Testing Shards to Incarnate Progression

I could get into semantics about how her original post said that trials would be one of the main story elements and whether or not I'd consider the trials we have now to be telling much of a story, but I really don't feel like going down that road.

Either way, my real point was that GG has a history of posting speculation as fact, if not here, then elsewhere.

I just want to say this was some masterful backpedaling.

I have no need to backpedal. My word choice of "baseless" was lacking, I fully admit. I think somebody already called her presumptuous though.

Most of the major points of the Praetorian war storyline are in the Trials - the next one, the Underground Trial, has us face the Avatar of the Hamidon, and learn a huge secret about Praetoria that will "shatter it permanently" - so lore wise, that Trial is going to be huge, and impact on everything we know about Praetoria so far - and then we'll be fighting Tyrant in another Trial as the finale of the Praetorian storyline - plus, we still haven't confronted Mother Mayhem yet, although her asylum in First Ward looks like another Trial map waiting to happen

The Trials are the multi-team version of the Maria Jenkins arc - we confront and defeat the Praetors one after another, with a final showdown with Tyrant to finish it off.

The Admiral Sutter TF is the only part of the Praetorian war storyline that's not Incarnate content - everything else is either an Incarnate TF or a Trial.

The Praetorian war is the first cosmic level storyline we've had, and it's been told entirely through team content, with the bulk of it being Trials.
The next cosmic storyline appears to be the Coming Storm - a threat even greater than Tyrant and the loyalists - and if the Praetorian threat was so great that it forced heroes and villains to join together to deal with it in multi-team Trials, then the even more dangerous Coming Storm will do the same.

"Storyline." Like I said, not even bothering.

Seemed like Diabolique's Tower might do too.

I disagree - Praetoria is not "team content" yet acts as backstory and a lead in to the conflict. I can't imagine that First Ward, a zone featuring an active piece of Hamidon among other things, is not going to move the story along either.

There's a difference between "there will be more trials" and "sucks to be you if you don't like trials.........! ".

Isn't that what the difficulty sliders are there for?

I don't quite understand why it's considered normal to design solo content for the first 50 levels of the game, but then unreasonable to design it for the next 10 pseudo-levels.

-D

Maybe because they consider end game content to be team focused, but how you get to it doesn't really matter?

Roy Cooling deals with invasion some. There is also at least one tip mission dealing with the Praetorian war. And of course there was some content in GR that was pre-level 20 dealing with the Praetorian War. Both Tina Mac and Maria Jenkins at least foreshadow it, but seem more like a run up to it. I am sure we will also have some level 20-26 content in Issue 21 dealing a bit with the invasion. And any solo incarnate can chat with Prometheus to get more story.

Saying that the Praetorian war storyline is all team content is very far from the truth. The trials and some task forces are where a fair bit of the action happens, but a lot of the story parts are actually handled elsewhere.

Why turn the game into a different game at level 50? You're simultaneously setting the soloists/small ground enthusiasts up for disappointment, and forcing trial lovers to slog through 50 levels before they can get to the good bits.

-D

Truer words have yet to be spoken. Okay, so that is some MAJOR hyperbole there on my part, but I very much agree with his/her assessment.

The majority of the pre-Incarnate endgame was already team based, and featured TFs and raids.

Thanks to Ouroboros, pre-Incarnate endgame was almost the entire game. That included a lot of solo content.

-D

This. The incarnate levels are ridiculously too much of a grind. I understand the devs want to get players to play the trials, but making it a ridiculous grind is completely unnecessary because players will play them over again because (shocker) they have many, many alts.

Making it so much of a grind only ends up burning players out and discouraging them, which is why I bet there has been a much more dramatic drop off in subscriptions after an issue release than in past releases. I know I've never seen so many fellow players lose interest and/or decide to let their subscriptions drop before. And for the first time in about six years, even I've begun to lose interest in the game.

Understand, I still love this game, and this is only meant to be constructive criticism. And hopefully the devs understand that their fanbody defenders will always be here to cheer them on, but their disgruntled customers are much more likely to simply walk away without a word, rather than offer a voice about what they feel is wrong with the game and how it could be improved.

Make incarnate progress less grindy. Increase solo incarnate progress so that when players are playing their 50's they feel like they are making some actual progress towards their incarnate abilities. To create incentive to play the new trials, bump up the rewards dramatically. And don't worry about it being 'too easy' to level incarnates in trials, because one, its a long way away from being 'too easy/fast', and two, the vast majority of your customers have a boatload of alts they can get incarnate stuff for - and they are far less likely to get bored leveling several alts than grinding on one or two of them.

Simplify the system. Having fifty currencies is not fun, its a chore.

The focus should be fun, not difficulty. I'm not saying make the game universally easy, but the base difficulty should be easy. If people want difficult, they should be able to raise the difficulty. When you make the base difficulty very high, as it seems to be in the new trial, you end up pleasing only your top players, and pissing off and/or discouraging everyone else. It took me three days after the recent issues release to get on a new trial because nobody wanted to play it, because of its difficulty. The truth is, most of your players like easy, they don't like watching their level 50 toon get killed routinely in a tf on a team of 15 similarly powered characters fighting one enemy. I personally like to be challenged, but I like being challenged by content, not challenged in trying to find players who are willing to play the trial with me, lol. Even then, having one of my pimped out toons getting one or two shot by enemies with auto hit powers isn't fun or amusing, it's just lame.

I do not think the devs expect people to solo most story arcs as they level up. The regular Ouroborous content is NOT solo content. It is content that normally can be soloed, but almost none of it was made with soloists in mind.

Can you explain it to me? I really do not understand why the devs want to get players to play in large scale team events.

