The guts of the system all work and the data is on track or even slightly ahead of schedule, but there remains work to be done before the system will be extensively testable by anyone not intimately familiar with the system.
As for the first question, let me turn it around - how long do you guys think it should take, in terms of hours of gameplay, focusing on a single commendation category, with what degree of focus on the assignment system?
If the system scores the same as the current diplomacy system at 10 points per completion and lets round a maxed score to 1350 points then it would take 11 hours to max out one discipline if each mission lasted 5 min and you did them back to back without doing any of the same type at the same time.
That said I think it would be easier to answer the question if we knew the answer of two of the three questions below.
1 How long will a typical mission last?
2 How many points will we get per mission and what is going to be a maxed out score?
3 Will be able to run missions of the same discipline concurrently?
As for the first question, let me turn it around - how long do you guys think it should take, in terms of hours of gameplay, focusing on a single commendation category, with what degree of focus on the assignment system?
Pure playing time? Something like 100 hours. That is if you focus on assignments only, pick as many assignments as you can, and then log out until you can get another.
Consecutive gameplay focusing mainly on assignments to reach the cap of one category. Something like 6 weeks if played daily.
Smart gameplay should allow capping of two categories in that timeframe.
If you have two categories capped that leaves players with 9 additional categories right?
Decrease progression per additional capped category by something like 10% so that the crazy people going for an all capped char have to deal with a ten times slower progression on the last part of the journey.
Obviously you cannot use a flat 10% decrease per capped category because people would leave their categories just shy of capping until done with them all so you need some kind of slow increase each tier.
i.e. 1% decrease in progression for each finished tier 1 category above the two free, add another 2% once you finished tier 2, 3% when done with tier 3 and the final 5% when hitting the category cap.
I'm fairly confident your math guys will figure something appropriate out
actually, it's not knowing that you'll die when something like that happens, it's working harder because you DON'T want to be the next one... it just makes sense
Also, it depends how well-liked the executed crew member was among the rest of the crew. If he was a notorious lazy TRIBBLE-up that made everyone else's job harder and put their lives in danger with his incompetence, maybe they'll be glad he's dead.
The rewards are based to a minor extent on time of the assignment, but primarily on the amount of micro the player has to do to set them up as well as the risk versus reward of the assignment.
So, let's assume three different players with three distinct playing patterns, then:
Player A: The Dabbler
Dabbles in assignments. Does assignments between standard missions, but doesn't micro too much or try to min-max the perfect selections or seek out the ideal assignments. Pretty much slaps some guys in, sends them out on long-duration assignments, maybe checks back in once every day or two.
Player B: The Average Player
Does assignments between missions, but spends some amount of thought and time into putting the right duty officers on the right assignments. Checks back into the assignment system maybe a couple of times during a night of play.
Player C: The Assignment Junkie
Spends more time with assignments, min-maxing his/her gains, than s/he even does with missions. A very hard core assignments player, in other words. Probably picks all fast assignments, really thinks about the best guys to put on the best assignments.
For each of the above players, how many hours of gameplay would you think it reasonable for that player to cap out a specific commendation category if that player just focuses on one single commendation category?
Put another way, if I am a dabbler in the system (Player A), play 2 hours a night, five days a week, for a total of 10 hours a week or 40 hours a month, at what point during (or after) that 40 hours do you think I should cap out a single commendation category? If I am an average player (B)? A hard core assignment player (C)?
As somebody ranging between A and B, generally around B, it needs to be to the point where you can feel progress being made and feel like things are happening.
Some of that has more to do with how diverse assignments are and how many you can find in the play time you have than how long it takes to get to the cap. If player A has to spend half his time tracking down 2-3 applicable assignments, even if he's capped inside a month that's going to be a drag because you don't feel like you're getting anywhere.
But if he can fly around and find a dozen or two dozen assignments easily (even if he's not focusing on his "priority" branch doing this), a 1-3 month grind per category is going to be a lot more palatable, because you feel like there's a lot of progress happening.
Making it long for the sake of being long or slow for the sake of keeping people away from the cap is never a good plan. If that means some people cap everything in a few weeks, I personally find that more acceptable than some people just never feeling like they're getting anywhere because it was designed to take Player C a long time.
It should be what you get out of it. For example, I consider myself in the C category. For as much time as I continue to play 6 characters (3 VA and 3 LG) it will only feel worthwhile to me to be rewarded for delving into the deepest parts of the system. I've already devoted 100s of hours to my characters, and continue to look forward to do so.
