What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

And here we have a nice friendly reasonable team-centric player. As a solo-centric player, I totally support your way of playing, and I also have no problem with the solo i-path taking longer than the team-path at all.

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."

Which is very laudable, but it's a shame there's some difficulty for some grasping the idea that you can have ingame friends without ever teaming with them. I love all the peeps on the MA Arc Finder channel, but I can count on the fingers of yoda's hand the number of times I've met them in game. beimng able to team doesn't keep me playing. Being able to interact with the people I've met here does, and by interacting I mean actually talking about stuff, not just having thei avatar near mine when we're both spamming attacks in an i-Trial.

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."

You are quite right, that is one of the main reasons you play an MMO game. Please be aware that there are a couple hundred thousand other players, in this game alone, who play for their own reasons.

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."

I agree.

This is why I think that the next big focus of the game needs to be 'player community'; SGs, Bases, Pocket D, Emotes, Dev Events, more badges and incentives for ingame mentoring, etc.

In Star Wars Galaxies, you could play actual music as a band. There was a variety of musical instuments you could acquire, each could play the scales with different appropriate sound. So you could meet with friends online, practice and learn songs together, then go to a Cantina and stand in a line, doing different songs. You could even emote while playing, so you could act all rock-and-roll or big-jazz-band-like while playing.

You know those dancers you see around Jabba? Not only could you play a dancer (and get gigs to go dance in various places for xp), you could pull off various emotes while dancing so you could dance differently than other dancers. If you did this in a Cantina, players could emote that they were smiling at you specifically, which gave you xp. Not only that, but players in the presence of a dancer in a Cantina got bonuses to heal rates. I don't think that exact thing would fly in this game, but you can imagine the kind of community it built.

Those are some rather extreme examples, but suffice it to say I think there are a lot of things that could be added to this game to build community and get Freems to become Preems/VIP beyond Incarnate stuff.

It is - they've already said that a few times

This point was brought up ad nauseam in the original brawl over a solo Incarnate path. Team play gets more stuff (XP, recipes, shards, threads) faster than solo. That's how it works, that's how it has always worked even before Incarnates were in the picture.

I think you have to be careful here. There are a lot of reasons people may not run iTrials, and it isn't all about the content itself. Some people don't like the very idea of teaming with that many people. Many people dislike the effort it takes to form one and are not satisfied with forming one solely via the LFG (and wouldn't be statisfied even if it worked better). Some people dislike the content.

If the "solo path" is good enough to replace running iTrials, then the people who have any concern with the above will likely divert to the solo path. Not always because they hate the iTrials, but because the solo path is intrinsically simpler to deal with. That undercuts the people who actually like the iTrials and are willing to run or even lead them.

There's a glass half full/empty thing going on here. We can't look at the above and say "yep, see, that means the iTrials suck". It's more nuanced than that. The devs (if they're smart) can't ignore those nuances, and I think they really do logically compel them to keep the "solo" path slower on average than the iTrial path. The really tricky part is what does "slower" mean? To create a wholly fabricated example, they could set drop rates be be 1/3 of those in iTrials and accidentally create faster average progress by failing to account for time people spend standing around forming leagues.

I think the important thing is to keep a focus on what we are trying to acheive.

The solo path should be great for those people who would otherwise give up completely on post-50 content because they will never, for whatever reason, do iTrials. At the same time, it should, by design, suck for people who can, will, and enjoy doing iTrials. It should be an alternative and at most an emergency supplement for when iTrials are not forming at all.

So it would be important to look at the reasons that people who hate iTrials hate them and build remedies for those into the solo path. For instance, iTrials are not a good environment for random exploration and reading text boxes to get story. The new DA should excel at that nearly to the point of overload. iTrials are not a good place to feel stronger than the environment; the opposite should be true in DA.

Of course, it is also to remember that the reason team content exists is not at all to have people blowing up npcs fast together. It is to build bonds between players due to shared fun, harrowing, and interesting experiences.

Even solo content should feed into this sense of community somehow.

For example, there could be a series of environment items around the zone that can be interacted with. Interacting with them in a certan order causes critter A to spawn, Interacting with them in any other order causes critter B to spawn. Maybe messing with the objects grants buffs or debuffs according to some esoteric scheme. The kicker? Whenever the server reboots, the rules change randomly. There would be hours of community and fun in that; figuring out what the rules of the day were, let alone how the critter, buffs and debuffs could be actually used...

