The problem is Federation Captains are busy farming Dilithium and refining it. No time and equipment to explore, aid or fight a stupid war. The only thing we are fighting are other Federation Captains that try to get our ore.
Perhaps this is further evidence that...centering the entire game around a war, was 'dumb' to do in the first place.
Why limit the exploration to a daily?
Makes no sense to the person who plays the game everyday and just wants to play a relaxing game of Star Trek exploring space.
Makes perfect sense if your goal is to force players to play the storyline missions that the player does not want to play.
The lesson here is:
Cryptic Studio's needs to stop forcing people to play the game in the story they created. They also need to stop trying to create a market with all kinds of restrictions that cause massive inflation.
Someone at Cryptic thinks they have the social solution to end 'greed'.
It is hard for people to understand how you can have all these restrictions on the player based economy in name only, then link everything to the C-Store.
The market in this game is simple...one group of player goes out and collects resources...another group of people goes out and produces items...another group who wants to fight a endless war...spend the money they farmed all day for by doing PVP.
This is what happens when you let a bunch of socialist try to design a economy. You end up with pure anarchy.
At this stage of development, it seems the designers and developers want to make a economy, where no one makes money, but they want you to spend allot of time spending money.
Why make exploration a daily?
I must assume they do not want people exploring space. That certainly makes their job easier in fixing exploration missions, since no one will want to do it.
Also, the way they are going with stories is, what happens to people who have more than one character. So, they are only allowed to log in to STO and play a 15 minute exploration missions and log out.
Certainly gives me more time to play another game.
I can kind of see why Dstahl left now.
I think people lose sight that The Article of Federations purpose is to abolish tyranny.
Anyone know what's the ratio of ore to refined? Is it indeed 1:1 or is it something moderately advantageous to the player? Or is it the other way around?
Sooo... looking at these C-store prices... what happened to prices going down?
This.
Find the post claiming the Cstore prices would go down, and make sure to forward that along with the price changes to massively and MMORPG. They've ALL gone up.
Soooo, thanks to the deep and high quality QA we have, here's the problem: The damn Exploration Cluster dailies do not give Dilithium, they only give Skill Points and Bridge Officer Skill Points.
So much for the Dev statement a while back saying that they had no plans to raise the C Store prices....Excelsior and Dkyr are now 1600 and the MVAM is 2000. I suppose by now we should be used to Cryptic going back on there word.....
So it seems that a T3 or higher ship is a luxury since we won't be getting them through normal mission progression. So does that mean content at Commander and higher is going to be re-tuned to reflect this? Or are you just going to be blatant with your ham-handed efforts to get people to buy c-points?
If you can't get the gear and ships you need to play without waiting months or dropping some cash then you'll be putting off all those shiny new customers you seem bent on forsaking your loyal supporters to chase, then it won't help your reputation or reviews, which are already in the toilet.
So, after this build, who all is looking more forward to December than ever?
I will wait, to see what if anything changes between now and release, but if nothing? Well... prepare for STO to become a ghost town. Word of mouth spread across the MMO sites WILL scare players away from this game, remember. After all the loyal people leave.
If you can't find a quote from someone at Cryptic Studios, saying that we're taking something away from ANYONE during this transition, it's because it doesn't exist.
Hey StormShade I Found the Quote. What NOW?? Yall have taken away the Free Ship Plaque upon Promotion. How's it feel?
Find the post claiming the Cstore prices would go down, and make sure to forward that along with the price changes to massively and MMORPG. They've ALL gone up.
from the F2P FAQ
Q: Will there be any changes to the C-Store now that STO is going free-to-play?Top
Yes. We'll be reviewing the content and prices of goods on offer in the C-store. This includes prices for ships at all tiers. There are currently no plans to increase the price of any premium ship. For now, we know that some previously purchasable playable species will soon be free (Ferengi, Rigelian, Pakled, Tellarite), and others (Liberated Borg, Joined Trill, Federation Klingons) will be earned through other means. If you have already unlocked access to any C-store items, including playable species, you will retain that access in the free-to-play transition.
