Solo content.

Betterment? You mean "to make money". Having the game appeal to the widest possible variety of playstyles works toward that goal.

And? The best way to make money off us is to keep us entertained and happy. What's insulting about it?

And I like them even more than I thought I would - which surprised me

Nothing personal, Golden Girl, but I've been in a league with you, and it does not surprise me that our preferences are diametrically opposed. The difference is that *I* am not trying to impose my version of "the right way to play" on everyone else.

I have a different theory. The argument that any change is just going to annoy a portion of your subscriber base to the point that they quit is a dead end. For any of those changes, including the introduction of endgame, the argument can be easily adapted to both sides. For all of those that are annoyed by the introduction and quit, there is likely a significant portion that have been annoyed by the lack of repeatable endgame over the last seven years, who have also quit. Thus, the argument would leave the developers in a position where they simply couldn't win, and should be completely discarded.

I'm not either

Liberty?

Yeah, I used to run occasionally with some folks over there. A lot of them are gone now, for various reasons. My home's always been Protector, but I've got a hero or two on every server.

Ah yes, the old "more reward = you HAVE to group" fallacy. You don't have to group if you don't want to. No one is holding a gun to your head. You will never find me advocating the position that you shouldn't get any rewards for playing solo. You just shouldn't expect the same level of rewards if you don't.

I'm about 99% sure that you're taking this grossly out of context. I'd like to see what led up to this alleged statement and what the exact quote was. I understand what they're getting at, but I'm not surprised that people pushing an agenda would miss the point.

[Not to anyone in particular]

People keep acting all insulted at the idea of the devs knowing better than they do how to keep their long-term interest. Hello!!? That's why they're devs! That's their job, it's how they feed their family. That's what they've been doing for years, with a metric crapton of experience in gaming, development, industry knowledge, and in most cases, formal training to back it up. If it were so easy that any armchair hack could do it, maybe even you would have a genre-defining game on the market. I don't even hold myself to the standard of knowing better than the devs what's in the best long-term interest of the game's well-being, why would I trust you over them? Especially when I'm having a blast?

Turn this around for a minute. What do you do for a living? Whatever it is, how much weight would you put in an e-mail from Matt Miller telling you how to do your job? If he called me up and told me how to support a datacenter, would I listen to his thoughts? As long as he wasn't spewing them at me with vitriol, sure. But in the end, I'm going to do what I feel is best given my education, training, and experience. I expect no less from the developers, and neither should you.

I remember around a year or so ago, there was yet another of these blowups over something totally insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I distinctly remember posting, "In a year or two, no one will even remember this argument took place." Hell, I can't even remember what it was about now, but whatever it was, it was a gross insult to the players, people were leaving in droves, and if you listened to the usual suspects, you would have thought that the game were on its last legs because of whatever grave injustice had been committed. And yet, here we all are.

I know for a fact that in another year, we'll probably have had at least two or three more hornet nests stirred up. People won't even remember the great "solo Incarnate" debates. Who cares about that when Issue 21 is going to destroy the game? And Issue 22, well, that's just a slap in the face! And Issue 23 just proves that they don't listen to the players at all. The silver lining is that through it all, here we are, the game just keeps getting better and better, and the vast majority of players are blissfully ignorant of the things that we keep being told on the forums by a self-selected vocal minority are so important to hate.

I don't think I've ever personally teamed with Golden Girl, but I have watched my roommate team with her. I remember it because we had actually sent a few messages back and forth on the forum at the time. She was nothing but nice, there was never sense of imposition, and I wouldn't hesitate to team with her any time. In fact, now that I have a character on Defiant, I'm hoping to get the chance to.

I'm glad you had a good experience.

Because the game is perfect, the Devs have never put a foot wrong and have never changed anything due to player feedback.

Uh huh. Yep.

Honestly, I can't really see any launch game decisions I really disagree with. A bunch of bugs or unintentional mishaps? Yes. A bunch of stuff that was badly designed from the start? Yeah. But otherwise? It's mostly just been improvements to a rather flawed undergirding.

I already posted the entire conversation above. Take it in whatever context you please.

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

it is a balance. some people dislike the change, some very much so, some others, including a poster with whom i have fought for years now have posted how a real endgame has caused him to return and reactivate his sub. nobody has real numbers past heavily biased anecdotes, and objectively saying that it has either been universally loved or universally disliked is very likely inaccurate. its being given a chance by a good number of players, it will have to be improved, and change will scare some people into leaving, this is unavoidable and staying exactly the same(focusing on tfs and mechanically similar story arc missions) may or may not have caused just as many people to leave out of boredom, and continued lack of challenge. there really are no facts at evidence other than some people on the internet are angry, as they always are, and a new system will need refined several times before it becomes optimal.