That being said, I understand that players who can only play and hour or 2 a week would like to have the feeling of instant gratification, which is why when you mentioned it's an optional portion of the game. You could spend 5min during your setup before doing PvP or STFs or even your dailies, and still receive rewards based on how you play.
This might become an argument for why people are asking for an offline option (ie smartphone/device app) in order to gain rewards like those who are in or like the players of category C. Albeit, it's understandable that it's probably something current tech might be able to do, but you guys are spread thin enough as it is. Probably a discussion for another time/thread, back to business. I know I'd love something like this for my Android smartphone.
If you're unable to devote time to it, while unfortunate, you'll still be rewarded. It's not like anyone is being left out, except for those who don't want to participate.
Therein lies the rub, the passives that the system grants will provide advantages to those who choose to participate, but I'm sure aren't so unbalancing that the players who don't participate will cry foul. If anything, it will give them another reason (not mandatory) to dabble in the system.
It's a game, you get out of it as much as you put into it. To gain the best (ie very rare, or unique, whatever the category that the reward falls into) you'll have to put time into it, I personally wouldn't mind something similar to the progression of the current diplomacy system or even the crafting system. Being that each commendation category would have it's own tier, T1-T5, with x amount of points would multiply it's progression already.
That being said, as the more rewarding assignments require more micromanaging, progression/time sink could be something like 40hours per commendation, ie if someone played it as if it were a full-time job (category C) or a casual player at cap and no new missions/stf to participate in were to log in and give it a whirl (category A). This is assuming I can run more than 1 commendation simultaneously, the limitation would or should be the amount of Duty Officers.
And even if player manages to max out all categories, will still receive Doffs/Boffs/loot/rewards, meaning there will always be something to do.
The rewards are based to a minor extent on time of the assignment, but primarily on the amount of micro the player has to do to set them up as well as the risk versus reward of the assignment.
So, let's assume three different players with three distinct playing patterns, then:
Player A: The Dabbler
Dabbles in assignments. Does assignments between standard missions, but doesn't micro too much or try to min-max the perfect selections or seek out the ideal assignments. Pretty much slaps some guys in, sends them out on long-duration assignments, maybe checks back in once every day or two.
Player B: The Average Player
Does assignments between missions, but spends some amount of thought and time into putting the right duty officers on the right assignments. Checks back into the assignment system maybe a couple of times during a night of play.
Player C: The Assignment Junkie
Spends more time with assignments, min-maxing his/her gains, than s/he even does with missions. A very hard core assignments player, in other words. Probably picks all fast assignments, really thinks about the best guys to put on the best assignments.
For each of the above players, how many hours of gameplay would you think it reasonable for that player to cap out a specific commendation category if that player just focuses on one single commendation category?
Put another way, if I am a dabbler in the system (Player A), play 2 hours a night, five days a week, for a total of 10 hours a week or 40 hours a month, at what point during (or after) that 40 hours do you think I should cap out a single commendation category? If I am an average player (B)? A hard core assignment player (C)?
I'm still fond of the six weeks to progress through a category somehow.
I would allow Player A to finish his chosen category after that time even if he didn't pay real attention just does his colonize assignments twice during his play sessions..
Player B (who somehow knows what to do) I would grant the possibillity to complete two (or three / whatever amount of categories you want the average player to have maxed) in the same six weeks.
And the hardcore player C should be able to complete the categories player B did and some.
At the risk of sounding macabre, I like the idea of our DOffs having a chance to die, hopefully not just red...er yellow shirts. However, I would like to see a chance introduced that one of the BOff's/Department heads could die. Say a .0005% chance. Think of it, invariably a main character has expired in each of the iterations of Trek, Tasha Yar, Jadzia Dax, Kes (ok she evolved to another plain of existance,) Spock...well he was brought to life, but he did die, and we could throw Data in there.
Now that kind of gut renching realism would make the game interesting. :eek:
As for the first question, let me turn it around - how long do you guys think it should take, in terms of hours of gameplay, focusing on a single commendation category, with what degree of focus on the assignment system?
It should take longer to rank up the more ranks you have. So maxing one category would be quick-ish. Two would take longer and maxing all would take months.
As for the first question, let me turn it around - how long do you guys think it should take, in terms of hours of gameplay, focusing on a single commendation category, with what degree of focus on the assignment system?
That cannot be answered tbh. We don't know timers/duration of assignments and the re-try cooldowns etc. There are tons of factors "on the devs' end".
That being said: I'll take Diplomacy as an example, because that is the only reference I can talk about.
Excource:
The current Diplomatic System is totally off limits and unfair.
