The real difference between Trial and non-Trial Incarnate Advancement

Nice to see a detailed Arcanaville analysis. What I get from this is that if they got rid of the time-limiting on the 10:10 conversion, it would make the non-trial methods of getting incarnate abilities viable.

First of all, that's not actually what I said, and what you paraphrased my post into isn't what I said or what I meant. However, even if that were what I said, this isn't an accusation. This is a fact. "They" know who they are because I've already called them by name in the past, and "they" very much have vilified me with various at-length posts explaining how I'm anti-social, how I'm unworthy of having my opinion considered and various other instances that I don't feel like listing.

As I've gone on at length in the past, I don't have a problem with people who enjoy the new systems, and am actually happy for them. Who I do have a problem is the Internet tough guys who feel the need to explain how much I suck and how therefore nothing I say should be considered.

And it's not like I haven't involved myself in these past discussions you mentioned. I was here, same as you, and I took just as active an interest in them as I do in this one. Probably not as technical interest as you do, granted, but no less of a concentrated one. I'm not saying the ED flame wars or the Inventions ones were benign. Far from it. But I did not see quite as many sinister, malicious arguments as I've seen this time. And I'm not saying they're restricted to one side or the other. You'll notice I've been careful whose position I stand behind, even when a whole bunch of people are arguing the same "side" as me, as I disagree with a lot of the more spacious arguments and disagree with the malicious tactics used by "my side" just as much. This does not change the fact that my character has not been attacked so relentlessly ever before. Point of fact, and I trust my memory of how I've been treated more than your memory of how I've been treated, no offence intended.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is probably the one part I want to comment on the most. I don't want to take away from your enjoyment of the writing, but I have to go Venture on this one and completely disagree. Praetoria's writing was pretty good, but it's ruined by the ham-handed approach to introducing morality to it, and anything since then has been a right mess. Current writing almost completely disregards the game's timeline, often ignores canon partially or entirely and doesn't actually make for a good story.

A big part of my disappointment is that newer writing is starting to feel like an unimportant excuse to bring us from one mission to the next, and no-one cares to treat it as a legitimate story. Most of the time, stories are even written with placeholders. Like, we'll be looking to recover the "thingamajig" because it's very important for the "doohickey machine." WHAT am I looking for? WHY am I looking for it? Remember those old Rikti piles of bones? "doesntmatter." And it bugs me, because it feels like stories are rushed out and not given due attention.

I don't question that the game's actual subsystems are good ideas, even the ones I don't specifically like. But the meat around those bones is starting to feel neglected. Costumes, powers, effects, animations, zones, flavour text... Unimportant. And even the systems themselves are coming out flawed at times. The new "classic" menu is horrible, for instance. The LFT queue leaves a lot to be desired, even above and beyond kicking people from it.

When I said "It feels like an EA Games project," that's what I meant. I don't question that EA Games make good games... Occasionally. But they always feel like the publisher is putting in the absolute minimum effort to produce the greatest possible sales, and supplementing lacking gameplay elements with Skinner box time sinks.

Of course, I could be wrong, but there's no changing how I "feel."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sam's ability to belittle others while playing the victim is legendary. This was a very impressive sentence. Even more so because I believe he said at one point that English wasn't his first language. His facility with it, however, is amazing.

Honestly, a disinterested observer probably has a better recollection than Sam does in this instance.

I'm speaking of Sam in the third person, because I'm apparently one of these "internet tough guys" who tells him he sucks. I would defy anyone to ever find such a statement, but there you go.

Just for my own clarification/understanding. How does earning rate - as per your estimates here - correlate to application rate? (I couldn't think of a better term.)

Earning threads as threads in trials can lead to near instant conversion to powers. If I understand properly, there is a daily shard-to-thread conversion cap? I thought that is where the 3 year number was coming from, not from earnings rate. So earning speed need be no faster than the application speed, because the latter has a governor on it.

(It is entirely possible that I have misunderstood something with the shard-to-thread conversion. It hasn't been something I have looked at meaningfullly.)


