Biggest Incarnate Content Issue

Right now, more than ever, it feels like the BAF and LAM trials are run over-and-over incessantly. Perhaps it is just on my server, Freedom, which has a community of players that are content to farm. But maybe the issue is more widespread.

The first two weeks following the release of the Media Blitz update were wonderful because of the diversity of trials that were departing. I was able to join plenty of teams that would run TPN and MOM, and both Keyes and UG had a serious uptick as well. However, it now appears that my server is once again locked in a familiar rut: BAF-BAF-BAF-SLAM-BAF-SLAM. And this leads me to the biggest problem with the trials:

• 1- People are content to run BAF and Lambda because the reward ratio still seems to favor them.

• 2- Far too often when a MOM, Underground, or TPN gets organized there is a glut of level 50 characters that join aboard to either experience something new, or to leech the increased rewards from higher tier trials, and both motivations invariably cause a disproportionate amount of these trials to fail. This happens despite requests for characters to be level shifted to +2 minimum.

• 3- Point #2 above creates a loop of failed trials and frustrated players that reinforces the habits of point #1.

The attempt at aiding this issue was the gating of the content. Of course, gates must be opened and well .. someone blew up the lock!

The way to fix this is to make trials that follow the KISS mindset - Keep it stupid simple!
Or is that 'simple, stupid!' ?

Oh and short.

Some people only play on a time limit - eg. I can't do a Quarterfield because I do not have 3 and a half hours to spend killing rularuu. Instead I will settle for a Lambda, because there is one forming right now!

::shrug::
We like low risk, high rewards !

BUT

When the new slots come out, those of course WILL likely be gated behind the newer trials. Then people will be forced to run the new trials to unlock the slot before falling into a Lambda Lambda Lambda league followed by a nice, steamy BAF.

OR

To solve that issue a new currency would need to be made.
Like Incarnate Cloth and T-Shirts.

"I beat Omega Sector and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!"

But, people will rage at the new currencies too, and just not do the new trials!
...
Or well, this is how I see it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wavicle CoH players are stupid and incompetent compared to WoW players.

I'd say its partly your server. If you have a good community, people will be alot more considerate about bringing higher lvl shifted toons to things like MoM/TPN/UG, which in turn makes those trials finish quicker and with higher success rate, which in turn makes people like them more, which in turn makes them run more than lower tier trials, which in turn makes people learn all the ins and outs of the higher tier trials better, which in turn makes them finish even faster and with even higher success rate, which in turn only makes the already better rewards all the more better. Many people may be unhappy about requiring level shifted toons for MoM/TPN/UG, however once people get used to it, it has an overall positive effect on your server's regular trial'ers.

There's a simple solution, which is to remove level shifts from the key AVs in UG, MoM and TPN. You cannot force people to play the trials in a certain order, so you may as well forget it. Alternately, make it easy for league leaders to see how much level shift a character has outside of trials, so that they can reject insufficiently level shifted characters more conveniently.

That said, BAF and Lambda (and now Keyes as well) have always given rewards disproportionate to their difficulty. Just don't expect to hear it from most of the playerbase, who only think about easy rewards. These two trials should not give components or emps for characters who have unlocked destiny/lore, and the damage pulse on Keyes should be restored to 50% maxhp, regardless of what other changes are made.

The Incarnate Trials represent a narrow play style wedged into a broad player base. While they's nothing wrong with them as a mechanic (the pebble is a different matter entirely), they don't work well in practice because people don't always value things the way the Incarnate dev team does. What the devs think of when they think of Incarnate Trials are increasingly challenging tasks built on the ones that came before them. BAF and Lambda seem to be geared towards getting your Incarnate Shifts, and it seems to be like a stepladder going from Keyes (54) to Underground (54 +1) to TPN/MoM (54 +2). You can't even think about going after TPN if you don't have the power to take on Keyes, for instance, so it's a bit of progression with some storyline mixed in. You do lower trials, you become more powerful, you do higher trials, you get all strong and stuff. Everyone wins.

From that narrow, restricted point of view, the Incarnate Trials make a lot of sense.

