Smaller iTrials: Would you do them?

They aren't enjoyable? At ALL? Gee, there is a heap of trials being run for something that apparently no one actually enjoys huh? Say..I ran a TPN today..it was fun. Amazing! If smaller leagues damage larger ones, assuming the rewards are similar, that tells me people are greedy, and want to get shinies for less work. But hey..we KNOW that..look how common baf/slam are.

What are you even saying...Honestly. You solo EVERY toon you have to 50? Then how did you ever arrive at this team size of 4 as being the best? Oh wait, so you actually TEAM, after you hit 50? Just thought I should point it out again..this is an MMO. Interesting you compare teaming to hitting yourself with a hammer. It must REALLY hurt to play with those other 3 people huh? Poor guy..maybe try some windows solitaire?

Yet..you want the incarnate powers, but the way we have to get them (again, in no way saying it is perfect) is not good enough for you. Thats fine, enjoy that solo path of shard>thread>salvage>some power in a month or so. Till we get a 'proper' solo path.

As to forced teaming..again..MMO. Multiplayer? If the implication that we should team, sometimes, isnt there..well...go play with yourself.

There'll be a big rush to do the DA content at first, just like with any new zone.

Indeed. But that "nao crowd" will be so easy to avoid since we know they play mostly during weekday prime time: 5pm-11pm local time. Their habits are so predictable I've rarely had a problem soloing what I want to get done without them buzzing around.

OK, let's break this catastrophe down into its core elements:

Do I solo all of my "toons" to level 50? I would say yes, but you seem to have a needlessly strict definition of the concept. Yes, I team sometimes, and if that means I didn't solo a character to level 50 for having another person on my team for one mission one time in the history of forever, then no, I don't solo my way to 50. That meaningless pedantry aside, however, I gain most of my characters' levels from 1 to 50 by myself, with teams had only occasionally, and mostly with people I know from before.

This is an MMO. Yes, that stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online." The word "team" does not appear anywhere in the definition, and is indeed not even implied. All the term means is that the game consists of a persistent world with many players playing in it, but these players are not necessarily playing together. Social interaction IS an important part of MMO design, and I just happen to have mine over chat, as opposed to via teaming. Global chat and Global friends make it incredibly easy to socialise with people not on my team. As a point of fact, it's far easier to socialise when I'm solo, because then I can pause the action for the time it takes to type up a long chat message.

Does it hurt to team? Unless I'm teaming with people like you, who feel that I should play the game their way or get off their game lest I dirty it with my soloing habits, no, it does not hurt. It doesn't hurt to watch a movie, but I don't want to spend every spare minute I have watching movies. Sometimes I like to watch movies, sometimes I like to play games, sometimes I like to construct Lego sets and some times I like to lie down and do nothing. Teaming is one aspect of this game, and as hard as it is to comprehend it when your objective is to insult me, that's not the only thing I want to do all the time every day. I team when I feel like it, and when I don't feel like teaming, I don't.

No game is perfect, but this particular mistake is said to be rectified. Whether it actually is or not is still to be seen. I, personally, have high hopes and low expectations, but I know you didn't come for this. It's much more productive to gloat that I don't have access to something I want because I don't play your way, so go ahead and continue attacking me. I'm sure it makes you feel much better about yourself.

Oh, boy, this is a good one. I applaud you, good sir. You are the first person who has ever told me that if I don't want to team, I should go **** myself. This is quite an ingenious word play you have going there. I am impressed. You have truly gone the extra mile to be an insulting, dismissive jerk, and we don't see this dedication every day. Normally, I'd extrapolate the insult into more and more absurd exaggerations, but with a statement like this, my imagination simply fails to come up with anything better. Well, there was that charming fellow who told me he wished I would die back in 2007, but that really doesn't count since I didn't think of it.

I am afraid I will have to continue blighting your game with my presence, however, because despite your best effort to ruin the game for me, it is still a lot of fun. Luckily, most people in our community aren't nearly as bad as you are, and the game isn't nearly as pedantic about robbing me of my choice in how to play. Moreover, the development team seem to have more sense than to stick with your "To hell with people who aren't me!" approach and are actually giving the players what they want, even if the players happen to want something different from what the developers had in mind. Hard as I may have been on Matt Miller in recent times, his team is indeed delivering on his old promise.

*edit*
I changed my mind. It's a new year on my end, and I figure it's time to do the right thing and stop getting sucked into this.

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.

Fun isn't the only reason to run a trial. I imagine that quite a lot of players will endure trials they don't particularly regard as fun so long as they get the Incarnate-building rewards they need. You know, just like how the majority of people on this Earth work jobs they don't particularly like and would never describe as fun, strictly for the paycheck. To the extent to which players have decided that having Incarnate powers is a "necessity" (for their enjoyment of the game), running the trials will remain an equally necessary evil, whether they are fun or not.

