Single-player & small team incarnate progression

Hi guys! I've been following the 'Incarnate Rewards' thread in the Developer's Corner section, and noticed & read a bit of the 'Incarnate Grindfest' thread in the open beta board & it's been kind of depressing. Rather than succumbing to that depression, I thought I'd throw out this idea for scrutinization by you. I'm pretty sure I haven't thought of everything, so feel free to tell me & whoever else reads these boards in excruciating detail what is exactly wrong with this idea. Or what's right. Whatever. That's what these boards & this section in particular are for right?

Anyway... here's the suggestion:

Motivation:
With the introduction of the Alpha slot, some players objected that in order to advance their characters they were being forced into teaming content. I can’t imagine they’re any happier with the incarnate trial content, as it “forces” them onto even larger “teams.” With the introduction of incarnate trials some other players who seem to like the trials well enough, have complained that the limited number of trials is too “grindy.” Additionally, another subset of players is unhappy with the participation metric, and yet another is peeved at the inclusion of random drops. I believe this proposal addresses these concerns, and hopefully provides both the player’s and the development team with an agreeable level of rewards for effort. Additionally, it is my hope that because I’m stealing ideas/formats from systems already in-game that it would be easier/quicker to implement. Of course, since I’ve never worked in a game development job, or even have any real direct knowledge of programming, I could be totally wrong & it would be a pain in the tuchus to implement & I’ve just wasted everyone’s time. *shrug* It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Concept:

A selfish malcontent sees the danger posed by Cole & his plans, but doesn’t care a lick for all the big grand plans to throw back Cole’s planned invasion. His idea to stop Cole’s plan is to send similarly self-interested malcontents into Praetoria to cause mayhem & destruction as widely as possible. This serves multiple goals.

1. It denies Cole the raw materials needed to arm & equip his armed forces
2. It denies Cole the manufacturing facilities to create his engines of destruction
3. It denies Cole the training facilities to train his troops
4. It can directly deny Cole use of his troops & war machines because we killed them all! (Or blew them to smithereens!)
5. It ties up Coles military & police forces protecting these targets, therefore they cannot be used in the invasion.
6. The raider gets to steal some phat loot from that ****** Cole

The primary problem I see here is that tip missions can be made arbitrarily trivial to complete. Its not hard to complete a normal tip mission in a minute or two. Unless you are really careful with the mission design, you could be earning five astral merits a day and one empyrean merit every two days for virtually no time.

Speed is important because tip missions are not time gated, they are time gated per character. Someone with a lot of alts could conceivably run nothing but these special tip missions on all their alts and earn merits faster than running trials unless the missions were very long. And making a lot of very involved and long running missions for this system could take a lot of developer time.

Honestly, I've been thinking of an alternative to this that is even more strongly gated in terms of total reward, but less gated in terms of time. I was thinking about awarding astral or empyrean merits for completing a story arc for the first time, either while leveling or through Ouroboros. I haven't thought through all the numbers yet (in terms of number of arcs that exist, the total values and earning rates, etc) but story arcs are less vulnerable to time manipulation and being non-repeatable means we don't have to specifically time gate them.

Its only a germ of an idea and there are lots of details and problems that I haven't thought through yet, but one related idea was to make Prometheus the Ouroboros contact for this, and using the in-game fictional excuse of revisiting the past to prepare the player for becoming an incarnate he would offer a restricted list of story arcs as pseudo task forces but with specific minimum settings in force. Stealing a page from EvilGeko's Incarnate Strikes idea, the difficulty you choose would determine the final incarnate reward you would get, probably threads or merits.

The advantage is the content already exists, and being non-repeatable it can't be farmed. But there's enough story arc content that at least for the people who do solo and do have only a limited playing time, you'd buy a lot of time to come up with more dedicated solo and small-team incarnate content. Most players with only a couple hours a week to play will take quite a while to finish playing a large set of story arcs. And if you solo, story arcs can be interrupted and resumed at any time for people with unpredictable playing schedules.

These are some great ideas. I'm thinking that they could just ensure that the individual missions have some sort of time-requirement that forces the missions to last at least 10 minutes each, so in about an hour, you can get 5 Astrals (no more than that and an Emp a day), which is about as long as it takes to run a BAF or Lambda (forming/wait time included), which already get you at least 3 Astrals, 1 Emp, and a component drop.

