Inferring Intent from Reward

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.

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.

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.

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.

you could also play the game for fun and the enjoyment of actually playing, rather than aiming solely for a "reward"

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

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.