Blue_Mourning

Part of me agrees, but I don't think this precludes the ability to protest. There are things about the incarnate system that I don't like, and I'm trying to sit down and really codify it before I come and say my peace. "I don't like this..." is usually not helpful criticism because writers tell the story that would hold their interest, otherwise they wouldn't write it. Said another way: A writer cannot predict with 100% accuracy what someone else will like, so the writer can only write what he or she would like with 100% accuracy (and hell, as a writer myself even that bit is false....)

I think there are a lot of factions in the coaltion of not liking i20. There's Venture who apparently doesn't like anything about it (or possibly the game, I'm not entirely sure); there's the "casual/solo" players that represent a broad coalition who maintain that the new direction isn't one that welcomes them (Eikio-Chan appears to be the extremist of this group); there's the people who's main complaint appears to be the storyline (Sam Tow seems to fall into this camp, but also the formerly mentioned one of casual friendly options); there's the group that doesn't like the mechanics of tying trials into incarnate progression, and other who simply don't like the Lore power.

The problem that I have with the majority of these arguments settle down into three basic problems:

1) There are some (BUT NOT ALL) who simplify the arguments. For instance: those arguing that they don't like the current way the stories are being written hold up the earlier arcs as well written arcs while dismissing anything that's bad about them. This simplification leads to a mentality of "If someone's disagreeing with me, I'm being attacked and must attack in return!!!!!". This, of course, is exacerbated by some people actually attacking them. Everyone is taking their position to be the complex and well thought out one and the other side simply hasn't thought about it enough to come to their side. For instance: I like the lore. How many times have you read that the current writing of the game is just "bad writing"? When I have pointed things out about it that I like, and that I feel it succeeded in accomplishing, my arguments are swept under the rug. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to find that some people put me into this "Dev Defense Force" which I wouldn't classify myself as being.

2) The various positions take the other, mostly unrelated arguments, as evidence of their own mostly unrelated opinions. There are a lot - a lot - of threads right now in this forum and others that are slamming i20. Considering the fairly broad coalition of those who don't like it, one would think that each thread would be about one thing and one thing only. This is sadly not the case. Instead every thread starts out focused, and then becomes an argument about the muck and mire of the various arms of the coalition. Every thread should not be an opportunity to come in and shout about what your problem is, because if it does it makes it absolutely impossible to sift through and find anything of use. Not liking the story should have nothing at all with not liking the mechanics from a feedback/discussion perspective. Yet in this single thread alone I swear I can't nail down some people's positions because there's too much noise. It makes the argument absolutely usless


And worse than all that there are those that are complaining about the current state of i20 when they haven't even tested the majority of it. Venture stated at one point that he logged on, read what Prometheus said, and then stopped testing. There are those who are complaining about how hard it's going to be to start the trials and some of them haven't actually tested it. There are others who have complained about the lag that it must engender because "If they're anything like MSR or Hami....", and THAT ALONE tells me that they haven't tested it.

There's so much noise that absolutely anything of interest and any useful discussion is simply getting shouted down by everyone who, apparently all they want to do, is use every opportunity to shout about it. They're not even interested in any kind of feedback - and that is something that you, Scarlet, actually just did. You made a complaint that some content is getting trivialized. Yes it was a sub argument, and yes it might not have been important in the grand scheme of your complaints - but you still made the complaint and someone still corrected you and told you that "There are options that make it none trivial again". Did you respond by saying "Oh, you know what, you're right, I was wrong on this one part."

You instead responded by saying 'Oh, I use those all the time, but content is still getting trivialized when I don't make it harder." That is an non-useful position, and one that I fear is a product of the noise of this system.

Then we have a complete and utter inability to progress beyond "I want to complain a lot." Seriously. If the complaint is "prior content has been trivialized" there are things you can do to mitigate that that has been there for quite some time. Set the difficulty higher so that it's still relatively as difficult. Otherwise, what precisely are we complaining about?

ITF set at +0 can be considered trivial. Set at +4 romans hit pretty hard even if if you have the level shift. Most people set their TF's at +0 and don't look back.

In this thread there are several people complaining about something they haven't tested. I wouldn't say that if I could name names, and I can. I can understand not liking the mechanics (although I do [and that being said if you feel that a levelshift trivializes current content, bump up your TF difficulty]), but at least everything you mentioned has been tested.

If you're able to put together a LGTF regularly with your coalition you'll be able to put together Lambda just as regularly, which only requires 8 to start.

