From what I have observed in a parallel thread, a good start would probably be to scale down the ridiculous effectiveness of Beam: Fire At Will and Torpedo Spread. I'll start another thread about it.
We have had that thread a thousand times, and enough of your threads.
You don't need to keep starting threads for the same topic, just stop already.
Why? Because you fear I would take anything away from you by pointing out what, in my opinion, is wrong with the game?
Who are you to bark orders about what anyone may say or not?
It's not barking orders, it's common courtesy you troll.
Look at your own stupid poll.. 30% agree, 70% don't. Yet you still had 2 threads for the same thing and have now opened a third. It wasn't barking orders asking you to not open a third thread, especially one we have already had dozens of times.
But no.. you just couldn't leave well enough alone. 70% of the people voting disagree with you and you still persist. You pointed out your opinion perfectly clearly before you created thread number two and three.
Either way, you'll be happy to know I'm done with this topic. You have made your point, I have made mine and I won't keep up the argument beyond this or 'Pointless Thread Part Two.'
I'll ask one last time nicely.. please stop making threads on this topic. Unless that happens, you won't hear another word from me on this issue.
Awww, did the bad man stomp your little cheerleader in public? Boo-Frakkin'-Hoo.
Your whole viewpoint, on any topic, can expressed thusly:
- I am the most intelligent person here.
- This is my viewpoint on this topic. Which is the ONLY correct one. Since I am the most intelligent person here.
- I am not interested in hearing viewpoints divergent to mine. They confuse me with logic and reason.
- I am interested in sycophants, and people toadying up to me.
- I will twist and squirm like an eel in supporting my viewpoint. Even if doing so invalidates my viewpoint.
After all, being seen as right in front of the forum audience is a mainstay of my view of myself.
- My real goal here is to give the F.C.T. checker something to do every day.
You are hereby nominated for the "Most Pompous Frakkin' Moron Ever" award. Like others, I intend to avoid you like the plague in the future.
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
Are we talking about the same devs here? When have they shown that they have ANY idea of what balance in difficulty is? [...] The people of this forum are completely unrealistic in their expectactions.
I do agree with some of that: The DR difficulty was sky high before anyone really had a chance to play catch-up with R&D and even the introduced skill trees which do make a big difference, then it was scaled back.
Maybe whoever's in charge and whatever metrics or ideas they go by really doesn't play the game, listen to other Devs, or even understand an average gamer (whatever that is for successful MMOs of this type).
Otherwise, in more concrete examples, Borticus did indeed tweak values around that have had big impacts on various abilities, probably all under pressure to 'just get it done' by a deadline. I've done my share of tribble testing through its endless iterations to notice the changes. More complex AI is probably a big undertaking, but it can take place gradually, and whoever codes more elements into them can also backtrack on them if the end result is too much. Also, there was a lot of feedback and dialogue, which was great, and assuming that can continue it would definitely help fine tune the difficulty.
Unrealistic, maybe so, but given what we have now, I'd rather them try, because the success IMO would be well worth it as described earlier.
Devs: Provide the option to Turn OFF full screen flashes from enemy ship explosions
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«» \▼/ T E R R A N ¦ R E P U B L I C \▼/ «»
﴾﴿ ₪ṩ ||| N A N I T E S Y S T E M S : B L A C K | O P S ||| ₪ṩ ﴾﴿
What I have taken from this thread is the OP feels the need to limit or reduce the way some people play this game. To make it easier for someone in a self-induced Diet Dew and Cheetos haze to understand what I am saying, I will use simple declarative sentences and small words.
People play this game to have fun.
Not everyone has the same ideas about fun.
Removing the way someone has fun in this game is bad.
I am always against such changing of the game.
I do not play for DPS.
Some people do.
Changing the game so they cannot is wrong.
Because it takes away their fun.
One word: agreed
I will be humble and say that I may or may not have one of the strongest PVE builds out there. At the same time I will be honest and I would say that my current build at least probably belongs to the upper tier of the DPS range.