wow. the mvam advanced escort now costs 2000 just like the gal x. other tier 5 ships cost 1600, and i cant even find the tier 4 retrofits in the c store. also, captain retrain tokens now cost 780, almost twice what they are now. i have probably bought 15 of those in my time playing, becase the skill tree SUCKS and you have to respec if you want to change anything in your build. this is the most underhanded money grab of all, well until this dilithium economy :mad:
wow. the mvam advanced escort now costs 2000 just like the gal x. other tier 5 ships cost 1600, and i cant even find the tier 4 retrofits in the c store. also, captain retrain tokens now cost 780, almost twice what they are now. i have probably bought 15 of those in my time playing, becase the skill tree SUCKS and you have to respec if you want to change anything in your build. this is the most underhanded money grab of all, well until this dilithium economy :mad:
Yeah, I'm stuck in a T2 escort at RA4, and can't get anything at T5 with the 10K DL and 1,200 TP they gave us. And even if I WAS going to pay them cash just to play a broken BETA test game, I can't even get any escort for RA; gotta wait and pay 2,000 CP for it when I hit VA1.
I have to agree with your post, Klytemnestra. The problem here is the game becomes more and more about grinding and combat and less about exploration and interesting stories. It's becoming less Trek and more Starcraft.
Cryptic, I know exploration missions aren't easy to propagate, but no one's doing them because they're not interesting. Limiting their usefulness and increasing their reward doesn't make them more fun. They need increases in the random seed; not to be turned into dilithium acquirement grinds. As it is, the focus of the game has already become more of grinding the Feature Episodes and dailies for the gear and emblems. I'd love to spend more time exploring star clusters, but I've already seen every iteration of them and the rewards are worthless compared to doing an STF or a Breen mission.
You keep trying to make more reason to keep grinding, but what we really need is more content. That's been the problem with the game since the beginning... not enough content. You have a 20 level game spread out over 50 levels. If you really want to encourage more play, make playing a Foundry mission as rewarding as playing Coliseum or What Lies Beneath. Are you worried people will make short missions and get uber gear from it? Tie the quality of the reward to the length, or to the variety of play (balance of combat/puzzles/investigation).
Your efforts to make the game better by addressing gear and economy are short-sighted. The problem is content, content, content and more content. I love this game and have great gear. But I don't play it much because I'm bored. I've already done everything there is to do 4 times over. And all four of my RAs/LG were almost the exact same game with some differences in powers. My science officer did all the same missions as my tactical officer. My escort leveled through exactly the same story as my cruiser.
Perhaps this is further evidence that...centering the entire game around a war, was 'dumb' to do in the first place.
Why limit the exploration to a daily?
Makes no sense to the person who plays the game everyday and just wants to play a relaxing game of Star Trek exploring space.
Makes perfect sense if your goal is to force players to play the storyline missions that the player does not want to play.
The lesson here is:
Cryptic Studio's needs to stop forcing people to play the game in the story they created. They also need to stop trying to create a market with all kinds of restrictions that cause massive inflation.
Someone at Cryptic thinks they have the social solution to end 'greed'.
It is hard for people to understand how you can have all these restrictions on the player based economy in name only, then link everything to the C-Store.
The market in this game is simple...one group of player goes out and collects resources...another group of people goes out and produces items...another group who wants to fight a endless war...spend the money they farmed all day for by doing PVP.
This is what happens when you let a bunch of socialist try to design a economy. You end up with pure anarchy.
At this stage of development, it seems the designers and developers want to make a economy, where no one makes money, but they want you to spend allot of time spending money.
Why make exploration a daily?
I must assume they do not want people exploring space. That certainly makes their job easier in fixing exploration missions, since no one will want to do it.
Also, the way they are going with stories is, what happens to people who have more than one character. So, they are only allowed to log in to STO and play a 15 minute exploration missions and log out.
Certainly gives me more time to play another game.
I can kind of see why Dstahl left now.