Make it so!

This would be a great way to provide incarnate progression of solos and teams outside of the league structure.

Alrighty, I think I may be posting here more to work things out loud and hopefully entertain you as I realize stupidly obvious holes in my thinking. I'll still happily accept insight from you my fellows, as sometimes, I'll NEED that ol' 2x4 to the head to get my thinking straight.

Now that I'm home from work, not feeling pressured to get this idea out of my head & out for all to see and then get back to work, do I see how colossally my initial presentation was undervaluing Astral & Empyrean merits. I've had time to really think about what Arcana meant by what she said & by what the link to EvilGeko's idea suggests. Now that I think about what you do to earn those merits in the trials, do I get a better understanding of why Arcana & Geko are setting their reward thresholds where they do.

(BTW I haven't read any of the posts between Arcana's and this one at this point, I wanted to make this post prior to being influenced by them.)

While I think there are probably still tons of mistakes in the initial suggestion, the lesson I'm getting now is that I was too enamored of the rate of reward & not thinking enough about what should be done to earn them & how that might affect the game.

I still want to see what I can salvage from my initial proposal & see if it can be developed into something useful to suggest/present to the dev team & the player base.

I think this'll be a fun exercise for me to play at being a developer and in a sort of mental exhibitionism. I like to think I'm open-minded & have a thick skin, I guess I'll see!

Now to read the "new" posts!

Ooh... responses flowing in to EvilGeko's thread that Arcana linked to are pretty good! (the kind of response I was hoping for here). Sooo tempting to take the easy route & follow his thread & leave this one to whither. I think a more reasonable approach for me is to follow his thread, mine it for ideas & then post more refined ideas here for my mental exercise (and whoever may be here's entertainment.)

I do encourage you to hang on to your ideas and not get mired in the odd debate over how many threads a solo/team option can give without causing a mass exodus from the trials. There are a number of advantages I see to your plan:

1) From a story-driven perspective, it's very enticing to me. "Incarnate difficulty" settings for existing TFs, or Prometheus sending me back in time, are fine ideas - just not as interesting or focused on free-choice for the individual. I (or my characters) would love the ability to decide, at any moment, to raid Praetorian military or scientific targets. Even though I'm all heroside, the "must bring friends" league/trial design leaves me feeling less significant. As Incarnate heroes, my characters would like the freedom to use their powers and to make decisions to push the war toward a Primal-Earth victory. That would feel...significant. I can see even stronger reasons for many players who have villains and rogues to prefer this concept over the other proposals.

2) I've done over two hundred trials. They are my only reasonable advancement path above alpha. I'll put it as gently as I can - variety would be wonderful, and if variety isn't provided then I will seek it elsewhere. The desire for variety will not be satisfied with a third trial or even 100 trials. Variety = multiple paths, each one reasonably rewarding according to my definition of reasonable, for different playstyles. Your idea goes far toward satisfying the requests for soloing and small teaming options, and even helps many (like me) who would like to mix it with the trials; for times when a trial is not running, or when a player cannot commit to a structured encounter for any number of reasons (family, connection issues, medical, being on call...).

3) Unlike storyarcs through Ouro, tip missions could be abandoned mid-mission without major loss or simply alternated with other storyarc/TF content on a per-mission basis. This flexibility is valuable and can help reduce the "starting to feel grindy" or "standing around waiting for Trial/TF to start" factors. If the storyarc idea is designed well, instead of locking characters into Ouro mode, it could overcome the problem I mentioned. However, anything storyarc-based must still deal fairly with people who join/leave a team partway through, especially if the biggest rewards are only granted at the end. Incarnate tips could avoid this problem by simply reusing the alignment tips tech, where each mission earns credit on a personal progress bar rather than on the mission holder's contact progress bar.

4) If a further enhancement to the LFG queue allows queuing from within missions, even if only from inside Incarnate tip missions...the story makes complete sense. My character could notice (or be notified of) a major conflict (the trial starting up) while in Praetoria already, and choose to assist or not.

