What would you do to make Keyes fun?

QR: Well, the Underground trial is live now, and I've had several chances to assess it up close and personal.

*BAF: fun.

*LAM: less fun, but you do it because you have to, to unlock certain things. At least it lacks that idiotic opening cutscene....

*Keyes: the anteroom of Gaming Hell. Nothing more, nothing less.

*Underground: needs a lot of teamwork. Gives high rewards, and the outcome is improving as people learn the trial. A fun trial and tests the limits of your powers, instead of killing you every 30 seconds. A learning curve is in place vs. sheer chaos, as with Keyes. The maps are beautiful. I'm in.

The moral of the story: [General] you can claim that people are too stupid to run Keyes - and this is the bare essence of many posts in here. General you can claim that Keyes "is a victim of bad press." My rhetorical question is, WHY is it getting bad press?

The "why" is the reason that even with upped rewards, people are avoiding Keyes like the plague, even as they cheerfully get on board to learn how to steamroll UG - and soon, we will be doing just that. Steamrolling it. In fact we are doing it now, in many cases.

So we're too stupid to learn, so we're slandering Keyes, gotcha, point made. The problem is that players are still not running it. Perhaps Keyes needs to be addressed by the development team. I found someone's assertion that some people zone into a trial and "intuitively know what to do," laugh-out-loud funny.

Those players don't have itrial Spidey-sense, they learned the trial during beta. No psychic superpowers are available in real life, that I know of.

I don't think the Keyes trial is that bad, though I would like to see the Pulse damage changed, perhaps to a percentage of your current health rather then about half your health per blast. Failing that, make it longer between blasts.

The whole "intuition" thing with the Itrials is kind of counter-intuitive [sic] I think. None of them can be won simply by running through the map and hitting stuff - and that is a notable change from the original content where most stuff with a few exceptions is simply "run through the map, bash stuff until it's all dead and achieve the odd secondary objective."

The problem is that the Devs were begged to provide more variation, but when they do, sometimes they haven't quite got the balance perfect. They are damned if they do, damned if they don't in that sense.

Personally I feel that the end game should be tougher than the regular content - by the time players get to Incarnate stage it's hoped they should have a good feel for game play and an extra challenge is exactly what's needed - doubly so given how much the game's been dumbed down over the last few years.

If it's simply a question of people failing to follow instruction, that indicates to me at least that the other trials would fail as frequently as Keyes but that doesn't seem to be the case - but maybe it's simply the additional complexity that throws people and no easy way to mitigate that pulse which does seem to be excessive

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

While I thank the developers for testing many of the ideas presented in this thread, I'll point out the suggested (and reversed) removal of BAF/Lambda Empyrean Merits proved the following post:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snow Globe So instead of making Keyes something people would want to do, you want to make less people do BAF or Lambda as well. I think that is the dumbest thing I've read on these forums in my entire time visiting them.

Edit:
And Arcana, I still haven't been able to distinguish the Will of the Earth effects. Then again, I've not done many trials where I've got to that point.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Get rid of the pulse.

I couldn't find a recording of the time I had Will of the Earth centered on me and I flew up and away from everyone, which would have been a nice view of the effect, but I did find a decent angle of Will of the Earth not centered on me but at least relatively unobscured by lots of other players and effects. A static screen shot just does not do it justice, see this video capture of the effect. Watch the far left side of the screen, at about 6-7 seconds into the video the phrase so-and-so is being consumed by the Will of the Earth appears in red letters and a multicolored pulsing effect starts emanating from that player. It lasts about six seconds, which is about the delay before Will of the Earth fires. I uploaded at 1024x768, so you should be able to watch it at 720p in full screen. If you look *really* carefully I think you can catch yourself running away from the effect at the very far left edge of the screen for a brief instant. This was one of the early master attempts that I happened to be on.

Interestingly, when reviewing some video of a couple of runs, its important to note that there are two warnings that Will of the Earth is being fired. The first is that floating red text. That text is centered on *the player* and not on your screen. In other words, if a player standing directly behind you has Will of the Earth targeted, you might not see that warning. Second, the multicolored effect spreads out very far from the target, and it can be seen even when the Avatar moves behind the rocks near the back wall and Will of the Earth is targeted at a player at its feet. Even though in that case I cannot see the Avatar except for the top if its head, and I cannot see any of the players standing directly below him, and I cannot see the target of Will of the Earth in particular, I can still see the effect radiating out from that point: it seems to radiate right through obstacles.

But this effect is definitely a bit harder to spot in dense conditions than the Obliteration target. I can always spot Obliteration no matter how much effects are going off around me, but Will of the Earth can get lost in the effects because it has no harsh lines that are unique to it, and it doesn't have a prominent color that is different from everything else around: its unique signature is its rainbow sherbet appearance which takes more practice to visually lock onto.