I’ll even go further. My level 50 alts who got to 50 just by grinding dailies in Kingsmouth can access DA because they have 50-60 IP (the minimum for E1 being 50 IP). No story completion required!
So how do you pick wave 1? I don’t get any option to pick. Please tell me if I’m missing something. I’m not seeing any drop down menu.
Thank you. As I said… I’m a noob!
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MMO-usage even distinguish between dungeon/group and raid content. Raid meaning 10+ players. Can we run DA in a group of 10 players?
You’re the one who used “accessibility” first, so I’m not sure why you’re accusing me of wordplay for using that term. 
Regardless of what words you’d like me to use, when I say things should be accessible I don’t mean “everything should be super easy” so there’s no need to get defensive - it’s entirely possible for things to be challenging and available for casual players.
Absolute nonsense. For starters, you can’t try out “every single activity” from the get go because you have to level to 50 first but secondly, the idea that fun parts of the game should be kept away from players in order to keep them on the hook is terrible and I have no idea why you’d defend it as a player.
Leaving aside the bizarre idea that players couldn’t push themselves to improve in skill and/or improve their gear if activities aren’t gated in some way, this is also absolute nonsense. The belief that entertainment software should operate on some quasi-victorian ideal of “no fun until you’ve finished your work” is ridiculous.
I would think it’s patently obvious that we’re talking about people who are already level 50 in this discussion so I’m not sure what kind of gotcha you think this is. 
In any event, I would define casual as someone who doesn’t play much and/or doesn’t pay much attention to the mechanics/systems of the game.
Dark Agartha as it stands is really only worth doing if you’ve bought all the passives and capstones and you’re a skilled enough player to stand a reasonable chance of success, so while any level 50 player can play it, they probably shouldn’t. I’m saying there’s no reason why this needs to be the case - we could have both the hardcore endgame grindy AP/SP sink version and a casual friendly option with different costs/rewards that were more appropriate to players who were still unlocking abilities. Dark Agartha is fun and the game would be objectively better if players could get at that fun more than once a day and without having to grind other content first.
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You’re throwing an assumption that the “fun” parts should be locked behind the “unfun” parts to complete first is what my arguments imply. So i’ll just use your favourite term here: this statement is absolute nonsense and is 100% an assumption. Don’t even know what the hell the fun has to do in this discussion.
That’s what i meant by “wordplay”. It’s not because you throw out some statements that the average person won’t understand that you’ll be granted argument points or something. Again, you throw out a statement about “fun”, or the game being “work” when it has nothing to do with the discussion. Absolute nonsense.
Oh wait, so all the people i used to play with that quit because of the fact they literally did all the content, and that them grinding their gear more without any perspective to UNLOCK something new or to put the grinded gear to some new use / some new challenge is nonsense? You’re being offensively dismissive.
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What nonsense.
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Yup, the GUI is horrendous.
How exactly is Dark Agartha legitimately helping there? It is effectively not replayable for more casual players due to the excessive costs. As such, it is essentially worthless for broad player retention.
This is the truth.
This isn’t. Dark Agartha is an AP/SP sink by design, which means it is inaccessible to basically every player who is not capped out and doesn’t want to gimp their progress on the wheel, sorry, the not-wheel.
This is an AP/SP sink to please an elite few, without a care for how that affects actual and/or perceived accessibility for more casual and/or new players. Having those really worked so well to make TSW broadly appealing that it needed doing all over again, I guess?
Given the relaunch was not turning baseline content into the Dark Souls of MMOs, but into the Tic Tac Toe of shared-world action RPGs, that statement is rather counter-intuitive for SWL.
Also, IP gating already exists. How elitist does one have to be to pretend that additional, bigger obstacles absolutely are a good idea?
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I don’t think either of us mentioned “unfun” actually, so it’s not me making assumptions here.
Look mate, I really can’t be bothered to get into a discussion about the very nature of language with you. Just because you didn’t literally use the word work, that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate to sum up what you said as “players should have to work to unlock activities”.
I haven’t run the numbers but I’m reasonably sure that in the overwhelming majority of cases, spending the hundreds of SP & AP needed to get a single glyph to elaborate on passives & capstones instead would be a greater improvement to your character. Obviously I’m not including the free attempt in this assessment.
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I sometimes wonder just what it is that people expect from Funcom, because whatever they add to the game is met with complaints that it’s “not enough”, “won’t bring them back”, or accusations that it “caters to” or “excludes” certain parts of the player base.
We’re never going to get a WoW-sized expansion with enough content to keep every single player happy for weeks and months.
Does Dark Agartha exclude casual players? I don’t think so.
It’s perfectly possible to successfully finish Dark Agartha on characters that are far from maxed out, as has been proven dozens if not hundreds of times just on the first day. And the reward, especially the first time bonus, is more useful to characters who aren’t already maxed out.
Is it the best investment of AP/SP for someone who only plays a few hours a week? Perhaps not. But then, earning the AP/SP required for a single Dark Agartha run doesn’t take that long, either.
Dark Agartha, to me, is a quick, dungeon-like activity that doesn’t require a group. I for one will be happy to add it to my regular activities.
The only player who is truly excluded is the one who’s unwilling to learn.
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You’re assuming that the “casual player” wants to min-max their progression, which to me is completely antithetical to the idea of a “casual player”.
If the idea is that the “casual player” just wants to have fun in SWL for a few hours a week then Dark Agartha absolutely has the potential to be a part of that, regardless of the AP/SP cost involved.
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Well, and the casual players who picked the wrong weapons, and then gimped their progress on fixing that by wasting AP/SP on an activity that would instantly become vastly more accessible to a broad player base in TSW or any other game with a decent traditional gear system.
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I’m not sure it’s really worth debating with these guys, they complain no matter what anyway.
Speaking about 7 AP / 15 SP obtainable in 15 min just by casually doing dailies is still something they really enjoy arguing about. It’s definitely inaccessible, see?
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That’s going to be somewhat limited by the Tic Tac Toe vs. Dark Souls dichotomy of story content and endgame content, though, particularly for Dark Agartha, which is definitely ‘harder than normal’ for its elite level.
Except they’re impeding their own progress by wasting AP & SP. Dark Agartha by it’s very design encourages players to switch up their builds and adapt to the different challenges, something that will be considerably harder to do if you don’t have all the passives and abilities.
That’s 7AP / 15SP per attempt. I doubt casual players, especially ones who don’t have all the abilities & passives unlocked are going to succeed on their first attempt each day.
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Again you’re assuming that that’s what the “casual player” prioritizes.
Just because you’re disrespectful towards them by calling them “random”.
I think one payment per day is enough. Non-patrons can’t go around and collect 15 SP + 7 AP at a whim, with 68h mission cooldowns, shard draining teleports and no double AP/SP.
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Narrowing it down even further, huh? Yes, I can agree that the progression-focused casual non-patron isn’t the key target audience of this particular piece of content.