So where am I going with this? Well, to be honest I don't care much about DPS numbers and I never parse... and I also do not care about any PUGs. I play for me and that is all I care about. If people contribute or not is not something I rage about. To be perfectly honest I play very casually and don't really focus during battle to perfectly trigger my abilities and align them with cooldowns and what not. Anyways, regardless of how I play I have noticed that the power creep and DPS group that everyone talks about seems to be... rather significantly minor.
Whenever I play an STF I very occasionally come across a player that can kill stuff either equally fast or even faster than I do. It seems like most of the DPS rage that everyone is on about comes from the perspective of the low to midrange DPS group. Well, this is just my perspective on things but the top elite of players are not that many to really cause this much problem... and a lot of you make it sound as if every STF is a pug scenario of weak vs elite players. You will know when you meet an elite DPS player because their build and play-style is so carefully and meticulously calculated. From my own observation most players belong to the low and midrange DPS range.
Reaching the very top of the DPS range requires a lot of time, a lot of effort, some money and a lot of research, and active thinking during combat to perfectly master and utilize activation and rotations down to the millisecond. There are only few of those players and there is also very few active such players who you may encounter in an STF.
I would say that most of the strong players that you more often would encounter really belongs to the midrange DPS group, and reaching that level of gear, combination of BOFF abilities and strategic playing is not super hard to achieve. Complaining about the super elite of DPS players is like raging about a group that makes up less than 10% of the whole player population. So instead of arguing about a group that you barely encounter, why not look at what you yourself can do that is truly within your economic reach and spare time? You would not belong to the top DPS but you will certainly be able to contribute in STFs, if that's truly your only concern and goal in playing this game? Personally I would find it insanely boring just to play STFs every single time I login STO.
So yeah, the DPS range would not be such a concern and issue to you if you just played for yourself and enjoyed your own way of playing. I mean seriously, whenever I am tired, unfocused and maybe a little bit lazy people do just perfectly fine in STFs with their low to midrange DPS builds. Sometimes I just fly about and shoot targets without really activating any abilities and people do fine. Either I overestimate the larger crowd of the player community, or you underestimate yourself and your fellow players... or so many of you really belong to the ~2000 DPS group that I did not think existed at level 60. I mean, if some of you are struggling that hard to even manage destroying a single enemy then... I don't know. STO is really an easy MMO to play and become good in.
From what I have observed in a parallel thread, a good start would probably be to scale down the ridiculous effectiveness of Beam: Fire At Will and Torpedo Spread. I'll start another thread about it.
We have had that thread a thousand times, and enough of your threads.
You don't need to keep starting threads for the same topic, just stop already.
Why? Because you fear I would take anything away from you by pointing out what, in my opinion, is wrong with the game?
Who are you to bark orders about what anyone may say or not?
It's heading towards spam territory actually.
Based on what I've read throughout this thread, the majority disagree with you and some have great reasons as to why, but that doesn't appear to matter to you.
Edit: I was going to put through another 2 cents worth about it, but I changed my mind, it appears to be a waste of time.
Retired. I'm now in search for that perfect space anomaly.
It is marvellous how one can ignore the core argument in a debate so enduringly.
In order for this to happen, your argument first has to have a core beyond your amorphous emotional appeal to people who resent being made to "feel useless" by better players.
[...]
See, and the core argument is that this is just not what it is about. This is not about "feeling useless", this is about lack of excitement. About too easy content. About the missions not scaling with the abilities of the players.
This has all been explained several times in this thread. You might want to read it.
I did read it, and I stand by my assessment. "Missions aren't exciting enough to me because DPS is too high" is a nonsense position with a solution that should have been self-evident and which has been pointed out multiple times - if that's the way you want to play, then limit your own builds that way and look for like-minded people to play with. If you can't find those people, that means the way you want to play simply isn't popular enough to be viable, so you should change your expectations for the game, or quit. That's it. Your problem is solved there, 100%. The fact that you have discarded that solution proves that there is more going on here than what you are claiming. Since your focus on reducing variabilty has been exclusively on bringing the top down to meet your level (rather than bringing the underperformers up to something reasonable and then rebalancing around that), the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from your spam posts is that you either don't understand the motivations underlying your own position, or you are lying about what they are.