I think people lose sight that The Article of Federations purpose is to abolish tyranny.
its hard to tell, but what i think is in the store at tier 3 is the ent-b excelsior costume for tier 3. might be the same for the nebula
Except the Nebula isn't there yet. Not enough Dilithium for a standard T5, not enough test points for the D'Kyr and no Intrepid or Nebula available. Makes my test sci not happy.
To everyone complaining about how much dilithium is needed to purchase items, may I ask a question.
Are you not getting any items via drops? The items in the stores are some of the very best in the game. To me, being able to go out and acquire all the best stuff should take some time. One of the things I don't like about Holodeck is that the best items are too easy to acquire. Items from drops/mission rewards, for the most part, are completely worthless every step of the way. Why? Every rank up, everyone runs to the store/crafter and grabs the very best, highest Mark gear they can equip, making all drops/rewards for the next 10 levels completely-irrelevant-vendor-trash.
This needs to change.
For ground stuff yes you do get drops, for space... it feels like 70%-90% of the drops we get are batteries which is an issue since batteries sell for so little while weapons, and especially shields, engines and deflector dishes are easily worth thousands. Hopefully the Devs will address this, but right now the only reliable solutions to getting gear is to cherry pick mission rewards or grind out crafting, or pony up dilithium.
For the person who just wants to stick to solo missions as a causal player, you'll be able to get the Breen set (which isn't bad), the Reman covariant shields which look great and are rather good shields being Covariant with expanded capacity, harg'peng torpedoes, rapid fire transphasic torpedos, the breen cluster transphasic torpedos, the borg set console piece, the cloaked tractor mines (which could prove rather nasty if they trigger doff tractor beam perks, but we'll need someone to test them to find out.) From The Devidian series people could get pretty descent phaser arrays, plus the old school phaser arrays fore and aft. At least the devidian series and doomsday machine are somewhat early in the episode chain. But seriously they should just sperate the episode chains out so when you hit the level requirement for that chain you can start on that chain without having to finish the previous chains. I'd expect this lienarity in a game meant for single players from a decade ago, but now people tend to have options about the sotryline which aspects they go for which ones they skip... with this new single track linear episode trail people have no options and are forced to do an episode they may hate and used to skip since they were disgusted by it or just hated it for other reasons.
What makes this worse is that we used to be able to do the Breen missions at lvl 8+ which had a descent leveling set people could use... Now they put the Breen stuff AFTER the borg missions... so only VAs will be able to touch the set... I see that as a problem.
As other people have requested, can we get the featured episode missions removed from the linear episode chain and return them to being independent, since otherwise it becomes impossible to do the 'featured episode rerun' stuff that has been done in the past. On Holodeck I've seen people use the featured episodes to get quick loot for use on a new tier to avoid having the gear hardships... so is that the real reason the featured episodes are buried in the episode chain in order to force people to pay cash to get anything in a reasonable time frame?
Right now I have the suspicion that STO is going to end up as a Pay to Win game despite all the claims to the contrary mostly because the cost inflation of EVERYTHING points towards that with how when you look at the Emblem conversions and if the mark conversions are similar then the price of everything looks to have jumped up outrageously.
Let's look at the list shall we:
-Removal of easy access to gear people can use to level up with from missions due to the linear episode chain (which sucked up the featured episodes and their nice level appropriate gear. Check!
-Going back on the promise of free new ships for subscribers when they level up forcing them to grind for a new ship instead of for new gear. Check.
-Jacking up the prices on all non-common gear. Check.
- Making missions so that you can't complete them without gear beyond what is easily available when you get the mission. Check. (Although this patch may be resolving this issue... Undine Dreadnought I'm looking at you. Go back to fluidic space and sit in a corner you have been naughty and I am tempted to come back with my VA on Holodeck and sp.... splatter you across the asteroid field you've been hiding in.)
-Limiting the rate at which the currency used for non-common gear can be acquired without spending real world money on it. Check.
If the devs don't respond to why they are making these changes... what else are people to think other than that the game is going P2W since they are turning the economy into a P2W economy. However this beta test is to resolve two issues, the Doff system, and the new economy. So there is a chance that with our feedback the economy will be tuned so that it isn't P2W....hopefully.
