Inferring Intent from Reward
I'd throw "take money from other players" in there, as playing the market yields much better rewards than either tips or tickets.
It's pretty significant in my own decision making. Making more influence in one hour of playing the market than in ten hours of efficient play, part of the incentive to actually play the game dissapears.
I guess it is good that they added an untradeable currency for incarnates - which I would also throw in that list, by the way, because XP or loot is trivial to get whereas incarnates take hours, if not dozens of hours to grind no matter how good you are yourself, due to the high number of players required.
My point, to phrase it delicately, is that what the developers have stated as their intent for the players, and what the reward system communicates, are somewhat different on occasion. I don't have a proposed remedy - I am merely noting the message that I receive.
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Gaming post-Issue 13 PVP and playing the volatile Wentworth/Black Market are different cases...
I think they would do well to reduce the Reward and Alignment Merit costs of recipes. Or at the very least reconsider the rarity of certain items.
The other day I gathered up a full set of purples from the market. They weren't the most popular purples, but they weren't exactly cheap either. I raised money to buy them by selling recipes earned with Alignment Merits (where oranges never go for more than 2). Enhancements: 6. Total Alignment Merits spent: 6. Normal price per Enhancement (in this set): 20.
This means I spent 1 Alignment Merit per Enhancement, spending a mere twentieth of the price the devs pretend they're worth. Working with three characters for tips, I had all six in 4 days instead of the month and a half the devs want you to spend to get just one of them.
It should be noted, however, that I ultimately got six purples by trading three oranges. This indicates that the rarities of some items are terribly disproportionate to their perceived worth by players.
I'd throw "take money from other players" in there, as playing the market yields much better rewards than either tips or tickets.
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I guess it is good that they added an untradeable currency for incarnates - which I would also throw in that list, by the way, because XP or loot is trivial to get whereas incarnates take hours, if not dozens of hours to grind no matter how good you are yourself, due to the high number of players required. |
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
You missed:
4) Run trials to get Empyrean merits, which will allow you to obtain very rare recipes faster than alignment merits (limited to 1 Empyrean merit/day/trial, soon to be 2/day for Keyes, and soon to have four separate trials for the potential to get 5 Empyrean merits/day).
5) Run trials to get Astral merits, which will allow you to obtain rare recipes in less calendar time than alignment merits, at the expense of more real time. These can be obtained at the rate of 5 or 6 per trial with no limit on the number earned per day, and since rare recipes cost 16-32, you can, if you want, run them to get LotG: +recharge recipes until your fingers bleed.
6) Run trials for incarnate XP to obtain access to incarnate powers that are effectively impossible to get in any other way.
I want to be clear as to my personal opinion here.
I have no problem with choices having consequences. I have no problem with different activities offering different rewards, or with the idea that there exist faster and slower ways to obtain a given reward. I certainly have no problem with the market being a PvP environment with winners and losers, and I say that as a person who frequently and willingly loses at market PvP.
I am, however, troubled by the specific examples I gave, because to me they represent the strongest examples of incongruity between what the development team has stated they want the players to do and what the system created by the development team grants tangible rewards to players for doing.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
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you could also play the game for fun and the enjoyment of actually playing, rather than aiming solely for a "reward"
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Thelonious Monk
5) Run trials to get Astral merits, which will allow you to obtain rare recipes in less calendar time than alignment merits, at the expense of more real time. These can be obtained at the rate of 5 or 6 per trial with no limit on the number earned per day, and since rare recipes cost 16-32, you can, if you want, run them to get LotG: +recharge recipes until your fingers bleed.
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Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
I am, however, troubled by the specific examples I gave, because to me they represent the strongest examples of incongruity between what the development team has stated they want the players to do and what the system created by the development team grants tangible rewards to players for doing.