It is a grindfest not seen anywhere in the game (ok, perhaps leveling a Klingon...)
The main problem with this proficiency is the randomness of the missions the dear Ambassador gives us.
1. You can not invest time to level your Diplomacy, even if you want to focus on it. It is totally up to Mr. Ambassador's mood.
2. The quests are too few and random. You have to grind up to Envoy until you get the chance to get an improved DXP mission. And even these missions are underwhelming.
3. Too few missions and variations. Go to: Cluster X. Initiate DI, scan data and snooze....
4. 10 DXP per mission is definetly too low. You need what over 1200 DXP only to get Ambassador from Envoy!
5. Cost + Reward =/ Balanced. What can I do with it? The only real reward maxxing out is the Uniform. The "Enenmy BoFF" is a common BoFF with no specialties. End
That being said. If there are no limitations/cooldowns and enough missions for each branch, it would be OK if it needed say 25% less time than the current Diplomacy. It should take a while, but not an eternity. It should totally be up to us how fast we want to level. Remember it should be achievable by a casual player who has not that time. I think you developed the System to be an alternative way of playing and advancing.
For each of the above players, how many hours of gameplay would you think it reasonable for that player to cap out a specific commendation category if that player just focuses on one single commendation category?
Player A) max. 8 weeks
Player max 4 weeks
Player C) max. 2 weeks
We are talking about one single commendation category. Since there are many others it should not take longer. Player C) clearly invests a massive amount of time and therefore it should not take any longer for him. I wouldn't want to grind months for only one category.
As for the first question, let me turn it around - how long do you guys think it should take, in terms of hours of gameplay, focusing on a single commendation category, with what degree of focus on the assignment system?
Okay, let's play with numbers!
The basic metric with the old Diplomacy system is 10 DXP per 'mission'. I know you can get more than that, but only in First Contact missions and those are rare. On average, it's going to be closer to 10.
Now, how long is a mission?
The absolute fastest way to get DXP is 'Aid The Planet'. If you buy all of the commodities and skip anomalies, you can probably do it in 5 min or so. But you don't always get those.
The bulk of the diplomatic investigation and first contact type missions should take around 10-15 minutes to complete if you're not futzing around.
Then there are the longer diplomatic missions, like mediating between the Ferengi brothers at Memory Alpha or finding a cure for a contagious disease. Or, Good Grief, having to run out to DS9 or elsewhere for a Jumja stick. 15-30 minutes, probably, but there aren't many of those.
So let's assume that the average diplomatic mission can be completed in 15 minutes. That's probably the high side, but it's probably a good number.
So, at 10 DXP per mission, how many of those do you need to complete in order to cap?
The only number I can find at the moment is 1360 DXP to Ambassador; I will assume that is the right number.
That's 136 missions. At 15 minutes a piece, we're talking about 34 hours of dedicated gameplay currently necessary to hit cap.
But wait! You can't do one after another without moving from place to place, and you can't always get one. If we were being true to life, we'd have to factor in time to travel and time to look for diplomatic missions. And I think we need to factor that in because I know it took me more than 34 hours of game play to get to Ambassador even when I was specifically grinding for it.
I would guess that the actual number of hours needed to cap is probably over 60, and that's if you're doing nothing but looking for diplomacy missions.
So let's assume I'm spending 4 hours a day, 5 days a week grinding diplomacy. That's 15 days, or 3 weeks at 5 days a week. I don't get near that amount of time myself, but we need to account for players who are putting in a lot of time on commendations; you Devs can't allow them to rank up too fast. On the other hand, it can't be out of reach for casual players either.
I think a fair benchmark is a 20% focus... The player is spending about 20% of his play time trying to rank up one commendation category.
If it took 34 hours of dedicated play to max out, that would mean 170 hours of total game play at 20% of his time. That's a lot. Assuming our 4 X 5 schedule again, that's 42.5 days of gaming in order to cap. Or 8.5 weeks.
Personally, I think you need to cut that time by at least a third. 20 - 25 hours of dedicated game play, at 20% of play time. 100-125 hours total, which would work out to somewhere between 25-30 days of gaming.
I'd rather see you cut it in half, but a third is probably more workable.
EDIT: Heretic, you're a Dev... you probably have the numbers... how close am I?
