Ok, listen, this is starting to get to a critical mass

I believe that expression is specific to the USA and the British equivalent would be 'Regimental'.

Here's something I want to say about just hanging out, and a little anecdote on the subject in particular.

Some friends of mine have a private server for an FPS game I'm apparently not allowed to mention. I live in Eastern Europe, their server is in the US, which means I'm seeing over 300 ping to it. When I attempted to decline an invitation to a planned event on said server, I was at first accused of just wanting to win and score points and be inconsiderate of the community, because... You know, why would I want a game that's actually fun to play when I have other people, right? When I attempted to explain, I was then told to join anyway, because even if I couldn't play for ****, we could all still have a fun evening over team-speak and just goof off. I've elected to just give up and not respond for fear of coming off like too big a jerk.

But the truth of the matter is that if I sit down to play a fun game, I want to play a fun game. If I'm just going to be hanging out, hanging out, hanging out with my family, having ourselves a party, then I don't need to play a game to do it. If I sit down to play a game, with or without friends, I prefer to focus on playing that game. I don't play games, single- or multi-player for the banter, the company, the community or the interaction with other people. I play them because I like the actual games. All of the above is, of course, always welcome, when it doesn't come at the expense of the actual game.

And the funny thing is I always end up pegged as the inconsiderate one for putting game before people, even though putting people before game makes me not want to play the game to begin with. Funny how that works.

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.

Nah. In the UK "Regimental" would mean formal and "going commando" means the lack of pants. Yes, I did say "pants", which is the correct name for underwear and not a term to be used to describe trousers

Yep, going Commando in the UK means without underwear, a popular choice on laundry day.

However, in my house, any mention of the term is generally met by hundreds of quotes from the greatest action movie ever, normally all done in poor Austrian accents.

I am farming the BAF atm in order to get tier 3s slotted in all my available Incarnate slots. I play on an en/en/fire blaster. This is what i do:
1. Zone in, activate all buffs/acolades etc.
2. fly to nearest Warwork sand spam attack powers.
3. Fly to Center Court (along with everyone else) and wait for the league's puller to pull NS.
4. When NS is at center court, close to melee range and spam attack powers until she's down.
5. Fly to south choke or north choke depending on where leader sends my team. Drop bonfire, spam attack powers at passing escapees until timer runs out.
6. Fly to center court and wait till league's puller pulls Seige.
7. When Seige at center court, close to melee and spam attack powers.
8. When Seige falls and rezzes, spam attack powers and then alternate between Seige and NS, keeping them at similar damage levels.
9. When they are defeated, grab my reward, 'GJ all' and exit.

Every single BAF is exactly the same. Occasionally, a leader will ask people to congregate at the NW corner of the courts instead of the center, and occasionally, the leader doesn't give any 'team 1 to n chokes , team 2 to s chokes, team 3 to doors' instructions, and then i fly to the south center door/choke and do the escapee bit there.

There is no shuffling of the deck involved in the BAF at all in my experience. I

I'm sure that approach could be used with pretty much any Blaster, but anyone intending to get any AT toon to a fully-slotted Incarnate status will have to repeat the trials over and over with that same toon, and so will soon learn an optimum strategy.

If you want to compare the BAF to poker, it's like a poker game where you're allowed to NOT shuffle the deck if you want.

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

A few other variants than you mentioned. The North wall pull [although that may be your nw courts method]. There's also the Helipad pull spot.

Given both of those locations trivialize the Turrets, they remove that aspect from most trials.

You could also attempt for seperated defeats. However to be honest, those are really just work for the league leader to try to get balanced teams [since expecting the players to be able to pay attention to the damage themselves is asking a bit much].

But to be honest, most of the variance just gets thrown out if your goal is just to farm, since there is an easy/easiest path to do it. Same as just any other content on farm status. You don't really vary it up that much.

Part of the reason that trials seem so grindy to me is that there's this community memory effect that favors stencil-strategies like these. It makes every run feel the same.

