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[Teikiatsu]

If you exemplar'd to less than 50 (TF or teaming) didn't you lose all your Incarnate stuff?

[KennonGL]

When my toons hit 50, most of them went into semi-retirement. Before too long I started to loose interest in playing, I would often skip months at a time between loggons.

See there's one of the great things that CoH hit on.  When my toons hit 50 (with a couple of exceptions), they permanently retired [ie I deleted them].  Sometimes they would be reincarnated as a slightly different powerset and join the 10 or so other alternates that were always in various stages of leveling. 

I never ran ANY of the incarnate trials (except the first couple of missions that could be solo'd on one or two of my permanent 50's), but
I logged in nearly every day for the entire lifespan of CoH, with only the occasional week-long breaks when some new game might come out that caught my attention, but the City was always there waiting for my return.

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.

I can certainly understand that thinking back near the early days of the game, but it seems an odd way of thinking to me later on.  To me at least, it seems pretty obvious that Alts were very important to a LOT of players [else why have a need to keep expanding server slots].  Even if those players weren't like me and deleting characters much, keeping a stable of 50's instead, the sheer number of built characters should have been a strong indication that Alts were much more a central focus of CoH than they are in other MMOs.

I honestly would have expected Posi and company to pick up on that, but apparently not so much...   Hmm, guess it's really true that CoH was really a very happy accident and a lot less of it's greatness was deliberate planning than I'd ever imagined.

[HEATSTROKE]

 I played my 50's... quite a lot.. there was always something to do.. there was always a trial.. or a TF or a Raid.. or just doing missions with friends.. or helping other people finish their Arcs or missions..

[Felderburg]

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.

[Tacitala]

I loved the Itrials.. the thing is that they were totally optional.. you didnt have to do one ever..

Optional unless you wanted your character to progress above a certain point.  Dark Astoria, as wonderful as it was, only took you so far and if you wanted to get up to +4 you had to play incarnate trials.  Of course, having your characters cranked up to +4 wasn't necessary for the game but not everyone was happy with that answer.

My main problem with the incarnate raids was that the storyline was flat out "you must DESTROY PRAETORIA".  Seriously, Prometheus was like a bitter, crazy ex-boyfriend.  I had a few characters whose back story made them still loyal to Cole and a few more who felt so much compassion for the citizens of Praetoria that they didn't want to see the land/resources of the city smashed.  So I had to chose between my stories vs. getting the full powers others got.  I can see how people grew sick of Praetoria, just from it being the large majority of the end game content, but I felt the answer should have been 'make new, non-Praetoria centered content' not 'go Godzilla on the dimension'.

I didn't see anyone answer Teikiatsu's question yet.  Yup, if you exemplared down you'd lose your incarnate abilities.

As for alts, I think they should have been taken as a complement for the new power sets.

[Scott Jackson]

On the subject of metrics...

In my experience, the poor design of metrics deserves some blame, but the preponderance of baffling errors stem from the all-too-human ability to misuse them.  If applied by someone willing to start with the null hypothesis, they can be powerful and revealing.  When applied by someone with a strong opinion of How Things Ought To Be, the subtle insights tend to be lost, and there's a danger that the existing opinion is either reinforced by "interpreting" the data, or the data is discarded and the metric rewritten to be "accurate" (fits the desired answer).

One metric I would have wanted was the number of Incarnate trials run per character -after- that character had fully slotted a top-tier piece in each Incarnate slot.  It would have provided a means to distinguish who & how many actually enjoyed the trial endgame on its own merits versus for the Merits.  As a second benefit, we might have obtained a cursory numeric glance toward player opinions on the useful/fun factor of various ATs and playstyles in each trial.  For example, if no one brought blasters into Trial Q once fully slotted, but brutes would replay it, that would tell us something was haywire.

The same metric could be used (with some caution, due to lossless transfer of rewards to alts) when evaluating task forces and other highly-rewarding content, to help identify what was most enjoyable once progression rewards were no longer the driving force behind player behavior.  If used well, these metrics would have helped to identify and deliver even more content with those traits - even if it ran contrary to what the developers expected the players to enjoy.  Player surveys would have offered a helpful window into this as well - though these face a self-selection problem when used alone.  That's where solid metrics plus follow-up "what do you like about content X" questions could really pay off for game designers, especially ones who have stumbled upon a popular formula and want to expand on that unexpected and potentially fragile design's success.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

On the subject of metrics...

