I must disagree with the majority of people here.
Look at the full game experience as we always knew it:
Day 0: you create a toon
Day 7: you are Vice Admiral, with all purple gear and having purple\blue gear while leveling up because a fleet mate crafted them for you
Day 8: you start complaining that there is no end-game content
Day 9: you start pvping
Day 10: you finally understand game mechanincs and start complaining that pvp is unbalanced
Day XX: you quit the game
Ok here is the new game experience (for new players, not for us of course)
Day 0: you create a toon
Ok here the experience splits in two different paths, lets call them A and B
A = you have money and you want to spend it
B = you don't have money or you don't want to spend it
In A
Day 1: go to c-store and buy some .5 ships, effectively helping this game to last, paying the developers, the servers, the bandwidth, and so on..
Day 7: you are Vice Admiral
Day XX: you still have end game content, because you have to collect 30 (common borg salvage) x 4 (sets) = 120 STFs to be done.
Day YY: you start pvping
Day YYY: you don't complain anymore that pvp is unbalanced, because there are 1000 new consoles\doff_powers\combos that makes impossible for anyone to test every build. Balancing through chaos. I like it.
Day ZZZ: maybe you are still playing to get that MK XII set that can give you a little more dps in your arenas or in STFs.
In B
Same as A but you are VA with all purple gear and great ships after much more time, helping this game not in a financial way but contributing to mantain high the number of logged in players (we all remember empty sector blocks on holodeck some months ago, right?)
So, i definitely agree with all these changes and personally I would make dilithium prices even higher, for both crafted and non-crafted items..
Two problems:
A) In answer B (the poor / not lazy) player, you get pwned, hard, once you try PvP, because everybody else who takes the P2W shortcut through the C-Store has extra consoles and Boffs compaired to your free ships attained through normal play, it's like you're playing with a T4 ship in a T5 arena (which you kind of are).
Not everybody is like that, heck, the majority of players (pay attention to the forums) aren't like that.
It took me four months to get my first toon to RA, which was the cap at the time. Then another three weeks to go from RA to VA once the cap was raised.
I've gotten 4 other characters to the cap since then. None of them in less than two months. I'm hurrying my last KDF toon to LG now precisely to avoid having to buy a LG ship for that toon. And I'm not bored with any of them yet. Not by a long shot.
Not everybody is a power-gaming min/maxer. Not every F2P player will be a power-gaming min/maxer.
Arguing from the presumption of everybody being power-gaming min/maxers fails to realize how diverse the player-base is.
I was, until now, only a thread reader, now i think its time to say something. I play this game since release and be LTA but this is the dead of crafting. So you want Dilitihum cost for crafting, did you thing is not hard to get the rare Sampels. Devs please overrthing this plan.
Being that I think at a higher level than most people I knew this was coming and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Heck it outta be apparently clear when a company drops 50 mil on a game like this they were not doing it as a charity and they want their money back plus some profits. .
Therefore they need players... people who believe that this game is fun. What's happening on Tribble is NOT fun for me, and if it is also not fun for others, that is 50 million dollars of fail.
OK, so if nothing else works, lets look at this as simple as possible.
Option 1: I'm harvesting data samples in exploration clusters to get enough high level samples and rare particle traces for crafting. This might not be difficult, but it takes time. The rare particle traces are random, so it can take hours or days to get the right ones. Also I have exactly 1 Daily I can do while harvesting (Explore Strange New Worlds) which grants me 1440 Ore. Doing this and maybe getting supported by others I will soon have enough samples to craft for me, my alts and the fleet. What I won't have is enough Dilithium to do that, since I was busy hunting samples.
Option 2: I'm doing events, dailies, STFs and what not to get enough Ore to be able to craft for me, my alts and the fleet. This is alot more grindy than harvesting samples, we are talking about almost 11 dailies for 1 single Beam Array or 15 STF runs. I have to do this all on my own for the whole fleet, all the time I have to play my crafter to grind Dilithium. This way I don't have time to harvest data samples (or enjoy the game). Granted, they could be provided by other fleeties, but is this the future of fleet crafters? Becoming nothing else than Dilithium harvesting machines that need additional sample grinders? There is also the refinement cap, so I need 2 days of refinement to craft 1 damn MK XI Beam Array for a fleety, no matter how good or bad they supply me with material.
