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Ask the Devs, Interview With Jeremy Randall

winters83winters83 Member Posts: 486 Media Corps
Hello fellow STO players, I'm please to announce that Priority One Podcast with be interviewing Star Trek Onlines Staff Systems Designer Jeremy "Borticus" Randall this coming week. So with that I would like to invite you (the STO community) to submit any "Systems" related questions that you would like answered. I will compile all of your questions for this interview and we will do our best to get them all answered. The interview will be available on the 1st of May in episode 315. Thank you all in advance! :smile:

-Winters
Twitter: @P1Winters83 YouTube: WintersGaming
=/\= ========================================== =/\=
Fleet Admiral Winters - Priority One Armada
U.S.S. Wolverine - NCC 831216
=/\= ========================================== =/\=
Armada Leader // Executive Producer // Host // Priority One Podcast
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Comments

  • vegeta50024vegeta50024 Member Posts: 2,335 Arc User
    -Are the repeatedly promised Breen, and early Klingon mission, revamps still planned?

    I think this would be more of a content design question rather than systems design.
    -Is anyone working on a DS9 map revamp at this point? Is it still something y'all want to do?

    This one is more of a Artist Question, though certain systems would probably be tied to it such as services access.
    -Exploration, will we get it before 2020?

    I'd say this is more like the kind of question he could answer, but likely he couldn't answer it even if he wanted to.
    -Are we ever going to see revamps to Vulcan, Andoria, Starbase 39-Sierra, Deep Space K-7, Ganalda, and Memory Alpha?

    This is more in the avenue of environmental artistry since there's not much in the way of systems design here. Maybe Content design depending on what you want from the revamp, but not systems.
    -Can Doffing get a reward increase + bonuses per commendation category like Admiralty has?

    Perfect question that falls into the topic questions and something I'm sure people want to see an answer to.
    -Can accolades get an update to give out rewards after getting so many points or just be made more useful overall?

    This would be interesting to see enacted.
    -Any plans to redo the last remaining pre-LOR content like pve queues, diplomacy missions, Fed patrols, and Klingon "Defend the Empire/Pi Canis Sorite" missions?

    I think these would probably fall more into content design.
    -State of Q mission revamp still planned?

    Another content design question, though it may also fall into systems design considering how they would have to devise stuff to work in the game now.
    -Playable Cardassians still possible?

    I see this as being more of a content design question.
    -Can we ever get improvements to the foundry like being able to make chained mission arcs/subscribing to foundry authors/interior editors?

    Definitely a system that needs improving. It's way overdue.

    -With the upcoming revamp to PVP, can we get PVP leaderboards?
    -New minigames like poker?

    It might take some work on this and possibly be hard to implement.
    -Improved exchange UI possible?

    This is more of a UI question, though it's probably also a matter of systems design since they have to work how the system interacts with the UI.
    -Is there a chance for the Children of Khan arc to be brought back in some way?

    -Any chance of a revisit to melee only PVP areas on Vulcan, Andoria, Qo'noS, Rura Penthe, as well as Vulcan Lirpas, Andorian Ushaan-tor knives, and Klingon bat'leths from special weaponsmiths?

    I think these last two are more in the area of content design since you're asking for content with PVP areas, though they can also be looked at for system design since you're talking about ground combat.

    TSC_Signature_Gen_4_-_Vegeta_Small.png
  • sleeeperr1sleeeperr1 Member Posts: 91 Arc User
    ask bort about the change to superbuffed tyken's rift
  • duncanidaho11duncanidaho11 Member Posts: 7,867 Arc User
    Would it be possible to make an item that enables Artisanal Sonification?
    Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
    Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
    Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
  • smokebaileysmokebailey Member Posts: 4,659 Arc User
    Will the frame rate in Delta Quadrant patrol quests ever get fixed? Everywhere else in game is fine, but those aforementioned delta patrols, the frame rate like chokes, even when my compy was brand new a couple of years ago.

