Friggin_Taser

Yes, Bill. Surely it's a known fact that MMO developers give more programmers to their 7 year old games in lieu of new projects and IPs that can expand the company.

My point still stands: every issue tends to have a focus on one kind of content. No one issue will feature content that every player with their own interests will applaud. To try to make an issue that appeals to casual players, old players, power gamers, crafters, base owners, people with altitis, people who only play one character, badge hunters, mission creators, marketers and more would result in an issue that barely throws a bone out to every sub-genre and leave no one happy.

Great.

But for the last 3 months I have been playing my rad/thermal almost exclusively and avoiding all alts.

So an entire issue where you get your pretty pretty illusion dom would net me absolutely no content.

See the problem?

But what should the devs focus on? I like badges. So if they add a few more story arcs with badges at the end like they did in the last few issues, I would blitz through them in a night to get the badges and never look back. So was that a waste of development time because I spent an hour doing the new content that took months to be put online?

Others like PvP and crafting. So should the devs focus on new PvP drops and new recipes that give a .05% boost and some weird uniques instead of making new story arc content?

Others just like raids and task forces and would probably never use flashback to check out a new level 30 story arc. So should the devs ignore them and just keep pumping out new content for the mid-levels?

My point being: no one should act like their concern is the #1 concern for the player base. Demanding a personalized dev response that your pretty pretties will be tended to is a bit selfish.

Well, lucky for you we have 7 years of experience and 19 other issues that prove that no issue is "the standard fare from now on."

We've had whole issues that consisted of nothing but PvP or just 1 new task force. Nothing is ever set in stone and new content will be added as warranted.

I'm sorry you are feeling a bit shunned by the devs, but the anti-PvP crowd, the anti-Paying For Expansions crowd, the anti-Villains crowd, the villains who are anti-Hero only new content crowd, the anti-Crafting crowd, the anti-Mission Architect crowd, and the anti-Ever Being Satisfied crowd have already taken your table reservation in the "This Game Will Never Be The Same And I Hate It" diner.

That also means you shouldn't earn rewards in the same time frame as I do either. You running a story arc that, if you fail, you just have to restart is not the same risk as running a raid that can fail and be forced to start back at the beginning of the rebuilding process. Or, as we've already seen with tonight's testing, getting a full team together and simply failing because the trial requires new strategies from you that you do not know yet.

And if you read back in this very thread, you will see you, yourself, posting that Vincent Ross' story arc seems good enough to drop Incarnate Salvage (after a nerf to its difficulty in the final battle that you pointed out). He is a level 20-29 contact, hence mid-level.

This is a game based on superheroes and supervillains. They've given you a way to be the most powerful villain there is, it's just going to take a little hard work and time. Just like it would take Batroc the Leaper to do so compared to the members of the Cabal putting their efforts together to kill all heroes.

But I'm going to stop here and take Leandro's advice: we're never going to see eye to eye. Is it a clash between an extrovert and an introvert? Doubtful. But it certainly is a case where I see there's no end in sight here. There is never going to be a change or an addition made to this game that will appease you 100%, so your complaints and demands will never cease. I have no control over what the devs create or what you post, but I do have control over turning away from you and letting you complain in an echo chamber of your own creation.

So I will do that now. Best wishes and happy ranting.

Once again, you oversimplify to fit your own narrative. I never said "Solo will kill the game."

I said "Making Everything Solo Will Kill The Game."

Why? Because with the amount of powersets, ATs, and power choices that can be made in this game, making content that everyone can universally solo will lead to a series of watered down and heavily simplified missions. There's no two ways around this. This isn't a solo player console game where, if the devs decide they want to reward the player more on level 5, they balance an entire fight around specific abilities they program Wolverine or Spiderman to do.

There is absolutely no way to program an entire game so that everything can be solo'd by everyone and still include thousands of power choice options. Therefore, some of it will require teaming. And, in fact, some of it has required teaming since day one in this game.

So absolutely nothing changing with issue 20 except the people who choose to slow their own progression because they shun off teaming for whatever reason will have to take longer to achieve what more active players can. Once again, with accolades and Hami-Os and Vanguard Merits, this is absolutely nothing new to this game.

And what have you done to make new friends?

I was part of the 3rd biggest SG on Pinnacle. Over time, people left for other games or for real life. We went from close to 30-40 people down to a core of maybe 8 or 10.

So I joined a PUG or a TF and if I liked a person on the team, I dropped them a global friend invite and kept in touch. It's not that hard to do and if you don't do it, you have no one else to blame but yourself. And you certainly shouldn't demand the developers change the course of the game because of your aversion to doing so.

Okay then: Put up or shut up.

Instead of twisting my words around or trying to match wits with Acana, why don't you tell me how the developers can make an Incarnate System that's solo friendly and quick to advance but doesn't make earning the awards trivial?

So far, the only other suggestion in this thread other than "Make Incarnate Salvage craftable from shards" (which they did, whether you like it or not) has been Eiko-chan saying they should add the same Incarnate salvage to mid-game story arcs as one gets from doing task forces. Since these story arcs are both incredibly easy and repeatable, this is not an answer. And since not everyone can solo every story arc (especially ones with EBs or AVs in them), that doesn't make Incarnate salvage and powers available for all.

You tell me how you'd fix it. You've already shown that you are a prodigy at making friends and influencing people, let's see if you have a natural flare for game system design, too.