Caps are not the way to fix this. You fix it by fixing underlying game mechanics where things multiply and add etc. I mean, there is a practical cap even now, its just too high when compared to an out of the box ship (does like 2k dps?) or compared to enemy defenses (entire fights designed for groups should not end in 2-3 min) or compared to casual/new/whatever players. We are talking TWO orders of magnitude here folks, as an out of the box ship vs a top player is literally 100X difference. That should proabably like 10k difference given that you replace all the gear on a new ship pretty quickly -- it should about double with the injection of purple rep/fleet gear and then double again with officer skills and flanking and specializations and toys and all the stuff we have. So looking at 2k / 4k /8k from out of the box to fully set up with 10k being top end results when you throw in group wide buffs and timing of skills and micromanagement. Adjustment of enemy to make fights reasonable and its done.
What this sort of approach does..
- everyone can play. The queues are empty; the few people that DO want to do them can't even group up in sensible ways because you have the 200k dps cowboy that flattens everything and gives the other 4 an afk penalty making the new to max level 10k guy not want to play again. This way, the new guy, the average guy, and the top guys are all capable of doing the content together.
- top guys are still top, they just can't one-shot the world.
- we have to try in the content and would have to actually DO the missions with a strategy and fufill roles etc. Instead of a drive-by one shot ISA done in 200 seconds, someone would *gasp* have to GW the nanites or tank the cube or something sensible.
- it will make all fights harder. Something many of the top people fuss about is being too powerful and bored. That will go away. Also it fixes the "too hard" complaint from the casual players. Even the most casual player, if actually shooting at the enemy, will contribute to the effort.
- if done correctly, it should have a positive effect on pvp. If not, well, it can't get much worse anyway.
What it does not do is cap dps so that any old gear slapped on reaches an artificial cap and improving your stuff is pointless. It just rewards improvements less -- instead of doubling your dps with every other item added, you get a couple % increases each time until it finally doubles after putting on a lot of good stuff.
This works. Back in the heyday of wow it was big deal after a raid to have top dps, and that was usually governed by just a few %s edging out your buddy. I remember coming in first, second, third and could be as much as a couple of crits or a few seconds of not dying in a bad pull that made the difference. It was a friendly competition, but no one person exceeded everyone else by 100 fold! No other game I have played sense (and there have been many) has had one person 100 times better than everyone else any any given category. This game is unique in allowing this to happen and its not healthy for the game.
There would need to be a lot of investment to make it happen .. I had thought this was the point of the level 60 cap increase actually, but of course that was not the case. The only really sensible way to do it is to raise level cap at the same time as redoing the mechanics.
I don't know that it could be fixed even if they wanted to do so at this point. Such a change is expensive, disruptive, and heavy handed. Its bound to drive off some people and probably too late to attract new players in large numbers to an old game. But its what should have been done 2 years or more ago.
I did read it, and I stand by my assessment. "Missions aren't exciting enough to me because DPS is too high" is a nonsense position with a solution that should have been self-evident and which has been pointed out multiple times - if that's the way you want to play, then limit your own builds that way and look for like-minded people to play with. If you can't find those people, that means the way you want to play simply isn't popular enough to be viable, so you should change your expectations for the game, or quit. That's it. Your problem is solved there, 100%.
Or I could just stop playing the queues and let the developers know why.
Peeps stopped playing the queues by the hundreds after Delta Rising because the content became too hard overnight. The participation dropped by 90% in a flash.
The remaining 10% who kept at it adapted, learned, practiced and endured a moths long grind to get to the point where they are now.
The devs know exactly what has happened, they were there, they made the decisions! All of them. They wnated it that way.
If you think that rejecting queued contend because players you end up with are too good for you I have high doubts they give a thing.