Astromomical? No. And for short spurts I'd be perfectly comfortable doing it, but I'd hear about that from my spousal unit pretty quickly.

Plus I have other games I like, and books to read, and children's sporting events to attend...

(Only pointing out that there are perfectly reasonable things to prevent players who like the game and want the shinies to not play constantly...)

I always appreciate your numeric efforts.

One thing that is impossible to account for is randomness.

In 2 days of eye bleeding grinding I have gotten 2 Very rare windows 15 Rare windows 25ish Uncommon and 3 Commons (why I can't get commons I dunno but sometimes I wish I would).

A year of ITFs a day is alot, I expect it would be MUCH higher to match the extraordinary luck I have been having with my drop tables.

Then there is a friend of mine who has gotten the 10 Thread drop multiple times, and mostly commons and Uncommon windows (and can't get IXP to save his life) Easily matched via the ITF method.

Are you enjoying the newer storylines, or the newer gameplay? It's an important distinction that I've noticed a lot of people don't make. "It's fun to play" makes for a good mission, but not necessarily a good story. I love running the ITF but the story is weaksauce.

Just a tangent: for a while there I've had this idea in the back of my head to see if I could redo some of the legacy story arcs using AE. That's a five mission maximum....the trick is to do it without losing any story integrity. The one that got me thinking about it was World Wide Red, which would be very tricky and would probably require chained objectives to the point of extremely annoying, but To Click a Thousand Glowies or a Hero's Hero (or a Hero's Epic for that matter) could definitely be done. A Hero's Hero could be done in three missions.

Mortimer Kal's SF is just a fancy MacGuffin chase. The entire SF is literally "Go get your temp power." Yes, it has some fun mechanics, but the basic story is about as deep as the one you get from the scientist in Bloody Bay.

I'd like to throw out here that a MMO has no imperative to both encourage teaming and discourage soloing. It's technically possible to just encourage teaming, and not seek to penalize soloing. Now it's all too true that what counts as active discouragement for soloing is likely to be subjective, as rewards for doing something are so often perceived as penalties for not doing it. We already know that at least some of this team's devs are keenly aware of that perception trap.

In this game teaming has always been encouraged in most ways as at least the potentially most effective way to earn progress. (Actual mileage always varies, depending on the players you team with and your own abilities, skill and interests.) Consider things like the XP/Inf bonus on teams, and just the nigh-invincibility of a team with buffs and controls on top of damage dealers.

I'd also like to point out that this game has not and does not always provide incentive to team. The major notable exception to promoting teaming that I always think of is how Inventions drop. I've never been sure if that was intentional or a side effect, but if you wanted to produce lots of Inventions-related drops, your best bet has been to use a strong soloist.

I do think that, as things go, the level of mechanical "encouragement" for teaming present in the Incarnate system exceeds anything we have seen in the game before. You might progress more slowly if you soloed prior content, but it was almost certainly not 30 times slower, and sometimes, depending on how you counted progress, you might actually progress faster than a team. I believe that the gap in rate of progress in Incarnate content is so wide that it was absolutely inevitable that it was going fall into the perception trap of being perceived as punitive for soloists, if for no other reason that it is such a departure from expectations set by prior design.

For myself and I know some other posters in this thread, this is about choice, not strict adherence to a single playstyle, solo or teamed. I like to do both at different times. For past content, I could make progress towards a variety of goals either way. Sometimes soloing was slower, sometimes it was faster, but I could feel that whatever way I played, I was within some band of performance that always felt meaningful. My subjective opinion is that the options currently in place for Incarnate progress anywhere but on a League Trial team are [edit: not] meaningful - anything else is so slow by comparison that I am compelled to ignore it. That's a change, and not one I favor. That's why I'm talking about it - to convey that message.

Edit: I'm not going to revise it at this point, but after re-reading this I want to apologize for the convoluted wording in this post. It's bad even for me. I wrote it while heavily distracted.

I very much agree with this post and it echoes my sentiments.

This pretty much sums up my sentiments regarding the solo vs team debate.

This has not been said better.