Solutions to avoid the P2W economy based on what I have seen so far.
* Remove the Featured Episode missions from the linear chain so they are sperate chains people can start upon reaching lvl 8 or 10 (Breen was lvl 10, but you could start the dividian stuff at lvl 8 on Holodeck, not sure what minimum level for the Romulan/Reman featured episodes were.) Also with new Featured Episode chains coming instead of plugging them into an existing list which can TRIBBLE things up, having them as separate chains would make adding them in easier. This would allow people to get viable gear at all levels, although that gear won't be the best except for niche builds, it would alleviate the we're stuck with Mark V gear at Rear Admiral levels. Also if you break up the chains between races so you can start one without finishing the previous ones that would also help things out.
* With the episode chaining and level scaling the gear the missions give must be converted into level appropriate gear. Why should a mission that a Captain is doing be handing out Mark 2 or Mark 3 gear?
This issue is even worse since until they beat a mission they can't proceed, and with current gear it can be difficult to beat some missions, although this patch may fix some of that, but without those fixes, the only solution was to grind out better gear which could take months, or pay to get the gear now. isn't that how pay to Win works? That is what needs to be avoided.
-- These two points being addressed would solve much of the gear issues while leveling up, people who want the extra edge of dilithium gear would grind/pay for it, but you wouldn't NEED it to just keep up with the higher level missions.
What needs to be done now:
* Look over the Dilithium prices of ships and how much of a discount gold members are getting. if this discount plaque is enough for a gold member to buy a ship of their new tier without needing to grind anything else, then subscribers won't have to grind for their next tier ship, just to grind if they want extra ships (much like we have to on holodeck, but with how Energy Credits flow like water, it isn't much of a grind at all.)
--Subscribers have been promised free ships when reaching a new rank since the game came out... taking that away now would be bad. Very bad.
*Make sure the dilithium economy is tuned before it hits Holodeck. It shouldn't take months to gear out a ship at VA with dilithium gear. However the Devs have said they are being conservative, so we'll have to see how they tune the dilithium economy once it is fully implemented on Tribble. Right now it is at its infancy so there will be teething pains. I just hope the Devs tune this accordingly to feedback.
If things from tribble went to holodeck without any economy tweaks, then yes STO would fail as badly as SWG did, however the point of this beta test on tribble as I see it is to pre-tune the economy so that it works without becoming a P2W economy, but we have yet to see how they are going to tune things. If a Dev were to post regarding this issue it would probably get people to stop crying out that hte sky is falling and that STO is going P2W and actually spend more time trying to test things on Tribble to make sure all the bugs in gameplay and the economy glitches are discovered and resolved before this hits Holodeck.
What we as testers need to do is give feedback so the economy can be properly tuned, and issues like the single linear episode chain issues can be resolved.
Except the Nebula isn't there yet. Not enough Dilithium for a standard T5, not enough test points for the D'Kyr and no Intrepid or Nebula available. Makes my test sci not happy.
the retrofits might be in the plain old space dock ship store.
turns out you can buy white boffs in space dock, they now cost 240 dilithium each though. extremely minimal station power customization is available though :rolleyes:
Well I was gonna test tribble tonight, but based on the pile of fail they call patch notes I don't think I'll bother.
I think Cryptic bring this on themselves at times. Vague patch notes that will cause rampant speculation, or even worse changes that they know will cause some negative reactions.
Devs;
I recommend you get more specific in your patch notes. Chances are, 99% of us reading 'em want detailed info.
If you're making changes that are likely to spark a negative reaction, be on hand to answer for and explain them. As of writing this its been over three and a half hours since you posted release notes with no clarification or explanation.
What is the point of releasing a build with major things broken in them? Yes we want things fixed, but not at the expense of breaking other things.
Up until now, I have been all on-board with Cryptic's changes. I was excited after watching STOked. I was hopeful they would FIX the broken Test economy. But to the contrary, they have made a cluster**** of the new economy, essentially making it impossible to get ANYTHING of value. Especially dilithium weapons.