The reason this doesn't work well in practice is because in the grand scheme of things, the percentage of players actually interested in a progressively difficult post-50 "endgame" is extremely low; perhaps just the bottom ten percent across all level 50 players (which themselves are the minority across all players). There's a couple reasons for this. First and foremost, Incarnate Abilities are for Incarnate Trials. Incarnate Trials are for Incarnate Abilities. They require each other, and the rest of the game doesn't. Sure, the Abilities are handy in upper-level missions, but we never needed them. Not even for Master of Lord Recluse's Strike Force done the real way (don't need no permadom). But if you want to get any real worth out of the Incarnate system, you'll be caught in a feedback loop that just tries to hold itself up by the bootstraps.

Secondly, the progressively difficult Incarnate Trials are... well, progressively difficult, and that's about as contrary to the concepts of "casual" and "accessible" as you can get. The devs have gone on record stating they want to make the Incarnate Trials accessible, but the fact remains that it says right there in their design specifications that they are specifically not meant to be accessible. This isn't a problem in and of itself, but it certainly plays a huge role in who is willing to participate in which Trials. At the end of the day, people want to have some fun and get some shinies to show for it. Trying to dig to China with their ears isn't as much of a fulfilling way to spend their time, so the more aggressive Trials aren't run as much.

Thirdly, something that can't be said enough: raids aren't fun when you have to do them multiple times. The Incarnate Trials are the only viable path to the Incarnate Abilities, and they quite simply are not fun. They're tedious, they're repetitive, and after the first time, they're really not all that interesting. It's not unlike grinding newspaper missions in Grandville from level 45 to 50. Defeat Anti-Matter and Guards. Kick the Warworks out of the BAF. Steal the Molecular Acids from the IDF. Over and over.

What do we do to fix Incarnates? One easy step: take the emphasis off of the Incarnate Trials. They should remain the most rewarding route to Incarnate Abilities according to their difficulty, but they should not be treated as the primary source of power. Let me repeat that so it sinks in: the Incarnate Trials should not be treated as the primary path to Incarnate Abilities. They should be regarded on equal footing with the upcoming Dark Astoria content, and additional non-Trial Incarnate content should come along in the future.

This can be done well, or it can be poorly. The correct way is for the non-Trial content to be a viable means for obtaining all varieties of Incarnate Ability, even the Very Rares. Simply making it possible isn't sufficient for making it viable: already it's "possible" to grind enough Shards solo to turn into Very Rare Thread Components, but that's only true on a technicality. The thing that the devs shouldn't even think of doing is making Dark Astoria and other related non-Trial Incarnate content so unrewarding that you may as well do Trials anyway.

I think this can be partly explained the fact that (at least in my observation) incarnate characters are either at the bottom or the top of the incarnate ladder, never the middle.

In my experience, my characters are low level incarnates until I get enough iXP to unlock Destiny and Lore. Then suddenly I shoot to the top of the ladder due to stockpiled components, and then am just backfilling minor details. There are 4 things you need from the incarnate system to be able to rock a trial: the level shifts, Destiny, and the Lore pet. All of them come at more or less the same time. (IOs are helpful too, but come from outside the incarnate system directly).

My recommendation is to move the level shifts way down the ladder to Judgment and Interface, tier 1. That would create a much more solid middle tier of incarnate character and fix some of the issues with the later AVs. It's also at least somewhat reasonable that a character could fill those slots after only a couple of runs of the lower trials.

Not my experience on Pinnacle, TPN and Keyes are in regular rotation with BAF and Lambda these days (and MoM to an extent; not UG though).

Honestly this is beating a dead horse in terms of nerfing rewards for the BAF and LAM. The devs realized that was not the solution and backed off.

This issue had a thread that was over 70 pages, therein contain the myriad of reason not to attack the trials people play more for reasons the individual customer decides they like and to attack the additional content challenging it to be more fun and not tied to a bunch of scripted gimmicks.

As predicted the devs went towards more scripted gimmick trials and people as predicted are responding. The issue is the same one that has been there for the Dr. Q and old Posi TF vs ITF or KHTF.