My suggestion for you is to look for friends or communities of players similar to your standing and enjoy the content with them. I suspect you find the challenges you seek rather quickly. I always do it that way and it works nicely.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Ah, gotcha. Well, suffice to say that my time budget is highly variable due to my business fluctuating a lot, so creating and maintaining any kind of segregated sub-community is just out of the question.
Just because the queues are underpopulated does not mean they never pop. Since you bring up HSE I mostly team with 1-3 friends and simply queue up. A 4th or 5th usually joins in less than 3-4 minutes then. The pugs finalize the difficulty we experience. It is correct that DPS timer of the mission has become less of an issue when 3 members of team bring in 50-75K builds. Other challenges like the feed back pulse ability of unimatrix ships and the queen however still cause exciting obstacles. It should also be noted that this map is also laggy as mad at the moment so not much fun to play for most. We take it with humor yelling at each other over teamspeak when someone dared to engage frenzy!
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
yes! Nerf the game. Make sure no one does more than 5k dps - I mean, I Keep trying to improve my game and I am wasting so much time trying out different combinations - and I was in an ISA the other day where I was THE ONLY Player who did morre than 3k DPS.
Now my solution: remove the mechanics. Everytime you join a PvE you watch an unskippable Video and then you get the message that you have won. No unhappy players anymore. Those over the top hardcore players who spent a lot of time and Money on this game will finally move on and let the new players and occasional players enjoy the game!
here's one to shock you-I used to PvP, and have always been a 'Casual/occasional' player, not the book-definition "hardcore" here, but Casual.
I say 'used to' because there's nothing left for casual players in PvP-it's been neglected and powercreeped to the point that the entire remains of the 'community' consists of the same 20 people at the top end, and a few cheezemunchkins trolling for easy duels in ESD.
(Historical note: in 2012 PvP players counted in the THOUSANDS-with Fleets and Teams not 'a team', but LOTS OF THEM.)
as a 'casual' in PvE...it's so engaging that I often don't log in for weeks. (I think I logged in once in April)-this is down from when I was logging in frequently, being a 'rock' to help my fleet, grinding the grind to fill projects and at times single-handedly carrying large investment projects to completion.
on a time-budget of two hours a night on weekdays.
as a casual player, i'm less and less impressed just about every patch now. Lots of existing content is pretty much unplayable because I'm not keen on surfing a hundred TRIBBLE channels to make a private match, and Pugging anything but ISA and CCA is nearly impossible.
When those missions do pop, it's basically an average of two to five minutes at the longest and they're done and we're back to a halfhour cooldown.
Now, put in perspective-once upon a time, STF's ran about fifteen minutes for the major six, you could run them comfortably with good green or blue gear at Mk XI and not be an embarrassment, or worse, hit with AFK penalties.
Yeah, I'm not shitting you-fifteen minutes was a GOOD RUN, and you had to run ALL OF THEM to get a full set of gear-sometimes more than once.
but none of them to the obsessive-compulsive ISA flogging we see today, where it's basically one to three minutes or failure.
Is DPS the problem? well, maybe, but maybe not. The problem is that it's the only Solution.
let me say it again-the problem is that DPS is the Only Valid Solution.
There is no role for the tank or the healer, no place for stealth or even for assassin builds in PvE here-there is only "Mass Quantities" DPS-that's the ONLY VALID SOLUTION IN THE CONTENT.
Basically it's all target-practice, only with weapons you don't even have to aim. Because BFAW and Torp Spread and Gravity Well do all your aiming for you.
Someone noted how 'useless' Science ships are in PvE runs-how showing up with one will get you snarked and laughed at and maybe even trigger some sensitive soul to ragequit...keep in mind, Science Ships Dominate in PvP...and heeere is why:
most sci abilities do jack TRIBBLE to NPC's, Sci captains' key abilities do very little or nothing to NPC's. NPC's do not have subsystems to target, they aren't 'grayed out' and stripped of buffs by subnuke-because they don't use buffs on their tray, the abilities they do use, are used on a timer, they don't react, they don't change. You can run ISA with a keybind, a stopwatch, watching netflix, once you've done it enough times-and a big chunk of the DPS community has done it enough times.
They don't even need to look at the frigging screen.