Broadly, I agree. Well, I don't know that I agree that either end of the scale should "suck", but I agree with what I take to be your general point. And I think it likely the new zone can hit those targets. The iTrials right now are raining progress on us, and I seriously doubt any mission progress will match that. I actually wonder what the implications of that will be for the costs of the next tier of slots, however.

To be fair, "it's an MMO" is a weak argument. CoX is unique in that there is no solo superhero RPG equivalent. (as an aside, can you imagine a BioWare superhero game on par with ME or DA:O?)

Anyway, I like chatting with people and the sense of community, I know that if there was a solo game for super heroes even vaguely as engaging and in depth... I don't know how much I'd be on-line.

I solo a lot - whole levels. I often use CoX more as a single player game than multi. Don't get me wrong, I love TFs and try to do them as time allows, and have made trial time enough to move several incarnates up to T3 goals. But I am looking forward to more flexibility and options to support my varied moods and playstyles.

I am like this. I level my characters up solo. It's the only way I can control what content they get to do without constantly messing with my XP on/off switch. It also gives me a strong feel for whether I like the AT/powerset combo, and how well it can perform solo, which is a critical determinant in whether I enjoy the character. (My best soloists are fun to team with, but if I had a strongly team-focused character, they would not be fun to solo when a team isn't around. That's a non-starter for me.)

I get my social interaction in global channels, on Skype with other players and whatnot. I also do participate in team and league activities, but I also spend a lot of time soloing while communicating with others.

That is a truely awful design philosophy. You would design a game that would suck for everyone.

I disagree. Not everyone is into iTrials. Content for people who absolutely hate iTrials should be created and maintained. This same content should not kill iTrials by being more attractive to the people who are needed to form Leagues.

This is called "Robbing Peter to Pay Paul". Its an awful design philosophy.

That's where you're getting into "glass half empty", and also where perhaps I disagree with Kitsune about whether the "solo" route has to "suck" compared to the iTrials.

The solo can't be as rewarding/time as the trials, or the devs have avoided robbing Peter by pulling the rug out from under Paul completely. Does that mean the solo route has to be crap? No. It should be permissible that it's good enough to draw some people away from iTrials, but not all of them, or probably even most of them. Most of the people who hate iTrials will go to the solo route unless its reward rates absolutely atrocious, and I think that's OK.

I disagree (naturally).

Killing iTrials by introducing solo content that sucks up all of the people who organize Leagues would be robbing Peter (iTrials) to pay Paul (soloists).

Moreover, it would be bad for the game: content that leads people to form 24 seperate instances of a mission is apparently harder on the servers than content that leads those same 24 people to work together in a single instance, hence the Atlas Park rework.

I (obviously) don't see any harm in having solo content that is optimized and enjoyable for soloists as well as team content that is optimized and enjoyable for teamsters.

Feel free to enlighten me.

It won't - the amount of loot that the UG or Keyes rains on us now isn't even matched by BAF and Lambda, so the solo content waon't be able to compete with that at all.

is =/= ought

Shouldn't the people "needed to form leagues" be a pretty similar set to "the people who enjoy playing in leagues"?

If those aren't virtually identical groups, then there exists a problem.

Suck for which people who hate trials? The FF/Elec Defenders or the SS/Fire Brutes?

Text overload is the problem in newer content. It is even more of a problem with content that is designed to be repeated, as the DA arcs must be. If they're full of talk-tos and cutscenes and instances of the player standing there and watching NPCs yak at each other, I will complain and not just because of the repeatability issue, but because it reduces the player character to a spectator. This is an interactive medium where 99% of our problems can be solved by punching something in the face, and the mission writers need to stop pretending they're writing a novel.

I honestly think the mission writers should have all their toys taken away and be forced to write mock-ups of new missions in AE first. Then they can add in shinies and unique encounters if they really feel it's necessary instead of coming up with a whole arc just to justify the special encounter.

Honestly if I could progress via small teams or solo content I would be doing so.

The trials aren't that impressive on their own as story items or events that they would be fun to play as just pure content if there were no rewards.

The exception is UG -minus the Avatar, as I love dungeon crawls.

The devs ofcourse know this so whatever they do for the REGULAR teams/solo path won't be soooo good that it takes away from the iTrails too much. I'm fine with that.