    Also, can we get a Constellation skin option for all the 4-engine ships?
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  • salazarrazesalazarraze Member Posts: 3,794 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    -Can Doffing get a reward increase + bonuses per commendation category like Admiralty has?
    What's the reasoning behind this request? An increase doesn't make sense as it's not needed.
    When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
  • asuran14asuran14 Member Posts: 2,335 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    Is a expansion, or just a revamping of the doffing system on the dev's mind? The system feels quite cluttered an abandoned kinda, but also with a lot of potential in it to expand playstyles thru. Though to be exact I am talking about the roster side dealing with the ground/space doff slots, as well as what kind of effects the doffs give as some of them could be quite a bit more interesting to give more variety in play styles, and not so much the duty officer assignment side that could still use some improvements.

    Is there a system, or concept in the works to give better incentives for players to que for more of the content? Such as giving some of the reps projects that might need items from certain specific stf content to complete them, or missions given by different reps to finish different stfs for a reward either gear vanity rewards or mark/dil/elite marks.

    Edit: Also could we see a system like the vanity shield/engine/deflector visual being implemented for the weapon systems? Even if it were just a color syncing system, and had three slots like the vanity visual system of the shield/deflector/engine system or a option in the drop down menu. I personally like to match up my weapon color, and being able to use any set while still keeping a color I like would be quite nice (I think some other players would like this as well.).
  • salazarrazesalazarraze Member Posts: 3,794 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    What's the reasoning behind this request? An increase doesn't make sense as it's not needed.
    Yes it is needed. Doffing is easily the single worst system in STO as it stands. The grind to get doffing commendation tracts maxed makes the grind for reps, admiralty, and crafting, look like nothing. Especially for some of the doff tracts that don't have too many doff mission available.

    Doffing needs several big changes to make it not garbage
    1. It needs base rewards upped a bit so that they are actually REWARDing in the first place.
    2. It needs daily bonuses per tract(like reputations and leach of the admiralty tracts have) to make progress easier for those who can't log in every 30 minutes to reload new doff missions.
    3. It needs alternating increases to base rewards, and daily bonuses, per rank, like admiralty has. Again make progression actually progress in a reasonable manner.
    4. They need to redo the entire way the doff mission list is generated, removing the randomness of the various sector blocks, and make it just one giant list, with pass tokens, per commendation tract. As it stands, you can easily spend literal hours flying all across Alpha/Beta quad sector space in a vain attempt to find a halfway decent doff mission for the one commendation tracts you need, and not find anything.

    Doffing, as it stands, is garbage. There is no reason to do it, and everything about the system is designed to make it far more difficult then it should.

    It needs a group up revamp, and to made closer to how admiralty works, if they actually want people to use it. As it stands, the vast majority of people I know on STO never touch it because of just how poor the design is.
    Doffing is just fine rewards wise. You say "need" a lot in your post but what's your basis for using that word? Doffing works quite well. I can get at least half of my daily dilithium from doffing and about 10k - 15k specialization xp on a once a day slotting of 23 missions. Also, while other people complain about a lack of exploration, I rather enjoy exploring around and finding doff missions that I didn't expect to find thanks to the randomness that you hate.

    Comparing doffing to Admiralty is just stupid as admiralty is monetized by ship sales which is a good business move (from Cryptic) to give you yet another reason to buy ships. Buffing doff rewards undermines the montetization of admiralty as doffing generates basically zero zen sales these days.

    So basically, for the zillionth time, the difference in rewards between admiralty and doffing is working as intended. If people are too dumb to not use doffing to their advantage, that's on them. I have characters that I basically never actually play that are nearly maxed out in all their spec trees thanks to using BOTH admiralty and doffing.

    When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
  • salazarrazesalazarraze Member Posts: 3,794 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    So basically, for the zillionth time, the difference in rewards between admiralty and doffing is working as intended. If people are too dumb to not use doffing to their advantage, that's on them. I have characters that I basically never actually play that are nearly maxed out in all their spec trees thanks to using BOTH admiralty and doffing.
    You seem to be making the straw man that I think doffing rewards need to be exactly the same admiralty rewards.

    I do not.

    Making them better does not mean they have to be exactly the same as admiralty ones since, obviously admiralty SHOULD give more rewards.

    Take your pathetic fallacy **** somewhere else please.
    I didn't say exactly. I said you were making a comparison, which you were. Don't like it? Don't compare two mutually exclusive systems for your complaints about why you don't like one of them.
    When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
  • mustrumridcully0mustrumridcully0 Member Posts: 12,963 Arc User
    First a few softball questions that are nevertheless fun and interesting to me:
    Q: If you had the time and resources to do it, what system would you like to revamp or overhaul first?