The problem is the system has already been optimised by the current market leader.

But no rather than having y'know a normal TF sized team advancement mode (which might be a little bit slower than the raid (I believe they are called 'heroics')) as well as the raids, they went just with raids and told us there might be pie for us tomorrow. Unfortunately 'tomorrow' appears to be a mixture of condescending parental ‘maybe’ and Valve time. I.E ‘Maybe in two years after subscription numbers have slipped to the point we are worried about our jobs’.

Only it isn't. The best way to make money off us is to get us addicted to an unhealthy degree. That's what the Incarnate system is designed to do, and that is what I find insulting. I'm just getting a little weary of Skinner box design games.

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.

I can. Non-scaling AVs and the intention to have bosses impossible to solo, leading to the infamous I4 Boss Buff which got rolled back within a week of hitting Live. Then there's also the "if you build it, they will come" approach to designing Hazard Zones, and conversely the "not worth your time" design for missions. Jack's continued arguments against real numbers and the ability to exemplar. The notion of mutually-exclusive armours. The whole game's balance when it went Live was just a mess, and a lot of those problems persist even to this day.

There was nothing unintentional about putting AVs at the end of story arcs, thus making them impossible for the vast majority of people to defeat solo. The only reason that decision was overturned is because people like me never accepted it and kept calling for an alternative, which came in the form of AVs scaling down to EBs. And I still consider that to be probably by far the best change to happen to the game in its entire history.

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 day a dev team starts worrying about /ragequits is the day they should start making console games. MMORPG developers need a stronger spine than that.

Do you remember what the game was at launch? It was significantly less solo-friendly than it is now and Jack most certainly was openly trying to make people play the way he intended. It took a lot of fights to change the game to the state it's in now.

Yeah, it was much more a an old school teaming game. The big bads were all AV's. Scrimping to save up for SO's. Ugh.

And the only level 50 TFs were in the Shadow Shard

I'm only speaking for myself, here.

I don't play much; maybe 6-8 hours a week, broken into 3-4 play sessions. I have only ever done two to three Task Forces, back when I had more time to play. I mostly run Tip Missions, because that way I can "save up" my play time (by earning Hero Merits) to get "good stuff". I run solo, or team with my spouse (who plays even less than I do), or with a very short list of friends.

Before the Incarnate system, I was excited at the prospect of getting to Level 50 on either of my "mains". I could then fine-tune them with the Invention system, particularly with Hero Merits, and get them to the very upper levels of performance. Even with my quite-limited time investment, I could "max out" a character. And as others have mentioned, CoX is actually pretty good, in general, at making sure you do feel that you're getting better-and-better - you can take on larger spawns of higher difficulty; there was an "awesome level" that I could attain, even playing on a purely casual basis.

Now, there's a level of power I'll simply never obtain.

It is my feeling - and I understand some will debate the "truthiness" of it, but it's definitely my feeling - that my play-time doesn't suit itself to Incarnate Trials. And I now feel as if the "upper echelons" of gameplay - which I was once able to look forward to reaching, on a "wow, imagine that I can get there someday" - are now out of reach. And it's dramatically altered my interest in playing characters over level 40.

I still make new alts, and I still enjoy the game. And yeah, I still run Tips on my 40+ characters, sometimes. But on the whole, the entire game is less engaging, specifically because there's a whole scale of power I know I'm never going to reach.

A solo option that I could work on at my own pace - even glacier-slowly - would keep me working towards Incarnate power. But currently, they're essentially unachievable to me.

tl;dr - The reason the "fun" drained is that the goalposts moved. I was working on the old goalposts, and comfortable with my rate-of-advancement towards them; I now feel I'll never reach the new goalposts. That changes the "fun quality" of running towards them.

Great post. However, I will challenge you a bit on some of your contentions. The trials typically take 30-40 mins. of play. Depending on what server you're on, if you can get 1-2 trials a week, you'll slowly but surely get towards that level of power. Also, doing the Weekly Strike Target is an absolutely reasonable way to engage the Incarnate system now. You can easily move up towards uncommons on a casual play schedule doing them.

I don't quarrel with the idea that you can't advance as fast as others. But I do quarrel with the idea that you 'can't' reach the new goalposts. It will be slow, yes. But take your time, have fun, and the rewards will come in time.

The trials take 30-40 minutes if you don't count the time spent forming them. On a less populated server during off-hours, that time can be significant.