So I have to ask again. Is this really the awesome future we can hope for with F2P? The awesome possibilities the Devs were talking about?
Edit: Don't get me wrong, if this were Eve or a Sim where you have a fraction or character class that is responsible for providing others with resources and people choose to play them, it would be fine (or maybe working as inteded). This is Star Trek, we are supposed to explore strange new worlds and obviously going to war with everybody else in the quadrant. We are not a Federation (or Klingon Empire) Mining Corp.
I almost never write in the forums. But I thought I would log into the forums after seeing this latest update. Really everything I have to say has been said. This is a horrible update and I hope it's changed soon. There really is no point to crafting anymore, because you don't really save much dilithium and for what you do save it's not worth the time and effort to go around and scan anomalies and then rank up.
Therefore they need players... people who believe that this game is fun. What's happening on Tribble is NOT fun for me, and if it is also not fun for others, that is 50 million dollars of fail.
I agree with you completely its not really fun the only nice halfway impressing thing they did was give carriers command abilities to command the pets. Other than it seems like 6+ months of time wasted on garbage of things that do not even look, feel, or taste like star trek. Sad thing is they give you enough test points to possibly test 2 out of the how many different ones they have available so its gimmick for you to have to pay money to get more test points as well they are trying to milk this cow dry before it even goes live. On top of that this crafting mess is nothing more than a nightmare to think about. I'm just hoping some game comes along interesting enough to get out of this pit they are trying to dig us into. Heck I might even go to aion they are not as bad as these PW people are.
As player and crafter I would like to offer you feedback to the recent changes introduced to the crafting- and Duty officer systems on the Tribble test server.
The only change to crafting is that you have added an additional cost, this is always bad from a consumer point of view and I think you are not surprised that no one likes it.
Also the price increase is so enormous that I'm still a bit shell-shocked. :eek:
Dilithium is earned by doing certain missions and the amount is hard capped at 8000 per day and it is not tradable.
However crafter usually sell their goods or craft for fleet members or friends.
Charging them dilithium will only discourage them from crafting since there is no way to get the dilithium back they but into the process.
If you want to add an extra cost to crafting then do not use dilithium but EC since those can be traded and keep crafting as a real alternative to the dilithium (Borg salvage / emblem) vendors.
And if you add an additional cost to crafting give the players something in return. (For weapons and armor this could be the ability to determine the modifiers based on the type and number of rare particles used.)
Also you could allow crafting everywhere for an additional fee, but keep it free at Memory Alpha and Qu'onos.
The duty officer system is a great addition to the game.:)
Adding the progress tracker, risk indicators and the visible countdown for assignment refresh makes the system more transparent.
I really am looking forward to assign a first officer and department heads on the ships of my Holodeck characters.:cool:
The recommendations are very helpful but it would be nice if the active slot would automatically go to the next unassigned slot after assigning a Doff, thus automatically show the recommendation for the next slot.
Also a button to "replicate all necessary commodities" would be nice, it is sometimes a little bothersome to do by hand especially if you are at SFA and have to beam up replicate and beam down again.
congratulations you killed crafting and added another vendor to the game.
next on the list: Tribble Breeding! now Tribbles are addicted to dilithium and only eat if you have refinded food with dilthium powder :rolleyes:
i understand why you did it... (crafting was getting to easy, especially with anomalies thrown at you in the DOff system) but there has to be a better way!
my first suggestion would be to put an Energy Credit cost to crafting instead of dilithium.
or better yet: remove the schematics that you can buy and craft completely, and only give schematics out as loot drops and per DOff assignments
or ADD a whole new minigame to earn schematics...
how about adding crafting XP to the DOff assignments, so people who did not craft at lower levels still have a way to level up crafting, without crafting low level TRIBBLE they don't want.
this would also be a way to slow down *mass producing*, but still be keeping the "Fleet Crafter" and "Account Crafter" options viable because you can trade those items back and forth.
...and personally the very rare particles are already in place only to slow down crafting of high end gear, and it slowed my crafter down pretty good (i can't craft shields for my BOffs because those rare anomalies are always empty somehow...). adding dilithium on top of that will bring him to a full stop because i do not grind with that char anymore... with no way to trade dilithium he will not be able to trade the crafted items.
