The real difference between Trial and non-Trial Incarnate Advancement

Only one PvP IO even comes close to making that kind of difference. That's two months, if you're running tips daily.

As has already been pointed out to you, it'll take nearly as long to earn them through PvP as well. The difference in timing between the two is nowhere near as extreme.

You have pointed out (correctly) that it takes a long time to get a full PvP set, especially if you are only doing it through Alignment Merits. You are, I repeat, completely right about that.

What you keep missing is that a week of PvPing does not suddenly grant you a character with all the PvP sets slotted. It takes a long time that way too.

That is not the case with Incarnate slots. A week of running the Trials and I can have them slotted. Your comparison falls short here.

The important distinction though is that I'm not offering up my anecdotes to make a specific statement about the difference in earning rates for the trials and the standard level 50 TF content. I'm offering it up to show that your anecdotes may not be anywhere close to the average, since they are radically different from mine. If the difference between my anecdotes and yours swings the numbers by a factor of five or more, that implies these calculations have an error bar of at least that much. So when you say that a factor of ten error is so high you don't see how that's likely, I'm just showing how easy it is just to account for a factor of five. I'm not specifically saying my experience is average, just that it shows levels of variability that are not just small, but enormous.

It usually takes me months to level an alt to 50, something that theoretically speaking someone could do in hours. It usually takes me months because I don't focus on a single alt, even if I'm specifically leveling them, and because my time to play is not unlimited, and because I do not specifically focus on leveling-optimal activities. I'm also often leveling them solo. This all conspires to make leveling much slower for me than it probably is for the average player.

No one would argue, though, that this obviously implies a game design error somewhere. So your statement, taken on face value, is not true. That's completely separate from the fact that comparing "hours" and "months" exaggerates the difference in a word-smithy way. For one thing, it doesn't take months of actual effort: that's due to the timer on shard to thread conversions using the optimal method. If you were more aggressive, and could earn more than 20 shards a day, the suboptimal method would be faster (but more work). Conversely, "hours" to unlock all four slots and slot them with uncommons? Again also possible, but only by people sitting on tons of shards and willing to convert them with the suboptimal path. Or someone willing to run trials non-stop for most of a day.

A while back I estimated that my MA/SR running 0x8 tip missions was averaging about 2.5 shards per hour. That's a calculated estimate from herostats statistics averaged over several dozen tip mission runs. It would take about 336 hours to earn the 840 shards mentioned in the post. Assuming that a really fast player might earn the same slots and powers in 12 hours of continuous trial running, that's about a factor of about 28: the difference between a day and a month. That's about the difference between a soloer running standard content and a team running incarnate content of at least moderately comparable spawn sizes.

(Incidentally, that's also why I believe the shard per hour rate for something like a plow ITF has to be higher than 3/hour on average across the entire playerbase, or it wouldn't even outpeform what I can do all by myself, which is all but impossible given the mechanics of shard dropping).

Someone running solo at 0x1 would of course be earning at a far lower rate. But at that point you're comparing the earning rates of a full league of players playing the top end content explicitly designed to award those rewards, to someone playing solo, facing the lowest possible fraction of the content strength, playing content that is of much lower difficulty and not explicitly designed to award those rewards directly. That's like comparing the leveling speed of a player that teams constantly and runs task forces and trials from level 1 to level 50, to someone who plays b y hitting their keyboard with a pencil between their teeth. Of course the earning rates will be vastly different. They cannot be anything but in any game that rewards anything besides attendance.


As an aside, several lines of thought I've contemplated all seem to be converging on this 30:1 ratio of Incarnate trials to non-incarnate content. My guess is that for the three areas of unlocking slots, slotting commons, and slotting uncommons, that ratio might be close to the truth. The ratio jumps dramatically for rare and very rare, but given they are the higher tiers of the system that's not intrinsicly a bad idea. Its also exactly in the range of reward target the devs normally aim for to be conservative, so they can tweak downward later if datamining shows it to be too high. The devs have said to me on more than one occasion that its easier to tweak downward than upward (in the context of reward requirements). Had they aimed and hit too low on the requirements, it would have taken an act of god to tweak it upwards for balance. But dialing it in lower, dropping the ratio from 30:1 to maybe 15:1 would be a lot easier, since few players would complain about that.