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Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
you could also play the game for fun and the enjoyment of actually playing, rather than aiming solely for a "reward"
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I am indeed not commenting on Incarnate Trials, because, regardless of how I feel about them, the degree of reward associated with the trials is consistent with the degree of effort the developers have expended on the trials and the apparent value they assign to the trial experience. Assigning high reward to content that some people do not enjoy is a different kind of decision from assigning high reward to some content while expending effort and resources on improving the quality of other, less rewarding content.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
I am indeed not commenting on Incarnate Trials, because, regardless of how I feel about them, the degree of reward associated with the trials is consistent with the degree of effort the developers have expended on the trials and the apparent value they assign to the trial experience. Assigning high reward to content that some people do not enjoy is a different kind of decision from assigning high reward to some content while expending effort and resources on improving the quality of other, less rewarding content.
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Which just begs the question: did the devs base the Incarnate system on the philosophy of "well, if everybody loves farming so much, we'll just make them farm what we want them to farm! And we'll require such big teams so that the uber elite farmers can't exclude everyone else! Farming for everyone!"
Eva Destruction AR/Fire/Munitions Blaster
Darkfire Avenger DM/SD/Body Scrapper
Arc ID#161629 Freaks, Geeks, and Men in Black
Arc ID#431270 Until the End of the World
The basic problem I see is that the Devs have given us a WEALTH of content, but the players choose to grind that which is most easily repeated.
I think the devs want us to do a variety of content to avoid burnout, but how to do that? They would have to give a 'first time you did this mission today' bonus or something that would be brokenly huge.
Story Arcs I created:
Every Rose: (#17702) Villainous vs Legacy Chain. Forget Arachnos, join the CoT!
Cosplay Madness!: (#3643) Neutral vs Custom Foes. Heroes at a pop culture convention!
Kiss Hello Goodbye: (#156389) Heroic vs Custom Foes. Film Noir/Hardboiled detective adventure!
Which just begs the question: did the devs base the Incarnate system on the philosophy of "well, if everybody loves farming so much, we'll just make them farm what we want them to farm! And we'll require such big teams so that the uber elite farmers can't exclude everyone else! Farming for everyone!"
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With the other items mentioned in the OP, I suspect it's more a state of deadlock among different parts of the dev team. There are a number of times, for instance, that we've been given the impression that there are strong divisions of opinion within the whole team about the scope and rewards of AE. Indeed, I suspect that the entire system would have been removed from the game by now if certain developers had their way, and that the only reason it survives and continues to grant rewards is that it would be a customer relations disaster to remove it. Similar arguments can be made for PvP or the alignment merit system. All of these could be characterized as situations where cures for the problems might end up being worse than the diseases.
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"
you could also play the game for fun and the enjoyment of actually playing, rather than aiming solely for a "reward"
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It's the same set of maps. Same groups of enemies. Same superhero-themed set of mission objectives. But with arcs, I get the fun of bouncing from zone to zone for no good reason instead of staying in one zone and getting my tips there. The stories in 90% of the arcs are not good enough to make me eager to do them over and over instead of doing tips over and over for a much better reward.
I enjoy tips just as much as any other mission - because I enjoy my character, and the people I game with. We also share an enjoyment of the rewards inherent in tips.
The reason I do not enjoy doing trials over and over is that there's rarely a situation in which I can use my full suite of powers or that my powers specifically matter at all (3-4 groups, everyone is at least a little redundant and combat is pretty fast) and I have to run with a bunch of strangers because I have a small gaming group and no wish to join a large SG.
you could also play the game for fun and the enjoyment of actually playing, rather than aiming solely for a "reward"
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If something is 'fun', but not rewarding, then those who enjoy rewards won't do it; those who don't care about rewards will do it if they find it 'fun'. If something is rewarding, but not 'fun', then those who enjoy rewards will do it because rewards are 'fun'.
Care to take a guess as to how much of the playerbase enjoys rewards in comparison to those who will do 'fun' things without also earning a reward for doing it?
Hint: What you consider 'fun' isn't necessarily what others consider 'fun'; what others consider 'fun' isn't necessarily what you consider 'fun'. This is as it should be.