Selling them on the exchange will not be viable because that would only turn dilithium into EC, which is not a good trade.
And to craft for my other chars it will force me to grind on that char EVERY DAY because dilithium is time gated.
The fun thing for me about crafting was that i could have one char as a crafter, but send him the materials per mail everytime i spend time playing with any of my chars....
and that isn't a problem, because it is still ME playing the game. Just not on that one char.
another thought:
if now every single one of my Chars needs to be maxed in crafting, at least give me an account bank so that i can put all my collected anomalies and schematics to work without emailing them around every time.
Also @Dev Blog, if Mark 8 items are the highest mark you can get without dilithium...
well that gear is not worth it at endgame.
at the very least make Mk IX items free of a dilithium charge... not that those would be viable endgame items but at least it wouldn't be as crappy as 8... or 7 or whatever...
The next step: Cryptic sells Dilithium in the C-Store.
You know that this is effectivly already in?
Buy C-Points and get ingame to the whatever-they-call-it to trade them in for another persons Dilithium...
And this Change to Crafting is nothing more then another futile attempt to get money from us for more Dilithium...
"Hey you don't want to buy a Ship with appropriate gear in the C-Store? I hear you want to craft it yourself without paying us? FORGET IT! *Slap Dilithium on anything worth for crafting* There you go... grind or pay!"
Until now I have defended Cryptic, in that everything on Tribble is just a test and fine tunement, of the content, like with prices, for ships and consoles. How Ever...
The idea of including a Dilithium tax of ANY kind as many have said is a TERRIBLE idea. I have 3 toons that are LTs. I will not touch them again until I get word the Dilithium TAX is revoked. I had always intended to keep buying C-store points even though the stipend comes.
If this Dilithium TAX goes to Holodeck. I will never Buy another C-store point. Nor will I level the LT till this Dilithium tax is totally revoked. I have 12 level 51 characters and no desire to level them anymore due to the prospect of paying Dilithium to craft.
If the Devs are intent on actually limited the items and item farmers. Then do the simple thing. Make all items from White to purple Bind on Pick Up. Just abolish the exchange entirely, and make all items no matter what Bind on Pick up. And banish the energy credits.
I am very upset that this concept was even thought of, much less implemented as what was thought of as a good idea.
Do I want the Exeter the Connie +1?
Yes I want it. Will I buy it?
No.
I will not buy it because I will never use it, because I won't spend my limited stipend on something I can't use for just a single console. Why buy something you never use.
But until this idea of a dilithium tax is removed 100% I won't bother putting any more of my money into the game to buy C-store points. and I want to, I want to so badly. there are a number of things I will buy with the Stipend... just not anything I can't get use at VA. like the Exeter.
I feel like this entire dilithium on crafting is like a slap in the face to EVERYONE in the game. I hope the Devs will for one listen to the community, and actually follow our suggestions. and remove the dilithium tax.
What's next? Buy 500 dilithium ore for 1000 cstore points? I will keep playing the game, as I am a life time subscriber. And most of my toons are all at level 51. Minus three at LT. This is of course very sad. I won't be making any more toons, or leveling them up. Because a MK 3, purple has the same attack/console stats of a MK 4 blue item of the same type. and since I rarely use Purples at low levels. This is just my form of protest to this idea and system of a dilithium crafting tax.
The reason is I have 4 crafters. and no way to trade Dilithium between characters or toons like samples, traces. and I will be forced to level their crafting up to get good ideas at VA.
If you have to charge something for crafting, make it EC which is at least transferable. Spending the extra time flying off mission to gather anomalies, plus having to spend a chunk of time based currency makes crafting a little redundant.
Unless you plan on adding a mining mini-game and a host of new industry ships, crafting should really stay as it is.
More of the game made more difficult no matter if you subscribed or not.
Cryptic, if you want to make this good for your existing customer base, then subscribers should be able to craft everything at ZERO Dilithium cost. And those items crafted by subscribers can only by traded and used BY subscribers.
Silver players should be locked out of crafting altogether or only allowed to craft Odd Mk'd Gear.
Thanks but no thanks.
I agree entirely.
Guys, I'm NOT happy with the new crafting system at all. I don't like the push towards a total grind fest.