That sounds great, except in one week you didn't even earn enough threads to unlock one single slot and slot a common in it (next week you can at least). Even then I feel like 10 shards for an ITF is a high expectation. My average for ITFs (and I do them fairly often) is 7. So I imagine it would take you 10 ITFs a week, rather than 7. Also Notices only average 5 shards, not 10.

In that same amount of time doing trials I have 3 VRs and 2 rares. And I made money rather than spent it.

Even assuming your numbers are right -- let's say you can earn 80 shards a week doing only 7 ITFs a week. It's always the WST and you get 80 shards each week. You will still have to run around 880 more ITFs to catch up to where I already was after the first week.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Bollocks.

I have been doing trials pretty much every night since i20 went live. I have never seen any recruiting specification beyond "we'd like a tank".

No "you need level shifts". No "you need slotted judgement". No "we need destiny barrier rare". Nothing. Nobody is that uptight about it, well maybe except you.

What I have seen is "grab him if he can fog a mirror so we can get this damned run started".

Lambda is slightly harder and longer, so people pursue the path of least resistance (BAF). However since you can only get an Empyrian merit from each TF roughly once per day you will still find lambdas if you try. I have not had trouble getting lambdas each day. It just takes longer for them to start.

Well, I have to burst your anecdotal bubble but I have seen requests for +1 or higher toons only on a few occasions. Granted, it's far from the norm but it does exist.


Oh, and...

Giggity.

Heh i guess not needing to count the number of shards required in astronomical units of measure is a good thing.

Though to get parity of rewards from 4 days of trials it'll take a year of ITFs and even much longer through non tf/trial content, to me, does seem absurd considering this is for a single character and assuming people actually play 7 days a week 52 weeks a year.

But as you said, opinions vary.

That's actually what the quote says. I'm not "reinterpreting."

While I agree that the general sliding scale argument of how level shifts will become mandatory because people will look for perfect teams is indeed "bollocks," I feel this is only half the point. The rest of that post still applies.

I can say with utmost certainty now and would even be willing to bet money on this (mostly because the developers have already said it, but why not make a quick buck?) that we will be seeing both level-shifted enemies and level debuffs for players. The former has been promised, the latter exists as precedent. This is not a debatable thing. This will happen. It is, in fact, just about the easiest way to add difficulty to content that I can think of, far easier than tweaking enemy spawns, enemy powers, enemy stats or task mechanics. Append a level shift to the enemies, slap a level debuff on the players and you've already made content "two levels harder" without so much as touching said content.

In this regard, level shifts may not become mandatory because players will be rabid for super teams. This has failed to happen at any previous point when it was threatened and I'm sure it will fail to happen now. However, level shifts may become mandatory because content will be built to expect them. When enemies are shifted up and you are shifted down, you begin to need to find ways to make up that difference, and given how the purple patch scales, the most direct counter is, in fact, level shifts.

And I don't feel that this is a bad thing, per se. I mean, that's how real levels work. Your enemies start spawning with higher levels, so you get higher levels to compensate. Granted, the cause-and-effect structure isn't quite similar, but there's nothing wrong with higher level enemies requiring higher level players, even if those are "false" levels we are talking about. What IS bad, however, is that said higher levels are considered elite exclusive content, so (not if but) when level-shifted content comes out, we'll be facing a rather serious question: How mandatory are level shifts now that enemies are using them for themselves and against me?

I don't have an answer to that yet, so I'll let people come to their own answers when that comes around. But I'd advise everyone to start thinking about it early.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

'Fraid I saw a +2/+3 only recruitment last night.

Now, to be fair, it was going for a MoBadge... but still.

Granted that's still true right now. But people tend to get turned away from an Apex if they don't have an alpha slot right? Not a whole lot of contribution a Stalker can give if all the enemies are +8 to them.

If future trials have 54+3 enemies, don't you think people will want to make sure the people on their team are at least 50+3?