It's a fun vs time vs reward issue, The devs and a few here have a valid good position in wanting more of a challenge and to some challenge = fun. I think that is something that is clear. However, as the playing habits of the majority of people that play the game(not the devs and not forumites), but people in the game have shown, the fun vs time vs reward leans more in the direction of the BAF and LAM.

The devs need to figure out what is more attractive about those trials and give us more of that pronto. Leaning on their own perceptions of fun and the vocal few forumites asking for more challenge is the wrong approach if the goal is to have people play all the trials evenly.

Which brings me to my end thought that the devs need to do less trying to direct players to certain content and more figuring out what content the entire playerbase wants more of and do that.

I always thought the moving away from 'all of the team is SSK'd to within 1 level of each other' back to the 'the lowest member is -4 to the enemies and therefore contribute much, much less' wasn't a good shift in team dynamics. Remember, back when someone would often have to be SK'd to a teammate who was -4 levels to the leader and they'd end up fighting +5s (contributing very little to the team effort, yet getting even better rewards)? I would have preferred it if they didn't have the second two level shifts, as it creates a dramatic difference between contribution of members again.

That said, we dealt with it for years, and will continue to do so without problem. I just thought SSK was great for 'allowing anyone to participate on near equal footing'.

Incarnate Trials and the whole Incarnate system in general strike me as a case of wanting to eat your cake and have it, too. It's like the development team wanted something with no progression, like Inventions, where you're just doing "other" things and possibly spinning our wheels, all the while getting components to make something which doesn't fall into a linear sense of progression, yet at the same time they wanted some kind of progression where people would feel they're accomplishing something, getting stronger and being able to take on tougher challenges. The problem is you can't have it both ways, and if you try to have it both ways, you can't have it either way.

OF COURSE people will run the lowest-level Trials over and over again. When there's no rigid hierarchy to the Trials and people can progress just as much off BAF as they can off MOM, but MOM is harder (to please), then why NOT do what's easier? Why, indeed, not level up to 50, or at least all the way to 20, on nothing but DFB? This is the problem - if you let people rerun the easier, lower-level content yet gain progress to their high-level status, they will rerun it. Because it's easier, because it's faster, because they've done it.

As far as I'm concerned, every Incarnate slot should come with a level shift up to a total of 10, and each Incarnate task should have its own level shift that it gives to its enemies, and that includes the solo Incarnate path, as well. If you're playing with a (+3) level shift and you're (+1) Incarnate content, then you get reduced rewards at task completion and reduced rewards at enemy defeats, like like you would if you ran a level 1 mission at level 3 or a level 48 mission at level 50.

The problem is that they've designed their Incarnate content to be SO complex and SO time-intensive to create that they can only make one task per three months or so. Obviously, there isn't enough content to go around in order to "tier" it and lock people into a specific path of progression, but I consider that to be an error of methodology, not a problem of human resources. The fact of the matter is raids don't need to be this complex and they don't need to take this long to create. Hell, STORY ARCS don't need to be this complex. I would take an Issue which had 50 or 100 very basic "defeat boss and guards" missions provided they were written well, over one three-mission arc that includes every mechanic the game has to offer.

---

Sideways from that is the question of progress. People have complained about long forced-teaming tasks because they don't have enough time to play them. Quaterfield and Moore come to mind. However, behind the problem of "not enough time" lies a much simpler room - these tasks can't be split or staggered, because the whole team must coordinate to do this. The problem, therefore, is not these tasks taking too long, but rather these tasks taking too long IN A SINGLE STRETCH. Personally, I feel that spreading these tasks into subtasks and letting people get progress that way would be far superior.

Think of how Portal 2 does it. The game has five large test tracks, each split down into eight or nine test chambers. Each player has his own record of which chambers from which tracks he's done, and he gets progress for any chamber he completes with any player, provided he hasn't completed it yet. So why can't we do that? Why can't our "trials" be broken down into multiple missions where any player joining a team at any stage will get credit for any of the missions he hasn't done yet? That's even better than how story arcs work, because for story arcs, you still have to run the story in order and you can't get credit for a stage you haven't reached yet. Sure, it might break continuity a bit, but it's not like "narrative" is a big part of these trials anyway.

