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Posts
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According to Arcanaville (who I, personally, consider a pretty reputable source) there's no cooldown of any kind on crafting/earning Notices of the Well currently. The only cooldown is the one on the Weekly Strike Task.
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Quote:Having a 'solo-only' way to get this stuff is the reasonable alternative. Whether you agree with how many shards it costs or not is immaterial. The devs could have said "Don't want to team? Well, then you don't get ANY rare Incarnate salvage." yet they did not.I don't see how lowering the cost from 88 shards (average 400 hours solo) to something reasonable is being catered to or puts huge financial pressure on the devs. Explain.
Quote:This coming from someone who has to come up with their own unique snowflake term like 'anti-teamers', when the reality is people who cannot reliably team or who do not want to be a hinderance? -
Quote:I'm having a hard time coming up with any examples from the 'pro-conversion' (for lack of a better term) camp. In this specific thread, anyway. I'm not worried about any long-term grudges or agendas or whatever.Both sides have, at times, been fairly liberal with throwing around the accusations and belittlements. No one can really claim a high-ground here.
Unless you're thinking of me using 'anti-teamers' but that was more intended to specifically exclude the term 'soloer' - because we weren't talking about people who solo (heck, I solo) we were talking about people who always solo, who never team. Calling them 'soloers' muddies the waters.
Well then those people are silly. I'm quite certain the fact that there was no damage resistance cap until Issue 1 was quite an... interesting mistake. But that's neither here nor there. -
I find it interesting how one 'side' of this debate seems to rely on pre-emptively defending their position while at the same time trying to cast aspersions on the 'other side'. It makes it seem like your (general your) reaching for ways to hamstring discussion.
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Quote:Way to twist around what the other guy said. Let's try this again:"I would prefer not to team. I have reasons for this."
"The only problem here is you, then."
"I would prefer not to team. I have reasons for this."
"If you don't team then you don't get the benefits of teaming."
He's not (as I understand it, I suppose I should note although I would think this caveat is obvious) attacking you, he's saying that if you're not willing to pay for a Porsche, then you don't get to drive it home. You choose not to team, you choose not to take advantage of team-based rewards/systems. -
I suspect the devs know a lot more about what the general player populace wants than you or I do. I further suspect that this shift toward end-game teaming content is being done because that's what the majority of the playerbase wants. I can't prove that, of course, but unlike some people I won't claim to know one way or the other. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
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Just wanted to post again and clarify - since one of my teammates saw my earlier image and pointed this out to me - that I really can't claim that Reichsman isn't a rather boring slog and basically just a big bag of hit points to pound on. That 52-minute I mentioned? That one took so long because our one Defender (who happened to be Rad/ and thus was a huge help in AV fights) quit the TF in the middle of the final fight, leaving a team of mostly melee characters to pound through Reichsman's regeneration.
So yeah, we were pretty successful all told, and I guess a lot of it was that I know 3 of us know general game mechanics pretty well and have decent-to-good builds (I think mine's pretty good but I've definitely seen much better 'monster' builds) and that may have skewed our times somewhat - I definitely don't know about and can't speak for what the 'average' may be in regards to Kahn - but despite the fact that we managed to cut through it pretty fast, in the end the Reichsman fight is a slog, it can't really be denied. -
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Coming up with names is hell for me because I prefer 'classic' type names. Some of my characters:
Impervious Girl
(The) Atomic Woman
Meteor Maiden
Fission Lass
Rock Lad
It's always a challenge to come up with a name that fits that sort of cheesyness ratio that works for me but that isn't also already taken. -
To continue Geko's line of thought:
Since the WTF has been around I have yet to have trouble finding people to run it at just about any time. Even if you don't have a lot of time to devote to teaming, it seems to me that joining a WTF group (which has a pretty good chance of having at least a couple 'powergamers' in it as alluded to by Geko) and 'suffering' through them stealthing maps or doing their powergamer thing for 30 or 40 minutes in order to get a Notice is far easier than saving up 88 shards all by yourself?