People may flame me, but I think the grind to ambasador was lengthy enough. I would aim for the average time to max out a commendation category to be around there, if a slight touch shorter. I expect there would be a large learning curve to managing the crew of a starship. As captain and adminstering to Doffs, with their variety of abilities and capabilities, would be a difficult excersize in logistics. Think of it like great generals of history. As alexander the great, conquered the persians, he had to leave elements of his army behind to secure the territory. Only through lots of experience, trial and error, and mistakes, would you learn how to manage effectively. I would support a system where there are not only a range of. Succeses, but also a range of experience rewards. On aid the planets, some of those diplomatic missions have to have been more successful/less succesful than other, for no other reason than the captains experience and execution.
Put another way, if I am a dabbler in the system (Player A), play 2 hours a night, five days a week, for a total of 10 hours a week or 40 hours a month, at what point during (or after) that 40 hours do you think I should cap out a single commendation category? If I am an average player (B)? A hard core assignment player (C)?
See, to me this is the wrong way to look at it. I'd rather see a calculation based on how much repetition the tasks will create. So something like: Commendation category A has 100 units of variety, how many times should we make the player re-use the content before we allow them to cap?
To me this is just like a normal mission...I don't mind killing wombats (Or sector defense missions, lol) for experience, but I do mind having to kill the same wombats 5,000 times to hit my cap. If there are 50 different wombat encounters though, I'd be OK killing 5,000 total if it means my average repetition of a specific wombat encounter is ~100 times.
Does that make sense? Is it applicable? Maybe it isn't, I don't know.
TL;dr---- I don't mind a long 'grind' to cap out a skill as long as A) there is an appropriately times reward stream repetition of tasks doesn't break my interest. So rather than ask how long an acceptable grind is, ask how long you can stretch the grind while meeting A) and for the 'average' player.
Remember, these missions are autonomous--so sending them on a 10 hour gamma quadrant mission would be a rank up.
Okay. But you can still do Diplomacy in under 24 hours /played. 24 is about what it takes now. You can make it steadier with short diplomatic assignments.
I'm hoping the bulk of assignments aren't 10 hours or 10 days. I'm sure those will exist for people who don't want to fiddle too much but I'm hoping a large chunk of the assignments will be designed to be 15-30 minute deals that we can do around the edges of missions, emphasizing gameplay over logging off.
So I think a 5 tier system should be around 25 hours of closely supervised work. That may translate differently if you use longterm assignments.
If people want it to be longer, I think you need more than 5 tiers... and I think this is actually a good chance to stack an extra tier or two onto Diplomacy since people will have the means to do it reasonably and First Contact Diplo-XP could matter. (As is, by the time you get those missions, you're almost done with the system.)
Most Diplomatic missions take me around 10 minutes. They's mostly scan and sprint. Once you learn which cluster missions are diplomatic, your best bet is to stay in one cluster, drop any mission that doesn't get more diplomatic XP, and don't travel, even for guaranteed diplo XP missions, unless they're in your cluster or you have an Excelsior/Transwarp to get there fast. The big key is dropping exploration missions fast. Also, I think B'Tran generally has fewer diplomatic missions so I don't grind diplomacy there.
I can get around 40-50 an hour in Diplo XP at present if I go into mind-numbing grind mode.
That's 30 hours.
But wait, the first tier can be had entirely with persistent missions that take an hour if you sprint and have the answers memorized.
So that's 1 hour for 160 DipXP.
26.6 hours for 1200 DipXP.
So that's around 27.6 hours.
You could shave off more with luck and in an Excelsior, cutting some time out of that first hour and, with luck, more out of the rest.
It should take longer to rank up the more ranks you have. So maxing one category would be quick-ish. Two would take longer and maxing all would take months.
Use something like a (cat)XP deflator perhaps?
QFT.
This is really the only way to give player type A a feeling of accomplishment without mindnumbing grind while making maxing out all categories something player type C has to really work for.
I'm thinking just make the DOff XP tree costs similar to the skill tree costs. Each tier costs more than the last, regardless of whether or not a category is maxed out. Early gains would be doable even by Dabblers but maxing a category would require either serious focus to do in a timely (i.e., a month) manner or consistent play over a long period of time. Maxing all categories would be something worth bragging about.
It should take longer to rank up the more ranks you have. So maxing one category would be quick-ish. Two would take longer and maxing all would take months.
Use something like a (cat)XP deflator perhaps?
I like this but I'd apply it in moderation.
The way I'd do it, you might have some related categories that actually speed up when you max out one.
But Diplomacy would speed up related categories and slow down everything else.
Likewise, if you're an Espionage Captain, maybe Interrogations speed up as a sub-category but you can't be bothered with Anthropology as much, so it slows you down there.
I realize opposing reputations are unlikely here but it could be neat to build them up as families of advancement.
My suggestion would be:
Make it so that having a maxed category in the family increases gains by 25% in that family but reduces your gains outside that family by, say 10% for each category you max.
If there are 12 categories and, say, 4 families, that last category could start with an 90% reduction. Likewise, you could go for a balanced approach if your goal is to get everything BUT you will progress in a single family much faster by opting for an imbalanced approach.
I have a question as to the quality of the rewards relative to the rewards available through other avenues.
Gozer has mentioned that, when the STFs are finished being reworked, that the rewards will be upgraded. Perhaps more so on advanced or elite difficulties.
My question is, could the DOff System be an avenue through which the somewhat more casual player, who does not possess the ability to invest large blocks of time in a Fleet and/or elite raiding, could earn comparable rewards by investing shorter blocks of time over a long period?
Certainly the rewards don't need to be exactly the same, but comparable: such as the Borg and Aegis sets.
Compare perhaps rep grinds in other MMOs. You didn't earn the same rewards as a raider, but given a proper investment of time, you could earn high-end rewards on the level of those obtained in a raid.
Successive tiers in each of the commendation categories (I keep wanting to call them "comcats") are currently set to be successively harder to achieve. That is, getting from 0 to 1 will take less time than 1 to 2, which will take less time in turn than from 2 to 3.
A female humanoid (Dont know yet what specie Ill pick) walks into the cantina and says loudly Who ever owns that freighter out there that is being towed away would be wise to act fast
I would presume that liberated Borg drones would be very very rare duty officers, if ad all or ever in the to be a duty officer.
Liberated Borg drones are not in the standard rotation of duty officer species. They will probably appear as uniques at some point.
I have a question as to the quality of the rewards relative to the rewards available through other avenues.
My question is, could the DOff System be an avenue through which the somewhat more casual player, who does not possess the ability to invest large blocks of time in a Fleet and/or elite raiding, could earn comparable rewards by investing shorter blocks of time over a long period?
Certainly the rewards don't need to be exactly the same, but comparable: such as the Borg and Aegis sets.
Compare perhaps rep grinds in other MMOs. You didn't earn the same rewards as a raider, but given a proper investment of time, you could earn high-end rewards on the level of those obtained in a raid.
I agree with this as a reasonable goal, though timing (i.e., at launch or later) of rewards like this will depend on the art schedule and other aspects of development.
Hey... One thing I would like to see down the road is for your DOs to come back a different species than when you sent them out.
Specifically, Kobali, Liberated Borg, and Tarchannenian, as these are all species that spread, well, virally.
Maybe you could restrict this to affecting common DOs, the ones capable of dying anyway, so as not to upset players too badly... and what you'd get is effectively a green, blue, or purple DO with all new traits and skills in place of your old DO. Might be a neat alternative to a standard death scenario.
Hey... One thing I would like to see down the road is for your DOs to come back a different species than when you sent them out.
Specifically, Kobali, Liberated Borg, and Tarchannenian, as these are all species that spread, well, virally.
Maybe you could restrict this to affecting common DOs, the ones capable of dying anyway, so as not to upset players too badly... and what you'd get is effectively a green, blue, or purple DO with all new traits and skills in place of your old DO. Might be a neat alternative to a standard death scenario.
lol, sorry, when I saw this, made me think of Pokemon evolving. Might be cool, might not. Not sure I feel strongly about it either way. But it is a cool idea.
I personally would like to feel more immersed in the game, while at the sametime enjoy some functionality with my ship. It would be nice if we could get a Priority One Message in our Ready Room of available DOff Assignments that come up. It would really be epic if you would conjur up a couple of different Admirals to hail us straight from the "New Starfleet" to notify us
Comments
If the system scores the same as the current diplomacy system at 10 points per completion and lets round a maxed score to 1350 points then it would take 11 hours to max out one discipline if each mission lasted 5 min and you did them back to back without doing any of the same type at the same time.
That said I think it would be easier to answer the question if we knew the answer of two of the three questions below.
1 How long will a typical mission last?
2 How many points will we get per mission and what is going to be a maxed out score?
3 Will be able to run missions of the same discipline concurrently?
Pure playing time? Something like 100 hours. That is if you focus on assignments only, pick as many assignments as you can, and then log out until you can get another.
Consecutive gameplay focusing mainly on assignments to reach the cap of one category. Something like 6 weeks if played daily.
Smart gameplay should allow capping of two categories in that timeframe.
If you have two categories capped that leaves players with 9 additional categories right?
Decrease progression per additional capped category by something like 10% so that the crazy people going for an all capped char have to deal with a ten times slower progression on the last part of the journey.
Obviously you cannot use a flat 10% decrease per capped category because people would leave their categories just shy of capping until done with them all so you need some kind of slow increase each tier.
i.e. 1% decrease in progression for each finished tier 1 category above the two free, add another 2% once you finished tier 2, 3% when done with tier 3 and the final 5% when hitting the category cap.
I'm fairly confident your math guys will figure something appropriate out
I hate to break you the news but that is not even close to the time it will take you currently to grind to ambassador with the proper help.
I think he meant 15 after they DOff system goes live.
Also, it depends how well-liked the executed crew member was among the rest of the crew. If he was a notorious lazy TRIBBLE-up that made everyone else's job harder and put their lives in danger with his incompetence, maybe they'll be glad he's dead.
So, let's assume three different players with three distinct playing patterns, then:
Player A: The Dabbler
Dabbles in assignments. Does assignments between standard missions, but doesn't micro too much or try to min-max the perfect selections or seek out the ideal assignments. Pretty much slaps some guys in, sends them out on long-duration assignments, maybe checks back in once every day or two.
Player B: The Average Player
Does assignments between missions, but spends some amount of thought and time into putting the right duty officers on the right assignments. Checks back into the assignment system maybe a couple of times during a night of play.
Player C: The Assignment Junkie
Spends more time with assignments, min-maxing his/her gains, than s/he even does with missions. A very hard core assignments player, in other words. Probably picks all fast assignments, really thinks about the best guys to put on the best assignments.
For each of the above players, how many hours of gameplay would you think it reasonable for that player to cap out a specific commendation category if that player just focuses on one single commendation category?
Put another way, if I am a dabbler in the system (Player A), play 2 hours a night, five days a week, for a total of 10 hours a week or 40 hours a month, at what point during (or after) that 40 hours do you think I should cap out a single commendation category? If I am an average player (B)? A hard core assignment player (C)?
Some of that has more to do with how diverse assignments are and how many you can find in the play time you have than how long it takes to get to the cap. If player A has to spend half his time tracking down 2-3 applicable assignments, even if he's capped inside a month that's going to be a drag because you don't feel like you're getting anywhere.
But if he can fly around and find a dozen or two dozen assignments easily (even if he's not focusing on his "priority" branch doing this), a 1-3 month grind per category is going to be a lot more palatable, because you feel like there's a lot of progress happening.
Making it long for the sake of being long or slow for the sake of keeping people away from the cap is never a good plan. If that means some people cap everything in a few weeks, I personally find that more acceptable than some people just never feeling like they're getting anywhere because it was designed to take Player C a long time.
With the proper help you can do it in less than 10 hours right now. *shrug*
But we're drifting offtopic. back onto the duty officers.
That being said, I understand that players who can only play and hour or 2 a week would like to have the feeling of instant gratification, which is why when you mentioned it's an optional portion of the game. You could spend 5min during your setup before doing PvP or STFs or even your dailies, and still receive rewards based on how you play.
This might become an argument for why people are asking for an offline option (ie smartphone/device app) in order to gain rewards like those who are in or like the players of category C. Albeit, it's understandable that it's probably something current tech might be able to do, but you guys are spread thin enough as it is. Probably a discussion for another time/thread, back to business. I know I'd love something like this for my Android smartphone.
If you're unable to devote time to it, while unfortunate, you'll still be rewarded. It's not like anyone is being left out, except for those who don't want to participate.
Therein lies the rub, the passives that the system grants will provide advantages to those who choose to participate, but I'm sure aren't so unbalancing that the players who don't participate will cry foul. If anything, it will give them another reason (not mandatory) to dabble in the system.
It's a game, you get out of it as much as you put into it. To gain the best (ie very rare, or unique, whatever the category that the reward falls into) you'll have to put time into it, I personally wouldn't mind something similar to the progression of the current diplomacy system or even the crafting system. Being that each commendation category would have it's own tier, T1-T5, with x amount of points would multiply it's progression already.
That being said, as the more rewarding assignments require more micromanaging, progression/time sink could be something like 40hours per commendation, ie if someone played it as if it were a full-time job (category C) or a casual player at cap and no new missions/stf to participate in were to log in and give it a whirl (category A). This is assuming I can run more than 1 commendation simultaneously, the limitation would or should be the amount of Duty Officers.
And even if player manages to max out all categories, will still receive Doffs/Boffs/loot/rewards, meaning there will always be something to do.
I'm still fond of the six weeks to progress through a category somehow.
I would allow Player A to finish his chosen category after that time even if he didn't pay real attention just does his colonize assignments twice during his play sessions..
Player B (who somehow knows what to do) I would grant the possibillity to complete two (or three / whatever amount of categories you want the average player to have maxed) in the same six weeks.
And the hardcore player C should be able to complete the categories player B did and some.
Now that kind of gut renching realism would make the game interesting. :eek:
Use something like a (cat)XP deflator perhaps?
That being said: I'll take Diplomacy as an example, because that is the only reference I can talk about.
Excource:
The current Diplomatic System is totally off limits and unfair.
It is a grindfest not seen anywhere in the game (ok, perhaps leveling a Klingon...)
The main problem with this proficiency is the randomness of the missions the dear Ambassador gives us.
1. You can not invest time to level your Diplomacy, even if you want to focus on it. It is totally up to Mr. Ambassador's mood.
2. The quests are too few and random. You have to grind up to Envoy until you get the chance to get an improved DXP mission. And even these missions are underwhelming.
3. Too few missions and variations. Go to: Cluster X. Initiate DI, scan data and snooze....
4. 10 DXP per mission is definetly too low. You need what over 1200 DXP only to get Ambassador from Envoy!
5. Cost + Reward =/ Balanced. What can I do with it? The only real reward maxxing out is the Uniform. The "Enenmy BoFF" is a common BoFF with no specialties.
End
That being said. If there are no limitations/cooldowns and enough missions for each branch, it would be OK if it needed say 25% less time than the current Diplomacy. It should take a while, but not an eternity. It should totally be up to us how fast we want to level. Remember it should be achievable by a casual player who has not that time. I think you developed the System to be an alternative way of playing and advancing.
Player A) max. 8 weeks
Player
Player C) max. 2 weeks
We are talking about one single commendation category. Since there are many others it should not take longer. Player C) clearly invests a massive amount of time and therefore it should not take any longer for him. I wouldn't want to grind months for only one category.
Okay, let's play with numbers!
The basic metric with the old Diplomacy system is 10 DXP per 'mission'. I know you can get more than that, but only in First Contact missions and those are rare. On average, it's going to be closer to 10.
Now, how long is a mission?
The absolute fastest way to get DXP is 'Aid The Planet'. If you buy all of the commodities and skip anomalies, you can probably do it in 5 min or so. But you don't always get those.
The bulk of the diplomatic investigation and first contact type missions should take around 10-15 minutes to complete if you're not futzing around.
Then there are the longer diplomatic missions, like mediating between the Ferengi brothers at Memory Alpha or finding a cure for a contagious disease. Or, Good Grief, having to run out to DS9 or elsewhere for a Jumja stick. 15-30 minutes, probably, but there aren't many of those.
So let's assume that the average diplomatic mission can be completed in 15 minutes. That's probably the high side, but it's probably a good number.
So, at 10 DXP per mission, how many of those do you need to complete in order to cap?
The only number I can find at the moment is 1360 DXP to Ambassador; I will assume that is the right number.
That's 136 missions. At 15 minutes a piece, we're talking about 34 hours of dedicated gameplay currently necessary to hit cap.
But wait! You can't do one after another without moving from place to place, and you can't always get one. If we were being true to life, we'd have to factor in time to travel and time to look for diplomatic missions. And I think we need to factor that in because I know it took me more than 34 hours of game play to get to Ambassador even when I was specifically grinding for it.
I would guess that the actual number of hours needed to cap is probably over 60, and that's if you're doing nothing but looking for diplomacy missions.
So let's assume I'm spending 4 hours a day, 5 days a week grinding diplomacy. That's 15 days, or 3 weeks at 5 days a week. I don't get near that amount of time myself, but we need to account for players who are putting in a lot of time on commendations; you Devs can't allow them to rank up too fast. On the other hand, it can't be out of reach for casual players either.
I think a fair benchmark is a 20% focus... The player is spending about 20% of his play time trying to rank up one commendation category.
If it took 34 hours of dedicated play to max out, that would mean 170 hours of total game play at 20% of his time. That's a lot. Assuming our 4 X 5 schedule again, that's 42.5 days of gaming in order to cap. Or 8.5 weeks.
Personally, I think you need to cut that time by at least a third. 20 - 25 hours of dedicated game play, at 20% of play time. 100-125 hours total, which would work out to somewhere between 25-30 days of gaming.
I'd rather see you cut it in half, but a third is probably more workable.
EDIT: Heretic, you're a Dev... you probably have the numbers... how close am I?
