I would really really (and I mean really) appreciate it if a dev could answer this but I know it's not likely. Why aren't red alerts a permanent feature on console like they are on pc? Back when I played on pc I enjoyed the red alerts and I don't understand why they only show up on console as a rare event.
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You can't run anything on PC anymore unless you're in an active fleet or a large group of friends. NONE of the queue's are being run, at ALL.. Unless they have en endeavour or some sort of feature to them.
I even do this myself..
Why "waste" time on a queue that can take.. 25-30 minutes with random people because of issues.
Compared to a Borg Red Alert where you blow everything up in 5 minutes or less, and still get about 30-40 marks with the daily bonus.
Alerts were so much better before the queueification.
That's the question, isn't it? Did queues die because of Red Alerts? Or were 24/7 Red Alerts instituted because the queues were dead? My money is on the latter: with the advent of Dilithium Rising, too many players left; and, in panic -- out of fear everyone would leave soon, in the absence of popping queues -- they quickly introduced perma-RA's.
The real decline started with the release of Delta Rising, but they were fairly dead even before that. DR certainly didn't help the situation, while things were already bad before Delta, the queue population never recovered from the death blow that was Delta Rising.
And quite frankly, after filling up all the reps on my jemmy almost exclusively with Recruit event unlocks (as well as stacking enough gamma marks for my other toons), I'm starting to think the alerts as a mark farmer aren't too far from going out, too. It's all too easy to just get everything on the side from events.
There is simply too little reason to play any of the non-event content in this game.
In fact, DR's attempt at adding higher difficulty levels had a chance to be a new reason to play, because getting better gear could've been actually necessary at some point rather than just another step up in the DPS contest (for those who care about such things). Too bad they walked back on that.
Considering that so many of the new queues are basically time-gated with mandatory mission times and wait times, it should be a lot easier to figure out a "fair" payout for these missions then before. But it seems they still haven't really figured it out.
But I think also given how many queues that exist, it might not even be enough to better distribute the rewards over time played. It will basically never be a perfect match, and any queue not the best will still be played less, which means more wait time for that queue, making it eve less attractive to queue for.
If I was Cryptic, Each week I would pick two of the least queued space and ground queues and give them a bonus reward once per day per character. Something like 50 Extra Marks and +1 Elite Marks +500 Dilithium. Not sure that would work for all queues, because some just plain suck (like can fail randomly or still just take too long). It would of course work better with better equalized reward/time ratios.
*sacrificestotheeditmonster*
Or conversely if CCA was scaled down to the ratio of the timed queues, it would give about 50 dil and 5 marks.
Neither of these payouts is realistic.
And because these queues are guaranteed win, there are no extra factors to adjust payout by difficulty, only time.
These daily bonuses always get brought up in this topic. As said, a 15-minute queue must give over 10k dil and 1000 marks per run to match CCA's reward/time ratio. Even large events like Mirror Invasion with their 50k dil, don't come even close to that.
There's absolutely no way to support 50-odd queues (and however many other activities) all with the same reward. Any attempt is doomed from the start. And that's before considering that, with Admiralty, players don't need to farm much dilithium anymore in the first place.
The queues are and will remain dead unless and until they start giving different rewards. As long as people can get their reward bigger, faster, easier somewhere else, that's exactly what they'll do.