Let's talk about TFs for a second. What if TFs could be broken down into different missions that you get credit for when you're on a team which completes them. If you leave the TF before the end, you retain credit for all missions that were in the TF. If you join another run of the same TF mid-way through, you retain credit for all missions that you did last time and start getting credit for all missions you didn't run. Then when you get to the end, you get a reward based on how many missions you have credit for.

So let's say a TF is 10 missions. You run 4 then leave. Then the next day, you join another run that's already on mission 6. You get to the end with credit for 8 out of 10 missions: 1-4, 6-10. You get 80% of the Merits.

This gets into the "granularity" of progress. If you can break progress down into micro units such that no matter how minuscule your action is, you still get SOME progress, then you can scale rewards based on participation. When your TF has just one monolithic reward at the end - like a component - you have to force people to be present all the way through, because you can either get it or not get it. You can't get half a component, or 63.173% of a component. When, on the other hand, your TF gives you 100 000 units (like TFs do with experience), then you very much can get half or 63 173 points of experience if you've run less of it.

Chance at drops, therefore, is a mechanic I hate. People often praise this game because they can log in, run a mission for 15 minutes, leave and feel like they've accomplished something. Well, I've logged in, played for 8 hours and not gotten a single Incarnate Shard. I earned NOTHING. When my play session may not as well have occurred, when playing the game was exactly like not playing the game, then I don't feel like I made progress. I feel like I wasted my time. And all because the development team can't make their minds up whether they want the Incarnate system to be a form of progression or a form of drops.

In my opinion, progress needs to be broken down into as fine a granularity as possible. ANY action, no matter how small or insignificant, should generate progress that I can see. It doesn't have to be a lot of progress, but it should be SOME progress nonetheless. As long as I can watch a bar rise or a number increase or a pie chart fill in, I know I'm making progress and I'm encouraged to do more of what's giving me progress. I know my time isn't wasted. It may not be used to its fullest, but it's not being WASTED.

I'm honestly not sure what the design specification behind the whole Incarnate system is, but I just it could be so much user friendly without necessarily taking any shorter a time to progress in it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I am sorry but people again need to think outside of the box.

You have trials that ALL award a random prize at the end. This means to get you what 16 or so slots you will need probably 30 runs of a trial to fill it all? So people run the fastest and easiest to get those 30 random awards.

My Solution is simple:
1. You must run the new trial ONCE to unlock the content for a new slot.
2. After unlocking if you continue the run the trial for THAT ASPECT you get an automatic exactly matching slot filled.

Players want the easy way to do things and they have proven this every single time. 16 runs gets a proven completion versus 30+ times for a maybe? I would also say no cooldown if you run the automatic trial. Yes that means some may get the power filled in an all day session - however they will be playing the content.

My attitude right now is that I'm done with iTrials and will just advance the remainder of my 50s in Dark Astoria when it comes out, no matter how slow the progress.

Why?

Because I feel the community are turning on each other and I don't want to take part in it.

There's no tolerance for 50s or (+1)s present in my experience on the new iTrials and when the lower tier Incarnates are present... I never felt that was the reason (whether I was the lower tier or not) we failed.

Even if it was because some players were too low that we failed, I'd rather go through the growing pains and make friends than outcast potential future participants, but that's me.

Sad thing is, there's no motivation for that iAttitude to be reversed as I see the system progressing unless something is done to reward or encourage allowing the lower tier Incarnates to join.

Maybe if the iTrials scaled the enemy difficulty based on the League's "cumulative threat rating" and "iPower swapping" was inactive while on a league (or ability to rejoin last event)... maybe things would be different.

I almost don't run the newer trials on my 2 mains anymore. They've done them, got the badges to prove it and they're already T4 in everything (and have been for a long time). I don't want to burn myself out on them, like I'm burned out on the BAF and Lambda. I also don't run the newer trials on any of my other 50's, well because they're not T3's and still stuck in the BAF/Lambda/Keyes stage. But since I'm burned on those, I barely do those either, so it's gonna take a few weeks/months before I get another character up to full T3 status.

