What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

What I am hoping for in this regard is at least 3 paths per 'side' through the storyline, similar to what was done in Praetoria. That way you can go all the way through the story multiple times and between the different base paths and branches, have a different experience most times.

Like one path that is all about the backstory of the Astoria neighborhood and what happened to it, along with a path that is all about the Banished Pantheon and their efforts to serve Lughebu, and yet another path that is all about Mot the Hoo...er, the sleeper.

"My name is Mot. Thanks alot. I am the power Sodom used on Lot..."

Good suggestion.

I'd prefer this method.

I find much of the trials to be NOT social. I find talking on the global channels to be more social than any grouping activity in this game or any other mmorpg.

On some teams barely anyone talks. On the harder trials I'm not focused on idle chatter, I'm focused on listening to the leader so that none of my mistakes frag the entire trial/league.

Then why make the league trials at all? Presumably there is someone who wants them and would choose to do them even if the rewards were equal.

It's also one I and many others agree with. Yes the solo/small teams path should not SUCK, but it sure as hell shouldn't be faster or as fast as the iTrials way (despite what I think of the level of sucktasticness of some of the trials).

not many would and it would be more difficult to form teams

And we are back to where I came in. Its seems to me people are acknowledging that the iTrials wouldn't get done without stacked rewards, so its okay to stack the rewards!

That just doesn't seem like good design strategy to me but since I am now repeating myself and the Devs most certainly don't agree I shall bow out of this thread as gracefully as I can

Ohhhhh I've acknowledged that a long time ago.

The fact that they had to bribe folks to run more than the easy mode BAF/LAF speaks volumes about how not that great the iTrials on their own are. Or more precisely how many more folks care about the fast rewards and not the actual CONTENT of the trials.

The four paths in Praetoria allowed you to get four alts to level 20. Whatever content we get for Dark Astoria, I highly doubt it'll get even one alt to Rares in every slot without repetition. Therefore, it must be designed with repetition in mind.

Furthermore, the four paths in Praetoria were designed with the express intention of allowing a character to get to level 20 in mind. This means most of the missions were fairly basic, because those require less time and resources to create. The fancy and "creative" mechanics took a backseat to the purpose of the missions. Do you honestly expect DA to have a lot of missions, if any, without fancy mechanics or custom maps? Because I don't. Which will mean the devs can create fewer missions in the allotted time, which means even more repetition.

At this point, I suspect they think we'd rather they pad out an arc with talk-tos and cutscenes than with generic encounters, because somehow "we don't like defeat-alls on a four-story office maps full of enemies standing around pounding their fists" translates in the devs' mind to "every encounter must be unique and significant." Of course, this means you run the two-hour arc full of fed-exes and walls of text and a convoluted story that your character is a secondary participant in, and then have to spend another half hour running papers to actually get some XP. (Or running repeatable missions to get some iXP and threads, in the case of DA).

As the trial mechanics get more complicated, the "no talking" convention is becoming a rule. "Everybody shut up and do what this guy says" is a form of social interaction many of us don't enjoy.

Hey, if they want me to write the darn thing, I am definitely available.

I enjoy this game a lot, but I figured out that if I could not also see a reward, I would play it a lot less, and likely would not have maintained an essentially unbroken subscription for 7 and 1/3 years. I was winding down in ability to sustain interest until I9 and Inventions came along. Suddenly, I had new goals. Reward does get people to play. Not everyone certainly, but certainly a considerable number of folks.

Reward alone is not sufficient motivation to play, but part of my fun involves doing things for a reward.

For the record, I rather enjoy Lambda, BAF and UGT. (I actually like Lambda best.) I do rather dislike running them ad-nauseum, but I do find enjoyment in it, because I want the reward. The good news for me is that getting Keyes and the UGT have broken up the monotony some, and more are coming.

For the record, I still rather dislike Keyes, because I still think the nature of the AV fight is rubbish. Note that I don't think it's hard, I just don't enjoy the litany of run away, be held, back off, run back, etc. It over uses those things, IMO. All that said, I still run Keyes because it's now short enough to make it worth the reward. I don't like it that much, but I don't have to endure it for very long. Not the model we want to see for future content to be sure.

Well, since not many would, shouldn't it be more difficult to form teams? Isn't a less popular feature supposed to be used less?

You have to be careful, here. A lot of people I know actively enjoy most of the Underground trial. A lot of those players aren't nuts about the massive confuse effect, but enjoy the rest of the fighting through the tunnels. Some feel it could be a bit shorter, but we're talking about looking for tweaks, not massive revamps.

