WST -- Ill-conceived.

If you were directing your hyperbolic vitriol at the other posters I would agree with you. Instead your response has been "The devs don't #%$ing care about us and they're not communicating with us!" when in reality they have shown that they're listening and they're investigating, which is all we ever get from them regarding issues like this. So, yes, if you're expecting more communication from the devs, you shouldn't redirect your anger at them when you're angry at other posters beating you over the head.

It is not, by itself, intended as justification. It is simply pointing out that 1) the number isn't 100%, which means that there is precedent for the devs adding content and rewards that are not achievable by soloing, and that 2) the number is way on up there enough that it cannot be reasonably argued that adding one more thing that requires teaming destroys the game or makes it not "solo-friendly."

What I'm trying to convey to people in this thread is that if you refuse to team up--as in, you literally will never do it--then you are significantly deviating from what is considered normal game play. I'm not saying that you must team up often, just that it is normal to do so at least once in a while, especially in an MMORPG, a genre founded on the principle of playing with other people. (And no, I don't mean merely playing at the same time as other people. I mean actually interacting with others and affecting their gameplay experience during coordinated efforts to attain mutually beneficial goals--i.e. "teaming up.")

By virtue of the fact that most people spend a lot of time soloing, the developers have been very accommodating to solo play. However, they cannot and should not be held accountable for catering to such significant deviations from normal game play. Requiring such accommodations would greatly hinder their ability to make the game as fun and exciting to the greatest number of players as they can by placing artificial limitations on what they can and cannot do.

That is what the justification boils down to, and why I have said that having rewards that are not available to players who flat-out refuse to team is not a problem with the game or the developers, but with those players themselves. It is purely a self-imposed limitation, one that can be easily gotten past in just a few short hours.

Also, you state yet again the incorrect notion that we (or at least I) believe that there should be no avenue for obtaining the reward by soloing. This is not true. As I said above, if they decide to accommodate solo-only players, I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is the expectation that the developers must accommodate solo-only players.

Think of it this way. If I go into a Krispy Kreme and buy a dozen doughnuts, and they throw in a couple of extra because it's close to closing time, that's awesome and I'd really appreciate it. But if I go back next week in the middle of the day and they only give me the twelve I paid for, I have no moral right whatsoever to get angry, storm out, and swear never to visit the store again. Sure, I can, but I'd be completely unreasonable doing so.

That's how I feel about these demands for soloable rewards. Because the devs have made an honest effort to give players soloable options for most (but not all) rewards in the past, there is this sense of entitlement that has built up, a misguided notion that the devs must always provide soloable alternatives to obtain rewards, that the design and implementation is "broken" if they don't. Now, some of those people are getting angry and storming out. That's their right, but I think they're being unreasonable. The saving grace is that from what I've seen, the vast majority of people think the new content is awesome and they really appreciate it. It has provided a lot of excitement in the game, excitement that I believe will translate into deeper loyalty among the larger player base and, ultimately, more net subscription dollars coming in.

Edit: Note that I'm not saying that no one should express that they want the developers to provide a means of obtaining the rewards through solo play. I'm fine with that, it's a reasonable request. I'm only saying that the people who are demanding it, threatening to leave, and expressing that the system is "broken" without it, are wrong. Also, "I'm leaving!" is never a viable means of trying to get something, no matter what it is. As soon as someone pulls out that card, anything they say holds no weight with me. If I were a developer, that would be doubly true since you likely are disgruntled and do not have the best interest of my game at heart.

I was here for the founding of the genre, back when "MM" meant hundreds instead of thousands, "O" meant "via dial-up", and "RPG" meant pretty much what it means now - getting levels and new abilities, and sometimes a bunch of people standing around pretending to be elves and dragons and magical ducks and crap (and yes, "duck" seriously was a race in an early game I played).

Some of these games had team focuses. The vast majority did not.

Your statement is simply factually untrue.

If anyone's been trying to get you to stop voicing your opinion, they've obviously been complete failures at it.

The problem is that the suggestions about soloability turned into accusations about the devs' motives and biases, completely unfounded assertions about the history of the game, demonstrably disprovable claims about the design of the game, uninformed extrapolations about the actual nature of the end game system, and a whole lot of people claiming to be the representatives for multiple overlapping groups of people that I'm sure forgot to hold an election for them.

All those things have nothing to do with soloability in the game, and are all highly impeachable activities.

The devs are spending time and money (and quite a lot of it judging by its quality) on the animal booster. Something I don't care about. I'd much prefer a sci-fi booster or steam-punk or practicly everything over an animal booster. So AWAY WITH THE ANIMAL BOOSTER!!!

Last time I expressed that opinion, in a polite non-inflammatory manner, (in the mutant booster thread) I got called egocentric and anti-social and got accused of all sorts of things for trying to speak out against something I didn't care about.