To my mind, there is really no other plausible explanation for why BAF and Lambda get run so often. The veteran trial runners clearly want the rewards; whatever "fun factor" these trials may have once had has long since been extracted, as evidenced by the fact that they are essentially executed purely on auto-pilot.

Like the ITF?

I think that various areas of the zone could have Trials formed in them, depending on the level of the league - like a league with mostly +2s and +3s might prefer to camp an area that that had 53 ands 54 mobs in it, so that they could get better rewards in between the Trials, while a league with mostly +1s and plain 50s might like to form up in an area where there are only 50 and 51 mobs to streep sweep in between their Trials.

The drop off from the first rush won't be as big in DA as it was in other new zones, like Faultline or First Ward, because not only can DA not be out leveled, it's also got unique content - it'll be kinda like Peregrine Island before any other high level zones were added - it'll be the destination for 50s.

I'd say the opposite: If you *can* solo Trapdoor easily then you certainly don't need the extra power that being an Incarnate brings, whereas the person who can't is actually in need of the power boost.

Never having done the ITF, I can't say what I think of it or speculate on why people run it repeatedly. I think the classic TFs are mostly fun the first time through, but after that the only reason I do them is to get the Task Force Commander accolade.

This is pretty much true for all the repeatable content in the game for me. Once I've experienced any given mission/TF/Trial once or twice, I'm pretty much done with it, and only repeat it for the character progression rewards or the team play experience. Content that offers no meaningful rewards rarely ever gets run again for that toon.

Honestly, I don't understand what the appeal is of "the grind"--which I define as running repeatable content over and over and over again, even after its immutable narrative script has been mastered--outside of the tangible xp/inf/merit/component rewards.

It's just like repeating anything else in life - it's because it's fun.

Andf also like anything else in life, the definition of fun is subjective.

The majority of the things we do in life repeatedly we do for reasons not even remotely related to how fun they are. And the fun things we do do repeatedly usually involve some form of dynamic potential so that the experience isn't nearly identical every time. Repeatable MMO content has very little in its architecture to help make it new and different each time through. It is relentlessly unvarying, in fact, and even the participation of different players can't always compensate for that, especially in the iTrials where the same exact sequence of activities and events play themselves out regardless of league composition.

The classic TFs and all TFs in general are only fun to do once in a while, as is most mission content. However, with mission content, there's enough of it that you don't have to repeat anything very often at all.

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.

Like rewatching a movie or rereading a book?

My answer would be yes or no depending on how often one rewatches a movie or rereads a book, and how much time there is between iterations.

I enjoy the current trials, and by that I mean all of them, I typically run Keyes, TPN, and MoM significantly more than BAF/Lam (rarely ever do baf). However when I run them I usually form them with the minimum number of people. It takes less time to form and typically have a higher % of people which I'm friends with, which typically means faster trial and higher success rate.

If the devs added new smaller trials with somewhat equivalent rewards I definitely would be running them more, but it has nothing to do with being greedy, it just means I prefer to just group with friends.

I rarely find a book or movie interesting enough to sit through a second time just for its own entertainment value, so yeah, that works pretty well in this analogy.

I have re-read two books in all my years. One was a Terry Brooks book: The Sword of Shannara. I originally read it when I was very young, and reread it many years later, and actually didn't remember most of the book, which is unusual for me. (This probably has a lot to do with why I do not reread books often.) Oddly, the other was the novelization of the movie Tron, which I read when that movie came out. I don't remember why, of all the things I've read in my life, I was compelled to read that twice in quick succession, but I know I really liked it (on its own merits, separate from the movie).

I rewatch movies frequently, usually on TV, and almost never at the theater. (I do watch many movies at the theater.) There are only a couple of movies I like to rewatch even though I've seen them recently.

As mentioned above combat in CoH is almost never the same twice. How my brain works, it doesn't matter almost at all that it's the same warehouses and caves every time, fighting the same several dozen foe models and four or five animation skeletons. It doesn't matter that I've read the same stories dozens of times. All that matters is that the fights are dynamic. Even on the same character, the same mission will not play the same way twice, basically ever.

Additionally, I am someone who approaches every replay of something as an opportunity to do something better. If I can help my league complete it faster, while getting more Astrals/badges, or with fewer deaths, or something like that, I enjoy that. For a long time before we had iTrials I was a speed TF runner, and my personal goal every time we re-ran a TF we had done dozens, maybe hundreds of times before, was to do it faster this time than we had previously.

Therefore, my tolerance for iTrial repetition is fairly high. It is not infinite, but even running the same iTrial repeatedly tends not to play out identically, and presents a new opportunity to improve tactics or just outright reaction. I play the iTrials for their reward, but I find ways to have fun with them while making that progress.

* This is probably one reason I prefer "clicky" powersets like Regen or Dark Miasma. Powersets that are "toggle and forget" tend to collapse the number of dynamic elements in a fight, at least in terms of how I react to the tactical progression.

Perhaps. But I am retired with 24x7 flexibility when I play. I guarantee I'll find the time & area when & where y'all are not and that's where I'll be.