I have no problems grinding for premo items, but I've spent a considerable amount of time and effort getting my character to be able to craft anything, this changes my gameplay and not for the better. I understand the change to the economy, but I don't think I should have to grind to get the samples for crafting, grind myself to the top crafting tier, then grind for dilithium too.
I enjoy new content, not an endless grind.....
Charge the silver players dilithium for crafting, please don't change this aspect of my gameplay please.
There are many things I like about F2P. Even though I'm a LTS and have poured money over Cryptic in the C-Store I still think the game should go F2P.
However much I LOVE THE DOFF SYSTEM it is the only thing about the way STO is going F2P on the Tribble Server that is good. I can't say much about the STFs as the rest of the enforced mission progression made me tired of it all. I'm sure Gozer did his best though. I have heard complaints about the missing Borg space set. Not to mention the idiocy of putting the Breen missions at the end of your enforced mission arc.
Instead I rolled a KDF toon and lo and behold, things have gotten worse. Not only the annoying run in circles tutorial is still the same (as if running is a skill in need of training). But Getting to the Klingon Academy can't be done from the warp in spawn point like it is possible to do from Sol's warp in point.
No Orion ships are available from the Ship Requisition, not for promotion tokens, not for EC, not for Dilithium, not for C-points not even for Gold Pressed Latinum. Way to go.
Not only is it cheaper to buy a ship then to equip your away-team with purple gear, it is so cheap that you can get more then one ship for the same amount of dilithium. Sorry but that doesn't make any sense at all.
*edit*
I turned Captain on my KDF toon on Tribble. I got a Capt. token to get a new ship. I got these to pick between:
Pach Raptor & Vor'Cha Cruiser. Then I notice that there are two different kinds of Cpat. tokens and that one ship, the Ki'Tank Bird-Of-Prey requires the other token, the one I didn't get.
There are also 3 C-Store ships:
Vor'Kang Battle Cruiser, Ch'Tang Bird-Of-Prey & Draguas Support Vessel.
Am I going to spend C-Points to get a ship? No.
Are there and Nausicaan, Gorn, Orion or Leethan ships available. No. Only one Gorn one that has to be bought.
Way to go to make me loose interest in playing on the KDF side even more.
*edit*
I know you want to stifle the economy because a handful of players got loads of EC. Well I've asked many many players and almost none have more then 7 digit amounts. Most only 6 digits. Why punish everyone if it is only a fraction or percent you're after?
Again, I would like to and with how much I LOVE THE DOFF SYSTEM. Even though it has some flaws that I hope can be fixed before it goes live. Like a bigger cap on DOffs then 100. Some way to sort the missions on how much time remains without having them divided in to departments. Love the new Department Head suggestions. I think that somewhere the info on what bonuses/rewards we get for each DOff tier in each department should be available. If it is there already, then maybe it could be made more easily found. I've looked but cannot find it.
I've lost count on how many friends have vanished due to boredom from lack of content. I agree that F2P should be put on hold. All these concerns addressed and changed, In the meantime, release some content to Holodeck. Preferable the DOff system as it will being a lot of things to do for everyone.
I couldn't wait for this game to come out. I paid a monthly membership fee to a website I can't even remember anymore just to get an early beta invite. I then per-ordered 3 CE copies of the game (1 for myself, 1 each for my boys). I played the hell outta this game in beta, loved every minute of it. Met a great Klingon player during the end-of-beta event who was so incredible, we had to invite him to our fleet.
Any Klingon should remember how lopsided that EOB event was, he kept returning, he baited some to follow him far enough away from the pack that he got some fed blood that day, and he NEVER complained about the obvious one-sidedness and spawn-camping. I KNEW this was going to be a great game with an AMAZING community! I bought three lifetime memberships before launch.
There were issues with the game, but i didn't mind. The lack of content combined with my lifetime membership meant I could take my time leveling and step away from the game to give Cryptic time to add more. My first character hit VA right after Cryptic announced they were eliminating the free ship tokens. I've been leaving and returning for a while now. Content has trickled in here and there - NO I don't count the foundry, can't keep up with demand so have the player base create your content?! - but it has been a long road with little to show. Don't get me wrong, there HAVE been great advances and EVERYTHING that is in the game makes me happy I'M in the game.
