Incarnate rewards based on participation?

I was reading through the Producer's letter (TBH looking for points to argue with people more. ) and I reread this bit by Second Measure:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Second Measure Rewarding We also want you to feel rewarded for participation, and want everyone to have an equal chance at getting a reward, whether you are healing or buffing or debuffing or using pointy things to make moving things fall down. We also don’t want to heavily reward people who don’t contribute to the team effort. So when you help your team, you will get the good stuff. The more you help, the cooler the stuff will be, and/or the faster you will climb the Incarnate Abilities tree. But we also know everyone has a different level of investment, and persistence will pay off in the long run.

Second Measure's February Letter

I've been wondering why I seem to be particularly lucky on these trials. I've gotten multiple rares and very rares and only a couple of commons and ONE uncommon. Now I'm wondering if I was lucky at all. Is there something to this bit above. Can you guarantee yourself a rare?

I'm interesting in hearing from other folks' experiences. I'm don't have it in me to leech a trial just to test the theory.

Hmm now a few of us on Union have been talking about this and it very much is random.

I've seen MO runs of the BAF and one of the blasters dealing a ton of damage on the AVs, hunting down runners and generally being a useful sod got himself...

10 threads.

While a friend who died a LOT but also helped out on the buffing/debuffing front got herself...

A Rare.

So we've come to the conclusion that random is indeed random.

I noticed this on the Lamda trial, my first play through netted some pretty good stuff, my second playthrough where my group split up to much and my blaster got seperated inside the base to my silly preoccupation with defeating one of those tubes instead of laying the smack down on Maruader netted me much less.

Ya know, it's a tough call. I really feel like my Dark/Sonic defender gets slighted on these trials because my debuffs are nearly worthless until a AV battle (the mobs melt before Darkest night can finish animating) and I only have one AoE (Howl). Well, I ahve two now due to VOID. Yummy.

Anyways, I've lost count the amount of trials I have run but I'm guessing 15+ and I still have yet to unlock Destiny and Lore (currently at about 15% on each). That to me is BS. And no, I don't leach. I'm a very active participant when I play. Shoot, on ITFs, I herd mobs if the tank or leader is too slow. These trials are no different.

I'm pretty sure any point I had at the beginning of my post is long gone now.

I think XP is based on participation, but not the tables.

That would be pretty evil, and create a interesting dynamic where people would jockey to have thier team asigned the more rewarding tasks.

You definitely get more iXP if you're contributing. This has the unfortunate effect of Incarnate-shifted teammates sapping some iXP due to being able to kill things quicker than someone who isn't.

But I'm pretty sure the reward tables are largely if not totally random. Though bizarrely, I've had better luck getting Very Rares than Rares...which due to how the Incarnate powers work is actually a bad thing.

I dunno, Geko. I've done a lot of these trials since they went live, with a very stabby, very active Stalker. She and her pets have held BAF doors, taken out 9CU spawns and IDF ambushes, chopped up AVs, stopped to throw Barrier and heals at people and the whole nine yards... and the vast majority of the time, I've gotten the Commons table when all was said and done. It took me several days and a ridiculous number of runs just to get the four Rare bits I needed for her tier 3s.

If what Kestrel has been doing in those trials is considered "low end" (and I'd call getting the Commons table the lowest of the bit rewards-), I'd say the scale of what consitutes "active participation" must be pretty ludicrous, if it exists.

Personally, I suspect it's all random. I've always had absolutely crap luck with random drops, and the rate of seeing anything other than commons come up is completely consistant with my RNG experiences elsewhere in the game.

I'm fairly puzzled by this.

I've been playing my Kat/Regen Scrapper almost exclusively to power her up and have not seen a Rare Incarnate Salvage offered on any reward table. I have seen Commons and Uncommons offered up.

Astral and Empyrial Merits have been had though, so no complaints there.
Would love to see the actual metric used by the engine to determine award of these items, but unlikely we will as it could be gamed.

After my first few successful Lambda runs on my stalker, I was wondering why this "random" reward table never gave me any options other than 10 Threads or a Super Inspiration. I poked around on the forums and saw speculation that the reward table gave the better options if you contributed more to the team. That was a frustrating fact to learn, though it didn't totally surpise me, as it was the first couple days of i20, and I had spent most of the Lambda sabotage phase either fighting through the laggy warehouse or getting to know the way out of the hospital very well. Even when I was contributing to that stage, it was more in the way of scouting out the crates, which I imagine the game mechanic doesn't recognize as a contribution.