    Q: What's the system you worked on you're the most proud of?

    Q: What's the system you didn't work on but would have loved to?

    Q: What was the most challenging system to work on?


    Now some more technical stuff:

    The Big Rebalance
    Q: The big balance revamp is going live soon. Do you forsee that your team will be able to do balance changes more actively and frequently in the future?

    Q: There have been no direct torpedo buffs in the rebalance, instead, some abilities were nerfed. Did you think that torpedoes were overperforming in the past, or do you anticipate furhter adjustments to make torpedoes more competitive with beams and cannons?

    Q: Torpedoes are weird for one particular reason - there are a lot of "speciality" torpedoes like the Quantum Phase, Neutronic or Plasma Emission Torpedoes, which can be seen as competitive, but the standard ones are generally seen as weak. This seems very different from energy weapons, where people might look for particularly item modifiers, but generally don't see the need to hunt down special reputation weapons. So far the rebalance patches didn't adress anything of this. Were you out of ideas or out of time, or do you think the situation is acceptable?

    Heavy Weapons
    Q: Heavy Weapons. How did they came into being? What were the goals that were tried to achieve? What kind of play style did you wantto support?

    Q: More specifically: As a player, they feel a bit uninspired to me - they seem to be basically normal weapon, with a few extra gimmicks. But so far all of them are basically omnidirectional beam/cannon type weapons that don't particularly highlight the high maneuverable play style of Escorts and Raiders. The beam-like firing cycle and the 360° angle makes them feel anything but "Heavy" to me. Is that intentional? Or have you just not explored the full potential design space for these weapons so far in the few guns we can test so far (on Holodeck and Tribble)?

    Q: The Patrol Escort looks like the first foray into something like heavy weapons, with its fused aft gun. Unfortunately, this gun apparently now also means that it didn't get a heavy weapon slot at all. Do you expect an overhaul if there ever is a Tier 6 version of the ship?

    Q: The Dyson Destroyer is a weird Escort/Science Vessel hybrid. Shouldn't it get a Heavy Weapon in its Escort mode? Or is a real revisit of the ship's abilities likely if there ever is a Tier 6 version?

    Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
  • salazarrazesalazarraze Member Posts: 3,794 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    I didn't say exactly. I said you were making a comparison, which you were.
    You switch from talking about me making a comparison to directly saying that the difference between the rewards in admiralty and doffing is intentional, which only means anything if you assumed I was suggesting they should be the same.

    Otherwise, what you said was completely meaningless, and pointless.

    So now we come to the conclusion that you are either intentionally straw manning what I said, just saying things that have no bearing on the conversation for the sake of it, or you simply have no idea what it is you are actually typing.

    Either way, your wrong.
    Since you clearly require a clarification, my intention in that post is to state that I do not believe that doffing needs ANY rewards buff at all. You originally brought up admiralty and how some of it's rewards can be used as an example of how to buff doffing rewards. You did not state that they should be the same, and I also did not state that you stated so. So I don't know why you are taking it so personally.

    The first paragraph is a direct response to your quoted post while the rest is more of a general rant about how admiralty often gets brought up when talking about doffing.
    When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
  • arabaturarabatur Member Posts: 407 Arc User
    Remember when we used to be explorers?
    Definitely not an Arc User.
  • captainkenny1captainkenny1 Member Posts: 326 Arc User
    Q: Will older uniforms such as the tng season 3 to 7 uniform and others be updated(revamped)
  • peterconnorfirstpeterconnorfirst Member Posts: 6,225 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    Q:

    The Silent Enemy Lobi 2-pice set offers a mere +8.9% Disruptor Damage for the price of 400 Lobi. Are there any plans to bring it more in line with other sets/items granting three times as much energy weapon boost and that are for free from story missions?
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  • baddmoonrizinbaddmoonrizin Member Posts: 10,247 Community Moderator
    OK, folks. Keep it friendly and stop the bickering. No one is wrong for asking a question or wanting an answer about certain aspects of the game.
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  • taylor1701dtaylor1701d Member Posts: 3,099 Arc User
    snip


    Way to contribute nothing.
    Who do you think you are ? "Mr. No", the keeper of the questions ?
    [img][/img]OD5urLn.jpg
  • taylor1701dtaylor1701d Member Posts: 3,099 Arc User
    What's the reasoning behind this request? An increase doesn't make sense as it's not needed.
    Yes it is needed. Doffing is easily the single worst system in STO as it stands. The grind to get doffing commendation tracts maxed makes the grind for reps, admiralty, and crafting, look like nothing. Especially for some of the doff tracts that don't have too many doff mission available.