I feel like I've been married to this above average girl that I found captivating. I've been faithful, provided for her, never neglected her, I thought she loved me back. Now, some pimp (PWI) walks in, tells her she could be doing so much better, that I was holding her back, that she can be a star desired by men who will throw money at her feet. I still love her, so I try to tell her she's just going to end up a strung out junkie, thrown away by her pimp as soon as he uses her up, I guess I'll know sometime this year if she listens to me.
I don't buy the 'its just test server' deal. This is just an excuse to see what they can get away with.
There is no way they couldn't possibly see the downsides to this before implementing it on the test server, and well, if they can't...I wouldn't even know what to say with that. I wouldn't know what's worse, the intentional pushing to see how far they can get, or just the utter lack of basic understanding of their own game.
I couldn't wait for this game to come out. I paid a monthly membership fee to a website I can't even remember anymore just to get an early beta invite. I then per-ordered 3 CE copies of the game (1 for myself, 1 each for my boys). I played the hell outta this game in beta, loved every minute of it. Met a great Klingon player during the end-of-beta event who was so incredible, we had to invite him to our fleet.
Any Klingon should remember how lopsided that EOB event was, he kept returning, he baited some to follow him far enough away from the pack that he got some fed blood that day, and he NEVER complained about the obvious one-sidedness and spawn-camping. I KNEW this was going to be a great game with an AMAZING community! I bought three lifetime memberships before launch.
There were issues with the game, but i didn't mind. The lack of content combined with my lifetime membership meant I could take my time leveling and step away from the game to give Cryptic time to add more. My first character hit VA right after Cryptic announced they were eliminating the free ship tokens. I've been leaving and returning for a while now. Content has trickled in here and there - NO I don't count the foundry, can't keep up with demand so have the player base create your content?! - but it has been a long road with little to show. Don't get me wrong, there HAVE been great advances and EVERYTHING that is in the game makes me happy I'M in the game.
I feel like I've been married to this above average girl that I found captivating. I've been faithful, provided for her, never neglected her, I thought she loved me back. Now, some pimp (PWI) walks in, tells her she could be doing so much better, that I was holding her back, that she can be a star desired by men who will throw money at her feet. I still love her, so I try to tell her she's just going to end up a strung out junkie, thrown away by her pimp as soon as he uses her up, I guess I'll know sometime this year if she listens to me.
MUAHHAHAHAHA Yeah the pretty soon the term Dev will be replaced with The Dealer. Yo you got the stuff I got the dough. Here's some high quality uncut C Points my man. Then you play and grind up a kilo of dilithium and see how much yer kilo is worth to the dealer. Then you find out some automated kid just born yesterday that does not need to get paid, eat, or sleep has just grinded 10,000 times more dilithium in an hour than you did in a week and has out bid you for your time you actually spent with your *girl* lol to get screwed by Cryptic and some fool using a bot. Yeah they put a lot of thought into this system which involved the 10 seconds before they ordered their beverages at their local steakhouse. Oh yeah the creativity is so flowing with these dev blogs that it's making me burst into tears.
This is a terrible change. It makes crafting nearly useless in my opinion.
No more fleet crafters and probably a lot less profit from crafting overall.
This is the free ship token all over again!
I think you should keep crafting as it is on Holodeck, but perhaps
add a Dilithum cost for silver players. You should also focus more
on adding more stuff to actually craft - because that is what crafting really needs.
And just incase any of the devs try to pull the 'we need to make rare stuff harder to get' excuse out of their plasma vents let me go on record with this;
Even *I* can come up with ways to accomplish that goal without ;
*A; nickle and diming players
*B; forcing them into a grind-fest
*C; time gating them
If I can think of those ideas the devs should be able to come up with more and better ones, isn't that what we are paying them for? supposedly?
Yeap ... Agreed.
When it comes to crafting, you already have to grind and grind some more just to collect those data samples and make sure you have all you need to get the item built.
And now they are asking us to grind even more to have dilithium to do it.
There is such a thing as a money sink, but we are talking about a black hole here in this game.
And you know black holes. ... The suck in everything and it doesn't end well for anyone caught in them.
I hate politics in game, but that is exactly what this all feels like ... corporate politics where I feel like they are trying to lead me blindfolded to the edge of the cliff, telling me its not there but yet I know it is.