In my experience, the poor design of metrics deserves some blame, but the preponderance of baffling errors stem from the all-too-human ability to misuse them.  If applied by someone willing to start with the null hypothesis, they can be powerful and revealing.  When applied by someone with a strong opinion of How Things Ought To Be, the subtle insights tend to be lost, and there's a danger that the existing opinion is either reinforced by "interpreting" the data, or the data is discarded and the metric rewritten to be "accurate" (fits the desired answer).

One metric I would have wanted was the number of Incarnate trials run per character -after- that character had fully slotted a top-tier piece in each Incarnate slot.  It would have provided a means to distinguish who & how many actually enjoyed the trial endgame on its own merits versus for the Merits.  As a second benefit, we might have obtained a cursory numeric glance toward player opinions on the useful/fun factor of various ATs and playstyles in each trial.  For example, if no one brought blasters into Trial Q once fully slotted, but brutes would replay it, that would tell us something was haywire.

The same metric could be used (with some caution, due to lossless transfer of rewards to alts) when evaluating task forces and other highly-rewarding content, to help identify what was most enjoyable once progression rewards were no longer the driving force behind player behavior.  If used well, these metrics would have helped to identify and deliver even more content with those traits - even if it ran contrary to what the developers expected the players to enjoy.  Player surveys would have offered a helpful window into this as well - though these face a self-selection problem when used alone.  That's where solid metrics plus follow-up "what do you like about content X" questions could really pay off for game designers, especially ones who have stumbled upon a popular formula and want to expand on that unexpected and potentially fragile design's success.

To a certain extent, I can see this.  However, I think the part about, "running iTrials after being fully slotted" isn't quite right.

When they started, I went in, full bore, on my main, to get the incarnate goodies... Once I got them on that toon, it wasn't that I was burned out or didn't desire to run iTrials on that toon any longer.

I had OTHER level 50's that I wanted to start working up the Incarnate ladder.  So it wasn't that I was done with my main.  I just had other toons that needed shards/powers...  It wasn't burning out on iTrials, or that, "Well, I'm done with THAT toon!" sort of mentality.  It was, "Yeah, I enjoy iTrials on that toon... but I have others that I need to spend time on...I'll come back to that toon once I get some powers on my others."

[Arcana]

I can certainly understand that thinking back near the early days of the game, but it seems an odd way of thinking to me later on.  To me at least, it seems pretty obvious that Alts were very important to a LOT of players [else why have a need to keep expanding server slots].  Even if those players weren't like me and deleting characters much, keeping a stable of 50's instead, the sheer number of built characters should have been a strong indication that Alts were much more a central focus of CoH than they are in other MMOs.

I honestly would have expected Posi and company to pick up on that, but apparently not so much...   Hmm, guess it's really true that CoH was really a very happy accident and a lot less of it's greatness was deliberate planning than I'd ever imagined.

They did, over time.  But they felt the need to balance the desires of the players who were alt-leaning with the ones that wanted deep single main development.  I don't think you could say which of those represented the bulk of all players in CoH until many years after launch.  It takes that long for enough players to even *make* enough alts to show the trend.  I believe it took approximately 500 hours of game sessions (not all of it in sustained combat) for the average player to level a character to 50, plus or minus.  For many casual players, that represented more than a year of continuous gameplay.

Also, not every player that made multiple alts was an alt-o-holic.  Many were abandoning characters they no longer wanted to play.  Its hard to say how much of this was happening, but my analysis of the archetype population numbers BaB released suggested that at least for Blasters (who were able to show the strongest signal by being one of the more popular archetypes and had the highest delta in leveling) abandonment was a significant effect: people would level Blasters into the 30s, and by level 40 or so many of them had been likely abandoned (because there were significantly less high level blasters than low level blasters relative to other archetypes).  I suspect even if this was true for Blasters more than other archetypes, it did happen at some frequency for all archetypes (just in a way difficult to spot in the data given other effects).

[Arcana]

One metric I would have wanted was the number of Incarnate trials run per character -after- that character had fully slotted a top-tier piece in each Incarnate slot.  It would have provided a means to distinguish who & how many actually enjoyed the trial endgame on its own merits versus for the Merits.  As a second benefit, we might have obtained a cursory numeric glance toward player opinions on the useful/fun factor of various ATs and playstyles in each trial.  For example, if no one brought blasters into Trial Q once fully slotted, but brutes would replay it, that would tell us something was haywire.