I guess what I'm saying is that even if you can't commit to long periods of play, there are ways to get Notices through the WTF. The only issue seems to be people who won't team up on principle. -
Quote:Well, first of all using the term 'soloer' is kind of misleading. A soloer can team up and stuff, the word doesn't mean they only solo. Thus why you see me use the term 'anti-teamer'.A_W, I have a serious question here. Why does it matter so much to you wether soloers get their options or not? You have your method, you clearly don't mind it, and it is guarenteed to be faster than whatever soloists get because...well, because. We all know that.
I just find it curious that so many people who obviously don't have any issue finding teams and whatnot seem so intent on muscling in on other peoples playing methods...
I'm actually glad that 'anti-teamers' are getting an option to do this. The devs are going out of their way to accomodate them when they don't have to, and that's great.
I take exception to the fact that you (general you here, not you personally) will have an option to get these rewards even though you're not participating in the stuff they're normally earned through, but instead of being grateful that it's an option I'm seeing people basically say "No, I want it faster!"
It's not supposed to be fast. It's there as the last resort for people who absolutely refuse to team. If it was faster there would be less incentive to team to get them. And it's been stated outright that all this stuff is designed around getting people to team. The devs want you to team. -
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Quote:How does this have anything to do with me saying that I get annoyed when people use lies as the basis for their arguments?Okay this post may come off as a little offensive, but what the hell.
When did you start playing MMO's? Do you even remember when the genre was just for the geekiest of the geeks? When to even level up you were required to have a team consisting of tank, healer and DPS? The holy trinity mean anything to you?
Design of MMORPG's have moved on from there, and this a good thing. You can argue try arguing that it's not, but you would be flat out wrong. Socially and economically wrong.
Quote:All that AND a rather large sum of Inf? What does money have anything to do with an entity like the Well? It stinks of being a totally arbitrary barrier that also goes against canon.
Quote:And (one more time) making players only able to Convert a Notice OR Earn one via WST, so a One a Week no matter the method, would also stop exploitation.
Quote:FCM and I regularly duo missions set at x4. By your reasoning, then, we should be able to get all the goodies in about twice the time it takes a full team, right? We are, after all, plowing through half-a-team's worth of mission.
Heh.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. There will be a way for 'anti-teamers' to get Incarnate salvage, but at the same time players are encouraged to team and get it via the WST. What you say you want is basically exactly what is (/will be) in place. -
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Quote:So the conversion on test still falls into the 'teaming encouraged' column for you.If the only way to get something is through a team, it's forced. If teams get those things quicker and easier, it's encouraged.
Also, from a Kahn I just did with 2 friends and 5 random people (the 8th person was another scrapper):
No pre-planning, just grab people and go, I tanked Reichsman on my scrapper. -
Nothing wrong with people disagreeing. I do find it annoying when people flat-out lie about something and then treat it as fact, and proceed to use that lie as the basis for an argument, however.
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Would you rather that the conversion didn't exist, and the only way to get Notices was the WTF? Because that's a perfectly defensible stance to take when the system in question is flat-out stated to to based around teaming in order to get people to team.
Edit: Also, what Bosstone said above. -
Quote:Nowhere in this game is there a 'you must team' mentality. If you want to get Incarnate stuff (at the better rate) then you need to team, but nobody is forcing you to, they are even explicitly giving you another way to get the stuff if for whatever reason you just can't/won't team for it.Honestly this 'you must team' mentality is a massive step back in terms of MMO design. Why not go the whole hog and up the difficulty so that to even level up you need a tank and a healer, at all times?
I really wish people would stop posting stuff like the quote above as if it were true and then using it to support their arguments. It just necessitates andother refutation and unnecessarily pads the discussion. -
Quote:Quoting this whole post for emphasis. Very well said.If someone never has more than 30-60 minutes a day to play, I really have a hard time agreeing that they should be able to attain the same rewards. Given that they have real lives, which the people who can devote 30+ hours a week to the game assuredly don't (
), I'm not too worried about them.
I agree to a certain extent that whether or not an MMO focuses on teamed or solo play is a design decision and there's not much that says an MMO must be teamed content aside from the inherent social aspect of the game. However, an MMO is about generating revenue, and the way in which it primarily seeks to generate revenue drives the design goals to a certain extent. When it comes to subscription-based games, they want you paying to play for as long as possible.