One or two levels doesn't make a difference, but there's definitely going to be a cutoff period where you aren't going to be too keen on inviting someone to fight +12 enemies. Exactly when, if, and to what degree we hit that point is up in the air though. It's not out of the realm of possibility that future trials will effectively require level shifts, and that people who don't have them won't be very welcome.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Okay. Now after 13 (!) pages of debate, can we all just go to our corners and sulk?

Both sides have very valid points. I play significantly solo and I'm in a good coalition that runs TFs/Trials all the time which I try to be a part of as much as possible.

I am absolutely sympathetic to the solo side. Again, I play solo 50% of my time that I am on CoH because of family obligations. I have to be able to log off at a moment's notice or I have work obligations too. So I completely understand. I would like to have all sorts of avenues for everyone regardless of their playing style to get their incarnate slots, threads, whatchamacallit uber doodads. I get it.

That being said, I think two points need to be made:

1. Notwithstanding all that has occurred so far in development of this game, it has been, and probably always will be a multi-player oriented game. Unless some paradigm shift in philosophy occurs, development will be made to accomodate multiplayer first, solo second.

Programming and coding costs money. So does resources to art, animations and environments. For every solo game development aspect we ask it is a real dollars cost. So is multiplayer aspects. Now that Paragon is a wholly-owned NCSoft sub, the emphasis will be on catering to multiplayer first as it is the most efficient and generates the most sales.

Am I comfortable with this? Pretty much yes. Believe me, I am very sympathetic to the solo side. When purple IOs came out and I saw the outrageous inf. prices going for them I knew I was completely priced out. There was no way I could afford to kit out all my alts with purples. That sucked. But that's the way it goes. The rarest aspects of the game sometimes won't be achieveable right away or even achieveable at all. There will be elite parts of the game where a minority of players can go or do or get. This will always be the case. Is it bad? I don't think so. That's how MMOs work. That's how real life works. Rares and elite status gameplay designs drives people to continue playing the game. If it was all solo content people would get bored faster and not play at all. They will switch to the next shiny game.

In addition, from past practice, there will be a solo solution eventually that caters towards some balance. It took years, but I can now get purples for my alts by grinding hero/villain merits. It works, half my alts now have purple sets. It's not ideal in any way at all but it certainly is better than farming to generate inf. to buy the purples.

Which brings me to point two...

2. There will be a more reasonable solo solution to the issue. It still won't make people happy.

A solo option that removes the dramatic exchange rate right now for generation of threads and incarnate thingamuhguffs will have to reflect the difficulty in the Trials right now. They will not be an easier option. Right now the BAF and Lambda aren't as hard as the STF but not as easy as morality mission. There will be failures and an unorganized league is one that will be defeated. Any solo content will reflect the failure rates and difficulty of the Trials. It has to be that way to keep it balanced. And this will make people unhappy. Seriously, people were complaining about the difficulty of Mender Alpha mission unlock. It wasn't that hard. It was soloable but not a cakewalk. I did it solo on all my alts, from blasters to brutes to defenders. And the forums still blew up about it.

There's only so much resources to go around. Issue 20 was all about the new incarnate slots and the multiplayer gameplay around it. Eventually there will be a solo solution offered and many still won't be happy about it.

So I leave everyone with a question:

What is a reasonable amount of difficulty for a solo player to get incanate rewards and what do you think is fair?

Because I have a feeling your opinion on fairness will not agree completely with the developers opinion on solo fairness.

If there is one thing that I demand 100% accuracy on, its the case when someone says "that's not actually what I said." Especially when I quote directly:

Now, if you're saying that this is a specific assertion:

then it is an extremely weird turn of phrase to specifically refer to yourself as "the people feeling it."

But more importantly, as I said repeatedly while all of this may be novel to you personally, its not novel. If this is the hardest you've ever been hit, its not the hardest people have been hit in general. You're implying that the fact you feel personally attacked out of proportion to the past suggests this issue must be radically different. What's different is not the issue, but only the fact that your personal experience surrounding it has been different.

This is not really surprising. You have to admit you are much more involved in the narrative content and social dynamic of the game than its mechanical or functional dynamics. Its significantly more difficult to entangle you in arguments over the latter than the former, and most of the previous blow ups have been over things for which you were less likely to draw a line in the sand. To put it bluntly, you were not as much of a threat in them.