I don't even that IO is strong enough to compare to Incarnate stuff, even at the optimal fit near the softcap. Someone at or above 45% takes 62.5% as much average damage over time as someone exactly at 42%. Someone operating at 40% can be softcapped by Barrier 3/4 of the time, get a crashless nuke, a combat pet and a 20% DPS increase. My BS/Inv, who can already saturate well above the L/S softcap will instead be able to add massive healing and significant +regen underneath his not inconsiderable defense through Rebirth. Oh, and it helps his team when he's on one, such as at Hamidon raids or on a TF.

I'm pretty sure no single IO really compares to even just one of these slots' contributions. You can make a lot of them pretty orthogonal benefits to anything set bonuses (or Global/special IOs) can provide.

"I don't like how the devs made this," while a valid opinion, is not an argument either and any rebuttal to it is equally valid as an opinion.

Only when stated as an opinion, which is not what was done.

We did not see:

• "I don't like how the devs made this."
• "I do, because I think it should work that way."

What we saw was:

• "I don't like how the devs made this."
• "You have no grounds to dislike that, because the devs made it that way. Additionally, here are other (not actually all that similar) examples that I feel illustrate that the devs have been doing this all along, indicating that you have no grounds to object based on change from past behavior."

There is a considerable difference in those two conversations.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree with Geko here. In terms of accessibility, the CoH endgame is so radically different from the traditional endgame MMO raiding system that if you scored accessibility of all other end game raiding systems of all other MMOs on a one to ten scale before I20 released, I20 wouldn't have been able to muster a zero on that scale. You'd have had to invent negative numbers on the scale to represent I20.

All I was saying was that you didn't offer any information about what you've actually earned through the trials in that post. You took what I've earned through the trials and compared it to your shard earning rate. For all we know, you might be earning ~30 times (I have adjusted my numbers based on your posts, and I see in your response to Venture that you're now saying that it sounds more accurate) the rate as well, if you assume that you actually use what component drops you can, and break down the rest.

I do believe there is a huge level of variability in performance for both trials and shard earning rates. Getting a Rare or Very Rare has a massive impact on your equivalent Thread rewards, and someone here has already posted a solo shard earning rate of over 17 an hour.

I want to be clear that my goal here is to get a better idea about how component drops, Empyrian Merits, and Astral merits have affected the advancement gap between Trial and non-Trial content. I've offered, really, the only information I have on the topic, in the hopes that it would result in people posting more data (so far only one person has), and some kind of a discussion on how we could come to some kind of accurate estimate instead of "5 times as long" or "1000 times as long". Aside from not having a very reliable estimate for my shard earning capabilities, and not including Alpha component breakdowns, I think I made two big mistakes. The first is posting something labeled "conclusion". The second is posting it in this forum instead of in a less flamewar prone forum like Archetypes and Powers (it's about rewards, not Powers, though, so I didn't know where else to post it).

If we are to exclude the foundation of the end game system (which is debatable), you could make an argument for CoX being radically different. But the foundation CoX end game system has is too similar to other end game systems currently, which is why it is causing a polarization to occur. If I were to take a wild guess, many of the people who have a negative view of end game have experienced it before, and that this end game as presented doesn't bring anything new to the table currently.

You could argue though that without this end game foundation, that it would no longer be considered an end game. But that is in a way what the team was shooting for.

As of right now grinding the two trials is the best method which I wouldn't hold it against the devs as that is the limitation of any end game system conceived radically, or straight forward, but the lack of alternatives is where the end game system of CoX in Issue 20 takes a massive turn compared to how it worked with the Alpha Slot in Issue 19.

CoX endgame currently has these end game sins:

1. Do the raids to obtain the gear to be able to do the raids reasonably. Alternative path not viable from the view points of some players.

2. Solo (Alternative) path is made extremely undesirable compared to the group method.

3. More level shifts ensures that future content will be gated at tiered levels.

Some feel that alternative paths are not viable currently, so CoX end game is exactly like endgames seen a few years ago. Especially with the emphasis of very large leagues when the rest of the industry has moved in the opposite direction with their end games (very small groups which CoX has always been known for).

Been doing it for 43 years now, works just fine for me.

My company, well...they do cater to an awful lot of illogical idiots, it's true.

This one I don't think is particularly problematic. The only content that is likely to require more level shifts is the future trials. If you don't want to do trials than getting the level shift isn't going to hurt you and if you are doing the trials then the level shift is simple enough to get.