This problem extends across all the existing PvE..but especially to the most popular (read: easiest to memorize) queues.
DPS is not the culprit. Design philosophy is the culprit-the absolute refusal to make NPC's follow the same rules players do, the outright refusal to give the NPC's effective AI, and the complete and utter refusal by development staff to consider game-balance when adding new stuff until three months after the game goes live.
Limiting DPS to a ceiling won't help here, anymore than giving PvP players a hitpointz buff in instances would have saved that community.
we're debating the symptom-the disease marches cheerfully along.
DPS isn't the Problem of PvP. If someone is JUST about DPS, then get Feedback pulse and survive his initial onslaught.
I loved PvPing and stopped. Why? Not because ofpower creep. Because I spent hours doing PvP and got no rewards. As I have 17 toons and I try to improve them. PvPing was fun - but only if done with friends. The PvP team we had lost as many games as we won. However, Season 10 or so saw 2 of our 5 strong Team stop playing the game alltogether. Another Player followed half a year later. And solo PvP? you cannot talk about glorious battles afterwards....
18 characters
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
yes! Nerf the game. Make sure no one does more than 5k dps - I mean, I Keep trying to improve my game and I am wasting so much time trying out different combinations - and I was in an ISA the other day where I was THE ONLY Player who did morre than 3k DPS.
Now my solution: remove the mechanics. Everytime you join a PvE you watch an unskippable Video and then you get the message that you have won. No unhappy players anymore. Those over the top hardcore players who spent a lot of time and Money on this game will finally move on and let the new players and occasional players enjoy the game!
here's one to shock you-I used to PvP, and have always been a 'Casual/occasional' player, not the book-definition "hardcore" here, but Casual.
I say 'used to' because there's nothing left for casual players in PvP-it's been neglected and powercreeped to the point that the entire remains of the 'community' consists of the same 20 people at the top end, and a few cheezemunchkins trolling for easy duels in ESD.
(Historical note: in 2012 PvP players counted in the THOUSANDS-with Fleets and Teams not 'a team', but LOTS OF THEM.)
as a 'casual' in PvE...it's so engaging that I often don't log in for weeks. (I think I logged in once in April)-this is down from when I was logging in frequently, being a 'rock' to help my fleet, grinding the grind to fill projects and at times single-handedly carrying large investment projects to completion.
on a time-budget of two hours a night on weekdays.
as a casual player, i'm less and less impressed just about every patch now. Lots of existing content is pretty much unplayable because I'm not keen on surfing a hundred TRIBBLE channels to make a private match, and Pugging anything but ISA and CCA is nearly impossible.
When those missions do pop, it's basically an average of two to five minutes at the longest and they're done and we're back to a halfhour cooldown.
Now, put in perspective-once upon a time, STF's ran about fifteen minutes for the major six, you could run them comfortably with good green or blue gear at Mk XI and not be an embarrassment, or worse, hit with AFK penalties.
Yeah, I'm not shitting you-fifteen minutes was a GOOD RUN, and you had to run ALL OF THEM to get a full set of gear-sometimes more than once.
but none of them to the obsessive-compulsive ISA flogging we see today, where it's basically one to three minutes or failure.
Is DPS the problem? well, maybe, but maybe not. The problem is that it's the only Solution.
let me say it again-the problem is that DPS is the Only Valid Solution.
There is no role for the tank or the healer, no place for stealth or even for assassin builds in PvE here-there is only "Mass Quantities" DPS-that's the ONLY VALID SOLUTION IN THE CONTENT.
Basically it's all target-practice, only with weapons you don't even have to aim. Because BFAW and Torp Spread and Gravity Well do all your aiming for you.
Someone noted how 'useless' Science ships are in PvE runs-how showing up with one will get you snarked and laughed at and maybe even trigger some sensitive soul to ragequit...keep in mind, Science Ships Dominate in PvP...and heeere is why:
most sci abilities do jack TRIBBLE to NPC's, Sci captains' key abilities do very little or nothing to NPC's. NPC's do not have subsystems to target, they aren't 'grayed out' and stripped of buffs by subnuke-because they don't use buffs on their tray, the abilities they do use, are used on a timer, they don't react, they don't change. You can run ISA with a keybind, a stopwatch, watching netflix, once you've done it enough times-and a big chunk of the DPS community has done it enough times.