This would have been a dangerous metric to use in my opinion.  First of all, the people who actually played iTrials tended to be skewed towards a self-selected bunch of power gamers in the first place, and you'd be datamining their playing preferences not the playerbase as a whole.  Second, the players that ran enough to fully slot a character were more likely to have multiple strong invention-slotted 50s, so its very likely that someone that had fully slotted an incarnate would move to another incarnate character and continue to run iTrials whether they enjoyed them or not just because it made sense (at shutdown I was fully slotted on my three main characters and working on two others).  And third, because the group of players that ran many iTrials were self-selected towards power gamers, they tended to be self-selected from a group of players with radically skewed ability relative to the median player population.  That meant that a statistical problem with certain archetypes not showing up would have to be extremely strong to show up.  For example, I ran enough iTrials to know there was no deficit of blasters.  On average would a blaster have a difficult time?  Yes.  But average blasters were not showing up.  Some did of course (nothing is ever 100%) but many if not most were players like me, running fully slotted and partially or fully incarnate blasters I had been playing for so many years I could have fired my optimal attack chains blindfolded.  I would go off *solo* to hunt caches and tubes in Lambda just to speed things up.  That's not typical blaster behavior.

On my server, the players that consistently ran many iTrials was a relatively small knowable group.  I can tell you their preferences were not statistically representative of the whole game.

PS: the archetype with the biggest deficit in actually showing up and being productive was masterminds, even after the level shift adjustment but certainly before it.

Ironically, the fact that CoH was alt-friendly would act to significantly impair this metric.  Because all players, whether they liked grinding for rewards or not, tended to have multiple options for doing so.  That reduces the strength of the signal of replayability of reward grinding content.

[Mistress Urd]

They did, over time.  But they felt the need to balance the desires of the players who were alt-leaning with the ones that wanted deep single main development.  I don't think you could say which of those represented the bulk of all players in CoH until many years after launch.  It takes that long for enough players to even *make* enough alts to show the trend.  I believe it took approximately 500 hours of game sessions (not all of it in sustained combat) for the average player to level a character to 50, plus or minus.  For many casual players, that represented more than a year of continuous gameplay.

Also, not every player that made multiple alts was an alt-o-holic.  Many were abandoning characters they no longer wanted to play.  Its hard to say how much of this was happening, but my analysis of the archetype population numbers BaB released suggested that at least for Blasters (who were able to show the strongest signal by being one of the more popular archetypes and had the highest delta in leveling) abandonment was a significant effect: people would level Blasters into the 30s, and by level 40 or so many of them had been likely abandoned (because there were significantly less high level blasters than low level blasters relative to other archetypes).  I suspect even if this was true for Blasters more than other archetypes, it did happen at some frequency for all archetypes (just in a way difficult to spot in the data given other effects).

Well relative to everyone else blasters got "weaker" as levels increased. I'm sure the metrics would show quite a few folks bailing on controllers at low levels. 

[Teikiatsu]

I didn't see anyone answer Teikiatsu's question yet.  Yup, if you exemplared down you'd lose your incarnate abilities.

Thanks much, I wanted to make sure I remembered the mechanics correctly.  That was my hesitancy to focus on incarnate; why put all that work into your character when you could only enjoy it at 50?  That was one of my suspicion as to why I was seeing less and less veterans taking part in lower level content on Virtue.

[Rigo42]

Curious, does anybody still have any idea why the site is down?

I know it was discussed earlier, but I haven't been able to figure why :O. Hoping its a good sign like everyone else.

[FloatingFatMan]

Curious, does anybody still have any idea why the site is down?

I know it was discussed earlier, but I haven't been able to figure why :O. Hoping its a good sign like everyone else.

Who knows? All I can tell you is, NCSoft are still the registered owners, at least until 16th May 2015, when the domain expires.

[Phaetan]

In particular, you'd lose all Incarnate effects when Exemplared below level 45.  Full level shifts were only available in new Dark Astoria and iTrials, as everywhere else, only the Alpha Slot's level shift applied.

[Pherdnut]

Curious, does anybody still have any idea why the site is down?