Further, there are roughly three types of people who play, with regard to time investment. There's a whole continuum, but it can be broken up into the following:
- The hardcore. These folk think nothing of putting in extreme amounts of time into the game running at the very highest levels. They're always the first to finish content, and are then usually happy to squeeze said content dry to get the maximum amount of reward out of it. If they finish it too quickly, though, they get bored and look for another game.
- The dabblers. You can't even really call these people casual. They are the ones who can only spare 30-60 minutes a day if that, may be called away at any time, can only play one night a week, etc. The cynical may think these are a MMO publisher's greatest customer, as they pay without playing, but they also have no investment in the game. They may like it very much and enjoy it when they are playing, but there's little holding them back from canceling their subscriptions at a moment's notice. I have no real data, but I suspect this is not that big a group.
- The casuals. These are people who either play regularly, as in every night, or if they can only play a few nights a week they can usually devote several hours at a stretch. They don't chew through content as fast as the hardcores, but unlike the dabblers they actually have a good shot at consuming all the content in a reasonable amount of time; any goal they set may be some time off, but it is achievable.
The casuals are who NCSoft want. They're the largest segment of the playerbase, and they play often enough that as long as you keep dangling rewards in front of their faces they'll keep playing for a long, long time. These are the people development is geared toward. If they developed for the hardcore players, casuals would be left so far behind that they'd be dabblers, and their subscriptions become just as easy to lose. If development is geared toward the dabblers, then even casuals will rip through content as fast as hardcores do and may well unsubscribe even faster, as there's less personal investment and need to be the best.
Fact is, the person who simply cannot team because they can only spare 30 minutes a night and may have to leave the computer often during that time is on the far extreme end of the bell curve. Any reasonable progression system is going to leave them in the dust. On the other end of the bell curve, the hardcore players are always going to leave a reasonable system in the dust. It is simply not worth designing the system specifically for either of them. Accommodations can be made, bones can be thrown, but not always more than that. If they can manage with the system designed for the casuals, great. If they can't, well, their circumstances are regrettable, but in the meantime there are another thousand customers who need to be served and who can be served. -
Quote:And the thing is, 3 shards for a 30-minute ITF averages out to a shard every 10 minutes. You can hop on, do that, and then go back to soloing (and get shards there). But it's hard to turn down a guaranteed 1 shard per 10 minutes, even if you can only do it once a day.I have been on several sub 30 minute ITF's. Yes they were speed runs, but still got a few (3) shards from it.
In the "kill all that moves" ITF's that i have been on, on average it took twice as long, and got between 6 and 9 shards.
So efficiency was about the same (for me), but that is the luck of the RNG. Hell i have been on a "kill all" ITF and got 3 shards from it... now THAT sucked for efficiency. -
When did this change, then? Last time I looked at the conversion recipe you break down a component (which takes 4 shards to make normally) and would get 3 shards back. If it's been changed to 1 then that sucks.
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Quote:Friend of mine did Kahn in under 18 minutes yesterday. He's a powergamer, sure, but the fact is it can be done.Given all the reports of 30 min. or less Kahn's this week, not buying that excuse. Not all are powergamer teams either. The powergamer teams are beating 20 min.
If you're so resolute that you can't team for 30 minutes to knock out an ITF once a day (which is a guaranteed 3 shards via the end reward if nothing else) I have to admit that I personally don't feel for you. A 30-minute ITF is not hard, you don't have to be a 'powergamer' to do it, and people are always running them (because they're so fast). -
It doesn't matter, because even if there were no 'speed bumps' on the Incarnate stuff you still wouldn't be able to get it because you refuse to team and/or do TFs. Nobody is 'robbing' you of your 'progress' except yourself.
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You're free to disagree, but at this point I sincerely doubt they plan to overhaul it.
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Quote:This is really what it boils down to. Apparently some people think getting their Incarnate stuff completely solo shouldn't be much slower than doing it via the WTF. Considering that the entire Incarnate system is described as an end-game, team-based system, I think the devs are being generous giving the 'soloists' a second option at all, but it seems proponents on the other side don't feel that's enough.I don't see the reason for complaint.
It's simple. They gave the soloers away to continue to get everything solo. They said it was going to cost more to do it solo.
If you're wanting to be solo all the time, then what's the rush anyways? Just to have it? To do...things...solo?