Have you played with this player base at all? I get yelled at all the frakking time for being one of those "evil" DPSer in minefield and taking away the first place prize. And that is just some random purple gear worth nothing...and you want to make it so that would get even worse. I ain't the best DPS person around even. Hell I ain't even really a DPS player...I just know how to build ships as I understand systems. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that players like the Ticket is rare in this game and not the norm. Hell not even the norm...they are by far the VAST majority of the player base. What you suggest won't make them better players...it will drive them away.
Yeah, the actual standard is "good enough to complete story missions". People like Ticket meet that standard.
What is worse is that those players who are good will also go away in the escalation between the average player in this game and those who know pretty much just the basics of gaming who gets called out for being an "evil": DPSer. Just look below for an example of this where somebody thinks that a 40 min ISA run is something to be proud about. My for fun ship that I use the most uses plasma and doesn't even remotely do the level of damage he claims and I can clear ISA alone in half that time in that ship. The only time I spent 40 min in ISA was when I was in a Valiant with common gear with two other players even WORSE than me. I would say our combined ISA DPS numbers would have been under 20k total. So we have players who on this board are proud of being bad at the game and thinks they deserve praise for something that is honestly super easy to achieve (because three players with common mark XII gear AND WORSE was able to do the same) and is lashing out at the "evil" DPSers...and you want to make this WORSE?
Yeah, it changes it into competitive PvE, and that's just not as desirable for most players.
The difference in Neverwinter, from what I remember from playing it when it first came out (I really do not know what is happening there now)....besides that scoreboard.....they have Gear Score.
In other words, I got locked out of queues and advancing to higher parts of the missions because I did not work to gain better gear. And I was required to complete lower level queues...which never popped for me, because no one was playing them. A lot of them were on clocks, I think, but I didn't know where or what time....if it didn't happen while I was on the game. I missed those, too.
Basically, it was rare that I could do those things....and that is where the better gear was. Which meant access to even higher gear, and gems, and all those token things...was locked away from me because I was not around the game enough. LOL!
Let's be real I don't think anyone enjoys queues and events taking longer than they need to. However that's an entirely different can of worms that's already been addressed before. With that said I pulled this out specifically because this point is easily addressed. I will admit that I have never played Neverwinter so I won't pretend to know how all their systems work beyond the bits and pieces I hear folks talk about on occasion.
First, what you're describing should be a virtual impossibility. If what you're describing is accurate, that tells me the gear systems over there are not complete or balanced. I say "if" because as I said prior I'm not familiar with the gearing systems over in Neverwinter. With that in mind in every game I have ever seen that has Gear Score requirements there have always been multiple ways to acquire the gear. In my WoW days if we were lacking in the gear department there were several options we had available. The simplest way of course was to simply get a piece of gear from the instances/dungeons. However if that wasn't an option, there were craftable items that could be obtained that would be virtually identical to what I might get from the instances I needed to run, or at the very least let me get my foot in the door. We also had the ability to do some minor upgrades to our items that would in turn boost their gear score ever so slightly. The amount of these upgrades that could be performed varied from item to item but it could be done. If all else failed there was the ability to get a group of people together in the cities or the zone chats. As time went on and new tiers of gear were introduced, different tiers of craftable items would also be introduced, along with instances that gave access to different gear bits that weren't restricted.
In WoW we had those 3 ways we could get our gear score up to snuff to at least get our foot in the door. In SWTOR there are similar systems in place to get gear. You can either craft pieces of gear that have static stats, get mission/instance drops from lower tiers, or grab a shell piece of gear and get some starting mods from the vendors. Point being you had options, even if they weren't always the easiest options. I have a hard time believing that something that massively game breaking and blatantly obvious could slip through the cracks and for that long of a time as you're making it sound. If that's really the case then the Neverwinter system is incomplete.
