Except that incarnate trials were not a grind...
This is the only ALT friendly endgame system in existence.
I would strongly disagree. Obviously the definition of "grind" is different for various people, but the fact of the matter was that in order to get incarnate gear, you had to do the same set of 8 trials over and over and Over and OVER and
OVER AND OVER again. That is a grind, it is not enjoyable, and I stopped playing CoH because of it.
No, I didn't
have to do Incarnate stuff. But I did want to "max out" my characters (or at least get them tier 1 Incarnate abilities) and I couldn't bring myself to do it. Not to mention, I really enjoyed the storyline of the game, and you couldn't get the storyline from an I-Trial - people were too busy rushing through it as fast as possible (so they could do it again) for anyone to actually read what was going on. In a game where the lore is so huge, it seems to me a bad choice to make something no-one gets the lore from, especially such plot-important trials.
And it was NOT alt-friendly. Maybe
more friendly than other endgames, but for me it was too much for one level 50, let alone the three I had.
I know I'm biased because I love incarnate trials but honestly If we never got incarnate trials I probably wouldn't have played nearly as much as I had. I was at the point where the options on what to do were getting limited after countless alts. Same for my friends and like many of us had requested for years... "Give us more to do with our 50's" and we finally got it!
I'm glad it made some people happy. But for me, it was terrible, because it meant to advance my characters, both plot wise and "gear" wise, I had to participate in what was, for me, terrible content. And I did want to advance my characters.
Although it might be a stretch to say Posi was anti-alt.
I admit it's a bit of hyperbole on my part to say he was "anti-alt", but the article he wrote clearly indicates he had some issues with them.
I don't think Positron was anti-alt. I think he believed supporting alts was more difficult (it was) and promoted a completely different gaming environment (it does) and it wasn't an expected outcome (because all prior experience would lead most people to believe that a player who did not fall in love with their character and want to spend time nurturing it would be more likely to quit playing than make an entire stable of less fixated alternative characters.
It seems so obvious now, but it was not obvious in 2004.
What about people who fell in love with
all their characters? Or at least, multiple characters?
...I imagine he made his statement based on metrics...
I do wonder if there was too much reliance on metrics. I suspect (with no evidence whatsoever) that people like me, who wanted to advance their character and therefore
had to play the I-Trials, contributed to the statistic that "everyone's playing them!" But how many people like me stopped playing entirely? And how many people like me, who felt "forced" to advance their characters but had enough patience / love for the game, contributed to that statistic - making the devs think the Trials were enjoyed, when in reality, they were not?
I should note that my statements about people "rushing" through Trials without reading the story are supported by the fact that until about a month ago, the Wiki had absolutely ZERO story content for the Trials. The only reason it's there now is because Blondeshell dug through old files and found it all. These things were live and playable for
years and no-one bothered to capture what was going on for the Wiki.