The level shifted AV's really should be scrapped. Or maybe make their level shift scale with the average level shift of the players on the league. But I'm guessing that'd require some coding work.

The situation encourages a sort of 'elitism' towards non-level shifted characters, which in turn decreases the pool of available characters and players for the newer trials. I like the fact that the Incarnate trials tell a story of sorts in a certain order, but at the same time it's really obnoxious that I can't (well, I can, but ...) just join a MoM or whatever trial happens to be on, with a fresh level 50. Having to repeat the already run to death BAF and Lambda over and over in order to get the level shifts so I'm even allowed on the newer trials is just not fun.

The big underlying problem as I see it, is that you require to do way to many trials on a single character in order to get the level shifts so you can not be useless on the higher tier trials. This is a game of alts, by the dev's own admission. By the time you have got T3 incarnate powers (let alone T4's) on a few characters you have run the, mainly older, lower tier, trials SO often that you really don't feel like putting another character through that. Some people grind through it anyway because they just have to make their characters as powerful as they can, but I'm not that kind of player, if I feel something to be a drag I simply don't do it. I get most of my enjoyment out of the doing, not the end result.

The main problem at the start of the trials was that there were only 2. People were forced to repeat because there was no other choice. Now there is more choice, but the devs are creating artificial gates through the level shifts, still basically restricting players to 2-3 trials until they can get level shifts themselves, by which point you already did most of your trialling for that particular character.

Removing the level shifts from the trial bad guys would open them up for a wider audience. Difficulty in these trials should be through mechanics (which i.m.o. are great, mostly), not ever higher numbers.

The suggestion I saw earlier in this thread to put the player level shifts in Judgement and Interface instead of Lore and Destiny, could work too. It'd help with the amount of BAF's/Lambda's you need to grind before you get to your level shift, reducing burn out.

• 2- Far too often when a MOM, Underground, or TPN gets organized there is a glut of level 50 characters that join aboard to either experience something new, or to leech the increased rewards from higher tier trials, and both motivations invariably cause a disproportionate amount of these trials to fail. This happens despite requests for characters to be level shifted to +2 minimum.

I think the level shifts in the new trials are bogus, but so are the mechanics IMHO. TBH, I don't like the rings in the BAF or the grasshopper like jumping by the AV in the LAM either. Having said that, they are not overly intrusive like the newer mechanics and I can live with them.

What is the "purpose" of the rings in the first place? The entire hold the half the league because of threat rings is absurd. It is somewhat obnoxious to play a melee toon having to jump out of melee range because you are laying the smackdown "too" hard on an AV...pfft weaksauce.

This "mechanic" was expanded in the Keyes trial with the green patch and the wonderful Anti-Matter stops time blah blah...Now in the MOM you have the purple patches that just don't appear under you while you are suffering from the "extra stealth rooting", no they now GROW sometimes to the point where the entire area anywhere near the AV is basically super fast DOT death area. Pfft weaksauce.

This kind of "mechanic" is not fun and is also contributing to people not wanting to run the gimmick fest trials, not to mention the must be level shifted stuff that people are resorting too to increase the chance for league success in the MOM and TPN. Telling people something is fun or should be fun is not the answer. Observing what they do for fun and providing more of that is the better path to take.

Personally, I find it rather inconsiderate to join even a BAF or Lambda Trial unlevelshifted. You're just making it harder on everyone else to succeed. It's not that hard to run three or four task / strike forces upon reaching Level 50 to get the parts you need to obtain a Tier 3 Alpha. When my newest toon dinged level 50, I ran an ITF, STF, and LGTF over two nights and got everything I needed to obtain a Tier 3 Cardiac Alpha, and then proceeded to join iTrials.

As to unlevelshifted level 50s joining TPNs and MoMs and making the trials fail... simple. Don't invite them. A friend of mine ran a TPN the other night. We had a whole team of unlevelshifted level 50s. Unsurprisingly, most of them were melee. Before we began, my friend asked everyone on that team to switch to a levelshifted toon. All but one just quit. So we just ran with what we had. You know what though? We ran the TPN and beat it easily.