They don't even need to look at the frigging screen.
This problem extends across all the existing PvE..but especially to the most popular (read: easiest to memorize) queues.
DPS is not the culprit. Design philosophy is the culprit-the absolute refusal to make NPC's follow the same rules players do, the outright refusal to give the NPC's effective AI, and the complete and utter refusal by development staff to consider game-balance when adding new stuff until three months after the game goes live.
Limiting DPS to a ceiling won't help here, anymore than giving PvP players a hitpointz buff in instances would have saved that community.
we're debating the symptom-the disease marches cheerfully along.
Because I spent hours doing PvP and got no rewards. As I have 17 toons and I try to improve them.
I defiantly agree with you on that one. Aside from fun the outcome of PvP is 0. With all the demands this game throws at me (homework) I hardly can afford that.
In earlier times of this game this was different. Three years ago I was invited by a group which exploited PvP maps. Think Shanty Town to generate 40k dil/hour in faked matches…
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Comments
We have had that thread a thousand times, and enough of your threads.
You don't need to keep starting threads for the same topic, just stop already.
It's not barking orders, it's common courtesy you troll.
Look at your own stupid poll.. 30% agree, 70% don't. Yet you still had 2 threads for the same thing and have now opened a third. It wasn't barking orders asking you to not open a third thread, especially one we have already had dozens of times.
But no.. you just couldn't leave well enough alone. 70% of the people voting disagree with you and you still persist. You pointed out your opinion perfectly clearly before you created thread number two and three.
Either way, you'll be happy to know I'm done with this topic. You have made your point, I have made mine and I won't keep up the argument beyond this or 'Pointless Thread Part Two.'
I'll ask one last time nicely.. please stop making threads on this topic. Unless that happens, you won't hear another word from me on this issue.
LOL. Just making refernce to that TOS movie that everyone wants to forget , , , maybe they can revisit that in the JJ-verse
Awww, did the bad man stomp your little cheerleader in public? Boo-Frakkin'-Hoo.
Your whole viewpoint, on any topic, can expressed thusly:
- I am the most intelligent person here.
- This is my viewpoint on this topic. Which is the ONLY correct one. Since I am the most intelligent person here.
- I am not interested in hearing viewpoints divergent to mine. They confuse me with logic and reason.
- I am interested in sycophants, and people toadying up to me.
- I will twist and squirm like an eel in supporting my viewpoint. Even if doing so invalidates my viewpoint.
After all, being seen as right in front of the forum audience is a mainstay of my view of myself.
- My real goal here is to give the F.C.T. checker something to do every day.
You are hereby nominated for the "Most Pompous Frakkin' Moron Ever" award. Like others, I intend to avoid you like the plague in the future.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I do agree with some of that: The DR difficulty was sky high before anyone really had a chance to play catch-up with R&D and even the introduced skill trees which do make a big difference, then it was scaled back.
Maybe whoever's in charge and whatever metrics or ideas they go by really doesn't play the game, listen to other Devs, or even understand an average gamer (whatever that is for successful MMOs of this type).
Otherwise, in more concrete examples, Borticus did indeed tweak values around that have had big impacts on various abilities, probably all under pressure to 'just get it done' by a deadline. I've done my share of tribble testing through its endless iterations to notice the changes. More complex AI is probably a big undertaking, but it can take place gradually, and whoever codes more elements into them can also backtrack on them if the end result is too much. Also, there was a lot of feedback and dialogue, which was great, and assuming that can continue it would definitely help fine tune the difficulty.
Unrealistic, maybe so, but given what we have now, I'd rather them try, because the success IMO would be well worth it as described earlier.
Yes, I put an awful lot of time and effort into my build, but it should not make THAT much difference. Even 30k should be a stretch.
