WST -- Ill-conceived.

If they are sensitive about reactions then they are in the wrong business.

It's not a sensitivity, but managing expectations, as said upthread. Besides keeping the game running so that they have jobs, they also do want to make the most amount of subs happy with their product, and maintain a level of trust with those subs. If they talk all wily-nily about their future plans (which may or may not happen....look how often the lost EAT's still get thrown in their faces). that leads to unhappy subs when things slip dates or get nixed all together, which in turn erodes trust.

Before even i18 came out, me and my friends would sometimes do 3-4 back to back speed ITFs in one night. The fun part is trying to beat the previous finish time. Folks switch toons as necessary.
My friends are also addicted to Hamis, so I usually do 1 LRSF a day with them. I tend to stay away from LGTFs and Barracuda tho and will only do them if my friends or VG want to.
Repetition is mind-numbing? I think mileage varies from player to player.

You know..... you keep throwing around numbers like 97% soloable and, given the number of task forces, strike forces and trials, that number sounds like total BS to me. I don't dispute that MOST (meaning more than half) of the game is solable, but that 97% is a complete load.

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/story_arcs/

690/721 or so, I'm sure I miscounted a little bit there in deciding what to include/exclude. I did exclude the pvp mission counts though, and the intros. *shrug*, comes off a bit closer to 96% though.

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Point of clarity however. The problem is more so in reference to the development of new/additional content. With I18, for instance, there was one new story arcs and two TFs being perhaps the most blatant. As opposed to in the past where we've had multiple story-arcs (Croatoa, RWZ, and Cimerora) and a TF.

Considering the sheer amount of content there is in the game around 90% sounds about right.

Funny, I thought it was people not being rational and patient that was causing unhappy subs.

And you've been saying the exact same thing. Hypocrisy is a strange two way street, ain't it

You did a good job of proving you can talk in circles to defend your friends. Nothing else

You have absolutely no idea that you're not helping, do you?

I find it hysterical that with that kind of attitude you've proven her right....

Woah - wait, what was removed from soloability between now and then?

Either you liked the system then, which is the same as the system now (except that there's more for other people - not you - to do), or you didn't like the system them (which is the same system now) and you couldn't be praising it.

And... 'fully-implemented'? The Devs bent over backwards to tell us that the Incarnate System was, very specifically, utterly and completely not fully-implemented as of I19 - that there was a great deal more to come.

Explain?

Is your complaint seriously that Timmy's wagon has shinier wheels this week than yours, (which you loved last week), because he played with Bobby and Suzie (which you didn't want to do), and so now your wagon is terrible and you don't wanna play wagons anymore? It boils down to "I don't wanna play my character anymore because someone else got more powerful" (I'm presuming your character's didn't get weaker or less fun as a result of the WST announcement, correct?) Because what I've read of your posts seem a great deal smarter than that.

You rock.

Honestly, I was considering other stuff to be "content" too, such as playing with the Mission Architect, hunting down exploration badges and history plaques, messing with the market, street-sweeping for defeat badges, trick-or-treating, crafting stuff, fiddling around with bases, etc.

Obviously, the exact number will vary depending on what one likes doing. Some people farm task forces over and over, jumping on teams as soon as they log in, and spend a lot more time on teams than other people who avoid it like the plague except when necessary. But I like to consider myself a pretty well-rounded player, and I guesstimate that I spend around 97% of my time solo. Not particularly because I hate teaming, I actually like it, but because there's just so much to do by yourself.

Still, I'm glad you looked that up. It does stick a pretty objective pin on an actual number that marks my guesstimate as pretty close.

there's very, very, very little of this game that can't be soloed by a determined player.

it wouldn't surprise me if that made up number was fairly accurate.

The justification "this shouldn't be soloable because lots of other stuff is" still doesn't work, but oh well.

Give me proof. All you have is an opinion

Premature self-congratulation isn't a virtue, sonny

Customers have no obligation to be rational and patient. They can be wrong, but they are still the customer.

FWIW, I'm fine with what we have now in game, I just don't like the lack of meaningful communication. But the people that are pissed/annoyed/irritated are just gonna continue to be pissed/annoyed/irritated until they here something definitive.

The ability to reach the top. Because the top was moved.

Also, my hope that the Incarnate system was going to be fully soloable, as it was decided we needed yet another salvage item to continue to advance. While it's possible this was intended all along, it seems a bit more likely to me that it was put in because of unanticipated shard hoarding (this wouldn't be the first time the dev team underestimated the player base's determination to get ahead.)