The point is: the Devs spend time and money on a number of things that I don't care about (though the past year has been pretty good). There isn't a single thing in this game that ever got received favourably by everyone.

I'll put it like this: if the devs have already planned on soloable incarnate content than they can go ahead and add it for all I care. If they haven't planned for it, however, I'd rather they not spend time and money on it and cause the rest of the incarnate content to get delayed.

As I noted somewhat obliquely, the volume of content available to soloists is less relevant that what sort of content is gated off.

When you gate the penultimate level of character development with teaming requirements, there goes your 7 years of accumulated goodwill with the portion of your playerbase who prefer to solo.

Your opinions about what they ought to feel are quaint but irrelevant.

In a game where you yourself claim 97% of the content is soloable?
How so?
In a game where soloability is the status quo, exceptions to that reality require justification.

Justification beyond "uh, MMOs are for teamers!" and "JUST CAUSE, that's why!", which is the basic level of argumentation on display from the it's no big deal, suck it up losers crowd.


To avoid another round of pointless jousting with your cloud of irrelevancies, I will summarize:

if the devs want contented, happy soloists there needs to be an avenue by which they can achieve all levels of incarnate power.


If they think this seeming change in direction is going to bring in more players than it alienates, they'll pursue it regardless. But neither they, nor anyone else, should comfortably assume the established community of soloists will choose to 'suck it up' when there are numerous competing options available to the discerning MMO player, with more arriving monthly.

As of now we don't really know what the plan is and this could all end up being a pointless detour when I20 hits. But if the gate stays up, there's going to be a rumble.

I consider three serious data points to have reasonable claim to being the "origin of the genre." Everquest and Ultima Online can lay claim to being at the origin of the modern MMORPG. Games like Air Warrior and Neverwinter Nights can lay claim to the origins of the Graphical MMO. MUDs can lay claim to the origin of the MMORPG itself. EQ invented modern MMO teaming, and the modern MMO's foundations include teaming within its design explicitly. Older games like AW have faction-based cooperative play and some teaming. MUDs as a genre were originally invented to add social interaction and cooperative (or PvP) play to single-player adventure games. There's a straight-line ancestry for the modern MMO to have its fundamental origins in the evolution of teamed play. The notion of the modern MMO team is a product of the modern MMO itself, but that's no different an evolutionary thing than the introduction of graphics to MMOs.

The only objective question is whether MMOs have outgrown that paradigm. Its revisionist history to claim the paradigm never existed. Years ago, on these very forums, I claimed that CoH owed a significant amount of its success to catering to two classes of players: "casual" players as distinct from the genuine hard core ones, and "solo-preferred" players that teamed infrequently or only with IRL friends. I also claimed at the time that WoW shared these properties, less than a year after WoW's launch. Both of these were considered extremely controversial (but not necessarily unique) opinions at the time. The two reasons were: one: it wasn't clear then that CoH even *was* friendly to soloers and casual players, and two: it wasn't obvious it was a good idea to be so even if it was.

It is amazing to me how something almost no one would publicly admit to believing just six years ago is now something a lot of people are claiming has been obvious from the start. Amusing, but also amazing.

I just wanted to say that separate from whether I agree or disagree with the rest of your post, and whether this was intentional or not, I congratulate you for using "penultimate" correctly in a sentence, which doesn't seem to happen often. Level shift is, at the moment, the penultimate level of character development. The very rare Alpha is the ultimate one.


Last month wasn't too problematic. I don't think February poses a significant challenge either.

Also, the term "established community of soloists" besides being almost an oxymoron presumes there is a monolithic one. There is not. The only community with a significant potential problematic future are the exclusive completist soloers which are probably a smaller collective group than Mids-based billionaire min/maxers and Scrapper challenge veterans. They are no less important a segment of the player population, but no more important of one either.

I cut out a lot, so I can concentrate on what I think is most important. The thing is, outside of some specific badges, I can't think of any reward in this game that requires teaming. Sure teaming makes getting rewards faster, but you can still get them without ever joining a team. So any non badge reward that requires a team is completely new.

So the expectation has been set by developers that every non badge reward can be had by solo play. So the people complaining(for the most part) are being perfectly reasonable in their expectation that incarnate slots should be completely soloable. Well they are being reasonable if you go by the games recent history(since I9 when HOs could be bought at the auction house).

That being said, I get your overall idea, and I feel you have a point about some people being unreasonable. I agree. But when doing business, unreasonable customers are just as important as the calm and reasonable customers. It may suck, it may not be fair, but it is reality.

edit: FWIW, given the recent history of the game, I am fully confident that there will be solo options at some point in the future, my guess is sooner rather than later. Simply because not giving those options would deviate from the current general perception of the game. And I feel that would be extremely bad.

I'm both! Having taken down Ghost Widow recently, Lord Recluse is next on my Scrapper's hit list!