Does raiding promote community better than running task forces or standard mission arcs? They keep saying we have the best community in MMO space, but that community was built in a nearly raidless game, so I am having trouble seeing the connection between raids and a strong social environment.

Do raids bring the ability to tell stories Task Forces do not? While I like the encounters in all 3 trials so far, they really are not anything special story-wise compared to the STF, LGTF, ITF, Faathim, and many other task forces.

Do raids bring the ability to use game mechanics that task forces do not? To an extent, I think this is true. The escapee phase could be tailored for smaller teams, but it is likely most interesting at 12 or more people. Large collections like in Keyes are likely better with higher number of people. I do think many interesting mechanics could be used in task forces that we have not yet seen, but 12 man+ trials do give some design options that may not work in 6 to 8 man teams.

Is there other stuff I am missing? Why do the devs want us to do trials?

No it isn't. It's borderline too easy/fast. I'm pretty much done kitting out my level 50's already, and I haven't exactly played intensively, and I've bought about half of the costume pieces too.

It's not too easy, I'd say it's on the lower end of "fine", but you really can't make it much easier without making it completely trivial.

Are you referring to the Ouroboros "task forces?" In that case, I'd agree with you. If you're referring to Ouroboros itself, the TF-style set-up makes a lot of the longer story arcs not team-friendly.

Story arcs themselves, if not expressly designed for soloists, are definitely written for soloists. The contacts speak to you, singular. Occasionally they suggest you bring friends. But the default assumption is that you are solo.

I think raids are worse at promoting community than TFs or teaming through standard content. The timers discourage chatting and screwing around, and the repetitiveness encourages some rather selfish behavior from people who just want to get them over with...such as failure to explain what is going on to people who aren't familiar with the trial.

i'm also having a problem seeing the connection between raids and a strong social environment considering what the community is like in every other game i know of with a heavily raiding-based end game. To be fair, the 900 kilo gorilla of the lot had a pre-established community from its previous games, so it's hardly fair to say that a raiding emphasis in the end game is what makes its community what it is.

Raiding may not necessarily be detrimental to having a strong community, but i certainly don't know of any examples where adding a raiding-focused endgame strengthened the community.

If anything, it seems to be dividing the community; or at the very least, making current divisions wider.

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Don�t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. - R.W. Emerson

I'm actually not convinced the trials are trying to emulate raids exactly. If you look at the MMO industry the past couple of years, there have (in my mind) been 3 big threats to this game that have challenged it over the past few years. If you look at the pre-launch feature lists of those games, and compare it to the headliner features of most of our issues, there is a pretty strong connection (recolorable powers, the AE (subverted from "archnemeses"), the LFG raid queue, and now trials). I'm not saying we wouldn't have gotten some of those things anyway, but in a couple of cases things that were on the "unlikely to ever happen list" ended up on the "right away" list when another game became a threat.

Anyway, almost everything about our raids resembles features of a certain new-ish game, all the way down to the multiple "stages" with timers, the participation metric, and the combined currency/random reward roll at the end of the fight. The only major difference is that our raids take place on a dedicated map instead of the open world. There are a few other minor differences, most of them not being put into place in CoH until after the first round of beta tests (e.g. cutscenes). While it's possible portions of this are coincidence, the resemblance is uncanny. Hilariously, both games have also seen lots of posts from upset players about some of the same kinds of things, including the super-secret Participation system which sometimes screws over people who feel like they participated, and fights about how "open" a league/team/raid party should be.

In short, my theory is we got the trials because another game had a similar feature and for a while looked like a serious MMO killer.

Here's my take on why they're doing this.

There's a common perception that City of Heroes is "dead" because there aren't hordes of people roaming the streets hacking wolves to pieces.

We play almost exclusively in instances. And frankly, it's a whole lot easier to play in those instances with just a couple of people. People you already know. Even with TFs, where you need 4-8 players, you can almost always fill the team with acquaintances.

That means you don't really need to meet other people. When I started out I was in a SG with 20-30 other people. Over time all but three of us quit the game. And we never really needed to meet other people to do the content we wanted to do.

By having large trials the devs are forcing us to be more sociable. They're creating spaces where people congregate to form trials. (That isn't strictly necessary, but that's how we're choosing to do it.) We're forced to meet new people, and expand the number of acquaintances we have so that we can fill trials with people who have similar goals.

The other aspect of this is that by giving better rewards for certain content, they are gating lots of people through the same content (trials and weekly strike targets). The devs are creating more opportunities for large team content to be done.

Games like this are social experiences. The more people you know, the greater the sense of camaraderie, and the more likely it is you'll stick around. If all your friends up and leave, and you've only got a few friends, you'll probably follow them.

Common perception of who?

It's my experience that being forced to do the BAF over and over to get my Incarnate gear does nothing to encourage me to socialise with the other people I team with.

I go to pocket D and say 'Blaster lf BAF' and wait for an invite. I'm surrounded by strangers, and my mood is tbh impatient and grumpy. I want to get it over with, so all i'm doing is scanning the broadcast for 'BAF forming pst' and the like. I'm certainly not there to chat or make friends.

When the trial starts, stopping to have a natter is the last thing anyone does.

And when it's done, it's 'gj all tx for team' and everyone logs out.

it's my experience that SOLOING encourages me to be more sociable because it allows me the time and opportunity to pasue whenever i want and chat in the various channels I'm a member of.

Sociability in an MMO isn't having your avatar stood next to another avatar firing off powers. It's communicating with other people. And it's my experience that PuG trials discourage all but the most basic specific goal-driven communication, ie 'team A to South' or 'To me' and suchlike.

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."

Agreed. I have yet to talk to anyone, but the person forming the league for a trial, while "participating" in the trial "experience".*

*the trial experience includes the wait for the trial to start after the league is formed.