I guess the issue for me is that Positron's "vision" ended up being something that I perceived as "let's put in grindy end game raids like every other game!". I can appreciate that he has a vision and that it's important to have one, but if I don't like the vision, I'm not sure where that leaves me.
Living in the real world I suppose.
Many players hated the inventions system, and many of them left because of it. Many others loved it, and went as far to say that the invention system kept the game fresh for them and caused them to stay when they otherwise might have left. Its clear in retrospect that the decision to add the invention system had no right answer if you are measuring that by whether the decision causes harm to the playerbase. Adding it caused harm: not adding it would have caused harm. The game didn't last long enough to make a similar judgment about the incarnate system, but I suspect a similar thing would have been true: adding it cost players, not adding it would have also cost players in the long run.
I personally think the invention system gained or retained more players than it cost overall: whether you were a single-character focused player or an alt-generator the invention system was overall a net positive, although that would be difficult to prove. I think the incarnate system was player-neutral at the time of the shutdown, but I think it would have turned positive over time as the developers expanded to non-trial aspects of it.
If you were one of the players that didn't and would never like it, there's nothing much to say. Its not that I want your gaming experience degraded, but if you asked me if I would have been willing to trade the invention system away to get back the players it cost the game, I would have to honestly answer "no."
Which, incidentally, brushes up against the asymmetry associated with alting. This is something I actually discussed with the devs occasionally in different guises, in particular when I was part of the Freedom focus group. This is a huge oversimplification for discussion purposes, but the wedge between those that want focused progression and those that want a variety of alts isn't in their differing desires, its actually how they interact with an overlapping player type: completists.
A "deep" (for lack of a short descriptor) completist wants to do everything on a single character. If it exists in the game, they want to do it at least once, get it at least once, have at least one of it. They want every badge, they want everything unlocked, they want to have done every mission at least once. Every time the devs add something they cannot experience on a single character that is related to making more characters, like power sets, they see that as time that could be spent making the game deeper for them: its an opportunity cost.
However, that's not true going the other way. an alt-completist wants to try every possible character type: every kind of archetype, every powerset, maybe even every powerset combination eventually. But they *also* tend to want those alts to be "first class citizens" which means to a large extent if they do it on one, they want to do it on all, or at least a large percentage of them. They want badges on more than one alt, they want to do mission content on more than one alt, they want to progress to the maximum progressional levels on every alt.
When you add depth to the game rather than breadth, the impact on alt-completists isn't that there's an opportunity cost, its that there's the potential to place a lot of content out of reach. Now, adding powersets also adds content out of reach of the deep-completists, but because they are deep players they already made that decision to forgo exploring alternate characters in the first place. Its adding content in an area they already decided not to go. It hurts less. If it hurt more, they would be altists.
So in effect, you have a game where you can expand its width (by adding more character options) and its depth (by adding more progressional systems and content). For those that want depth, increasing the width only hurts a little. But for those that want width, a significant percentage not only want width they also *need* less depth. For them, adding depth hurts more.
I think the discussion of "grindy end game" masks a more fundamental problem that the devs perceived in the feedback they got, and is something Matt had on his mind when writing that article. A game that encourages alting does create a problem that is specific to alting in that there is a group of players you will enable that won't just advocate for more alting options but also *less* everything else. That's not true in the reverse, and its a problem that can hamper future development of a game.
Personally, I think the dev team believed this problem was mostly intractible. I tended to think it was not completely intractable: it could be significantly moderated in a way that the Incarnate system itself did not succeed at. But I think the core of the problem is actually intractable. My philosophy was "something for everyone, not everything for someone." That means when in doubt, develop in a way that gives something to each kind of playstyle. But there's one kind of playstyle that philosophy is incompatible with: the wide-completists. When you give something to everyone, you will almost certainly be adding things to the game that make it increasingly difficult to be a wide-completist. In my opinion, that's just the way it goes: if you want to be a wide completist, you need to have a lot of time to do so.
As a developer, you never want to say to a player that you're just not going to develop for them, but the truth is that you either develop for wide-completists, or everyone else, and everyone else usually wins. The only reason why CoH was compatible with wide-completists in the first place was purely coincidental: they simply didn't have enough developers to outrace most wide-competists until long after launch. But it wasn't for lack of trying.
As I said, this is oversimplifying a lot, but that's how I tended to see the overlapping player interests. I don't know if the devs saw it exactly the same way, but I do know there were many times during my discussions with a dev where they would say words to the effect of "we can't do that because" and essentially give a reason congruent to the above: that doing so would make life difficult for one segment of the player population or another. Its something they thought about a lot.