Overall, this concern is easily alleviated by adding alternative means to acquire gear than strictly through instances. With the way STO is right now, I really don't see how requiring at least mk xii very rare across the board is or would be impossible as just one hypothetical.
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again." - Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek Generations
Treating Y as a constant when the call is do X for Y minutes is hardly an issue. It only becomes one if you don’t get rewarded for doing X well. And that is simply the problem of many PvE in this game. Swarm is the sad zenith here where entire teams can AFK for 7 minutes (only 1 player needs to kill a dread which takes 10 seconds) without any consequences for the rewards to the slightest. The game just plays by itself.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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i alt f4 when the team can't do any damage or stay alive, im not wasting my time anymore, last time i did that i was in a ISA for almost 40 mins, nope not again, if you don't like me bailing on a mission then build for the mission, TFO's are not for noobs, even normal ones, you get your story gear first then think about tfo's you got battlezones to grind up in so stay the hell out of TFO's.
Your calling other people "noobs" would have more weight behind it if you didn't first admit it takes you 40 minutes to solo ISA.
this shows ur likely one of the cookie cutter antiproton builds that I don't like playing with. I can crank out 50-60k on a plasma build, and that's enough. what's more fun is that its my build not someone elses build i pulled off a website because im not creative enough to come up with my own build. Nobody should have to solo an isa, and I wouldn't even want to try. I don't want to plow through it in seconds either because that's not fun. I play the game to kill time, so, there's that. if someone can solo an ISA at all the last thing you should be doing is insulting them for it. heck, you should be congratulating them.
your attitude here is what I don't like about a lot of the super high dpsers - you have taken on the unhelpful "you aren't good enough" attitude without offering advice/help.
AP hasn't been the best energy type to go in ages, best at the moment are phasers and disruptors IIRC
ok then remove antiproton from my comment and you still have a cookie cutter build, which most of the super-high dps builds are. and everyone else is a player they feel like they should laugh at/ridicule for not copying the cookie cutter build and flying the exact same ship they are.
You are still wrong, the "uber dpsers" ridicule cookie cutter builds.
yet they all run the same energy types, consoles, etc. my issue isn't even that. my issue is the fact he ridiculed the player for no good reason, without offering any good advice, for doing something a lot of players can't do because the player wasn't fast enough so hes still a noob.
When my character in Neverwinter hit level 70 I regeared via Auction House, the Tyrrany of Dragons Campaign (Rep) stores (opens well before 70 and has some good bits for lvl 70+), and assorted other entirely game asset routes. I didn't even have to run dungeons (TFOs) to get it. I was earning Astral Diamonds without them. Yeah it was only blue quality, except the Campaign gear, but it was more than usable. Oh and the Campaign projects reward special enchantments to put on items that are much more powerful than the standard ones and are upgradable, and they sell well too.
Gear score is basically just a way of saying "you need level appropriate gear" to do this. Not entirely sure just how powerful all of them are since I've not gotten a character to 70. But you can start on Tyranny of Dragons by going to Neverdeath at level 30 and playing with Charthraxis. I've gotten a bunch of Dragon enchants that way.
I think a better way to prevent a high DPSer from causing someone to get an AFK penalty would be to have something that detects not the AMOUNT of damage caused, but how consistantly they caused damage.
For example... if someone was doing just shy of the minimum vs a top DPSer now, and still participated in the STF... they might still get declared AFK and penalized. If there was a way to register that they were at least causing damage for the majority of the run... might lessen the "false positives" caused by being teamed with an uberDPS build. The problem is then we have speed to contend with. How do we actually GET to cause damage if everything gets nuked instantly?
This is really a complex problem that can't be easily solved.
Cryptic is not about to look at root causes for these things
The root cause is sheer laziness on the part of the players.
>WHY CAN'T I DPS MY WAY THROUGH THE PORTAL PHASE OF MIRROR INVASION TO MAKE IT SHORTER!!!?!?!?!
Why would your DPS affect the Terran Empire's ability to open portals from their end, while you are stuck on your end?
Every single MMO I have played has had quests, dungeons, and events, where you have to wait on a set time while slashing/shooting your way through a horde with no way to speed up the timer because the situation gives you no logical means to, and no one complains about them except in STO, because only STO's playerbase has this bizarre mindset where they think everything should be determined by DPS.
Except STO does NOT have quests where you have to wait for a set time while shooting your way through a horde. It has quests where you just have to wait. Whatever horde is there is completely irrelevant, you don't have to shoot them and there is no consequence to not shooting them. They will just disappear when the time is over and the mission will continue exactly the same no matter what you did or did not do.
A better way to stem the problem would be three fold
A. We need another S13 style balance pass(or two) to hit the things missed in the first pass, and the things that have cropped up since then. The top DPS in STO should be 100Kish, period.
By making it impossible to increase their DPS, DPS players would have no reason to play the game at all.
The "balance pass" was an utter disaster that should be avoided like a plague in the future. The game needs more reason to play, not less.
B. Cryptic then needs to further emphasize existing AFK punishment systems that already exist in the game, such as the "<2% damage = afk penalty" system so that it detects this more frequently. This way you can't AFK your way through something like Mirror Invasion and still get rewards.
The joke of an AFK penalty has never caught an AFKer and never will. Buffing it up would, however, be even more effective in beating on newbies who haven't been told they have an invisible DPS quota to fill.
The AFK penalty is useless. As long as Cryptic designs content where nothing is required to win, players will win it by doing nothing. If you don't like the way other players win the content, whine at Cryptic for designing it to be won like that.
C. Cryptic similarly needs to emphasize existing reward systems so that hard timed missions/events like Mirror Invasion reward an increased number number of bonus marks for closing more portals, so that people feel more rewarded, and thus incentivized, for doing so.
Except people don't do Mirror Hell for bonus marks, they do it for the event token. The unique is the reason to play, and no amount of optional peanuts is going to change that.
I tell you an AFK Penalty of making all Characters on an Account play at no greater than a Captain (30) for 40 hours would cool their jets pretty quick. Tier 4 Ships, Mk VIII equipment max. You'd have to tighten up the parameters though.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I tell you an AFK Penalty of making all Characters on an Account play at no greater than a Captain (30) for 40 hours would cool their jets pretty quick. Tier 4 Ships, Mk VIII equipment max. You'd have to tighten up the parameters though.
Lol. Considering we are talking about the kind of content you can finish just by staying in the map until the timer runs out, that's obviously of no consequence.
This is a very bad idea for how easily exploitable it is. I can already see the new farming meta where people make their teams, go into a TFO, then intentionally have one of their team mates drop out in order to get the combat boosts/upped rewards for the rest of the team members.
While I don't care about the health of the PUBLIC queues, this line of reasoning is abundantly flawed.
What players are doing in PRIVATE queues should not affect your solution to PUBLIC queues. Especially since players with this mentality are probably not playing PUBLIC queues anyway. @patrickngo is suggesting that to combat the troll problem, you make the queues more engaging and improve the rewards. That is the kind of thinking that makes players want to actually complete the content, rather than troll it. Many posters here seem to think that combating the troll problem involves "more crippling punishment for engaging in publicly queued content". Um, good luck with that. I'm happy to continue to avoid the public queues.
Comments
My character Tsin'xing
Let's be real I don't think anyone enjoys queues and events taking longer than they need to. However that's an entirely different can of worms that's already been addressed before. With that said I pulled this out specifically because this point is easily addressed. I will admit that I have never played Neverwinter so I won't pretend to know how all their systems work beyond the bits and pieces I hear folks talk about on occasion.