    Doffing needs several big changes to make it not garbage
    1. It needs base rewards upped a bit so that they are actually REWARDing in the first place.
    2. It needs daily bonuses per tract(like reputations and leach of the admiralty tracts have) to make progress easier for those who can't log in every 30 minutes to reload new doff missions.
    3. It needs alternating increases to base rewards, and daily bonuses, per rank, like admiralty has. Again make progression actually progress in a reasonable manner.
    4. They need to redo the entire way the doff mission list is generated, removing the randomness of the various sector blocks, and make it just one giant list, with pass tokens, per commendation tract. As it stands, you can easily spend literal hours flying all across Alpha/Beta quad sector space in a vain attempt to find a halfway decent doff mission for the one commendation tracts you need, and not find anything.

    Doffing, as it stands, is garbage. There is no reason to do it, and everything about the system is designed to make it far more difficult then it should.

    It needs a group up revamp, and to made closer to how admiralty works, if they actually want people to use it. As it stands, the vast majority of people I know on STO never touch it because of just how poor the design is.
    sophlogimo wrote: »
    Oh, yes, it is.

    Then why frack do NPC's do insignificant damage?

    We have player ships who do terribly overpowered damage so that they can melt away those high NPC hit point numbers, but NPC's who do laughable damage to not overstretch the much lower player hitpoint capabilities. Works fine, until you do PvP or NPC vs. NPC (and at the very least, the latter is a relevant part of STO, with carrier and separation pets, fleet support and allied NPC's in missions).

    They could just even out the numbers without any change to the mathematical relation between players and NPC's, and solve the intra-category problems. For example, thes could multiply the NPC damage by 10, but also multiply player hitpoints by 10, and have a much better NPC vs NPC and PvP balance.
    1. Learn to quote right, holy hell I don't know what it is with some of you people doing the
    >
    >
    >

    He's obviously on a mobile device, the quote button doesn't work on mobile. Derp.
    [img][/img]OD5urLn.jpg
  • lopequillopequil Member Posts: 1,226 Arc User
    1. Are there any plans to work on fixing some of the long standing bugs in the game, i.e. those introduced when new content clashes with the old and/or low priority ones that have been overlooked in favour of more pressing concerns?

    2. Has there been anything put in place to reduce the number of zero day bugs, where new content makes it to Holodeck that's pretty obviously broken, e.g. the escort heavy weapons that heal the enemy or the Tzenkethi battle zone that was not completable from the outset?
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  • lordsteve1lordsteve1 Member Posts: 3,492 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    1) Are there any plans to move away from the reputation system? I mean we're now at 10 different reps with 10 different currencies and essentially they are all identical but with different flavoured gear. In short I think the rep system is getting a bit stale now, its the same grind for a month, then unlock parts a,b,c etc.

    So any plans to looks for a new system or area for players to commit to in the future?

    2) Any plans to adjust/improve the older universal consoles from older pre-DR ships? Maybe add passive buffs to them or open up a few to be used on any ship? I mean it would maybe give people a reason to actually use some of the lower tier ship gear, maybe add some fun to builds?
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  • nikeixnikeix Member Posts: 3,972 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    Question: What gear would you like to go back and add to or change in the existing Reputations? Should more reputation stores offer ground kits? New heavy weapons? Existing special weapons iterated to include other configurations like single cannons or turrets? New mines?

    Question: After the space balance pass is promoted to the Live server, would you consider a review of lobi store space gear?

    Question: What existing/canon ship design would you most like to see promoted to a T6 version?

    Question: Would you consider introducing a new Romulan Republic Experimental Science Vessel and a KDF Experimental Science Vessel that would then form a 3-pack with the Federation's Dauntless Experimental Science Vessel? Possibly with all of them sharing the Radiant Nanite Cloud starship trait?

    Question: What do you think are the worst or least effective choices still left in the skill trees?
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