And on the subject of "that's not what I said" this is what I said in the post you responded to:

Multiple times, I stated directly that your experience now may have been different than in the past, but that doesn't mean the issues themselves were different overall in fervor. And yet you say this:

*I* say you're probably being treated more harshly now than in the past, *you* say you're definitely being treated more harshly now than in the past, but you're implying here my memory of the past where it specifically relates to your experience may be faulty. That seems to be a jab with no specific cause, even if no offense was intended.

I mentioned before that a shard:thread conversion ratio of 10:50 would allow:

1) About 1.67 months (50 days) for the unlocking and slotting of one slot, which is longer than Alpha took but still not in the "years" category.

2) Allow people who aren't doing the trials to fully unlock and fully complete the new slots in a bit under 7 months, which is a decent estimate for when the next stuff will be out for people to fiddle around with.

3) Be an actual effective 1:1 conversion ratio; 4 shards = 1 common but 20 threads = 1 common. 10 shards is 2.5 commons for Alpha, and 50 threads would be 2.5 commons for the other stuff. What increases the rate slightly is that you need more rares and stuff to actually finish.

4) Allow players to do whatever content they want, while still giving a speed and ease advantage to people doing it "the intended way."

It would still cost money but it'd be a step in the right direction.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

You have two choices on converting shards to threads. You can convert one to one, but only once every 20 hours at a 10 to 10 swap. So using this method, you can only get 10 threads per day no matter how many shards you have.

The alternate method converts 10 shards to 5 threads, and you can do this an unlimited number of times per day. But its only half as efficient: using this method can double the effort required to earn a set of threads. But as a practical matter, it won't really double that effort because no one can really earn hundreds of shards per day. Assuming you manage to earn 30 shards per day, then every day you'll be able to convert ten into ten threads, then the other 20 into 10 threads, for a total of 30 to 20. Your 30 shard per day earning rate becomes 20 threads per day using the two conversion methods, a 1.5 to 1 ratio, if you go as fast as possible and don't skip any days of play.

In one year, you could convert 3650 shards into 3650 threads. The 2.7 year figure I've seen quoted is I believe the time gate estimate for the amount of time it would take using nothing but the more efficient method to upgrade about 10,000 threads, which is I believe what it would take to slot very rares into all four slots. And that is something that at my calculated earning rate of 263 thread-equivalents per hour would take me 38 hours of continuous trial running. In theory, it would probably take about three weeks at my quoted times, but as a practical matter that first week was a curious anomaly for me: I was out of town and able to play in the day time, something I'm usually not able to do. My guess is that it would take a couple of months of my normal play habits to acquire that same 10,000 thread equivalent.

The OP has been updated. The 18 thread number has already been corrected.

That being said, I've never received 10 shards in a single ITF, and I believe 4 to be my average. I'm glad to hear that you get 10.

Also, check out Arcanaville's post three below yours. After my corrections based on her feedback, I'm not far off from her (she has earned 30 times on Trials what she gets on ITFs).

Thanks for posting this and for your analysis!

I should also thank Nihilii for posting his/her data as well, I forgot to do that.

For what it's worth, a little over half of mine came from rare drops too.

Edit: I misunderstood this at first, and removed irrelevant comments. I'm glad you included this, as it does change the perspective for people who don't feel Rares are a worthwhile goal. (Note that I feel that way about Judgement and Destiny for non-trial usage, but not Interface. Interface starts to gain extra bonuses at rare, instead of just improving the bonuses it already has.)

I agree.

We may or may not agree on the degree, and in spite of me, I haven't spent much time thinking about what that degree should be, you see.

The 3 year estimate is for Very Rares, which we both agree isn't really a reasonable goal for "casual" players, so it shouldn't be used in their defense. However, is it a reasonable goal for hardcore players that just hate the trials? As you've already suggested, that's subjective.

That depends on whether you're posting from work or not, doesn't it?