Saying "non-badge rewards" is a very odd exception. It implies that these are trivial rewards, but some have accolades that are not trivial. Why is it justified to claim that Task Force Commander is not an exception to the "no significant reward is team-gated" or Portal Jockey or Geas? If the devs removed the badges associated with the accolades and just awarded the accolades, would it change anything?

The other thing is that lots of rewards have been gated in the past to teamed content as a practical matter, and the list keeps changing. While the devs have made some rewards that were gated no longer gated by teamed content, they have also added rewards that were team gated long after release. So its not true that a player should expect that no reward will ever be added that is not team-gated: they've done so many times in the past. The only thing that history shows is that *eventually* most but not all of them gain solo paths to them.

Even now, there is no way for solo players to earn Hamidon enhancements. Sure, you can buy them, but technically you can only buy what a teamed player elects to sell. If a teamed player doesn't voluntarily sell, there is no amount of effort a solo player can expend to earn one. This would be a mere technicality if all HOs always had lots of sellers, but that's not true. You cannot simply buy however many you want at any price. There have been times when I've seen literally a couple of them for sale for certain ones, meaning even with unlimited effort A solo player could buy one, but if more than a couple of solo players wanted one no level of effort would allow them all to get just one. To say that isn't technically team gating is saying people would be satisfied if the devs put one Notice of the Well for sale to the highest bidder a week. Technically speaking, any one solo player could, if they were the high bidder, acquire it. So technically speaking it doesn't lock out solo players. But as a practical matter, solo players would still be excluded. And as long as you think this scenario excludes solo players, HOs also have no solo path to them, which means its been long established that some rewards have always team-gated in this game.

Either one believes there are some team-gated rewards in this game, and there's no precedent for claiming that is out of the ordinary, or one believes the kinds of restrictions that exist for the most solo-unfriendly rewards would be acceptable to place on Incarnate rewards. You cannot simultaneously claim the game has never gated rewards to teaming, then claim the gates on some of those rewards are unacceptable. That's called "cheating."

For the record, personally I believe HOs are team-gated rewards, and do not qualify as having a solo path. I believe if a similar path was put in for NotWs, that would also not be a valid solo path. If someone wants to claim that a solo path is fine even if its at the mercy of the teamed players selling discretion, have a ball with that. To me that is illogical outside of incredibly liquid exchanges. I have a feeling NotWs are unlikely to be a frictionless exchange item. I doubt strongly you would be able to buy them below the inf cap, simply because even players that can earn many of them would first deploy them to alts less able to earn them, then exchange them with friends unable to earn them, and then *finally* try to sell them. And at the moment, at one per week maximum per alt, and needing four to craft one very rare Alpha, it would probably be easier to buy a Gladiator proc for months.

Truly, and sadly. These kinds of threads are what I would assume the devs hate seeing since people could pm spam them on this. We take one word or sentence and expand it from the original source till it is not truth anymore.

Your Hyperbole Stat must be over 9000! Good job on farming that one!

Respect does not equal Blind Hero Worship in any context I have ever encountered.

I am not trying to help. Neither are you.

There really is nothing that needs help here anyway. People love to make stuff up and argue about it. I doubt our genetics will change enough for that to stop happening anytime Soon(tm).

People will be pissed and annoyed no matter what is added or removed from the game. That won't change with or without information. In fact, several people arguing about this current topic, IMO, have gone out of their way to misconstrue every bit of communication that has come from the devs.

You asked others for proof, where is yours? Where are your hard statistics that 90%+ of the players do not team, hmm?

Just to clarify, I do not care one way or another if end game content requires teaming, soloing or the wearing of pretty hats. In fact, I like me some pretty hats, so that would make me happy.

The main thing I am 'on about' is derogatory statements about the developers. They have produced a very fun, financially viable product. I do not think that because of one system having been partially added to the game, they deserve to be attacked and reviled as they have been by people over this topic and others.

Additionally, personally, I cannot abide the spreading of misinformation. At all. For years my title at the conference our company hosts for it's clients has been 'Misinformation Eradicator'. Watching some people pull out supposed 'facts' to bolster their positions on this topic and others is like watching my Alzheimer ridden mother justify her decisions to set the house on fire. (And yes, my Hyperbole Stat is not 0 either.)

I actually rather like that idea, perhaps not inf cap, but at a sufficiently high price to introduce another downward force of the economy of the game. Something I feel that Inf->A. Merit is meant to be, but that is simple 'too little' at it's current rate. Or perhaps more like what the Inf->Prestige conversion was supposed to do. Hmm, not getting the best record of inf-sink efficacy .

I do hope that the time-gate gets mitigated a bit [be it through integration with other Incarnate ability fabrication or what-not] however. But time will tell .

