Eva Destruction

You obviously don't get the difference between "slower" and "probably not in the lifetime of this game unless you play all day every day" do you?

Six days. I could have gotten it faster if I had run something other than my daily allotment of tips. If I cared how fast other people got things I'd PL and do speed runs. I don't. I care how fast I get things. Nobody else. 2.7 years or however long someone calculated it will take to "finish" these four slots without running trials is too long. Period. Note that the stupidly long time frame they calculated assumed ten shards a day, every day. I think I've earned ten shards in a day exactly once.

Look, I'm not saying having trials is a bad thing, I'm not saying having trials that reward well is a bad thing. I'm saying having a reward that requires running nothing but these trials, that is limited to one playstyle and two pieces of content, with the only alternative being a very very long slog, is a bad thing.

I also don't care what "other games" do. I'm not playing those games. I'm playing this game. I care what this game does.

Because. It. Takes. A. Stupid. Amount. Of. Shards. To. Accomplish. Anything. Beyond. Alpha. The alternative is running the same two trials over and over.

I don't see how I can make it any clearer than that.

Funny, cause I have a Blaster who got her Uncommon Alpha by going from Vigilante to Villain, running a Patron arc, and going back to Hero. Unless the aspartame in this Diet Coke I'm drinking is seriously rotting my brain, that trip....didn't involve any of those five tasks.

Yes Sam, that is the entity I meant. That stupid Well, which was originally a hotline to the gods, has been retconned into....what? The source of the gods' power?
I don't think it's explicitly made clear, but the previous lore makes it sound like the Coralax summoned the Leviathan because Merulina wasn't helping them out much against the Mu. Either she was sleeping (cause you know, if you're going to rip off Lovecraft you have to have a weird alien god sleeping under the sea somewhere) or otherwise incapacitated.

The Coralax blurb on the official site does mention the Shapers, plural, as priests of the Coralax. Calystix is just like the high priest or something.

When AE was released I believe Hero One stated in an in-game Q&A that they'd allow the players to influence the canon story of the Coralax through AE. Players didn't really step up. There haven't been a lot of player-created arcs dealing with the Coralax, and the only one that I've found memorable doesn't really go into the hows and whys of them, only furthers their Lovecraftian theme. And it uses Krylov as the contact, so it's played for comedy somewhat. Surprisingly, it works. But it's not really useful as something to base canon on. But it's still way better than what Vincent Ross gives us. Huh, what do you know, you don't need to pull a bunch of story elements out of your butt to make for an interesting arc.

Whether I like the trials or not is irrelevant. The complaint in this thread is that the new Incarnate slots require repeating the trials many times. I like the ITF but I wouldn't want to have to level from 35 to 50 running only ITFs.

We knew about a mysterious entity behind...Merulina? Funny, I thought Merulina was a mysterious entity in her own right, being a space god and all.

These aren't revelations. "Oranbegans wear humans like cheap suits" is a revelation. "Rikti are mutated humans" is a revelation. This is stuff they just made up to shoehorn the Well in there (Merulina), give us the illusion of choice (Botis) and give us a temp buff while pretending they're "making villains feel powerful and evil" (Blood Coral). There's a difference.

It makes more sense for female supers to wear properly supportive undergarments. Even if said undergarments are apparently the size of a postage stamp. Technology in the CoX universe is light years ahead of our own.

It could be because you can't enter a PvP zone until you're level 15 maybe? That doesn't account for the arena of course, but it's possible that someone had a brainfart that day.

There's no reason you can't encourage running a crappy old heroside TF and a much less crappy old villainside SF one week, and reward people for doing something they really really like doing the next.

Popular content is popular. Why not throw it into the rotation a bit more often?

Once again GG shows she knows absolutely nothing about how to play a villain.

No villain should EVER leave their enemies supervised in the inescapable deathtrap. He must order his Praetors to leave with him, and take the War Walkers with them. After gloating how he's going to use the War Walkers to kill all our friends, destroy everything we hold dear, and step on kittens, of course.

It wasn't a branch of the FBSA until they decided to add in another branch of the FBSA for no good reason. DATA or SERAPH could have been used instead. Real-world bureaucratic bloat doesn't have to carry over to a video game, and in fact it shouldn't. If SAM is a branch of the FBSA, why have we never heard of it before? You'd think we would have. Oh, and they're shady too. But we're supposed to trust them anyway. Sorry SAM guys, Crimson and Indigo already did that whole shtick, and they were much better at it than you.

Ok, fair point.

Merulina was related to the Coralax. The Leviathan was summoned by the Coralax to get rid of the Mu. Merulina was not connected to the Leviathan, until now. Merulina was a space god. Some mysterious "entity" powering her was just made up for Vincent Ross's arc. The Blood Coral was just made up. The demon bound by the Midnighters was just made up. The Coralax twisting people's memories was just made up.

The other problem with people you just made up is that they ask us to trust them but we have no reason to, especially redside. Virgil Tarikoss is more trustworthy than this Vincent guy I just met...and he tried to have me killed.

I10 didn't take seven years to create. It had way more content than i20. Going Rogue had way more content than i20. Heck, even i19 had more content than i20.

I dunno, some total amateurs have done a pretty good job of creating stories that seamlessly fit into the larger game world without any sort of story bible to go on. A bunch of amateurs have also done a very good job of compiling the game's lore into a reference guide. There is no excuse for the professionals to try to pass off garbage like Akarist working with Reichsman and relying on the amateurs to point out that it's wrong.

Because there was a lot more of it. Repeating something a few weeks later feels a lot less grindy than repeating it the next day.

Some people did. That was their choice. Others chose not to.

AE is, as per Positron, not supposed to be used for farming. If you come across a blatant farm it's perfectly fine to 1-star it and report it as such. Unfortunately, nothing will probably come of it.

As for charging for farms or PLs in general, people have been doing it long before there was an AE. As someone else said, as long as only in-game items are changing hands, they're not breaking any rules. Heck, people used to charge for badge missions before Ouroboros. Is this mercantile attitude sad? I think so. I had members of my own SG send me inf for sharing my mayhem missions shortly after i18 launched....what? But it's perfectly "legal" as it were. If you have a service people are willing to pay for, you can charge inf for it. Obviously people are paying, or nobody would bother.