So, a little discouraged, I decided to give the BAF trial a go. The only other time I had run BAF was a massive day 1 failure on a LFG queue league that just gave me a headache. But now the leader of this full league knew what to do and explained it well. My stalker was able to contribute a lot to the prisoner escape stage and especially against the spawns during the AV fights. Now I was getting Rare reward tables almost every time, and never the 10 Threads option. So this illustrated clearly the concept of "more contribution = greater rewards" for me.

After probably a dozen good BAF runs, I had slotted most of my incarnate powers and went back to try Lambda again. With stronger powers, better leagues and leaders, sound strategy and a new understanding of the way the rewards tables worked, I was able to avoid the 10 Threads table every time. I think the whole experience may have even taught me a few new things about teaming as a stalker, much in the way that the addition of the Alpha slot and WSTs did for me not very long ago.

Though I am yet to see the Very Rare table.

Random is random . .. for the tables and threads.

For the trials themselves, pay attention to what happens to the IXP that goes to the slots when things die that you didn't do much (or any damage on). I think they are speaking about the IXP.

Healing/dbuffing I'm not sure how anyone could test that or how to even show what effect it has since everyone who buffs/debuffs/heals STILL gets threads and IXP. And my support toons have gotten good Ixp while doing their thing.

The reward table keeps giving me uncommons. Kinda tired of it.

Huh...that's a very good point. I've never seen the 10 Thread reward table either.

I highly suspect then that there are only two levels of rewards: The 10 Threads or a Random Component Table.

Seen two rares (both from BAFs where the only thing I did different from other BAF runs I was on was doorsitting and range-coning away at everything coming out), one uncommon (from a Lambda I was leading and therefore spending a good amount of time typing through Oo) and too many commons to count. I dunno. Feels sorta random, but if so my luck makes me a little sad.

Oh, and Interface does unlock faster than Judgement. It just does.

I apologie to the unlucky, but I mostly get rare tables.

I have a ton of rares but I have only unlocked the Judgement slot.

As I said in a similar MM-focused thread, I hope it's not based on participation/contribution. I can maybe see a 10 threads for doing almost nothing vs random table for anything else, but I don't to see the reward roll to be influenced by how the game perceives your contribution.

Every MMO I've played so far that had a system like that it was heavily flawed, with certain actions given more weight than they warranted and other actions that were actually contributing a lot in real terms getting little or no credit from the system (the classic one in more traditional mmos is that healing gets less credit than damage - and buffing none at all - yet it's viewed as vital to accomplish the challenge, so who's gonna be the one to gimp their rewards to fulfil that crucial role?).

Also, once the players figure out how such a contribution system works it becomes possible to game the system - you're no longer just trying to use your powers to best overcome the challenges of the trial, you're now trying to ensure that the powers you use are the ones that give the best reward roll, even if they're doing nothing at all to help the league's success. One other game I played got around the damage-gets-all-the-contribution problem by instead giving contribution based on number of skills/spells used... except once players figured that out they were spamming the zero cooldown resource-node-tracking powers for max contribution while the poor saps that didn't know were getting lower rewards by actually taking part in the battle.

Especially in a game like ours, where there's such an array of different buffs, debuffs, mezzes, and other mechanics - and they are of hugely variable magnitude - I just don't think anyone could come up with a truly fair and accurate participation or contribution system.


So yeah, hope it's just plain random.

I'm really glad I started this thread, because I didn't even know that a 10 thread reward was possible. There has to be something to this.

This is really interesting. I've gotten 3 rares, 1 common, and the rest uncommons (not sure exactly how many were from completions, I've gotten a few badges) I'd have loved for most of those Uncommons to have been Commons, given that you need far more commons (7) than uncommons (1) on the way to a Rare. Maybe all I have to do for commons is leech!

That's kind of messed up. It wouldn't be, if Uncommons broke down to 18-20 components instead of 8-10.

I only learned about the 10 Thread table on Sunday, and someone I know personally got it in Sunday after being very active in blasting and debuffing with a Dark/Dark Defender.

My guess is that if participation matters, it's fairly binary. I would be extremely surprised to learn that it was treated as a weighting factor. To be brutally honest, for it to be as subtle as it would have to be based on what we're seeing, it seems advanced beyond the mechanisms we have seen the devs produce to date, to my knowledge.