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

I guess that you mean I19, as I18 had one TF (CoP), 83 tip missions (each with two different sets of objectives), another dozen morality missions, and rewrites of Tina's and Maria's arcs. And Praetoria, of course, released at the same time.

Mind you, I19 had three new story arcs, another in flashback, new tips and morality missions, Praetorian zone events and a Praetorian repeatable mission contact, so that was far from predominantly team-only content, either.

Incidentally, parents sometimes have reasons for doing things that children don't understand, thus coming to the conclusion that the parents are being unreasonable. Sometimes the children are right, but parents have a lot more experience in living, and more information about living. This means that, on balance, they are being reasonable even if the kids think they are not.

Would you like me to repeat the above paragraph, using the words "Devs", "players", and "game design", or did my point make itself manifest?

As to your second paragraph, the Devs disagree with you. They have set things up so that some parts are equally accessible to soloists and groups, some are accessible to both, but more slowly to soloists, and some are group-specific. The game has forever been this way, and (I suspect) will be this way until they pull the plug on the last server.
This game has also shown a marked propensity to move content - sometimes frustratingly slowly - from the 'group only' category to the others.

It might be worth considering that if you're unhappy about not being able to do the Incarnate content, the only certain way to miss out permanently is to quit the game. Any other course of action might get you a solution you like.

But again, it's your call.

All I've been saying is that people should be a little more patient about solo Incarnate content and not jump to the immediate conclusion that "Don't have it now = never will have it"

I never once said "I like it, so STFU" like you're asserting. And in fact I have said several times that I would LIKE solo Incarnate content.

What I did NOT do was say that I was mad because the devs spent time and money on stuff for other people when then should have been spending it on stuff for me. That is basically saying that what YOU want is more deserving of developer attention what anyone else wants.

I also did not follow up in the same post by saying that I am going to continue arguing because I am offended by people saying that what THEY want is more important.

I did say I like how it worked now, I'll grant that. But not once did I ever say that what *I* want is more important than what anyone else wants, and then turn around and say that people saying that make me mad.

Being angry about something when you did the exact same thing in the same post is pure hypocrisy. That simple.

I haven't been being a hypocrite. If you can find a place where I came out and said that what *I* want is more important than what YOU want, please show me.

The only thing I really want is to play the damn game. I don't feel that I should be getting bent out of shape because the devs didn't add things that appeal to MY specific playstyle right this instant. And I don't feel that the sheer amount of rage over the lack of solo content in this particular issue is justified.

If you remember, Cimerora didn't have story arcs when it was first released. It had the ITF and Marcus Valerius's repeatable timed mishes, and that was pretty much it. The Daedalus and Sister Airlia arcs didn't appear until the next issue, and they got a second arc an issue or two later. There is precedent for releasing team content first and following up with solo content in later issues. The fact that it is happening again does not surprise me, and it shouldn't have surprised anyone else either.

If you don't believe me on that, look it up on the wiki. The ITF was introduced in Issue 12, and Daedalus and Sister Airlia were introduced as contacts in issue 13.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I believe most posters are going by what the devs have stated publicly. 'Investigating' implies there is currently no solo method available. It implies they are researching what the costs et al would be for instituting such a path.

I'm about 90% certain there will be a solo path EVENTUALLY, but that is not reassuring. We EVENTUALLY had power customization too. We EVENTUALLY had merged markets. Etc.

Just to restate here, I'm not really hampered all that much by the non-solo options any longer but I don't agree with the required teaming. Just my opinion.

Which are "solo content". Maybe not high quality solo content, but content nonetheless.

big difference with those examples and our current situation. Those are things they were flat out saying "no way. not happening". And yet managed to make them work.
Here we have them actively looking into it (and we're still pretty early on in this situation...only 1/10 of the system released with barely any of the content thats going to require Incarnate boosts) and that's *not* reassuring somehow? Given all we know (as rehashed in this thread) about how Devs speak and why they speak that way, "we're looking into it" should be more than enough to sate the masses, especially this early into the end game, given the track record this studio has earned.

They are content in the same way Borea's missions and whats-her-name in the Hollows missions are content. They don't have any kind of a story to them, and are essentially just the same two or 3 missions over and over.

Are you saying that you would be happy if the devs gave us a contact like Marcus who had no plotline to his missions and basically no point to even doing them, and told us that it was our "solo content"?

I wouldn't.

If we're going to get solo Incarnate content I'd much prefer they take their time with it and give us GOOD content, instead of just banging out a few crap missions to shut people up. And if the devs respond to your demands and ultimatums and give us solo content RIGHT NOW, that's exactly what you're going to get: A handful of crap missions that aren't even worth doing that you will have to repeat over and over and over to get anywhere with.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Well then Mender Ramiel is your starting content for the solo incarnate arcs. Just like Cimerora you might have to wait an issue to get the rest of it.