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STO to Remove Random Explorable Content
crypticbuxom
Posts: 4,630 Arc User
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/6002963-exploration-cluster-removal
This is an STO issue but I think it says a lot about what Cryptic defines certain parts of their games as useless. Sure it doesn't have super quality missions to do, but the whole purpose of that part of the game was to explore places that has random missions applied every once in a while to acquire materials without having to rely on the queue system. It was places to go as an alternative for players who want to go about farming casually with small variations to the same few missions.
I think its safe to say now that Cryptic doesn't want randomly generated missions to be a part of any of their games with a move like this.
"While we are removing part of the game, we hope that this improves the overall quality of STO. In the end we aim to make Star Trek Online something youre excited to be playing every week."
I feel that having such Explorable Clusters in a game (no matter how useless) makes that world feel more vast. And removing it from a game that boasts "To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before", this is ludicrous.
I feel sorry for your loss of content, STO. We here at CO can relate.
This is an STO issue but I think it says a lot about what Cryptic defines certain parts of their games as useless. Sure it doesn't have super quality missions to do, but the whole purpose of that part of the game was to explore places that has random missions applied every once in a while to acquire materials without having to rely on the queue system. It was places to go as an alternative for players who want to go about farming casually with small variations to the same few missions.
I think its safe to say now that Cryptic doesn't want randomly generated missions to be a part of any of their games with a move like this.
"While we are removing part of the game, we hope that this improves the overall quality of STO. In the end we aim to make Star Trek Online something youre excited to be playing every week."
I feel that having such Explorable Clusters in a game (no matter how useless) makes that world feel more vast. And removing it from a game that boasts "To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before", this is ludicrous.
I feel sorry for your loss of content, STO. We here at CO can relate.
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I use "Help a Citizen" missions as an alternate leveling path for my toons from level 10-20. Will CO remove them?
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
No joke, I had one toon that picked up the low-level mission to deliver aid to a planet somewhere in the Delta Volanis sector. You have to find a world that needs the particular supply you were given (seismic stabilizers, I think). I had to drop the mission eventually because my admiral had never been able to find a world that needed those!! The very first "exploration" mission gave me nothing but hours of frustration, boredom, and random attacks on Gorn raiders. (As far as I could tell, there were more Gorn in the Delta Volanis cluster, less than a dozen lightyears from Earth, than on all of Gornar!)
No, those things are well lost, in my opinion, and I certainly hope nothing that bad is ever implemented here.
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The clusters really added nothing to the game, especially not the content that they were intended as. They tried doing a lot with them but they still always felt flat. Especially since they were big blocks to new sectors of space to enter. Some say it's content that's being removed, and they are partially right. But I doubt it's widely used content except by a handful of people.
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The exploration missions were, no matter which one you wound up with, terrible at best, nonsensical at worst (Wait, I have to prevent the Borg from picking flowers? On an already-assimilated planet?!). The drop in quality in the exploration missions is very obvious when you play the missions released with Seasons 8 and 9 (Or the entire Romulan PC story arc, if you want to go back further).
The achievements from exploration clusters will be transferred to the Duty Officer system, and reworking "exploration" sectors like B'tran and Delta Volanis will help keep players from getting lost in Sector Space. (Yes, it does happen.) This is more "trimming the fat" than anything else.
And if you truly wish to level without playing the story, the Duty Officer system can still do that (albeit slowly). The general consensus from the fleets I'm part of in STO is that exploration missions will not be missed.
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It's one of those things that would be cool if they expanded it, made at least a dozen auto-generated mission types and worlds... but I suppose it doesn't really work with the over-all gameplay mechanic of bashing mobs for XP.
Huh...I should play more Minecraft and Skyrim.
Scan 5 things in space.
Destroy five enemy groups in space.
Scan 5 things on a planet.
Kill five enemy groups on a planet.
Bring 10 things to a planet.
I didn't know that the Borg had a third dynasty and that the artifacts are vital to keep out of their hands on a planet they've already assimilated.
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They were generated by the Genesis engine but now they are static missions taking up a lot of database space for very terrible content.
Nothing says great newbie experience like having your mission be to bring 10 items, each of which costs more EC than you have, to a planet you can't find.
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...something Champs needs badly.