Cryptic has introduced SO much power creep into this game that it's gotten to the point it's beyond ridiculous.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
I will be humble and say that I may or may not have one of the strongest PVE builds out there. At the same time I will be honest and I would say that my current build at least probably belongs to the upper tier of the DPS range.
So where am I going with this? Well, to be honest I don't care much about DPS numbers and I never parse... and I also do not care about any PUGs. I play for me and that is all I care about. If people contribute or not is not something I rage about. To be perfectly honest I play very casually and don't really focus during battle to perfectly trigger my abilities and align them with cooldowns and what not. Anyways, regardless of how I play I have noticed that the power creep and DPS group that everyone talks about seems to be... rather significantly minor.
Whenever I play an STF I very occasionally come across a player that can kill stuff either equally fast or even faster than I do. It seems like most of the DPS rage that everyone is on about comes from the perspective of the low to midrange DPS group. Well, this is just my perspective on things but the top elite of players are not that many to really cause this much problem... and a lot of you make it sound as if every STF is a pug scenario of weak vs elite players. You will know when you meet an elite DPS player because their build and play-style is so carefully and meticulously calculated. From my own observation most players belong to the low and midrange DPS range.
Reaching the very top of the DPS range requires a lot of time, a lot of effort, some money and a lot of research, and active thinking during combat to perfectly master and utilize activation and rotations down to the millisecond. There are only few of those players and there is also very few active such players who you may encounter in an STF.
I would say that most of the strong players that you more often would encounter really belongs to the midrange DPS group, and reaching that level of gear, combination of BOFF abilities and strategic playing is not super hard to achieve. Complaining about the super elite of DPS players is like raging about a group that makes up less than 10% of the whole player population. So instead of arguing about a group that you barely encounter, why not look at what you yourself can do that is truly within your economic reach and spare time? You would not belong to the top DPS but you will certainly be able to contribute in STFs, if that's truly your only concern and goal in playing this game? Personally I would find it insanely boring just to play STFs every single time I login STO.
So yeah, the DPS range would not be such a concern and issue to you if you just played for yourself and enjoyed your own way of playing. I mean seriously, whenever I am tired, unfocused and maybe a little bit lazy people do just perfectly fine in STFs with their low to midrange DPS builds. Sometimes I just fly about and shoot targets without really activating any abilities and people do fine. Either I overestimate the larger crowd of the player community, or you underestimate yourself and your fellow players... or so many of you really belong to the ~2000 DPS group that I did not think existed at level 60. I mean, if some of you are struggling that hard to even manage destroying a single enemy then... I don't know. STO is really an easy MMO to play and become good in.
It's heading towards spam territory actually.
Based on what I've read throughout this thread, the majority disagree with you and some have great reasons as to why, but that doesn't appear to matter to you.
Edit: I was going to put through another 2 cents worth about it, but I changed my mind, it appears to be a waste of time.
just let it out.....then let it go......
original join date 2010
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I did read it, and I stand by my assessment. "Missions aren't exciting enough to me because DPS is too high" is a nonsense position with a solution that should have been self-evident and which has been pointed out multiple times - if that's the way you want to play, then limit your own builds that way and look for like-minded people to play with. If you can't find those people, that means the way you want to play simply isn't popular enough to be viable, so you should change your expectations for the game, or quit. That's it. Your problem is solved there, 100%. The fact that you have discarded that solution proves that there is more going on here than what you are claiming. Since your focus on reducing variabilty has been exclusively on bringing the top down to meet your level (rather than bringing the underperformers up to something reasonable and then rebalancing around that), the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from your spam posts is that you either don't understand the motivations underlying your own position, or you are lying about what they are.
What this sort of approach does..
- everyone can play. The queues are empty; the few people that DO want to do them can't even group up in sensible ways because you have the 200k dps cowboy that flattens everything and gives the other 4 an afk penalty making the new to max level 10k guy not want to play again. This way, the new guy, the average guy, and the top guys are all capable of doing the content together.
- top guys are still top, they just can't one-shot the world.