I'm sorry Cryptic, but you're getting really close to completely ruining your one opportunity at redemption. Fix it now before you put this TRIBBLE on live, or else you can say good bye to STO, and we can all add yet another failed Star Trek game to our lists. Seems star wars gets all the good games
Meh. Increasing the price of the retrofits from 1200 to 1600 is not pleasant. I can understand the retrain token, I guess, but the skill tree is still poorly documented and an absolute mess.
Meh. Increasing the price of the retrofits from 1200 to 1600 is not pleasant. I can understand the retrain token, I guess, but the skill tree is still poorly documented and an absolute mess.
Comments
Yes, this is now EVE of Star Trek Online
Perhaps this is further evidence that...centering the entire game around a war, was 'dumb' to do in the first place.
Why limit the exploration to a daily?
Makes no sense to the person who plays the game everyday and just wants to play a relaxing game of Star Trek exploring space.
Makes perfect sense if your goal is to force players to play the storyline missions that the player does not want to play.
The lesson here is:
Cryptic Studio's needs to stop forcing people to play the game in the story they created. They also need to stop trying to create a market with all kinds of restrictions that cause massive inflation.
Someone at Cryptic thinks they have the social solution to end 'greed'.
It is hard for people to understand how you can have all these restrictions on the player based economy in name only, then link everything to the C-Store.
The market in this game is simple...one group of player goes out and collects resources...another group of people goes out and produces items...another group who wants to fight a endless war...spend the money they farmed all day for by doing PVP.
This is what happens when you let a bunch of socialist try to design a economy. You end up with pure anarchy.
At this stage of development, it seems the designers and developers want to make a economy, where no one makes money, but they want you to spend allot of time spending money.
Why make exploration a daily?
I must assume they do not want people exploring space. That certainly makes their job easier in fixing exploration missions, since no one will want to do it.
Also, the way they are going with stories is, what happens to people who have more than one character. So, they are only allowed to log in to STO and play a 15 minute exploration missions and log out.
Certainly gives me more time to play another game.
I can kind of see why Dstahl left now.
I think people lose sight that The Article of Federations purpose is to abolish tyranny.
Thank you.
Ummm.. aside from all of the other stuff that has been said so far ...
There is nothing in that link giving information on the changes in the economy...
Is there going to be another announcement concerning the economy today??
Jolan'tru
Anyone know what's the ratio of ore to refined? Is it indeed 1:1 or is it something moderately advantageous to the player? Or is it the other way around?
Oh... C-Store prices went up? Shocker.
We were never humanitarians in STO, so theres no change there
This.
Find the post claiming the Cstore prices would go down, and make sure to forward that along with the price changes to massively and MMORPG. They've ALL gone up.
If you can't get the gear and ships you need to play without waiting months or dropping some cash then you'll be putting off all those shiny new customers you seem bent on forsaking your loyal supporters to chase, then it won't help your reputation or reviews, which are already in the toilet.
Just a warning.
I will wait, to see what if anything changes between now and release, but if nothing? Well... prepare for STO to become a ghost town. Word of mouth spread across the MMO sites WILL scare players away from this game, remember. After all the loyal people leave.
from the F2P FAQ
Q: Will there be any changes to the C-Store now that STO is going free-to-play?Top
Yes. We'll be reviewing the content and prices of goods on offer in the C-store. This includes prices for ships at all tiers. There are currently no plans to increase the price of any premium ship. For now, we know that some previously purchasable playable species will soon be free (Ferengi, Rigelian, Pakled, Tellarite), and others (Liberated Borg, Joined Trill, Federation Klingons) will be earned through other means. If you have already unlocked access to any C-store items, including playable species, you will retain that access in the free-to-play transition.
They didn't say they absolutely wouldn't...
Cryptic, I know exploration missions aren't easy to propagate, but no one's doing them because they're not interesting. Limiting their usefulness and increasing their reward doesn't make them more fun. They need increases in the random seed; not to be turned into dilithium acquirement grinds. As it is, the focus of the game has already become more of grinding the Feature Episodes and dailies for the gear and emblems. I'd love to spend more time exploring star clusters, but I've already seen every iteration of them and the rewards are worthless compared to doing an STF or a Breen mission.