You are wrong because you seem to equate what you want with what everyone else wants.

To put it in comic terms, hoping you can grasp the scenario you've painted yourself in over the last few weeks, you are Turner D Century trying to tell Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil that you should get as much infamy and notoriety as them even though your exploits are marginal compared to them taking on the Avengers.

I think the problem isn't the game in this situation.

Other people seem to be able to find a group of regular teammates (be it a SG, a coalition, or even a global channel) just easily. It's not that hard to join a single server's Badges or TF global channel, answer one call for a TF looking for a person or two, and make some new friends.

I've also been part of a group of about 8 people who have played this game since launch. We've done every TF repeatedly. We used to run Moonfire and Hess back to back for fun pre-Inventions and we certainly weren't getting a drop for it. We team because we're friends and we enjoy teaming with each other. And even this week with people clamoring for the WTF, we've done ITFs and Renault SFs simply because one of us asked or put forth the idea to do so.

Because we're players who enjoy each others company. Not because the Eye of the Leviathan drops fat loot or we desperately needed that Coral Hammer temp power.

My situation, judging by the SG forums and the Server forums on this very board and global channels in game, seems to be the majority. Your situation seems to be one where you don't want to put any work into changing.

The fact that you seem to generalize anyone who does TFs and SFs regularly as a person who has to force his family members to join him against their will or dual box to be able to do so says way more about you than it does about the game.

Yet I have never attempted to clutter up a feedback thread for the devs with a shameless rebellion plea.

Eiko-chan is a predictable and broken record at this time and I'm kindly inserting my two cents to balance out her posts for the sanity of the force that is this forum. If we allow her and the 2-3 other fanatical solo posters to control the dialogue, it will never end because they will never get what they want.

We're playing a game that hasn't had a major system-wide nerf that affected all in issues. We're getting something a lot of people have asked for. And it's not enough. And it will never be enough until everyone gets the best rewards for doing next to nothing and no one has any reason to actually challenge themselves and play to the ends of their own skills and limits.

And then when everyone is super, no one will be.

That's the future making everything solo will bring. That's the future every Eiko-chan post brings us one step closer to: a City of Completely Arbitrary, Palette Swapped EB Fights With No Real Risk And A Far Too Great Reward So Everyone Can Feel Special For Minimal Work.

That's an awful lot of words for "Waaaaah, I want everything to be given to me easily on a silver platter because people find it irritating to team with me for some reason."

Except I never said anywhere in this or any thread that the devs should force people to team. It doesn't stop people like from making that assumption, though, which only proves my initial assumption that the solo-friendly crowd will never ever be satisfied.

I'm pointing out the logical problem with developing a game with multiple powerset and AT combination for solo players. If something can only be solo'd by an IO'd out scrapper and a defender complains, should that piece of content be dumbed down even more so even the most gimped of powersets can beat it? And should the entire game stay mired in stagnant "point, click, die" gameplay because some people refuse to team... and they are the minority?

I have never said all players should be forced to team. But some solo players have said that they should be able to solo all content. Like it or not, if the devs listened to them, making all content solo friendly will lead to a game with absolutely no difficulty curve or variety to it, simply because of the needless limitations it puts on their resources.

A change to make everything 100% solo-friendly in this game would be the thing that kills it. Even more than ED or any nerf in the history of the game. Because we would have absolutely no reason to continue playing it.

Because you are solo. You don't have the risk of a trial falling apart because your teammates quit or don't have the right AT/Powersets or just suck at the game. You can go at your own pace. You don't have to worry about your tank deciding he needs to walk the dog and leaving your team standing around for 15 minutes doing nothing.

If you really have to ask why teaming should net better rewards than soloers, then you really shouldn't be playing an MMO. Might I recommend a nice single player console game for you?

No, I resent whining soloers who think they are entitled to everything in the game if they raise their voices and threaten to quit. I'm glad the devs added a way solo players can craft things with shards. But I also pointed out that some people will then complain that, after being given a way to solo Incarnate abilities, that it wouldn't be enough and that they'd want it faster and easier. Which you are proving right.

I resent solo players thinking this entire game can and should be based around them. There are only so many encounters the developers can program for solo players and they pretty much consist of the standard EB/AV fight. You can't do same-time defeats or glowie clicks if everything is solo orientated. You can't have a fight with actual strategy because every fight has to be just as balanced for one AT as it is for all of them if everything is geared towards soloers.

I'd rather the devs be given to actually, you know, develop something other than your standard "target Purple thing, queue attacks until dead" encounter. Gearing the entire game towards soloers gives the developers an unnecessary crutch that just can't be overcome in a multiplayer game. And when I say multiplayer game, I mean a game where there are multiple ways to play, not forced teaming.

If you want to keep paying the same amount of money as I do for the same AV encounter over and over and over again with no growth and no depth and no challenge added, I can only pity you.

I think you are overlooking the SG/global channel factor just a little bit here.

There are plenty of small-to-midsized SGs out there right now chomping at the bit for this and will do it as often as possible to get incarnate awards, just like the WTFs now. These people will be the norm and will most likely bring as balanced a team as possible to the table just like they would a STF or RSF.

The solo player joining a queue will happen regularly, but I think they will be met with a majority of a league that's made up of 3-4 SG teams formed in advance.