The basic problem I see is that the Devs have given us a WEALTH of content, but the players choose to grind that which is most easily repeated.
I think the devs want us to do a variety of content to avoid burnout, but how to do that? They would have to give a 'first time you did this mission today' bonus or something that would be brokenly huge. |
One of the issues the devs have is they've introduced too many forms of in-game currency. I'm trying to take the dev-sanctioned way of obtaining a single PvP IO. No one runs Keyes, so I run a BAF and LAM every night for 30 days... for one IO. It'd probably be smarter to buy oranges and make money to buy the IO, but I am still taking a dev-sactioned path because it is quicker than any other dev-sanctioned path (half the time of alignment merits). Even still, I think the cost is a bit extreme and I find myself viscerally disliking the grind and the game. One obvious solution is to eliminate the different forms of currency and normalize the costs. Let me run any content for as much reward as the trials. Let me play an hour or two every night and still find myself with enough reward to buy a PvP IO. Instead, they've greatly diminished my enjoyment of the game by altering my playstyle such that I'm playing sub-optimally if I do anything else. I was only able to log in tonight for long enough to look around and I couldn't force myself to accept any trial invites. I don't think this is a good path.
4) Run trials to get Empyrean merits, which will allow you to obtain very rare recipes faster than alignment merits (limited to 1 Empyrean merit/day/trial, soon to be 2/day for Keyes, and soon to have four separate trials for the potential to get 5 Empyrean merits/day).
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Underground will reward 2 Emp merits upon completion. 2+2+1+1 = 6
I could, and do. So do many others. But as I stated, in aggregate, player behavior is strongly influenced by tangible rewards, and the developers should know this, but they seem to be repeatedly surprised when highly rewarding activities become highly popular, even though they spent significantly more time and effort on improving the quality of other activities.
I am indeed not commenting on Incarnate Trials, because, regardless of how I feel about them, the degree of reward associated with the trials is consistent with the degree of effort the developers have expended on the trials and the apparent value they assign to the trial experience. Assigning high reward to content that some people do not enjoy is a different kind of decision from assigning high reward to some content while expending effort and resources on improving the quality of other, less rewarding content. |
The thing about an MMO is, you don't necessarily want to spend all your time on stuff that "most" players enjoy. A really good effort at something that only 30% of players (who are currently unhappy) enjoy may have more subscriber-base benefit for you than a comparable effort on something that 70% of players enjoy -- but those 70% of players are already happy.
Suppose we were to assume that the developers communicate what they wish players to be doing through the reward system. This is not a completely insane idea: after all, empirical evidence shows that aggregate player activity is often strongly influenced by rewards, and surely the developers are in an excellent position to be aware of this. What, then, do the developers want us to do, based on relative reward?
1. Farm AE.
AE farming is the single best way to earn XP, Influence, and many commonly sought rewards. It is wildly better reward/risk and reward/time than doing just about anything else. AE farms ran over 2XP weekend. It's that good. Clearly it's the thing the developers most want us to do.
2. Be a hero or villain and run Tip missions.
Most Tip missions can be stealthed in a few minutes. Running five a day, every day, gets your pick of most of the more highly sought items three or four times a week, per alt. The rewards are equivalent to up to 200 reward merits - that's several long task forces, or dozens of short task forces, or scores of standard arcs representing hundreds of individual missions.
3. De-PVP.
There are no rewards that are optimally gained from fighting other players in PVP. There are, however, a number of good rewards that are optimally gained from cooperating with your assumed opponents while in a PvP setting. Many PvP zones set up a prisoner's dilemma, where the best option - collaborating - maps to not PvPing in the PvP zone. All PvP zones encourage PVPIO farming, which goes a lot faster when one person does the killing and several others volunteer to be sacrifices, and is completely ruined if someone decides not to play along and instead goes and actually fights people.
My point, to phrase it delicately, is that what the developers have stated as their intent for the players, and what the reward system communicates, are somewhat different on occasion. I don't have a proposed remedy - I am merely noting the message that I receive.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs