I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
I admire your loyalty and efforts to rationalise this, but it's nonsense. I don't think anyone would complain if we had to save up 500 emblems for a super-awesome phaser of butt-kicking, because /that/ is the trope, you have to work hard for the best gear. And I totally agree I much prefer a system where that goal is guaranteed after a certain investment of time and effort.
But I repeat: These are ships. They are /character classes/, and no other MMO - not WoW, not even Champions Online - would make you pay individually or grind so hard for each individual character class on top of paying a monthly fee. It is simply indefensible.
mrfixit said it best - either this is mere fluff - in which case selling it is permissible and the grind to obtain it in-game is insane... or it is 'end-game gear', in which case selling it at /all/ is unacceptable. Would anyone here accept phasers with clear DPS advantages being sold on the C-store and also be available in-game via emblems? I really don't think any but the most die-hard microtransaction enthusiasts would.
The fact that you're charging so /much/ merely rubs salt in the wound.
And lastly, Stormshade, I don't know if you actually qualify as an employee - but if you do, all this stuff is totally and entirely free to you. So /have/ you actually sat down and done the 500 emblem grind yourself?
Picking up 10 emblems a day doesn't take a lot of time, and you can get way more than 10 if you want to push it, and 50 days played doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
I also see people worry about needing emblems for gear, but most gear is craftable as well, and I didn't find it hard to grind up my crafting after the change.
If you don't want to commit that much in game time to getting the item, you always have the C-Store option.
If you don't want to do either, well, sadly life is about choices and you can't have everything you want.
except then your in the same boat, i find it takes longer to get say enouph chronometric particle traces to get anything i need than it is to just couph up some emblems... and i enjoy the missions to get emblems far more than i do just swimming around in the expoloration sectors... further more, the cost of these is so outragious on the eschange, that you cant merely buy these either... so your argument presents a catch 22... some food for thought...
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
Thanks,
Stormshade
OK, I can see the point to this. And my irritation at having to grind Emblems has changed to a mild annoyance.
Of course I think this automatically begs for more content in which to earn Emblems. Maybe even being able to earn Emblems when doing the Featured Episodes for those of us at max level, no idea if that is even plausible but its still a nice idea.
So, 500/15 is 33 days of striaght emblem grinding.
How long does it take to get those emblems on average?
4-5 Hours of playing.
So that equates to 132 - 165 hrs of gameplay....
How reasonable does that sound now??? Either lower emblem costs on things or don't be so conservative with how many and what missions give emblems. Really, subsequent explorations missions in B'Tran (you must run a series of three) only give one emblem.
The whole emblem grind is probably the worst you have put into game and as a more casual player (1-2hrs a night) it really turns me off to the game. It did at the start and it still does.
Now let's put this into perspective in terms of what my time is worth. I make a decent amount of money that if I spent working instead of grinding emblems be three - four weeks of work. I can buy the tokens for $12.50.
Not only is 500 emblems not a fair price, doing the math it is just a ploy for you to just cough up the $12.50 if you are a casual gamer and you want the ship.
Bravo to your marketing team but for everyone out there, if something in a game costs you more time to grind than it does for a typical 40 hours work week it is not worth it.
So true my friend and I even don't bother anymore just to get a new ship, although I'd love to have it it's just not worth my entire time.
Of course I think this automatically begs for more content in which to earn Emblems. Maybe even being able to earn Emblems when doing the Featured Episodes for those of us at max level, no idea if that is even plausible but its still a nice idea.
It's definitely plausible - they added that feature to the dailies in Deferi space (though not the episodes). Another option would be to award emblems for episode replay - that could be cool. I would assume that more Emblem-earning content is coming, considering that since Emblems became available they have added the Emblems for the Deferi dailies, as well as the Eta Eridani dailies.
Also cryptic broke thier promise to not put gameplay effecting items in the store.
Sort of. I don't know if it was ever actually a "promise," but it was certainly the stated intent at one point. What we have now is a compromise, wherein certain gameplay-affecting items are available both in-game and the C-Store. This may or may not be an acceptable compromise to you.
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
Thanks,
Stormshade
In principle, I totally agree with what you said. However, there are two major differences between getting a ship off the C-Store versus through emblems:
1) Emblems are per-character, C-Store is per-account. Earning 1000 emblems takes twice as long as 500.
2) I can always decommission a ship I got from C-Store if I am running low on space, and get it back later. Not so with a ship purchased with emblems.
What I'm looking at is getting an item with emblems or marks should have the same unlocks as the C-Store equivalent.
Did you hear that cryptic is reducing the # of in-game currencies? We may someday be able to get it through a billion EC, 5 million latinum, or 90000 merits (merit cost calculated from the cost of retrain for Tokens/Merits). Maybe we could use that ridiculous amount of merits like Atari tokens:). OR CRYPTIC COULD MAKE STO SUBSCRIPTIONS FREE AND PEOPLE WOULD BE MORE WILLING TO PAY FOR C-STORE ITEMS!!!
PvP dailies (Capture and Arena) 3 each win or lose = 6
I know for a fact that I can get at least 9 Emblems a day in under 2 hours. More like 10-12 really. Not counting Fleet Action Dailies (though I'd love to see Breaking the Planet and Starbase 24 get emblem options)
So 10 emblems every day for 50 days is around 100 total hours of gameplay. As a max level character wth else are you doing in that time?
If you want to play on an alt don't complain about grinding Emblems. You're choosing an alt over the main. If you want the emblems grind them. Because frankly there's nothing else to do at VA other than grind dailies just about all of which give emblems.
It comes down to this: Is 100+ hours (across multiple characters) worth 25 dollars. Even if you got paid waitress money (around 3 bucks an hour YMMV) you'd have paid for the thing 6 times over.
It's not that unreasonable. I've bought a couple ships off the C-Store (granted there's no in-game way to get the NX/Connie and wasn't a way to get the Excelsior at the time) but I bought my Nebula with Marks that I'd been saving up since they were an option.
Don't trash and spend stuff. Ever. Just in case. That's the way I played and I casually worked up over 400 marks. I fully outfitted my ship (Luna-Class) and had 200 left over just sitting there when the Nebula was announced. Same with emblems I have 500 now. I like the Dkyr but I'm saving and casually grinding because I know that there'll be something else I like as much or more down the road.
Wrong assertion, you only have the C-Store option. That is the only mildly reasonable option. With the current award rate of emblems, 500 is absurd.
Its is only the only reasonable option if you are impatient and have to have it right now. The idea behind the in game cost is they want players to play the game for a long time, if you could get it in a week or two of casual grinding, that really wouldn't meat the business goal, to offset the lost C-Store sale with higher player retain-age.
except then your in the same boat, i find it takes longer to get say enouph chronometric particle traces to get anything i need than it is to just couph up some emblems... and i enjoy the missions to get emblems far more than i do just swimming around in the expoloration sectors... further more, the cost of these is so outragious on the eschange, that you cant merely buy these either... so your argument presents a catch 22... some food for thought...
Most of the emblem giving dailies also have scanables in them now, and you also get loot drops. I play very casually (less then 5 hours a week typically, more when a new feature or episode launches) and I gave up on the exchange because despite trying my best to try and set what was, as far as I could tell, a fair price, most of my stuff wouldn't sell, so I vendor almost all my unused drops. I'm swimming in credits, and have had to buy some rare particles to make stuff, and I'm still swimming in credits. I'm not seeing the catch 22, sorry.
At the end of the day unless you want something right this minute there is no reason to pay for it.
For the record I know I want MVAM, I haven't decided if I can be paitent or not yet, but I don't feel that griding for it is an unreasonable time commitment or option (I have about 23 emblems as I recall).
I wouldn't be sad if they offered more emblem dailies at the same quality level as Deferi and Neutral Zone dailies, so I could skip B'tran, and if they would revamp Fleet Actions so anything other than Klingon Scout Force didn't make the 3 emblems feel not worth it.
I think people should go play Planet Calypso and come back and see how they made fools of themselves
What we have here isn't a bad deal. If you want it now well skip on ordering out for a day or don't buy that starbucks coffee and buy that item off the c-store.
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
Stormshade
sto dose not have much of an eand game right now, while alot of the others out there do have an big end game.
mmos i have played can take about yaer or so to get to the point where you can restart it all over.
Its is only the only reasonable option if you are impatient and have to have it right now. The idea behind the in game cost is they want players to play the game for a long time, if you could get it in a week or two of casual grinding, that really wouldn't meat the business goal, to offset the lost C-Store sale with higher player retain-age.
What you fail to consider is most of the paying playerbase is casual and I do not consider the hour estimates I gave above anything other than power. Look at it this way:
Say we can comfortably get 15 emblems a day for that 4-5 hrs of gameplay. That is a rate of 3 - 3.75 emblems an hour. For the casual player that only plays for a couple of hours a night, that means they will have enough emblems for this ship in ~67 - 83 "play days" (2 hours a day) of game time. So I dare say at the current rate of getting emblems will definately preclude the majority of casual players from even remotely thinking this is an option leaving only what? Pay for it.
If you cannot see how this is a clever marketing ploy to make the more casual player think they have a choice I really cannot help you.
Perish the thought if you can only play on the weekends!!!!
Either the cost at 500 emblems is not balanced or the rate of aquiring emblems is not balanced.
Grinds are not surrogates for content. Grind hard games cater to the powergamers and leave the casual gamers feeling like they cannot compete. So what then? After years of that you game population shrinks to mainly powergamers as does your revenue stream. How about that for marketing??
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
Thanks,
Stormshade
Did you just reference JBoots? Wow. You played EQ? At the risk of going off topic ... what class did you play? For how long did you play? Like I played hardcore until my guild kind of got bored with Plane of Time, but we were behind the curve on that so ... wow, I think there were a few of those mini expansions out by then.
I went back when it was free during the legacy thing a few years ago. That was good times, good memories. I still get creeped out thinking about Kithicor Forest. And the Terrorantula (who was in the same zone as the cyclops you referenced, hee hee).
So, 500/15 is 33 days of striaght emblem grinding.
How long does it take to get those emblems on average?
4-5 Hours of playing.
So that equates to 132 - 165 hrs of gameplay....
How reasonable does that sound now???
Compared to spending over two months trying to grind enough whavtever currency would let me buy a simple mount in WOW Battlegrounds, playing relatively casually? Compared to FOUR months of trying to get my artifact armor in FFXI, every night, hoping to get on a big enough team that I could finally get The Hat? That sounds pretty darn reasonable to me. What's unreasonable to you is reasonable to other people.
Now, the real question is, is it reasonable enough for the majority of players? That's harder to answer. And I don't think I would believe anyone who said they claimed to have the answer, no matter what side they were coming down on.
PvP dailies (Capture and Arena) 3 each win or lose = 6
I know for a fact that I can get at least 9 Emblems a day in under 2 hours. More like 10-12 really. Not counting Fleet Action Dailies (though I'd love to see Breaking the Planet and Starbase 24 get emblem options)
So 10 emblems every day for 50 days is around 100 total hours of gameplay. As a max level character wth else are you doing in that time?
If you want to play on an alt don't complain about grinding Emblems. You're choosing an alt over the main. If you want the emblems grind them. Because frankly there's nothing else to do at VA other than grind dailies just about all of which give emblems.
It comes down to this: Is 100+ hours (across multiple characters) worth 25 dollars. Even if you got paid waitress money (around 3 bucks an hour YMMV) you'd have paid for the thing 6 times over.
It's not that unreasonable. I've bought a couple ships off the C-Store (granted there's no in-game way to get the NX/Connie and wasn't a way to get the Excelsior at the time) but I bought my Nebula with Marks that I'd been saving up since they were an option.
Don't trash and spend stuff. Ever. Just in case. That's the way I played and I casually worked up over 400 marks. I fully outfitted my ship (Luna-Class) and had 200 left over just sitting there when the Nebula was announced. Same with emblems I have 500 now. I like the Dkyr but I'm saving and casually grinding because I know that there'll be something else I like as much or more down the road.
If you go Klingon side you can comfortably get 20 emblems in under 2 hours:
Azlesa Expanse daily (4) + private PvP daily (3) + 2 rounds of Pi Canis Alpha and Bravo sorties (2 + 2 + 2 +2) with optional objectives (5) = 20 emblems
In game methods are *so* easy here and take so little time.
In another currently running online game, you can only raid once a week (the dungeon is on a one week timer), and with 24 people in the raid along with the fact there are 12 different classes, the odds of you getting one of the pieces of gear each week is slim. So, you might literally be raiding 6 months to a year before fully equipping a single character in all tiered gear. They did add an alternate way, but the tokens are limited and tend to get spread out between the 24 people in the raid, meaning you still need to raid for *weeks* before getting enough tokens to get a piece of gear you're missing. And that's per character.
STO is so easy compared to other MMOs for acquisitions.. and you can buy the item outright if you don't want to spend the time.
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
You could probably swing this argument better if the C-Store items aren't priced higher than other items. A general sense of "worth" has been attached to Emblems and the C-Store items violate this.
A purple mark XI Impulse Engine retails for 90,000 EC, and costs 105 Emblems. That means each Emblem buys you 857.1 EC worth of value.
A T5 ship retails for 246,000 EC, and costs 500 Emblems. That means each Emblem buys you 492 EC worth of value.
That's a large discrepancy. According to the EC <> Emblem value on the engine, the ship should be more in the range of 287 Emblems, not 500.
And of course speaking of pricing being out of whack, in the C-Store it is way off. Typically in other games the type of micro-transaction we're seeing for the ships would be priced at perhaps a 1/3 or less of what we're seeing in the C-Store (three-to-five dollars is about the average for something like this). In a dollar-for-content comparison to a typical MMO expansion pack I can't even begin to conceive of how off-base the pricing is. If I were trying to toss enough content from the Store together to create something that might be viewed as a valid retail expansion, something that would typically be in the thirty dollar range, I could end up spending three hundred dollars and content-wise still fall drastically short of what I would get in another title for a tenth that much.
And of course speaking of pricing being out of whack, in the C-Store it is way off. Typically in other games the type of micro-transaction we're seeing for the ships would be priced at perhaps a 1/3 or less of what we're seeing in the C-Store (three-to-five dollars is about the average for something like this). In a dollar-for-content comparison to a typical MMO expansion pack I can't even begin to conceive of how off-base the pricing is. If I were trying to toss enough content from the Store together to create something that might be viewed as a valid retail expansion, something that would typically be in the thirty dollar range, I could end up spending three hundred dollars and content-wise still fall drastically short of what I would get in another title for a tenth that much.
Yeah, this is something I can agree with. I think the prices for the ships and stuff should be at least half what they are currently.
Of course, the fact that the ships unlock for every character on an account helps somewhat with the value.. I'd only end up spending about 1.25 to 1.50 per Fed character for a C-store ship..
I don't know if it was ever actually a "promise," but it was certainly the stated intent at one point. What we have now is a compromise, wherein certain gameplay-affecting items are available both in-game and the C-Store. This may or may not be an acceptable compromise to you.
No it its not. But ive been able to ignore it.
500 emblems is just an insult and rubs salt into that very open wound. Ive yet to meet anyone ingame to dosnt think its a joke. I mean literally laugh at the idea of grinding 500.
As i said in a previous post im 5 days into the grind and im allready bored to the point i dont want to log in at all.
If i was only to stick to the things i find fun in the game i could get 3 emblems a day. If i was lucky to get 167 space fleet action dalies in a row, it would take me 6 months.
I find it funny all these lifers saying it will take so long to earn the Cstore ships for free. What does time mean to you any way? You should be playing the game for years from now if we're all lucky.
Honestly if you love one of the Cstore ships so much just bite the bullet and pay the money and have it now. Not only that but you get it on all your toons. Say a Lifer has 4 Fed toons that's 2000 emblems you're saving yourself.
If it helps just wait till the next Cstore sale and pick up what you want then for 20% off. The Devs have already said there should be another Cstore sale around April for Tax season. Plus it should make you feel a bit better that your Cstore purchase does go back to Cryptic to help fund non-cstore projects.
So, you might literally be raiding 6 months to a year before fully equipping a single character in all tiered gear. They did add an alternate way, but the tokens are limited and tend to get spread out between the 24 people in the raid, meaning you still need to raid for *weeks* before getting enough tokens to get a piece of gear you're missing. And that's per character.
I don't think 6 months is an invalid amount of time to 'fully equip a character in all tiered gear', but that's not a valid comaparison, is it?
Because here we're talking about one to three months for a single item.
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
Thanks,
Stormshade
Storm, old-school Everquest player.
But yes, I agree. 500 emblems is a fair deal, especially since at Vice Admiral you can get one of those Refitted ships for free with a ship token.
And lets not forget that the Excelsior and the Nebula are with Marks of Exploration, so you can get them even easier.
For confusion factor, refer to below thread to understand this sentence:
- Maybe something that could be part of the duty officer system? Completing duty officer missions and regular missions has a random chance to generate a "new position offering" that grants you a ship token...
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
Thanks,
Stormshade
Maybe it is all perception. In STO, the grind is too transparent for people? They don't get the illusion that there could be a fast way to acquire an item? (Except spending money.) I mean, as you said - some raid noob could get exactly the cool item everyone wants on his first try!
That luck does not exist in STO. Maybe there needs to be a super-duper-rare category of items that drops 1 % of the time very rare items drop, and are ship requisition tokens?
... and this is why the Garumba Destroyer is now 700 emblems? I had started working toward that but... 700? At that huge # I'll end up just buying it and it works out for Cryptic because I ended up spending money on it
Folks, 500 emblems is really a pretty fair deal. If you don't want to spend the time to earn the emblems, you have the option to buy the item from the C-Store.
I've played quite a few MMOs in my day, and having a wait for an end game level item is nothing new to the MMO world.
There is a long standing tradition in fact of having hard to earn items available in MMOs. One might even say it's an MMO Trope.
I've spent weeks searching for hard to find items in old games like GemStone or Dragon Realms. I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast. I've also spent inordinately large amounts of time going on raids so I could get the best gear available for my class, just to have someone who showed up for the raid the first time ever win the roll for an item I still needed.
I like the way things are done here better. Pick a reward, and start saving up for it. No random factor required, you get the required amount of funds, and you can now earn the item you wish to have the most. Plus, if you really have to have an item right now, you have the option of the C-store available to you.
MMOs are always going to have something else to achieve, some new piece of gear you desperately require, or some sort of new challenge to face. The C-store simply allows you to trade time for money, when working to acquire these things. Money which then goes back into the game so we can continue to make Star Trek Online better for you.
I'll continue to believe that one month worth of play time spent gathering emblems is a fair trade when I compare it to my own experiences raiding, and grinding, in other MMOs, to earn similar rewards. I'd much rather know when I'm going to get the item I need than to spend another few months sitting on an island in the middle of an empty zone waiting for one particular mob to show up.
Really, the point of all this is... If you think about the alternatives, this is really much better.
I literally spent months camping this really old cyclops in an early MMO so I could take something only he would drop, and trade it in for a pair of boots that would let me run fast.
Not really a valid comparison. You spent months camping the cyclops for your jboots? Ok. I spent...none. I was running through the oasis one day and boom...there he was.
If you're really going to make comparisons like this, where's my random dumb luck chance at getting one of these ship classes in game? Oh wait...there is none.
Your entire comparison, every single one, fails in that you're trying to compare a single item...the ship...to raiding and grinding for a fully geared character.
I've been in some very high end raiding over the years in everything from EQ to WoW, and soon to be Rift. Your comparison also fails in that raiding can be difficult. It takes practice and at least some level of skill to get the best stuff. In STO I can practically turn on auto fire and go make a sandwich. If you're going to try to pretend ships in STO are end game items, at least have the courtesy of making the path to getting the emblems challenging, or at the very least mildly entertaining, because right now you'd have to pay ME to grind that many out.
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I admire your loyalty and efforts to rationalise this, but it's nonsense. I don't think anyone would complain if we had to save up 500 emblems for a super-awesome phaser of butt-kicking, because /that/ is the trope, you have to work hard for the best gear. And I totally agree I much prefer a system where that goal is guaranteed after a certain investment of time and effort.
But I repeat: These are ships. They are /character classes/, and no other MMO - not WoW, not even Champions Online - would make you pay individually or grind so hard for each individual character class on top of paying a monthly fee. It is simply indefensible.
mrfixit said it best - either this is mere fluff - in which case selling it is permissible and the grind to obtain it in-game is insane... or it is 'end-game gear', in which case selling it at /all/ is unacceptable. Would anyone here accept phasers with clear DPS advantages being sold on the C-store and also be available in-game via emblems? I really don't think any but the most die-hard microtransaction enthusiasts would.
The fact that you're charging so /much/ merely rubs salt in the wound.
And lastly, Stormshade, I don't know if you actually qualify as an employee - but if you do, all this stuff is totally and entirely free to you. So /have/ you actually sat down and done the 500 emblem grind yourself?
except then your in the same boat, i find it takes longer to get say enouph chronometric particle traces to get anything i need than it is to just couph up some emblems... and i enjoy the missions to get emblems far more than i do just swimming around in the expoloration sectors... further more, the cost of these is so outragious on the eschange, that you cant merely buy these either... so your argument presents a catch 22... some food for thought...
OK, I can see the point to this. And my irritation at having to grind Emblems has changed to a mild annoyance.
Of course I think this automatically begs for more content in which to earn Emblems. Maybe even being able to earn Emblems when doing the Featured Episodes for those of us at max level, no idea if that is even plausible but its still a nice idea.
This is another great point. It is not fun at all.
Im on day 5 and im allready sick of it, only 28 more to go
1 person on these forums has said they have done the grind and defended the cost. More power to him. Any others?
So true my friend and I even don't bother anymore just to get a new ship, although I'd love to have it it's just not worth my entire time.
It's definitely plausible - they added that feature to the dailies in Deferi space (though not the episodes). Another option would be to award emblems for episode replay - that could be cool. I would assume that more Emblem-earning content is coming, considering that since Emblems became available they have added the Emblems for the Deferi dailies, as well as the Eta Eridani dailies.
Sort of. I don't know if it was ever actually a "promise," but it was certainly the stated intent at one point. What we have now is a compromise, wherein certain gameplay-affecting items are available both in-game and the C-Store. This may or may not be an acceptable compromise to you.
In principle, I totally agree with what you said. However, there are two major differences between getting a ship off the C-Store versus through emblems:
1) Emblems are per-character, C-Store is per-account. Earning 1000 emblems takes twice as long as 500.
2) I can always decommission a ship I got from C-Store if I am running low on space, and get it back later. Not so with a ship purchased with emblems.
What I'm looking at is getting an item with emblems or marks should have the same unlocks as the C-Store equivalent.
Btran = 4 Emblems
Deferi Dailies = 5
PvP dailies (Capture and Arena) 3 each win or lose = 6
I know for a fact that I can get at least 9 Emblems a day in under 2 hours. More like 10-12 really. Not counting Fleet Action Dailies (though I'd love to see Breaking the Planet and Starbase 24 get emblem options)
So 10 emblems every day for 50 days is around 100 total hours of gameplay. As a max level character wth else are you doing in that time?
If you want to play on an alt don't complain about grinding Emblems. You're choosing an alt over the main. If you want the emblems grind them. Because frankly there's nothing else to do at VA other than grind dailies just about all of which give emblems.
It comes down to this: Is 100+ hours (across multiple characters) worth 25 dollars. Even if you got paid waitress money (around 3 bucks an hour YMMV) you'd have paid for the thing 6 times over.
It's not that unreasonable. I've bought a couple ships off the C-Store (granted there's no in-game way to get the NX/Connie and wasn't a way to get the Excelsior at the time) but I bought my Nebula with Marks that I'd been saving up since they were an option.
Don't trash and spend stuff. Ever. Just in case. That's the way I played and I casually worked up over 400 marks. I fully outfitted my ship (Luna-Class) and had 200 left over just sitting there when the Nebula was announced. Same with emblems I have 500 now. I like the Dkyr but I'm saving and casually grinding because I know that there'll be something else I like as much or more down the road.
Its is only the only reasonable option if you are impatient and have to have it right now. The idea behind the in game cost is they want players to play the game for a long time, if you could get it in a week or two of casual grinding, that really wouldn't meat the business goal, to offset the lost C-Store sale with higher player retain-age.
Most of the emblem giving dailies also have scanables in them now, and you also get loot drops. I play very casually (less then 5 hours a week typically, more when a new feature or episode launches) and I gave up on the exchange because despite trying my best to try and set what was, as far as I could tell, a fair price, most of my stuff wouldn't sell, so I vendor almost all my unused drops. I'm swimming in credits, and have had to buy some rare particles to make stuff, and I'm still swimming in credits. I'm not seeing the catch 22, sorry.
At the end of the day unless you want something right this minute there is no reason to pay for it.
For the record I know I want MVAM, I haven't decided if I can be paitent or not yet, but I don't feel that griding for it is an unreasonable time commitment or option (I have about 23 emblems as I recall).
I wouldn't be sad if they offered more emblem dailies at the same quality level as Deferi and Neutral Zone dailies, so I could skip B'tran, and if they would revamp Fleet Actions so anything other than Klingon Scout Force didn't make the 3 emblems feel not worth it.
What we have here isn't a bad deal. If you want it now well skip on ordering out for a day or don't buy that starbucks coffee and buy that item off the c-store.
sto dose not have much of an eand game right now, while alot of the others out there do have an big end game.
mmos i have played can take about yaer or so to get to the point where you can restart it all over.
i have np with the c store
What you fail to consider is most of the paying playerbase is casual and I do not consider the hour estimates I gave above anything other than power. Look at it this way:
Say we can comfortably get 15 emblems a day for that 4-5 hrs of gameplay. That is a rate of 3 - 3.75 emblems an hour. For the casual player that only plays for a couple of hours a night, that means they will have enough emblems for this ship in ~67 - 83 "play days" (2 hours a day) of game time. So I dare say at the current rate of getting emblems will definately preclude the majority of casual players from even remotely thinking this is an option leaving only what? Pay for it.
If you cannot see how this is a clever marketing ploy to make the more casual player think they have a choice I really cannot help you.
Perish the thought if you can only play on the weekends!!!!
Either the cost at 500 emblems is not balanced or the rate of aquiring emblems is not balanced.
Grinds are not surrogates for content. Grind hard games cater to the powergamers and leave the casual gamers feeling like they cannot compete. So what then? After years of that you game population shrinks to mainly powergamers as does your revenue stream. How about that for marketing??
Did you just reference JBoots? Wow. You played EQ? At the risk of going off topic ... what class did you play? For how long did you play? Like I played hardcore until my guild kind of got bored with Plane of Time, but we were behind the curve on that so ... wow, I think there were a few of those mini expansions out by then.
I went back when it was free during the legacy thing a few years ago. That was good times, good memories. I still get creeped out thinking about Kithicor Forest. And the Terrorantula (who was in the same zone as the cyclops you referenced, hee hee).
Compared to spending over two months trying to grind enough whavtever currency would let me buy a simple mount in WOW Battlegrounds, playing relatively casually? Compared to FOUR months of trying to get my artifact armor in FFXI, every night, hoping to get on a big enough team that I could finally get The Hat? That sounds pretty darn reasonable to me. What's unreasonable to you is reasonable to other people.
Now, the real question is, is it reasonable enough for the majority of players? That's harder to answer. And I don't think I would believe anyone who said they claimed to have the answer, no matter what side they were coming down on.
If you go Klingon side you can comfortably get 20 emblems in under 2 hours:
Azlesa Expanse daily (4) + private PvP daily (3) + 2 rounds of Pi Canis Alpha and Bravo sorties (2 + 2 + 2 +2) with optional objectives (5) = 20 emblems
In another currently running online game, you can only raid once a week (the dungeon is on a one week timer), and with 24 people in the raid along with the fact there are 12 different classes, the odds of you getting one of the pieces of gear each week is slim. So, you might literally be raiding 6 months to a year before fully equipping a single character in all tiered gear. They did add an alternate way, but the tokens are limited and tend to get spread out between the 24 people in the raid, meaning you still need to raid for *weeks* before getting enough tokens to get a piece of gear you're missing. And that's per character.
STO is so easy compared to other MMOs for acquisitions.. and you can buy the item outright if you don't want to spend the time.
You could probably swing this argument better if the C-Store items aren't priced higher than other items. A general sense of "worth" has been attached to Emblems and the C-Store items violate this.
A purple mark XI Impulse Engine retails for 90,000 EC, and costs 105 Emblems. That means each Emblem buys you 857.1 EC worth of value.
A T5 ship retails for 246,000 EC, and costs 500 Emblems. That means each Emblem buys you 492 EC worth of value.
That's a large discrepancy. According to the EC <> Emblem value on the engine, the ship should be more in the range of 287 Emblems, not 500.
And of course speaking of pricing being out of whack, in the C-Store it is way off. Typically in other games the type of micro-transaction we're seeing for the ships would be priced at perhaps a 1/3 or less of what we're seeing in the C-Store (three-to-five dollars is about the average for something like this). In a dollar-for-content comparison to a typical MMO expansion pack I can't even begin to conceive of how off-base the pricing is. If I were trying to toss enough content from the Store together to create something that might be viewed as a valid retail expansion, something that would typically be in the thirty dollar range, I could end up spending three hundred dollars and content-wise still fall drastically short of what I would get in another title for a tenth that much.
Yeah, this is something I can agree with. I think the prices for the ships and stuff should be at least half what they are currently.
Of course, the fact that the ships unlock for every character on an account helps somewhat with the value.. I'd only end up spending about 1.25 to 1.50 per Fed character for a C-store ship..
I probably spent a good 10 minutes in just travel time overall.
That means a grand total of 50 hours of gameplay will net you everything but the Garumba...
No it its not. But ive been able to ignore it.
500 emblems is just an insult and rubs salt into that very open wound. Ive yet to meet anyone ingame to dosnt think its a joke. I mean literally laugh at the idea of grinding 500.
As i said in a previous post im 5 days into the grind and im allready bored to the point i dont want to log in at all.
If i was only to stick to the things i find fun in the game i could get 3 emblems a day. If i was lucky to get 167 space fleet action dalies in a row, it would take me 6 months.
Honestly if you love one of the Cstore ships so much just bite the bullet and pay the money and have it now. Not only that but you get it on all your toons. Say a Lifer has 4 Fed toons that's 2000 emblems you're saving yourself.
If it helps just wait till the next Cstore sale and pick up what you want then for 20% off. The Devs have already said there should be another Cstore sale around April for Tax season. Plus it should make you feel a bit better that your Cstore purchase does go back to Cryptic to help fund non-cstore projects.
I don't think 6 months is an invalid amount of time to 'fully equip a character in all tiered gear', but that's not a valid comaparison, is it?
Because here we're talking about one to three months for a single item.
Storm, old-school Everquest player.
But yes, I agree. 500 emblems is a fair deal, especially since at Vice Admiral you can get one of those Refitted ships for free with a ship token.
And lets not forget that the Excelsior and the Nebula are with Marks of Exploration, so you can get them even easier.
For confusion factor, refer to below thread to understand this sentence:
- Maybe something that could be part of the duty officer system? Completing duty officer missions and regular missions has a random chance to generate a "new position offering" that grants you a ship token...
Mustrum "Trigger Happy Today" Ridcully
Maybe it is all perception. In STO, the grind is too transparent for people? They don't get the illusion that there could be a fast way to acquire an item? (Except spending money.) I mean, as you said - some raid noob could get exactly the cool item everyone wants on his first try!
That luck does not exist in STO. Maybe there needs to be a super-duper-rare category of items that drops 1 % of the time very rare items drop, and are ship requisition tokens?
Not really a valid comparison. You spent months camping the cyclops for your jboots? Ok. I spent...none. I was running through the oasis one day and boom...there he was.
If you're really going to make comparisons like this, where's my random dumb luck chance at getting one of these ship classes in game? Oh wait...there is none.
Your entire comparison, every single one, fails in that you're trying to compare a single item...the ship...to raiding and grinding for a fully geared character.
I've been in some very high end raiding over the years in everything from EQ to WoW, and soon to be Rift. Your comparison also fails in that raiding can be difficult. It takes practice and at least some level of skill to get the best stuff. In STO I can practically turn on auto fire and go make a sandwich. If you're going to try to pretend ships in STO are end game items, at least have the courtesy of making the path to getting the emblems challenging, or at the very least mildly entertaining, because right now you'd have to pay ME to grind that many out.
Something cant be both cosmetic fluff / endgame equipment, its a total FU to devoted players.
This is like any other pay to play MMO suddenly selling off all their max tier armour sets/weapons