First, what you're describing should be a virtual impossibility. If what you're describing is accurate, that tells me the gear systems over there are not complete or balanced. I say "if" because as I said prior I'm not familiar with the gearing systems over in Neverwinter. With that in mind in every game I have ever seen that has Gear Score requirements there have always been multiple ways to acquire the gear. In my WoW days if we were lacking in the gear department there were several options we had available. The simplest way of course was to simply get a piece of gear from the instances/dungeons. However if that wasn't an option, there were craftable items that could be obtained that would be virtually identical to what I might get from the instances I needed to run, or at the very least let me get my foot in the door. We also had the ability to do some minor upgrades to our items that would in turn boost their gear score ever so slightly. The amount of these upgrades that could be performed varied from item to item but it could be done. If all else failed there was the ability to get a group of people together in the cities or the zone chats. As time went on and new tiers of gear were introduced, different tiers of craftable items would also be introduced, along with instances that gave access to different gear bits that weren't restricted.
In WoW we had those 3 ways we could get our gear score up to snuff to at least get our foot in the door. In SWTOR there are similar systems in place to get gear. You can either craft pieces of gear that have static stats, get mission/instance drops from lower tiers, or grab a shell piece of gear and get some starting mods from the vendors. Point being you had options, even if they weren't always the easiest options. I have a hard time believing that something that massively game breaking and blatantly obvious could slip through the cracks and for that long of a time as you're making it sound. If that's really the case then the Neverwinter system is incomplete.
Overall, this concern is easily alleviated by adding alternative means to acquire gear than strictly through instances. With the way STO is right now, I really don't see how requiring at least mk xii very rare across the board is or would be impossible as just one hypothetical.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
Treating Y as a constant when the call is do X for Y minutes is hardly an issue. It only becomes one if you don’t get rewarded for doing X well. And that is simply the problem of many PvE in this game. Swarm is the sad zenith here where entire teams can AFK for 7 minutes (only 1 player needs to kill a dread which takes 10 seconds) without any consequences for the rewards to the slightest. The game just plays by itself.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
ok then remove antiproton from my comment and you still have a cookie cutter build, which most of the super-high dps builds are. and everyone else is a player they feel like they should laugh at/ridicule for not copying the cookie cutter build and flying the exact same ship they are.
yet they all run the same energy types, consoles, etc. my issue isn't even that. my issue is the fact he ridiculed the player for no good reason, without offering any good advice, for doing something a lot of players can't do because the player wasn't fast enough so hes still a noob.
My character Tsin'xing
For example... if someone was doing just shy of the minimum vs a top DPSer now, and still participated in the STF... they might still get declared AFK and penalized. If there was a way to register that they were at least causing damage for the majority of the run... might lessen the "false positives" caused by being teamed with an uberDPS build. The problem is then we have speed to contend with. How do we actually GET to cause damage if everything gets nuked instantly?
This is really a complex problem that can't be easily solved.
By making it impossible to increase their DPS, DPS players would have no reason to play the game at all.
The "balance pass" was an utter disaster that should be avoided like a plague in the future. The game needs more reason to play, not less.
The joke of an AFK penalty has never caught an AFKer and never will. Buffing it up would, however, be even more effective in beating on newbies who haven't been told they have an invisible DPS quota to fill.
The AFK penalty is useless. As long as Cryptic designs content where nothing is required to win, players will win it by doing nothing. If you don't like the way other players win the content, whine at Cryptic for designing it to be won like that.
Except people don't do Mirror Hell for bonus marks, they do it for the event token. The unique is the reason to play, and no amount of optional peanuts is going to change that.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
What players are doing in PRIVATE queues should not affect your solution to PUBLIC queues. Especially since players with this mentality are probably not playing PUBLIC queues anyway. @patrickngo is suggesting that to combat the troll problem, you make the queues more engaging and improve the rewards. That is the kind of thinking that makes players want to actually complete the content, rather than troll it. Many posters here seem to think that combating the troll problem involves "more crippling punishment for engaging in publicly queued content". Um, good luck with that. I'm happy to continue to avoid the public queues.