5) Strong potential for players to create tip-style missions in the AE, which the developers could tweak to fit the requirements (difficulty, time, and story) and copy-paste into an expanding list of valid missions. I think a number of AE mission-makers would enjoy the chance to contribute to the incarnate storyline, even if only "at the edges" through repeatable tip-style missions that strike a variety of Praetorian targets, assist Resistance members, or even rescue innocent Praetorian citizens from the crossfire. If the developers have some spare time and wish to add in-mission choices, that would be even more impressive. Such choices could be along the loyalist/resistance spectrum, the slow vs fast path to power from the well, or hero/rogue/villain/vigilante (though perhaps not affecting alignment due to being minor choices or not being known to Primal Earth).

6) It can be adapted to future incarnate content as well, to continue to provide soloing and small-to-large teaming options against The Coming Storm. A poorly-designed solo option might get sidelined by that transition, but yours seems flexible enough. Choosing an inflexible system now might force us back into "only leagues and trials" mode with The Coming Storm as we may go through another content bottleneck. I fully understand that the developers have limited resources with which to create content, so a solo/team option that has the potential to survive (and thrive?) under that strain gets five stars from me.


Hopefully this is useful feedback, and feel free to take any ideas...they are open source!
I will of course look at the ideas in the linked thread, hopefully they have much in common.

A nice and simple idea indeed I like anything that adds options to the game without causing imbalance. as you point out not all players want to team or prefer to play in Duos and option which is not given much care and attention in the current trials system.

An addition to standard tip missions you could include mayhem and safeguard type missions (under the same contraints as the tip mission timers) with objectives that better suit a small team or solo character focussing on stealth than an army steamrolling everything in its path. (sabotage the portal generator and destroy any cloning vats you come across along the way. each vat destroyed raises the alert level, once alert is triggered you have to avoid detection and make it to the exit; safeguard a primal earth target from a minor praetorian incursion).

This could easily be expanded to allow more praetorian side content as well. Tip missions to help or hinder the invasion. mayhem/safeguard missions to destroy a primal object or defend a praetorian location.

They would also have the bonus of being both solo and standard size team friendly and utilise an eisting mechanic to do so.

Personally, I believe that any task which gates one large reward at the end is going to encourage people to rush it, skip to the end and repeat it as many times as possible. Yes, you can time-gate it (and you probably should) but time-gating is a really bad solution when it's the ONLY solution present. If you time-gate an activity to too long a period, you discourage people from playing past the gate, and if you time-gate it to too short a period then you just have speed gamers farming it for disproportionate gains.

I personally look to experience and what it has done to the game for me. I've always had a particular quirk when it comes to RPGs - I want to accomplish and obtain EVERYTHING I can before I meet a particular milestone, because in the RPGs of old, that meant I was "ahead of the game" and better prepared for its difficulties. More broadly, every time you have an activity which is itself directly rewarding with a smaller reward at the end, you give people more incentive to dive into the activity itself, rather than skipping to the end. If you take one big reward and spread it into bread crumbs all along the way, you make players more interested in the way than in the final destination. Yes, they can skip content, but that won't save them time or effort in the long run, it'll just replace time and effort spent doing one thing with time and effort spent doing another.

The experience system we have, I think, is about the best expression of this notion, at least looking at just City of Heroes. Yes, you CAN speed-run to the end of missions and collect mission rewards fast, but killing everything along the way is about on par with that. What this means is you have motivation to take your time, because the more enemies you kill along the way, the more reward you will leave the mission with. In fact, I recall clearing a large outdoor mission and scoring around 150 000 experience points. When I finished the mission, it gave me just 15 000.

I say about the Incarnate system what I've always said about it: I'd prefer to see progress broken down into far more, far smaller pieces which drop far more frequently, possibly even with a guarantee. Even if it actually took longer, removing the random aspect from the whole thing and removing the "big reward at the end, time sink before that" I'd still have a much more positive response to it. The trick here is that I'll be rewarded for my actions, not just for the results. And, really, the trick to making a cool game is to get the player interested in PLAYING it more than he is interested in BEATING it.

A system which rewards each micro step of actual gameplay is far superior to one which only gives rewards at the end, at least in my book. The former motivates players to play it all the way through, while the latter makes players resent the actual gameplay as a no-reward gate. And I'd much rather have the former.

Quote:

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.