I know it was discussed earlier, but I haven't been able to figure why :O. Hoping its a good sign like everyone else.

I'd keep an eye on that domain for a couple weeks. It usually takes about a week to transfer a domain. But of course it's just as likely that they reviewed their assets as a part of the negotiations and finally noticed somebody left that particular light on.

[Noyjitat]

I don't expect you or anyone to agree with everything I say but some of your statements just sound like to me that you never spent any lengthy time doing trials or that your server had issues doing them. My responses in bold:

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.

Grinding is when you put many many hours into something for very small rewards or no rewards at all in the case of the mmo where you roll for loot or kill
this npc until it drops an item you need. (the sith waist pack 4/5 from swg comes to mind here)

Okay you've lost me here... How is doing the same 8 trials over and over any different than doing the same taskforces over and over to get random recipe rolls (later merits) or the same bank missions, scanner missions insert any other thing here? Did you now that most of the incarnate trials could be completed almost as quickly as an ITF or Kahn task force?

You quit the game over a new set of content that wasn't designed for you... I could kinda understand if they had changed the rest of the game or nerfed your favorite characters... but did you quit city of heroes when villains and  pvp was added just because you didn't like pvp?

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.

You do realize you can easily get all of your incarnate abilities way sooner than a purple/pvp ioded build right? (unless you were wealthy)
It sounds like to me that you hated it so badly that you didn't give the trials a fair chance or you were on a server with people that generally were not good at incarnate trials. Tier 1 incarnate can be earned doing 1 and a half bafs / lambda trials by converting all of your threads and the component you earn and being on a team that actually goes for some of the badge earning achievements in the trial (The baf was really easy for this)

As for the story were you not impacted on taskforces as well? How did you have time to read during positrons, itfs etc? Did you quit teams that didn't want to wait? People were rushing through those for years before trials came out and people rushed through trials for the same reasons:
A like you they felt the taskforce or trial was a grind
B they have limited playtime and want to get as many rewards and possible for that session
C They have family and other things to attend to: See above
D They wanted to earn as many rewards as possible in the shorted time possible because its fun or because above reasons
It's just like farming for purples it might feel grindy but you either gotta do that, save up hero merits/empyreans, or have alot of influence. Which you had to grind for the influence or exploit a bug ingame to dupe mone. Either way if you wanted to have something in the game you had to spend time and effort to get it and most often this is done by speeding.

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.

It's hard not to come off as rude or seem like I'm bragging here but it wasn't hard to get one let alone several characters to t4 with all the time incarnate trials were live from day one up till the shutdown. Now I don't know if you were on an extremely low population server or didn't have a regular group to run with but saying that you couldn't do it on at least 1 character seems unbelievable to me.

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.

Frankly when the system first came out I was as negative as you are about it but I gave it a chance and loved it. I don't know if the way back machine has the city of heroes forums archived or not but if you were to search for my posts there you could see just how negative I was about it. And I'm sure a few people that post here probably remember and know what I'm saying. My final gripes were the insane inf costs for converting uncommons to rares and rares to very rares and the devs were nice and lowered the cost.

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.

Matt Miller was anti many things but not once has seemed like an anti-alt person to me. Nor have I ever gotten anything out of any video or article that he was.

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 personally don't know of any that stopped playing because of trials until you. But I do know several that stopped playing due to the pvp changes. (They eventually returned however) Generally I felt that those around me playing trials loved them and when I would put a shout out in channel for a trial forming the zone would flood with people looking for a trial invite.

However for those of you that hated trials and wanted more solo or non league team options: We got them with issue22 death incarnate (that was the name right)  and I suspect eventually we would of gotten more stuff like the new dark astoria had the game not been shutdown.

[Rigo42]

I'd keep an eye on that domain for a couple weeks. It usually takes about a week to transfer a domain. But of course it's just as likely that they reviewed their assets as a part of the negotiations and finally noticed somebody left that particular light on.

Ah thank you, I really like this answer actually.

[Cobra Man]

Noyjitat. I'm not going to quote your post.

To keep it short and sweet, rinse/repeating the same 8 incarnate TF's was indeed grinding and it ultimately forced me out of the game for months.

Your opinion clearly is different but it was a total grindfest for me and many others. The devs were urged to change the way that players could get incarnate XP but they chose to ignore those requests.

Also .. Matt Miller certainly held the view that multiple alts were detrimental to the game and interfered with plans for the 'endgame'.

