Atomic_Woman

If a team of 8 does X in Y amount of time, then it is entirely reasonable to expect an anti-teamer to take roughly 8Y time to achieve X themselves. It's simple math. Nothing in this example is penalizing the anti-teamer other than his or her insistence/inability to join a team. But then again, it's not the game's fault that they won't/can't, either.

Let's refrain from attacks here, please.

I think something like the following would be more appropriate:

<those same various incarnate salvage pieces>
20 or 25 shards
250 million Inf

That would bring the total amount of shards needed down to 68 or 73, which is still enough to incentivize the WTF, I think.

I can make a lot more than that in an hour. At 10 million an hour (conservative estimate) you can have the Inf for it in 10 hours, or about 3 days playing 3 hours a day. Maybe you can't put that much time into playing in one week, but that just means it takes you 2 weeks, or 3 weeks, instead. This is an end-game, long-term reward system, anyway.

How are any of these the devs/game's responsibility to address? It sucks if you have to drop things to take care of your kid or your computer can't run huge teams, I agree, but those aren't exactly things that they can do anything about on their end.

So not offering an option is not acceptable, but offering an option is also not acceptable?

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Serious question: If they had never said they planned a way for 'anti-teaming' people to get rare incarnate salvage, that it would always and forevermore be a WTF-only thing from the beginning, would you have been okay with that?

Wow, you're just looking for things to be angry about now, aren't you?

Glad to see you have nothing else to contribute to the discussion, then.

Content: I reactivated my subscription after a 2-year hiatus a few days before the last 2XP weekend (so around Jan 20). I had one level 50, who wasn't even kitted out with IO sets, and my total liquid assets were in the 300k Inf range. As of today I've spent roughly 1.5 billion Influence on her IO sets (all earned by me, and none of it farmed), although she still only has an uncommon alpha boost (but 2 Notices) since I've got characters at 45, 47, and 48 I've been pushing to 50. Making Inf is not hard at all.

I actually think that's kind of a lowball estimate. I may have exaggerated a bit in my last post when I said 100m in 2 hours, but when you figure in recipe drops and invention salvage and Wentworth's it's pretty common. Most recipes aren't worth anything but vendor trash, but you end up with a surprising number that cost maybe 400k to craft and sell for 8-10 million at auction. And salvage can get up there pretty well in price, too.

It's honestly really, really easy to make Influence at 50. Like the man said, it spews out like confetti.

Yes, it is. Simply saying that it isn't doesn't make it (not?) true.

Normally I'd be willing to meet you in the middle here and say something to the effect of me being okay with the requirement being lowered to 60 or 65 shards, but experience has shown me that doing that just gets people saying "60 is still too much, it should be 30!" or other similar things.

That wasn't meant as a personal attack, by the way.

You don't have to farm at all to make 100 million. I can probably make than in 2 hours of normal play with one of my high-level characters, easily.

Probably. I wouldn't mind if the shard count was lowered to the 60-65 range. Perhaps with the Influence doubled to make up for it. Because 100 million Inf at the point we are talking about is pretty laughable. But I don't make the decisions, so who knows?

In most MMOs socializing takes the form of teaming.

Unless you're coming from Second Life I guess.

And this hasn't changed. You can still team or solo as you so wish. Even for your Incarnate stuff (not this very second, but we know it's coming).

However, expecting the 'anti-teaming' option to be anyway near as fast as the option that the devs are actively trying to encourage is pretty much folly.

I can't/won't speak to CoH itself, but as far as the MMO industry goes on the whole that is absolutely the biggest gripe. Players go through content orders of magnitude faster than it can be created.

You've already spoken on the devs' intentions in thsi thread, why shouldn't they?

I agree that it would/should be easy, but we don't know that it will be countered/limited at all.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this. The majority do one thing but that doesn't make that one thing 'normal' because... ? So the minority that refuse to group at all, ever, are playing 'normally' and the majority who group are doing it wrong?

Note that we're not talking about people that only group here. We're talking about people who refuse to group vs 'people who solo some and also group some'. If you were to define 'normal' behavior for a MMO the latter case is surely it.

I play mine like a(n anemic) Blaster that debuffs AVs really good. It's kind of frustrating but I'm really invested in the character...

Good to know you know how a feature still in beta will work after release.

This is (at least) the third time this thread you have either ignored half of a post to make your point, or deliberately twisted something to try to make a point.

Please state where I said MMO meant only team content was acceptable. Having some content require teaming doesn't suddenly mean that you can't solo. It only means that you can't solo that content.

Notices from the Weekly Task Force are gated, once per week. Notices from that conversion recipe don't seem to be (it's not mentioned in the recipe at least).

... And everyone can (once this conversion goes live)?

They never said (to the best of my knowledge) that everyone would be able to partake of it at the same speed/rate...

I don't think it's a matter of fast versus slow. It's more a matter of the majority vs the minority. I don't say this to single you out, and I certainly don't have server stats and such so this is just anecdotal, but in my experience playing MMOs for going on a decade now the people who simply will not group are indeed in the minority. The devs need to make sure that this system is first and foremost balanced around the majority (ie, those willing to group).

I like how this poster completely misunderstood what that Hartsman guy said.

A design decision made when it was decided the game was to be a MMO instead of a MO or some other type of game, true.

Now, granted, the requirements for this conversion will probably get tweaked before it's finalized, but the fact is this is a secondary way to get stuff added in for the people who just refuse to do it the 'normal' way, and it shouldn't be as easy or as quick. As mentioned earlier in the thread, if it wasn't noticably slower than doing it the normal way you'd end up with people who got pieces from TFs and also converted shards to rare components, which runs the risk of screwing up progression for them as well.