My only concern is that when the next tier of trials come out it will be harder for a new player to "gear up". I can see several options for the devs to do that in the future (the easiest one being to add additional recipes for the current slots that use the Alpha slot shard costs and/or reduce the component costs).

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

Says who, exactly? Apparently, just a few vocal forum posters, because the Developers don't agree with this anymore than the busy servers I see everyday.

This an MMO. It is not a single player game. In an MMO, you have to put in the time, doing the required things, to get the goodies. It's how they are designed.

While this may be super-pretendy-fun-time, there is NO reason that all players, of all types, must be treated equally. The game has not, since it's inception, done this.

From the very beginning of CoH, those who play more and play the team content have gotten more rewards than those who have not. You play with teams in CoH and you get stuff way faster. It has always been this way.

To address the poor-tech thing specifically, I was dirt poor for a number of years. I never once whined that I should be given anything because someone else that could afford to do that something faster/better than I could. Sometimes life does, indeed, suck. The developers are not under any obligation to cater their product to someone that cannot afford a good machine to run it, that's truly absurd. And they are not unethical for not doing so either.

To conclude, I still think anyone that is really upset over this, I mean truly upset, might want to think about not playing these types of games. I really mean this. I doubt playing these games and becoming so emotionally embroiled in them is healthy for you. I had a friend lose his job, house, everything because he took an MMO too seriously. If a change/addition/nerf/whatever to a video game really upsets you, please take a step back. Even in the dealers in Vegas tell you not to gamble with the Mortgage money.

Well that is the general idea behind a progression system. If the new trials that will eventually come out are balanced around not having any of the current slots it'll be a snooze-fest for those who have them.

I guess the devs could potentially simply disable the new powers int he next set of trials but that'll piss off a lot of people.

Yes they can help out the new players, but in that process they may end up making these current two trials into ghost towns.

Yes, that is a way to keep the past trials relevant, but I concur that it doesn't really offer an alternative that is agreeable with some.

My point was that when the next set of slots comes along they will likely have a new salvage type. As such the current trials will almost certainly become ghost towns anyway.

At that point implementing a "side-step" system to aid new players/characters in gearing up makes a lot of sense.

In other games with a progression system it's standard practice to increase the rewards obtainable from non-raid content whenever a new raid is released. This serves to allow new characters to get the gear they need to participate in the new content without relying on sympathy runs through the old content.

Content that becomes abandoned is a hall mark of any game system. But even more so with an end game.

Issue 19 was a start to rejuvenate interest with older content, while allowing progress with the new content.

Issue 20, and onwards though looks radically different in approach, so we shall see.

Having new players join in on the current fun is important yes, but it may cause resentment with existing players who took the time and effort to grind it out.

No easy answers to these dilemmas by any means.

Oh definitely. Personally I would say that locking new players out of the content is worse for the game as a whole than upsetting existing players by "devaluing" their efforts.

Indeed and I'm curious to see how the devs handle it.

One thing that interested me was a comment Posi made about the possibility of introducing even more Incarnate slots after the first 10. If they do that I'll be interested to see how they handle what will pretty much have to be a "gear reset".

They might be able to get away without doing any of this during the first 10 slots but if they try to make a second set of 10 that require you to be Omega slotted to even start doing the content I think it'll come crashing down.

No, actually, I was continuing a comment from Beta where all we got was 'do this trial today'.

That was the extent of our communication unless there was a bug.

[rant]You know, I really don't get the idea that it "devalues" the efforts of players. Yes, it makes it easier for other people to get to where you (generic you) are at but that doesn't change your accomplishments. You were still able to do it the "hard" way and that is the true accomplishment. All that has changed for you is that you are now longer able to prove to other people that you did it before it was easy, but to be honest who cares? If the only reason that you did it was to be able to prove yourself "better" than other people then IMHO you need to reevaluate your priorities.[/rant]

I think that if they do a second round of incarnate slots a "gear reset" of some type is inevitable, the question is how? WoW did it by raising the level cap which allowed for the introduction of new basic gear that was significantly better than existing gear (also raising the cap helped defuse complaints from people who's uber gear was now useless) but I don't see that working here. In addition to the various issues with raising the level cap simply raising the cap doesn't make the existing incarnate abilities worthless, after all a level shift is still a level shift.

That leaves two options I can see:
1. Make the existing slots trivial to get to T3 (say a week or two)
2. Make the existing slots non-functional in the new content