But before recent changes, all of them agreed that it just didn't make sense to run it for iProgress unless you needed Empyreans. Spending that much more time than a BAF/Lambda didn't make good practical sense even if you enjoyed it.

See, in my experience most people aren't playing games like this for pure, abstract fun. They want it to be fun, but they also want a sense of progress. In the Incarnate System, for better or worse, a significant part of progress is how many Rare or better components you can get as drops.

It wasn't that everyone hated the UGT. The biggest problem was that the UGT just didn't give enough reward return on time invested.

(Some very good posts have been made in other places about what I think are some real problems with the nature of the challenges in the UGT. Despite that, they seem less hated than Keyes used to be, despite being technically harder {IMO} to overcome.)

I don't like the direction that question points to, because it then potentially becomes harder to justify spending more resources on that less used feature.

See also bases, pvp and AE.

If the majority of initial content they could create was trials then you'd hope that they don't see interest drop on that content, or it might be harder to justify spending resources on the non-trial parts of Incarnate system.

When I call BAF/LAM easy mode, I mean in part, easier to form for. The length of time it takes to start any of the others directly relates to the desire of folks to try and run those others. Or in other words, why should I spend 45 minutes standing around for something that may not get going, when I can just jump on a BAF/LAM and get my daily emps easier?

Well, quite soon you'll be able to spend those 45 mintues of Trial downtime street sweeping or running missions in DA

In a single player game, sure.

In an MMO, the current design philosophy is that at default you want people to team. I think that is somewhat of a fallacy, but that isn't the point. If teaming is flagging it has to be shored up; it's the core.

Soloable stuff is what is supposed to be there as an extra for those who want it.

I think that in the minds of many designers, teaming = community. I personally don't think that is necessarily the case, but I can see why they think and implement that.

That's painting it with too broad a brush, IMO.

Anything that has social networks in them (by which I mean networks of people interacting, not things like Facebook) have feedback mechanisms. When making changes to these systems, you have to be aware of the existence of those feedback mechanisms, and be cautious that changes don't precipitate big, unintended shifts due to how feedback magnifies small effects.

If appropriate, try to look beyond personal biases for team content and against trial content. Look at it just as networks of people. You have a fixed number of people, and you're giving them more things to do. If one set of things is easier than the other and gives the same reward, what do you think most people will do?

This was exactly the BAF/Lambda vs UGT problem. Same reward, but one was harder/longer, so pretty much no one did it. There were people who really did like UGT, but the reward/time imbalance meant they couldn't often get a league to run it, because they all wanted to run BAF instead.

Posters in this thread have indicated that there really is a part of the CoH player base who wanted more "raid size" content. So there are people who want something like the iTrials, even if they may not be fans of the story or the particular mechanics in any given trial. By definition, they need people willing to participate in the raid-sized stuff.

We also know there are people who don't want to do raid-sized stuff. They are very vocal, and have been asking for a "solo"/small team Incarnate path ever since the first iTrials appeared. Until DA comes out, if they want iProgress, their only choice has been to run the thing they don't want - a raid-sized league. Now at last they're getting something that (hopefully) will match their desire for non-league-based iProgress.

But I suspect that most players don't care. They don't love raids or hate raids. They'll run whatever is handy. If there is a league forming, they might do that. If their friends are forming a DA team, they might do that. They aren't super picky. But if running stuff in DA gives them three times the Incarnate Salvage drops per hour as waiting on an iTrial to form? Guess what they'll do more often? And that creates a feedback loop, where people who want to raid have to take longer to form leagues, which eventually dissuades the least dedicated of them and converts them to running DA arcs, and so on until the raid system croaks.

Edit: The key here is that this isn't a symmetric problem, because raids need more people, but the "solo" path needs only one person. So the solo/DA stuff can never "die off" - one person can go off on their own and make use of it. But the Trials need more people.

The goal here is to keep the different ways of doing things balanced such that most people won't distinguish between them. If forming a league and running a trial takes longer, then it needs to be rewarding enough to make that worth while. If it's not, the everyday players who aren't super picky will start to notice that they make less headway running trials, and will eventually stop.

troof

Ture, but as to the bold I think solo content in recent years has gone on to be NECESSARY if you end up being on a crappy server that doesn't have that many folks on it . . . especially for some recent mmos that launched in the last year or two.

And there'll also be a reduction in forming Trials too - like if there's a full team of 8 doing missions in DA, and a group of 5 street sweeping, a single invite will turn them into a league of 13, so that's an almost instant Lambda or MoM.
I think the DA zone broadcast will have quite a few messages about teams looking for Trials, rather than just individual players looking for Trials.