Miller's views on just that were posted a few days ago on this forum if you'd care to have a look for the post - or if someone can remember what post it was in?

[Noyjitat]

But what you're calling grinding is no different than the rest of the game. To unlock contacts you run scanner missions over and over and do a bank mission. To earn rare recipes you had a limited number of taskforces to do in order to get the merits needed for recipe rolls or you had to do something else and rely on buying them with influence. (later they expanded recipes as rewards from incarnate trials as well via empyrean merits) Heck we got new incarnate trials added more often than the number of new taskforces added since city of villains "Strike Forces" We got the itf, return of the reichsman, apex, tin mage, sutter. It took years to get new taskforces added since villains but more choices for trials were added sooner.

As for incarnate xp, wasn't that added to the dark astoria missions as well? Personally, I just burned threads on it at 50k iexp per thread on the first 3 incarnate powers it didn't take long.

[Scott Jackson]

To a certain extent, I can see this.  However, I think the part about, "running iTrials after being fully slotted" isn't quite right.

When they started, I went in, full bore, on my main, to get the incarnate goodies... Once I got them on that toon, it wasn't that I was burned out or didn't desire to run iTrials on that toon any longer.

I had OTHER level 50's that I wanted to start working up the Incarnate ladder.  So it wasn't that I was done with my main.  I just had other toons that needed shards/powers...  It wasn't burning out on iTrials, or that, "Well, I'm done with THAT toon!" sort of mentality.  It was, "Yeah, I enjoy iTrials on that toon... but I have others that I need to spend time on...I'll come back to that toon once I get some powers on my others."

That's similar to what I did, and apparently Arcanaville too, though I didn't have a "main" so several characters were at various rungs of that ladder at any given time.  The metric I mentioned would have essentially discarded players like us when we were midway through that process, and thus be useless on its own for detecting the difference between a distaste for trials and simply switching to progress our alts.  The metric's only value is in providing a fairly strong signal of the minimum playercount that enjoys trials even when the item reward is low or zero, and a list of those players who could be surveyed for what trial aspects they enjoyed.

As Arcanaville noted, that self-selection into the "we love trials" group doesn't mean their opinions should be used as unfiltered input to design all future incarnate content, and not even all future trials...unless the developers have time to create content specific to that group.  Certainly not what I'd want them to focus on given the I24 state of things; since we were still missing an array of viable Incarnate progression paths (solo, small team, trial suite designed for casual/pug leagues, free server transfers for L50s, etc) to serve a significant majority.  Until that time, it would simply be a way to understand that group of players better, so that they (Noyjitat & others) could rely on at least some of their favorite features appearing in future endgame content.

...the group of players that ran many iTrials were self-selected towards power gamers, they tended to be self-selected from a group of players with radically skewed ability relative to the median player population.  That meant that a statistical problem with certain archetypes not showing up would have to be extremely strong to show up.  For example, I ran enough iTrials to know there was no deficit of blasters.  On average would a blaster have a difficult time?  Yes.  But average blasters were not showing up.  Some did of course (nothing is ever 100%) but many if not most were players like me, running fully slotted and partially or fully incarnate blasters I had been playing for so many years I could have fired my optimal attack chains blindfolded.  I would go off *solo* to hunt caches and tubes in Lambda just to speed things up.  That's not typical blaster behavior.

On my server, the players that consistently ran many iTrials was a relatively small knowable group.  I can tell you their preferences were not statistically representative of the whole game.

PS: the archetype with the biggest deficit in actually showing up and being productive was masterminds, even after the level shift adjustment but certainly before it.

Oddly enough, that's why I like the idea of being able to let those self-selected experts get attention on the AT-trial mismatch question (via such a metric and followup surveys).  If such a signal does appear among even such an experience group, one can be fairly certain there's a real mismatch between a particular AT and a given trial, not just a phantom signal from semi-casual players who haven't yet found a tactic to enjoy their character's possible roles in that trial.  It does require/assume there would be a large enough sample of devoted "not in it for the Merits" players to show anything on this point.  And I wouldn't propose using that self-selected experts/"trial lovers" metric as the only one.  For example, metrics for alt-heavy Incarnate players could be quite useful...though they'd probably already seen those (I fit there somewhere).  My curiosity led me to ponder a metric they may not have even considered.