See, to me this is the wrong way to look at it. I'd rather see a calculation based on how much repetition the tasks will create. So something like: Commendation category A has 100 units of variety, how many times should we make the player re-use the content before we allow them to cap?
To me this is just like a normal mission...I don't mind killing wombats (Or sector defense missions, lol) for experience, but I do mind having to kill the same wombats 5,000 times to hit my cap. If there are 50 different wombat encounters though, I'd be OK killing 5,000 total if it means my average repetition of a specific wombat encounter is ~100 times.
Does that make sense? Is it applicable? Maybe it isn't, I don't know.
TL;dr---- I don't mind a long 'grind' to cap out a skill as long as A) there is an appropriately times reward stream
Okay. But you can still do Diplomacy in under 24 hours /played. 24 is about what it takes now. You can make it steadier with short diplomatic assignments.
I'm hoping the bulk of assignments aren't 10 hours or 10 days. I'm sure those will exist for people who don't want to fiddle too much but I'm hoping a large chunk of the assignments will be designed to be 15-30 minute deals that we can do around the edges of missions, emphasizing gameplay over logging off.
So I think a 5 tier system should be around 25 hours of closely supervised work. That may translate differently if you use longterm assignments.
If people want it to be longer, I think you need more than 5 tiers... and I think this is actually a good chance to stack an extra tier or two onto Diplomacy since people will have the means to do it reasonably and First Contact Diplo-XP could matter. (As is, by the time you get those missions, you're almost done with the system.)
I can get around 40-50 an hour in Diplo XP at present if I go into mind-numbing grind mode.
That's 30 hours.
But wait, the first tier can be had entirely with persistent missions that take an hour if you sprint and have the answers memorized.
So that's 1 hour for 160 DipXP.
26.6 hours for 1200 DipXP.
So that's around 27.6 hours.
You could shave off more with luck and in an Excelsior, cutting some time out of that first hour and, with luck, more out of the rest.
QFT.
This is really the only way to give player type A a feeling of accomplishment without mindnumbing grind while making maxing out all categories something player type C has to really work for.
I'm thinking just make the DOff XP tree costs similar to the skill tree costs. Each tier costs more than the last, regardless of whether or not a category is maxed out. Early gains would be doable even by Dabblers but maxing a category would require either serious focus to do in a timely (i.e., a month) manner or consistent play over a long period of time. Maxing all categories would be something worth bragging about.
Z
I like this but I'd apply it in moderation.
The way I'd do it, you might have some related categories that actually speed up when you max out one.
But Diplomacy would speed up related categories and slow down everything else.
Likewise, if you're an Espionage Captain, maybe Interrogations speed up as a sub-category but you can't be bothered with Anthropology as much, so it slows you down there.
I realize opposing reputations are unlikely here but it could be neat to build them up as families of advancement.
My suggestion would be:
Make it so that having a maxed category in the family increases gains by 25% in that family but reduces your gains outside that family by, say 10% for each category you max.
If there are 12 categories and, say, 4 families, that last category could start with an 90% reduction. Likewise, you could go for a balanced approach if your goal is to get everything BUT you will progress in a single family much faster by opting for an imbalanced approach.
Gozer has mentioned that, when the STFs are finished being reworked, that the rewards will be upgraded. Perhaps more so on advanced or elite difficulties.
My question is, could the DOff System be an avenue through which the somewhat more casual player, who does not possess the ability to invest large blocks of time in a Fleet and/or elite raiding, could earn comparable rewards by investing shorter blocks of time over a long period?
Certainly the rewards don't need to be exactly the same, but comparable: such as the Borg and Aegis sets.
Compare perhaps rep grinds in other MMOs. You didn't earn the same rewards as a raider, but given a proper investment of time, you could earn high-end rewards on the level of those obtained in a raid.
Liberated Borg drones are not in the standard rotation of duty officer species. They will probably appear as uniques at some point.
I agree with this as a reasonable goal, though timing (i.e., at launch or later) of rewards like this will depend on the art schedule and other aspects of development.
Specifically, Kobali, Liberated Borg, and Tarchannenian, as these are all species that spread, well, virally.
Maybe you could restrict this to affecting common DOs, the ones capable of dying anyway, so as not to upset players too badly... and what you'd get is effectively a green, blue, or purple DO with all new traits and skills in place of your old DO. Might be a neat alternative to a standard death scenario.
Nice to know that it might be a possibility to se them ad some point in the future
lol, sorry, when I saw this, made me think of Pokemon evolving. Might be cool, might not. Not sure I feel strongly about it either way. But it is a cool idea.
maybe something for us lifers?