I doubt Cryptic has enough drive (or incentive, really) to remove parts of this game. Largely because A: They're ****ing neurotic as hell about touching the code in this game, to the point that after doing so, they must make 5 backups of the original source code, run it by the CTO and CEO to verify the game still works on all systems, pray to the virtually deceased developer spirit of Bill Roper for 36 hours while fasting, then make a blood sacrifice to their computer in order to ensure that they keep running for the remainder of the week due to the code being too buggy to even be physically possible within this realm of existence. After all this they must engorge themselves upon the carcasses of deceased hamsters that are used to power the servers in order to maintain a theoretically balanced diet produced by NCSoft due to a prior perceived health benefit they had managed to deduce out of nonscientific entirely correlation-based observations that the prior company had made before shoving all its money into Guild Wars for the remaining eternity of their existence. Finally, they must allegorically ride motorcycles over a flag with the Atari logo on it in order to symbolize and commemorate their liberation from a horrible failing company whose best achievements were made back when games only required about 6 hours to make and could be sold for around 182 dollars in today's currency. This is all done to ensure that both the server remains running, as well as to properly debug any committed changes to code that might be made between patches. In fact this is actually what happens on thursdays when server maintenance needs to be done. Because of this it is too much of an opportunity cost to extract any part of the game from live.
The other reason is that the worst missions we have here are just semi-bugged, but still largely coherent in their purpose (Oh no, villains attacked a MARS base! Help us out!), instead of literally mad-libs missions (Look out! (DEMON) has taken (DARREN'S PIZZA) by ambush, hoping to get (IONIZED POWER CORES) out of the robbery! They are taking a ransom of (5 LUCKY GEM II)s in order to leave the premises without incidence. Or, by spending (80)G, you can dispatch MCPD to remove the robbers by (USING PULSON RIFLES CONFISCATED FROM VIPER))
Saying that it should be removed based on you not liking it is bias and ultimately selfish. This is like the crafting system.
All the STO team had to do is give it a descriptive as supplemental parts of the game. But they rather remove it entirely instead of give it a proper presentation rewrite.
Keeping it in doesn't help the game, and trying to keep it there because a few people enjoy it only creates issues and problems for the possibility of new content additions that would be better suited to that spot.
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And how do you know they don't have plans to replace it? And really those exploration maps are in the way. Even a casual observation can see that.
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These aren't very random at all, and they pretty much rolled the Help a Citizen mission style into the Alerts, even using some of the same maps.
Its long past time they use a few more of the more interesting maps and they drop the use of silent menace cut scenes.
Read the blog post. Its in there.
A casual observation shows that its not as exciting to play. Its not in the way of anything.
My only problem with the Help a Citizen missions is that citizens will bother me with them while standing around in Ren. Cen. If they're in Ren. Cen. already, then why not talk to Defenderp or Corporal Harrison?
Oh, um, Bluhman, you do realize that the Atari that used to own Cryptic was not the same Atari that made Pong, right? It was actually the company behind Alone in the Dark. They bought Hasbro Interactive in 2001, which was an IP that happened to include Atari's trademark (and a few of their games), and then decided to change their name because more people had heard of Atari than had heard of Infogrames.
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I read the blog. And nothing about the blog saying anything but what the current plans are. Seriously,t his is making a mountain out of a molehill concerning the same 5 repeated missions over and over again. I would agree with the point if the said content being removed was say, an entire sector of space but none of the exploration maps were even that varied, and the missions in them were just the same 5 on repeat.
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The current plans are to remove them just because. This is Cryptic. Its not coming back in any form.
They were the same 5 missions but they were a way of farming items. Now you HAVE to queue and be dependent on others to get those items. But that's not the point. What they are doing is removing variation that while in the game was of no consequence.
Fixing the issue is as simple as adding a warning window that the areas involved are of no consequence to the game and is for farming exclusively.
Oh no an MMO expects you to interact with other people. The horror. Seriously if that's your excuse it's a mighty thin stretch since I can still get said items and stuff without needing to rely on anyone.
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You can replay almost all the story missions at will (not counting the half hour cooldown).
....
You do realize that the completion of ANY Relief Effort mission would have completed that mission, right? You didn't even have to use those ten commodities that were given to you.
Isn't this a contradiction? You berate me for suggesting something along the lines of doing things where I don't have to depend on interacting with other people in an MMO, yet immediately turn around and boast about how you can do things without interacting with other people on an MMO.