You keep trying to make more reason to keep grinding, but what we really need is more content. That's been the problem with the game since the beginning... not enough content. You have a 20 level game spread out over 50 levels. If you really want to encourage more play, make playing a Foundry mission as rewarding as playing Coliseum or What Lies Beneath. Are you worried people will make short missions and get uber gear from it? Tie the quality of the reward to the length, or to the variety of play (balance of combat/puzzles/investigation).
Your efforts to make the game better by addressing gear and economy are short-sighted. The problem is content, content, content and more content. I love this game and have great gear. But I don't play it much because I'm bored. I've already done everything there is to do 4 times over. And all four of my RAs/LG were almost the exact same game with some differences in powers. My science officer did all the same missions as my tactical officer. My escort leveled through exactly the same story as my cruiser.
We're not under-worked... we're bored.
But is it any different than the one we were already using at T-3 on Holodeck?
its hard to tell, but what i think is in the store at tier 3 is the ent-b excelsior costume for tier 3. might be the same for the nebula
Except the Nebula isn't there yet. Not enough Dilithium for a standard T5, not enough test points for the D'Kyr and no Intrepid or Nebula available. Makes my test sci not happy.
For ground stuff yes you do get drops, for space... it feels like 70%-90% of the drops we get are batteries which is an issue since batteries sell for so little while weapons, and especially shields, engines and deflector dishes are easily worth thousands. Hopefully the Devs will address this, but right now the only reliable solutions to getting gear is to cherry pick mission rewards or grind out crafting, or pony up dilithium.
For the person who just wants to stick to solo missions as a causal player, you'll be able to get the Breen set (which isn't bad), the Reman covariant shields which look great and are rather good shields being Covariant with expanded capacity, harg'peng torpedoes, rapid fire transphasic torpedos, the breen cluster transphasic torpedos, the borg set console piece, the cloaked tractor mines (which could prove rather nasty if they trigger doff tractor beam perks, but we'll need someone to test them to find out.) From The Devidian series people could get pretty descent phaser arrays, plus the old school phaser arrays fore and aft. At least the devidian series and doomsday machine are somewhat early in the episode chain. But seriously they should just sperate the episode chains out so when you hit the level requirement for that chain you can start on that chain without having to finish the previous chains. I'd expect this lienarity in a game meant for single players from a decade ago, but now people tend to have options about the sotryline which aspects they go for which ones they skip... with this new single track linear episode trail people have no options and are forced to do an episode they may hate and used to skip since they were disgusted by it or just hated it for other reasons.
What makes this worse is that we used to be able to do the Breen missions at lvl 8+ which had a descent leveling set people could use... Now they put the Breen stuff AFTER the borg missions... so only VAs will be able to touch the set... I see that as a problem.
As other people have requested, can we get the featured episode missions removed from the linear episode chain and return them to being independent, since otherwise it becomes impossible to do the 'featured episode rerun' stuff that has been done in the past. On Holodeck I've seen people use the featured episodes to get quick loot for use on a new tier to avoid having the gear hardships... so is that the real reason the featured episodes are buried in the episode chain in order to force people to pay cash to get anything in a reasonable time frame?
Right now I have the suspicion that STO is going to end up as a Pay to Win game despite all the claims to the contrary mostly because the cost inflation of EVERYTHING points towards that with how when you look at the Emblem conversions and if the mark conversions are similar then the price of everything looks to have jumped up outrageously.
Let's look at the list shall we:
-Removal of easy access to gear people can use to level up with from missions due to the linear episode chain (which sucked up the featured episodes and their nice level appropriate gear. Check!
-Going back on the promise of free new ships for subscribers when they level up forcing them to grind for a new ship instead of for new gear. Check.
-Jacking up the prices on all non-common gear. Check.