Once again - don't judge these on MSR's and Hami's. For one those are usually done with 30+ people, the maximum that can be on the largest so far is 24, and that one can be done with 12. Second of all, while it does require coordination you have time to establish, at the beginning, just who should be leading and who should be giving the orders. There isn't a time limit on the first section. Thirdly, even if you fail, that doesn't preclude you from earning threads or incarnate XP to unlock the slots, so even if you lose it won't totally be in vain.

Third of all, I would like smaller tasks as well. But you'd be more likely to be able to judge these trials on the current in game TF's than the raids. The trials are instanced, and don't require any specific AT anymore than any other content does, and like everything else, will get easier the more often everyone does it. You want a higher chance of a more successful run? Don't run it when it first hits live. Run it the week after. That's when you'll get people who are more able to lead and the majority of them will know more about what's going on.

I do, however, think that the shades of grey happen at the more naunced of the two factions. Power Loyalists and Resistance Crusaders are both fairly selfish/bad people. The moral choices provided in them are given in those terms. However, the Warden and Responsibility paths are the ones that the moral choices are usually real choices. The bad guys in those arcs are usually likable, or at least understandable. The syndicate in the IC Responsibility arc has more honor among each other than anyone except maybe Kang during that whole arc. I thought it was a great choice at the end. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the interesting questions take place then and not at the more extreme positions.

I didn't mean to indicate that everyone who complains about it is automatically hysterical. But what there is, however, is a tendency to not be interested in discussion. Some people are indeed being hysterical.

However, there is very little actual substantive debate or discussion on the topic. We are judging a completely new system based on the merits of a game that has been rolled out over almost seven years now.

I'll say that again because it bears repeating: We are judging a system based on the merits of the rest of the game that has been rolled out over almost 7 years.

When they gave you the ability to get to 50, once you completed the missions how much was there actually left to do? We had all the arcs. We had the 44 - 50 Shadow Shard TF's and the LRSF for villains, and that was it for a really freaking long time. Even when I signed up in i9, when they finally even gave a reason to play after 50 (IO's as character progression), there was one new TF rolled out - the STF (and by the way, no new villain SF's at 50). Now we could do the STF, Justin Augustine and Faathim. It was only after the next two to three years that the LGTF (and all the vanguard missions), ITF (and Daed's Sister Arlia's mission), and Kahn/Barracuda came out.

This might be the second issue dealing with incarnates, but the system they roll out will be halfway through by the time i20 is done. I'm not trying to say you don't have any claim to be frustrated with the "slow" roll out. I'm not even trying to say that people who are frustrated with the Lore Power have nothing to complain about (although I think that they're simplifying what it would take to "fix" the perceived problem). I'm trying to say that we're judging an entirely new system that hasn't been rolled out yet on the rest of the game which took several years to get to that point.

And yes, some poeple - And I'm not saying you specifically Scarlet - are over reacting to this entire thing. And there's nothing that grates on me more than pointless histrionics. Between that - and to be fair it is on both sides - and the fact that there's a lot of complaining by people who admittedly haven't wandered over to the Beta server and tried the trials, and the fact that there's very little, if any, actual honest debate is extremely annoying. Seriously. How many times have we seen people that won't do the incarnate trails because they hate Hami raids and MSR's (either because they hated the lag, or because they hated putting the team together)? I did test them out because I wanted to see what it would be like. You know what I found? It was absolutely nothing like Hami or MSR. Nothing at freaking all. And they're easy to put together, and should remain that way even on relatively low pop servers. There's other things that I would complain about for sure, but that's not one of them.

Which is what I mean about hysteria. If you don't like it, that's all well and fine. But don't pretend that there should be a breadth and depth of content for incarnates at roll out if you want the roll out to happen any time soon. I'm fairly confident it'll happen, and I'm fairly confident because they've explicitly said that it'll happen, and this is a dev team that rarely operates in absolutes. Whether it will come in a way you'll be satisfied with is something else. But let's complain about that when we get to it, all right?

Wait, what in the world are we arguing about here then? When I say "follow directions" I'm not referring to some strange "You must stand here and do this and heal that this particular time or we're all doomed!!!!!!!" I mean simple things like "Don't go underneath Lambda if we're killing in the courtyard. Wait until we're all ready". I mean, seriously, that's what destroyed any chance of having a semi organized trial the last time I'd done it, because suddenly we were on a time crunch that the majority of the league wasn't ready to deal with. But you know what? Most of the trial was still a lot of fun.