When you can't come up with a valid counter argument you resort to accuse players with something unrelated to the subject. You never have anything positive to say about other people's opinions anyways, yet you want all the support for your ideas. You speak about how an MMO should ENTIRELY be about interacting with other players, yet you're awful at said interaction.
You've lost this argument. Walk away.
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Like I said, the entire Exploration Cluster is a waste of time, other than acquiring certain materials that are sometimes difficult to find. And with the old crafting system going away as well, who cares?
I find that there's still plenty to do at level cap, just in the storyline missions. I don't need to go wandering through this conveniently unexplored star cluster right next to my faction's homeworld in order to fill in my time.
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God knows there are plenty of reasons to be cynical when Cryptic makes major changes to game systems. I really don't think this one qualifies, though.
Exploration Clusters have a quantifiable cost to Cryptic: Server resources and upkeep, unit and regression testing, drop rates, impacts from other systems that may be changing, things like that. In this case, it was a direct impact from the new crafting system. As it was, the only statistically-significant reason players ran XClusters was to farm crafting mats. (And I'm sure Cryptic has the usage stats to back it up.) Like Bluh and others have said, the spirit of exploration kinda dies when you realize that it's a server playing Quest Madlibs. Without crafting mats, there's no reason for XClusters to exist any longer, so why continue to deal with all the other costs associated with keeping them running?
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Sadly, at one time, they had coding in place that as soon as you entered the correct cluster, THAT 'relief' mission would automatically be available to you. All you had to do was click on it to go to the system, and VIOLA! the mission completed.
It still puzzles me to this day why they removed that 'auto-find' feature for that particular mission. Maybe because they wanted people to get lost looking for a mission that may or may not EVER pop up depending on the Random Number Generator used for the Genesis system?
Oh wait, they are removing the whole exploration cluster system now precisely because people WERE getting lost. :rolleyes:
Oh, brother!
Then you weren't trying hard enough. I find it unbelievable that you couldn't find one single Relief mission, considering one usually popped up after three or four random exploration missions.
Hey, I liked Bab5 (except the final season or two) and DS9 (mostly).
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DS9 had plenty of exploration, all you had to do was stick your head in that wormhole.
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Which, more often than not, are even more crappy and more stupid than the auto-generated missions.
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Have you seen the Spotilght list in STO? Many of the missions there are BETTER than the official content.
I never understand why people automatically throw out the baby with the bath water when it come to User Generated content.
It's sure a lot more content than what were getting in CO.
No BS.
It's happened to me too.
They totally borked that 'assigned' mission when they changed the coding.
I could say something equally inflammatory about the origin of your opinions being a good deal further south than your mouth perhaps being the cause of the smell, but that would be mean.
Thats thing about random number/content generators - your experience is not guaranteed to be reflected by others. Take lockboxes - you may open 1 box and get top prize first time. so to you boxes pay out 100% of the time. Someone else my have opened tens or hundreds of boxes and never got anything truly worthwhile.
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Only problem with that assertion is that I seemed guaranteed to run into one after three or four exploration missions. It was almost regular like clockwork: do so many exploration missions and a Relief mission pops up.
So you can stop lying now.
kojiro has spoken. it must be so...
:rolleyes:
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This is the old, "I have a sandwich, so you must not be hungry" argument. :rolleyes:
It's based on a random number generator. Your mileage must vary.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Well, from what I've observed on each of my characters, a Relief mission seems to be weighted a bit after each exploration mission done, as I never saw any variation or deviance from the "three or four exploration missions finished, next one's a Relief mission" formula. It ALWAYS happened.
So as I said, the lies can stop.
Even if it is weighted, it is still random, and two observers of that random function can still get different outcomes. Calling the other observer a liar is neither good analysis nor polite discourse.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
1) Having played through STO (just one at level cap, sadly), I'm inclined to agree. As a vet, there's no such thing as bad options for content, but as a new player, these weren't that great. The supply missions especially were confusing, but I had one or two ground missions that just weren't well put together.
When you're trying to put your best foot forward for a new player, you don't want them falling into a pit just because a vet wants to be able to climb down it. I haven't read the blog post, but removing them makes sense to me.
2) That said, there's no plans to remove anything from Champs anytime soon -- someone mentioned the Help a Citizen system. No plans on changing anything in Champs along this line. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Help a Citizen is fine and fun.