When I20 launched, the first few runs I did were painful. Eventually, though, the community as a whole started to learn more about the task and what they needed to do to beat it, and runs started to experiment with various strategies for doing so. Some of them even worked! This was the 'sweet spot' of difficulty level. Failures still occurred, but when they happened, there was this 'oh, so close!' feeling afterwards rather than 'well, that sucked.'

Once that 'sweet spot' disappears, though, it's gone forever. The community settles on a strategy that strikes the best possible compromise between simplicity, ease of implementation, and success rate. The vast majority of league members along for the ride are familiar with the most common strategies and they know exactly what they need to do to win. Failure becomes rare because deviation from the accepted methods becomes rare. As far as the community is concerned, the need to adapt to the nonstandard objectives and mob behaviors has been met. The experimentation phase - the 'fun' bit, arguably - is over and isn't coming back. There's no reason to when the standard fare is so efficient and consistently rewarding.

If the Man from Mars gets on an average BAF, his ignorance won't affect things at all. Even though he's a complete newbie, it's still going to be a curbstomp run. With that trial in particular, his knowledge of the how or why of things is almost entirely irrelevant, since most of the rest of the league will know the steps of the dance and there's nothing that any one person could do to ruin the outcome. He's still going to leave with a component, an Empyrean merit, and a handful of Astrals. Really, if he just treated the whole affair as a grand-scale newspaper mission and followed his teammates around spamming his powers, it's unlikely that anyone would even know he was a newbie.

I don't know what they could do to prevent this from happening beyond adding some element of randomness to the events to force the league to switch tactics on the fly or design trials for smaller groups (which is probably against their design rules for these things, and is therefore unlikely to happen).

There were some nice suggestions about randomizing things with the Trials. However, problems occur when you have a drastic difference in difficulty between certain components. I like the mention CoP there because Purple-mode is significantly harder than Red, and the complications there in.

Not to say that random components wouldn't work, they really can, it's just a difficult balance to make the variance interesting and not annoying. Especially since unlike some other raid-style encounters, we don't suffer from a lockout. It's alot easier to just decide to screw it and hope for an easier raid.

I do think 'hard modes' are a nice way to add some variance, but there needs to be a reasonable award for them, and personally, Astral Merits aren't worth it to me. And well, it's really just a delay of farm mode, since at least with BAF, it's not too hard to do a Mo run. Conversely, I don't see many Lambda master component runs going on either, it's just too frustrating of a difficulty hike.

"Where's Sully?"

"I let him go."

Greatest one liner Arnold movie of all time.

The short 'evolution' of a trial:

Phase 1: first time run for everyone on the League, exploring, screenies, maybe.
Phase 2: 'exploration' of strategies.
Phase 3: optimal strategy is settled on and that's how it's always done forevermore

is surely inevitable. From launch of a trial, Phase 1 can surely be measurable in hours at most (and it might even be exhausted during beta, since Players present during Beta wil be around on the trials at live launch to show folks how to do them).

Phase 2 takes about a week or two, it seems.

So three weeks tops after launch, trials are whack-a-mole runs being farmed in exactly the same way forever.

Eco

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Yes, I knew that part. My cousin was in London and visited a clothing store and asked about the "plaid pants". The staff were confused until she pointed them out and they responded, "Ah! The tartan trousers."

A big difference in the comparitive play experience of a trial/TF and a solo or small team arc or series of missions is that generally you can 'stop and smell the roses' in the latter.

I've been of the opinion for a long time that everything in the game should be scaled for different team sizes, down to solo - with comparitively scaled rewards as well. IMO trials should be too.

Eco

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Trials also have a lot more momentum than TFs because of the larger amount of people in it. I recall I think it was last year when I ran I... Some TF, I don't remember which, but we ran it with the minimum of four people that it allowed. In that TF, at one point we took a lunch break of about 20 minutes, any time someone wanted to go to the loo or stop to read text, we waited, every time someone wanted to defeat all or hit a specific objective first, we did so.