I don't know, I prematurely self contragulate myself all the time. Nothing wrong with that. Grows hair on my palms.

Oh, wait, you meant to be derogatory. Well....that's okay.

In all seriousness though, yes, I have an opinion. My opinion is that you're setting up and then moving goalposts for the devs - they haven't added solo content and you want them to acknowledge it...which they did. Only when that happened some on that side of the argument thought that that wasn't good enough. And maybe he shouldn't have mentioned that we should expect team oriented content in an MMO, but he DID mention that they were looking into it. There might be several reasons why they need to think about how to implement a solo option when they clearly have a deterministic way to get a notice of the well in team content but they're not sure how to also implement that in solo content. I can think of several reasons why, off the bat for instance, it might not be workable with their current ideas with how the system should work to not make the Notice craftable by shards. It actually defeats the purpose of making the Notice drop when you complete some kind of task. It also might make it difficult for them to decide whether you should be a recipient of the WST other drops if you got the Notice in a solo fashion and then did the WST, which clearly shouldn't then drop another notice.

With all of that said, moving the goal posts for a dev who's job description doesn't really include talking with people on the forums is at best annoying and at worst disrespectful. Complaining that they also don't care about you when he just spoke on the forums to specifically say they're looking into it is the kind of desperate hyperbole that makes the devs not want to post on the forums in the first place.

I'm not an advocate of dev worship. I'm an advocate of purposeful constructive intelligent debate, none of which we're really getting. I understand that that's the internet, and I understand that I'm essentially tilting at windmills hoping for something different, but I'll just keep trying. Hey, I teach teenagers for a living. What do you expect me to be? Rational?

Incidentally, the parents in this scenario of yours are being horribly unreasonable, because the only reason "my" wheels are unshiny is because the parents (dev team) are refusing to let me have any wheel polish unless I agree to play with Suzie and Bobby, even though I'm totally willing to do all the work polishing the wheels by myself.
By this logic, my ability to craft Incarnate Components defeats the purpose of having Incarnate Components be a selectable award at the end of a Task Force.

In reality, something worth 4 shards seemed to be ample incentive for many people (myself included) to run a Task Force or two.

If, as I proposed up in the Developer's Corner threads, they make the Notice cost the equivalent of 24 shards (which would be about right; Uncommons break down into 2-3 and cost 12, Notices break down into 4-6, so a cost of 24 would translate) - whether that be components + shards or, as I think is a bit more elegant and Task Force Friendly, one of each of the six existing Common Components - I am sure getting one for "free" will be more than enough incentive to get people to go for it as a drop, as opposed to crafted.

This is the best argument I've seen for why there should be a solo way to get a NotW. Actual level advancement - which is what levelshifting ALMOST is, shouldn't be gated behind teaming activities like TF's, because of their restrictive nature. Not everyone can get on a TF for more reasons than being an introvert (which I don't consider a good reason for not wanting to do a task to get a reward in a game if only because there are some activities that you're not going to want to do depending on personality type in a game this comprehensive - Introverts aren't banned from doing TF content. People with children or RL duties [being on call a lot] might).

Honestly the best thing I can think of (and it's been suggested here) is to have a solo arc that can be done ad naseum, but only drops a NotW once a week. Here's the thing though, it should act as a solo TF and it should be difficult, and consdiering how many people regularly complain about Trapdoor, I'm not sure that will make anyone happy.

The thing is though - they've never been able to be definitive when they don't have a system ready to go because that's the nature of the beast. Why should this be any different?

Great. Let me get this straight. I said my opinion was that making endgame content that requires teaming, something that roughly 90%+ of the game doesn't, is a bad idea.

People come along and beat me over the head because I'm not drooling in love with said idea, so I personally reiterate my reasons for not liking it. Repeat ad nauseum

This has nothing to do with 'constructive intelligent debate', or forcing the Devs away from posting. It's two groups of online posters and one group decided we weren't going to be able to voice our opinions in peace. If we're unworthy of having the peaceable ability to voice our opinions, then we'll do it as hyperbolically as possible and live with that

My problem with the NotW being craftable by shards is this: The devs have seem to decide that it shouldn't be craftable becuase they didn't make it craftable. They could have just done that and have been done with it. The system they put in instead rewards an action they've deemed worth getting the attention of the well. Simply by crafting incarnate shards doesn't exactly jive with that design intent. So it's got to be more than just saying "We should craft it by using incarnate shards" because that would be a fairly easy system to implement because it would already be there.