If you want team tactics, then what exactly is the problem with the raids? They're set up for team tactics and for the team to not act like soloists and instead accomplish goals.

One of the things that has really bothered me about this debate is that all the level 50 content that we've become really comfortable with was rolled out over a long period of time. For a long time the only level 50 TF's were the shard TF's. Then STF was added. Then LGTF was added. Then ITF. Then Kahn/Barracuda. Those last few took two to three years to finish rolling out. People seem to want that breadth of content released at launch of a new and not complete system.

I don't think it's necessarily fair to want that right away at launch.

To GG's credit she never did state that she was okay with Calvin Scott killing people in hospitals. She even has an amusing comic to that effect.

Which is why I ask people to try it. The trails aren't hard because you need a specific make up for them. Actually they're uniformly hard despite who you take with you partly because of the sheer numbers you're up against and partly because of the time limits and partly because of the mechanics.

And seriously, do you think the devs shouldn't make it important to have team tactics in team content?

You like ugly not very powerful powers?
:P

Before you come down hard on the raid content please try it out. It's not hard to join, it's not particularly difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do. The hardest part is figuring out how to play as a team on the fly and following directions. But the LFG feature make sit easier than ever before to form a team for trials.

Yes, but the current segment that's being loud are also really annoying to me. I'm loud. I talk a lot. I hope I'm not being annoying, and if I am, I hope it's not due to hysterical comments. Chyll, for instance, is loud, but not annoying.

The increasing section of the population is still awfully small. They're just getting really frickin' annoying. And yeah, it cuts both ways. But the "dev defense force" is significantly smaller, and only come out to be annoying to the people who are currently annoying me.

I really should have said an "increasingly loud segment of the population".

I don't think you specifically are being hysterical. I am sorry you don't like the roll out. I do, and I'm also not going to apologize for that, but I do understand it. I don't particularly like that the tip mechanic is the only way to switch sides - I would love that the choices you make with regards to things like Trapdoor's fate would have an effect on it. It doesn't. That, to me, is frustrating.

But with all that being said, I kind of like them tying it to the current storyline. For the first time it really makes your character feel like a part of the bigger world, that what you do has some kind of an effect. I understand why people don't like it. I'm sorry that I don't have any arguments for them other than to say "give it time". If that means you have to unsub in the meantime, so be it.

Mostly agreed. I actually suspect that since they said they want to eventually add more lore pets and they can add more powers to existing incarnate trees, that the newer raids will both provide either more incarnate trees, or more incarnate options. From a game play design standpoint once the core 10 slots are done it will be easier to add stuff rather than add more slots.

It should be noted that I don't actually disagree with you. But I also understand the need from an allocation of resources to tie them together, at least at initial roll out. The system isn't done, and we're currently seeing only the first implementation of said mechanic. I will be very unhappy if, after we're done rolling it out, they simply say "Okay, we're done. Time to do something else and not revisit incarnate progression!"

If they do that I would complain. But we *just* started the incarnate system, and it's a system that, in game, there is no real precedent for.

Yeah, I get that. And I want them to add more content that allows you to progress the system that's not tied to Praetoria. I also believe that eventually they'll add it. Just not at launch, because that would likely delay it even more. If we get to the end of the storyline and the end of rolling out the system and the next thing they do is abandon it, absolutely lets revisit this arguement. In the meantime, however, they're not done rolling out the system. And in this game a system of level less progression is fairly unprecedented. The systems you just cited, save for AE, aren't tied to character progression.

And the system of moral side switching is tied to only one mechanic - the tip mechanic.

They're rolling out a system bit by bit and when we get to the end, if they indicate that they're done, they're not going to talk about the coming storm or rularru or whatever, then you will have had a point. Would I like them to add more content? Absolutely. I would love for them to roll out non-TF incarnate content to earn things like threads that aren't tied to the new multi-team trials (I am not calling them raids. They're not raids. Hamidon and MSR are raids. The closest analog to these in game is the CoP. These are multi-team TF's). But I understand that we're only about halfway through the system as is currently implemented.

It should be noted that the raids don't play anything like the raids we currently have in game. The raids play like a task force where you change missions but never change maps. The only difference is that more than one full team can be on it.

But right now they appear to be breaking that mold since we appear to be heading for an epic conflict with Cole, and you want them to not break the mold and go back and refocus on something else?

No reason it should be either.