Basically, on a small TF or other single-team task where organisation isn't necessary, it isn't necessary to play the task in the one single most efficient manner possible. You play it however you like, and finding a compromise between four people isn't all that hard most of the time. Compare that to swaying 23 other people and doing something that's not very efficient - not gonna' happen. Ain't a person alive who has enough charisma to convince 23 people to give him a 10 minute potty break in a 45 minute Trial. Not gonna' happen, especially when no one specific person is vital to success.

---

Here's some more food for thought: No MMO in history can ever hope to entertain people solely on novelty. Every bit of content becomes old hat within the same month in which it is released. Trying to outpace players with content additions does not work. Therefore, designing content that's supposed to work on its novelty, its mystery or the difficulty in figuring it out is throwing money off a bridge. Your content will be novel, difficult and unknown for all of a week, if it isn't figured out the day it releases. And then what?

As far as I'm concerned, all content in an MMO should be designed with either a strong emphasis on replayability, or at the very least with the awareness that it WILL be replayed over and over again, so annoying time sinks and fiddly mechanics just get in the way. Counter-intuitively, the more complex, longer and fiddly a task is, the less its replayability value becomes. Sure, it's fun to do once, maybe twice, but over and over again? Gimme a break! That's why I spend so much of my solo time on old Launch story arcs - it's because they give me simple, clear, straightforward missions that I can enjoy without irritation even when I can quite contact dialogue with my eyes closed.

I'll tell you a basic truth, at least as I see it. If I only intend to run a piece of content once, then I want the experience to be damn memorable, exhausting and exciting. If I want to run a piece of content several times, then I don't want chance involved with it so I can repeat my old results. If I'm planning on running a piece of content over ten times, and possibly dozens and dozens, then I want it to be as simple as possible, as straight-forward as possible and require me to jump through as few "I am still awake!" attention tests as is absolutely necessary.

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 only exception I'd toss in there would be traditional trials. Since they also have a time constraint going on.

I wouldn't want to run ITF 30 times on any character either.

Interesting, I can see know why our opinions differ since I guess I never truly farmed BAF. Back when I20 first released, I ran a lot of trials for about 3 weeks. At first, we had a lot of variance as we tried out different things. We also spent a lot of runs doing various things to get the various BAF badges.

Now when I run trials, I'll join a team and run a Lambda then BAF (or a BAF then Lambda). Normally after 1 or 2 trials I head out to do something else. If I feel like more trials I might stay, but I will switch characters to change my experience. I oftentimes still get to play in runs where we will do the more fun methods of Keep 'Em Separated and/or shoot for Strong and Pretty (I lead trials, so I can make that call myself and I'll occasionally suggest it to leagues I am on even when not leading, it doesn't always work, but sometimes it will).

If you are engaging in the BAF repeatedly with the same character and using the same strategy with mostly the same other leaguemates, then I agree with your assessment. I would not do that to myself. No reward is worth that mind-numbing monotony, IMO. However, that mind-numbing monotony is not the fault of the game designers.

I only have two 50s, one hero and one villain. I'm currently Incarnating my hero. I join PuGs in Pocket D on Freedom to trial ; I haven't noticed any hreat consistency in the Players I'm teaming with - everyone's there to grind, not make friends.

Eco

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Heh, I've probably run it way more than I've run the trials combined, and for far less rewards.

I mean, what else was there to do?

I'd rather run ITF 30 times than BAF.

Luckily you don't need to run the BAF 30 times. (I don't even think you need to run 30 combined trials on one character)

In order to achieve what? Get a single common? Achieve the two level shifts? Get uncommons in all four slots?

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.

Depends a lot on your luck. As Sam points out, 'To do what?' is a valid question.

If you want the stuff that's locked behind E-Merits, yes you will need to do a bit more than 30 Trials.

And if the RNG isn't your friend, 30 trials at least for a T4 [if that is your goal, I'd also direct you to Arcanaville's posts regarding T4 being a stretch goal].

Further, my controller who started going through the grind after 20.5 has done about 30 trials already, and has only unlocked Judgement so far [Interface is close at least]. This is due to the iXP share issue, yes, but it is still a real factor now.