- we have to try in the content and would have to actually DO the missions with a strategy and fufill roles etc. Instead of a drive-by one shot ISA done in 200 seconds, someone would *gasp* have to GW the nanites or tank the cube or something sensible.
- it will make all fights harder. Something many of the top people fuss about is being too powerful and bored. That will go away. Also it fixes the "too hard" complaint from the casual players. Even the most casual player, if actually shooting at the enemy, will contribute to the effort.
- if done correctly, it should have a positive effect on pvp. If not, well, it can't get much worse anyway.
What it does not do is cap dps so that any old gear slapped on reaches an artificial cap and improving your stuff is pointless. It just rewards improvements less -- instead of doubling your dps with every other item added, you get a couple % increases each time until it finally doubles after putting on a lot of good stuff.
This works. Back in the heyday of wow it was big deal after a raid to have top dps, and that was usually governed by just a few %s edging out your buddy. I remember coming in first, second, third and could be as much as a couple of crits or a few seconds of not dying in a bad pull that made the difference. It was a friendly competition, but no one person exceeded everyone else by 100 fold! No other game I have played sense (and there have been many) has had one person 100 times better than everyone else any any given category. This game is unique in allowing this to happen and its not healthy for the game.
There would need to be a lot of investment to make it happen .. I had thought this was the point of the level 60 cap increase actually, but of course that was not the case. The only really sensible way to do it is to raise level cap at the same time as redoing the mechanics.
I don't know that it could be fixed even if they wanted to do so at this point. Such a change is expensive, disruptive, and heavy handed. Its bound to drive off some people and probably too late to attract new players in large numbers to an old game. But its what should have been done 2 years or more ago.
Peeps stopped playing the queues by the hundreds after Delta Rising because the content became too hard overnight. The participation dropped by 90% in a flash.
The remaining 10% who kept at it adapted, learned, practiced and endured a moths long grind to get to the point where they are now.
The devs know exactly what has happened, they were there, they made the decisions! All of them. They wnated it that way.
If you think that rejecting queued contend because players you end up with are too good for you I have high doubts they give a thing.
My suggestion for you is to look for friends or communities of players similar to your standing and enjoy the content with them. I suspect you find the challenges you seek rather quickly. I always do it that way and it works nicely.
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I think he meant 'too good for your standards', not 'too good for your skill level'.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Just because the queues are underpopulated does not mean they never pop. Since you bring up HSE I mostly team with 1-3 friends and simply queue up. A 4th or 5th usually joins in less than 3-4 minutes then. The pugs finalize the difficulty we experience. It is correct that DPS timer of the mission has become less of an issue when 3 members of team bring in 50-75K builds. Other challenges like the feed back pulse ability of unimatrix ships and the queen however still cause exciting obstacles. It should also be noted that this map is also laggy as mad at the moment so not much fun to play for most. We take it with humor yelling at each other over teamspeak when someone dared to engage frenzy!
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DPS isn't the Problem of PvP. If someone is JUST about DPS, then get Feedback pulse and survive his initial onslaught.
I loved PvPing and stopped. Why? Not because ofpower creep. Because I spent hours doing PvP and got no rewards. As I have 17 toons and I try to improve them. PvPing was fun - but only if done with friends. The PvP team we had lost as many games as we won. However, Season 10 or so saw 2 of our 5 strong Team stop playing the game alltogether. Another Player followed half a year later. And solo PvP? you cannot talk about glorious battles afterwards....
KDF: 2 tacs, 2 engs, 3 scis
KDF Roms: 3 tacs, 1 eng, 1 scis
FED: 2 tacs, 1 eng, 2 scis
TOS: 1 tac
all on T5 rep (up to temporal)
all have mastered Intel tree (and some more specs Points)
highest DPS: 60.982
I defiantly agree with you on that one. Aside from fun the outcome of PvP is 0. With all the demands this game throws at me (homework) I hardly can afford that.
In earlier times of this game this was different. Three years ago I was invited by a group which exploited PvP maps. Think Shanty Town to generate 40k dil/hour in faked matches…
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