. That's a lot of them, although running one a day would achieve that in about one year. That seems to be inconsistent with a circa 3 year estimate that is floating around out there, and running one ITF a day is actually a far lower activity level than the people who are running trials now are putting it.
One year of an ITF a day sounds like a lot of play, and it is. On the other hand, its not an astronomical level of effort, and its not entirely absurd considering that's the level of activity necessary to match the fact I got four rare drops in four days running trials, valuing those drops at their maximum value. But that's just my opinion. I'm sure others will have a different opinion of these same numbers. I tried to be as complete as possible so others could dissect them accordingly. Also, I think I got them accurate, although there's a ton of logs to analyze even with some automation assistance: there might be a miscount of a couple threads here or there, but nothing I think that has material impact.
Left as an exercise for the reader is how many thread-equivalents this post cost in opportunity-cost.
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In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
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Quote:
I'm not sure what you mean by that, since I wasn't attempting to echo anyone: I was stating the converse of the position I was responding to. So in that sense, the argument such as it is was entirely my own, and not anyone elses.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I think you're misappropriating an argument here, if ever so slightly.
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Quote:
| I can only speak for myself and at most a couple of other people, but the complaint in itself was never about the specific Trials, themselves, or the specific implementations or the specific numbers. Those can be changed and tweaked as time moves on. My biggest complaint and biggest fear lies elsewhere completely. It lies in a very pertinent question: Where is this game headed? |
Quote:
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What concerns me the most, however, is this apparent drive to sweep said discontent under the rug by discrediting the people feeling it, and vilifying them as some kind of intellectual vandals seeking to take parts out of the game down seemingly out of sheer malice. This is a major change for the game, and I don't think you can afford to ignore its effect on the community as a whole. |
Is the end game and its collateral consequences a major change for the game? Probably. Is it the biggest, most controversial, or most heatedly debated in the game's history? Probably not. I've been there for basically all of them, and not just observing from the sidelines either: I've put myself into the cross-fire in essentially every shooting-war the forums have had since I first signed in. So my perspective is from someone that has not just seen it all, but has taken actual bullets from every single one of them. They're *all* heated, *all* emotional, *all* important to someone, and *all* critical moments in the game's future from someone's perspective. That's not to belittle your perspective, but just to give that perspective some, well, perspective. Just look at the quoted passage above: "they" vilify by falsely accusing "us" of malice. You realize "they" just saw "you" maliciously and falsely accuse them of vilification. Its actually just that easy.
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In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
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i19+ Has kept me playing the game. It's also brought back a few friends. I'm content. :P
<:[ shark goes nom nom nom ]:>
[QUOTE=theOcho;3409811]As to the REAL reason I'll be leaving, I'm afraid it is indeed because Tamaki Revolution dc'd on me during a RSF.[/QUOTE]