Devs Haet Hoarding

The developers are not good at figuring out how to incentivize desired behaviors.

On the one hand: the structure of the trials requires that experienced players continue to run them indefinitely, because without enough player interest in general it isn't possible to run trials at all, and without enough experienced player interest it's difficult to run trials successfully. Therefore, there must be a continued use for the currencies they provide, and a promise of future uses for same, to keep players running trials and hoarding currency.

On the other hand: the structure of the trials requires that many players must have a reason to run each new trial, or again there will not be sufficient population to make the trial viable. Therefore, each new trial must award something unique to that trial which has not been previously pre-hoarded and cannot be obtained through running only the easiest or most popular (same thing, really) trial. They learned this lesson once with Katie farms and then apparently need to learn it again with the BAF.

On the gripping hand: what the devs learned from PvP (but never actually applied to PvP) is that when some form of activity is only entertaining (or possible) if enough people are doing it, then that activity needs to be sufficiently incentivized to ensure that people are doing it a lot. Which means a) that any alternative offering the same type of rewards must award them in drastically lower quantities (see: ship raids vs any other way to earn Vanguard merits), and b) that the players must never feel that they have enough of the reward in question.

It's actually not a simple problem, if you allow that the developers are obliged to provide sufficient incentive support to league-type content to make that content maximally viable for people who like league-type content.

Just to add, based specifically on Positron's blog on the subject (which I had read before I20 came out), I do expect them to create new component requirements for the next wave of Incarnate slots.

I also have some expectation that those new components may only drop from trials released with and after the new slots. However, doing that creates the issue that the new "tier" of iTrials will start over the cycle of not having enough different trials to run, and if the devs have learned anything from these first four slots, I hope it's that the community really dislikes that "content reset". For that reason, I am hopeful that they will instead be more inventive. However, I have a hard time seeing them let a BAF be worth equal progress as something designed to expect us to have two or four more Incarnate powers. That doesn't mean the BAF has to be completely off the list, but it probably means its reward has to suffer some lossy conversion to the new "tier" rewards.

When I came over here to look at this topic, I thought it was going to be on the ridiculously LOW number of storage slots in Salvage Racks inside of Bases. You can now have a CHARACTER who can hold as much invention salvage as FOUR Salvage Racks in a Base now. That's completely out of whack.

But no ... I see it's about grinding out Incarnate Stuff™. Feh.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

You really think they will put any significant unlocks in Incarnate anymore? They are going to make you pay for it now.

What I'm worried about is the "necessities" for unlocking the next round of slots. My Incarnate desires have never been more than one or two of the Incarnate powers per character (a couple don't even have anything past Alpha). None have any Lore nor Destiny powers, and only one actually has those unlocked. Based on the pattern, all of the current slots will have to be unlocked before one can access the later slots. If there are powers released in the next wave that conceptually apply to one of my characters, I could have to power through up to 4 slots worth of iXP just to access them.

That's where that "iXP Delegation" feature would have been smart to input. People would be able to choose which slots they unlocked and which they just wanted nothing to do with. Too late now though I guess...

I am not hoarding anything, mainly because I have no desire nor reason to play the trials any more (I only wanted about a third of the stuff they put behind Christy and Michael). If/when more powers and/or rewards are released, I'll worry about purchasing them when that time comes.

Conceptually, the iTrials are the equivalent of what other games do when they raise the level cap and give you a bunch of new raids which you run endlessly in order to acquire new gear that makes your old gear obsolete. The reason for acquiring the new gear is, of course, how it looks and the fact that you need the new gear to run the new raids efficiently.

The only new thing is that we wave our hands about how we're not really raising the level cap (even though the effect is more or less comparable) and we drop currency that's used to buy/craft the loot instead of dropping the loot directly.

Since every iTrial is essentially a mini-expansion and a virtual raising of the power ceiling, I expect that every new iTrial will continue to be accompanied by it's own custom currency. The alternative is to be like everyone else and drop costume bits and what-not as loot.

The only saving grace in the whole thing is that nobody actually needs to ever become an incarnate.

Odd in what way? Progression throughout the rest of the game does not come in random spurts. The incarnate system introduced a new system of progress that was divergent from what already existed. Imagine if the rest of the game played in a similar fashion; 1 bubble until level could mean defeat 100 more foes or 10.

In my perspective, the random reward should be a bonus, a little something extra.

I'll concede that it's a personal perspective. I enjoy working toward a set outcome more than risking a roll of the dice.