- Making missions so that you can't complete them without gear beyond what is easily available when you get the mission. Check. (Although this patch may be resolving this issue... Undine Dreadnought I'm looking at you. Go back to fluidic space and sit in a corner you have been naughty and I am tempted to come back with my VA on Holodeck and sp.... splatter you across the asteroid field you've been hiding in.)
-Limiting the rate at which the currency used for non-common gear can be acquired without spending real world money on it. Check.
If the devs don't respond to why they are making these changes... what else are people to think other than that the game is going P2W since they are turning the economy into a P2W economy. However this beta test is to resolve two issues, the Doff system, and the new economy. So there is a chance that with our feedback the economy will be tuned so that it isn't P2W....hopefully.
Solutions to avoid the P2W economy based on what I have seen so far.
* Remove the Featured Episode missions from the linear chain so they are sperate chains people can start upon reaching lvl 8 or 10 (Breen was lvl 10, but you could start the dividian stuff at lvl 8 on Holodeck, not sure what minimum level for the Romulan/Reman featured episodes were.) Also with new Featured Episode chains coming instead of plugging them into an existing list which can TRIBBLE things up, having them as separate chains would make adding them in easier. This would allow people to get viable gear at all levels, although that gear won't be the best except for niche builds, it would alleviate the we're stuck with Mark V gear at Rear Admiral levels. Also if you break up the chains between races so you can start one without finishing the previous ones that would also help things out.
* With the episode chaining and level scaling the gear the missions give must be converted into level appropriate gear. Why should a mission that a Captain is doing be handing out Mark 2 or Mark 3 gear?
This issue is even worse since until they beat a mission they can't proceed, and with current gear it can be difficult to beat some missions, although this patch may fix some of that, but without those fixes, the only solution was to grind out better gear which could take months, or pay to get the gear now. isn't that how pay to Win works? That is what needs to be avoided.
-- These two points being addressed would solve much of the gear issues while leveling up, people who want the extra edge of dilithium gear would grind/pay for it, but you wouldn't NEED it to just keep up with the higher level missions.
What needs to be done now:
* Look over the Dilithium prices of ships and how much of a discount gold members are getting. if this discount plaque is enough for a gold member to buy a ship of their new tier without needing to grind anything else, then subscribers won't have to grind for their next tier ship, just to grind if they want extra ships (much like we have to on holodeck, but with how Energy Credits flow like water, it isn't much of a grind at all.)
--Subscribers have been promised free ships when reaching a new rank since the game came out... taking that away now would be bad. Very bad.
*Make sure the dilithium economy is tuned before it hits Holodeck. It shouldn't take months to gear out a ship at VA with dilithium gear. However the Devs have said they are being conservative, so we'll have to see how they tune the dilithium economy once it is fully implemented on Tribble. Right now it is at its infancy so there will be teething pains. I just hope the Devs tune this accordingly to feedback.
If things from tribble went to holodeck without any economy tweaks, then yes STO would fail as badly as SWG did, however the point of this beta test on tribble as I see it is to pre-tune the economy so that it works without becoming a P2W economy, but we have yet to see how they are going to tune things. If a Dev were to post regarding this issue it would probably get people to stop crying out that hte sky is falling and that STO is going P2W and actually spend more time trying to test things on Tribble to make sure all the bugs in gameplay and the economy glitches are discovered and resolved before this hits Holodeck.
What we as testers need to do is give feedback so the economy can be properly tuned, and issues like the single linear episode chain issues can be resolved.
the retrofits might be in the plain old space dock ship store.
turns out you can buy white boffs in space dock, they now cost 240 dilithium each though. extremely minimal station power customization is available though :rolleyes:
I think Cryptic bring this on themselves at times. Vague patch notes that will cause rampant speculation, or even worse changes that they know will cause some negative reactions.
Devs;
I'm sorry Cryptic, but you're getting really close to completely ruining your one opportunity at redemption. Fix it now before you put this TRIBBLE on live, or else you can say good bye to STO, and we can all add yet another failed Star Trek game to our lists. Seems star wars gets all the good games
Can we get this fixed ASAP?
Playing till this load of &^%$^& goes live then it's quit time. Flame away could do with the warmth!
This.
/19char