This planned change to crafting has prompted me to post my first reply on this forum, even though I read it every day.
I have multiple alts on both factions, with one alt on each as a crafter. Under this plan I would have to max out crafting on every alt, increasing the amount of time that I need to grind samples, rather than enjoying and playing the game.
Also I would need to spend Dil on crafting even gear, gear that I have already spent a considerable amount of time trying to collect in game, and now I have to spend 15k Dil, plus 30 samples, plus 2 rare traces to craft a single item, when I can just buy the same item for only 22k Dil. This does destroy crafting.
Odd gear is gear we make do with, both in PVE and PVP, it is what we use if we have no option at our current rank. It's the ugly sister of gear. With this plan you are increasing the grind by a factor of nastiness and turning time that I could spend playing and enjoying the game into 'work'. EVE seemed to work like that, that is why I left it.
This change removes crafting from alts, fleet crafting, social crafting, actually just crafting full stop from the game. Remove the Dil requirement, use EC, or a broader range of samples, etc if you want to make even mark gear a bit more of a challenge to craft. Using Dil just seems to indicate that you want to add $ to the crafting equation, rather than make it a better system.
I will add my "dilithium on crafting sucks" vote......
It sucks, its pure greed, its uncalled for and its going to kill crafting, remove the dilithium cost...
Now i cant wait till the next moronic announcement comes from cryptic.... i wonder what they are going to mess up next..... Im going to guess that the death penality will be enforced on normal and you will have to pay dilithium to remove the negative effects ohh and at the same time all enemys will double their dps !!!!!
I agree. BUT, I still have to wonder who on the team thought this was a good idea? Because it worries me that that same person might be thinking up other "good ideas" like this later =|
No doubt the same person who thought x.5/+1s to the C-Store (and ONLY the C-Store) was a good idea. And the same person who thought that removing ship tokens (thus driving more people to the C-Store) was a good idea. Or that introducing quad-cannons (which should have been in the game freeat launch) as a C-Store bonus to the captain level 4.5/+1 Defiant was a good idea. And that the dilithium/CPoint exchange system was an excellent substitute for a real in-game method to attain C-Store products, and that due to it ripping out any and all in-game methods already available was perfectly warranted. And probably the same guy who thought that gathering all the missions into an unbreakable chain so that a single showstopper bug can derail your game entirely was such a hot idea.
To be frank, since the Rhode Island Cryptic (more accurately the STO Team, since CO seems to be doing fine) hasn't seemed to have been able to make a decision that isn't (and forgive me if this doesn't doesn't sound diplomatic, as I'm going for an assessment that's accurate as opposed to whitewashed) fall-down-and-drool-on-themselves stupid. I have no idea what exactly caused this, I have trouble believing it was PWI since many of these decisions seem to predate the finalization of their deal, but the fact remains: since the RI it's just been bad decision after bad decision.
At this point they should just rename the Path to Free to Play Dev Blogs as "Bombshells" as it would seem to be an accurate title. I keep waiting for the next one to drop to see what hilariously horrible stuff will crop up and worsen the game next.
I've said it before: they should do it like a Band-aid; just tell us all the new ideas they have NOW instead of dropping them piece by piece over a course of weeks. Seriously, just save us all the time and tell us all ideas they have in store, then tells us why they think we shouldn't uninstall the game and see how many of us agree with their presentation.
As it stands, this bit-by-bit thing... it just seems like they're wasting everyone's time.
The design of crafting as it is currently in Tribble is flawed.
It should be EITHER dilithium OR samples+particles, not both! Give people that buy tons of dilithium with their CP a way to powerlever crafting, if you like, but keep a way to craft our own gear just through exploration and particle hunting.
If you feel like dilithium needs to be a part of everything in-game, then add a token cost to crafting (something like 1-2k / recipe, about 1 or 2 days worth of exploration in B'Tran) and maybe drop the cost from 30 samples to 25.
Paying 70% of the dilithium vendor cost for something that I made myself, with even more mats, is plain nuts. People would rather stop crafting altogether. And bear in mind that this does not affect most veterans, who already have everything they want - and after this update I'm sure they will craft everything they need for 10 alts yet to come. Instead, a newbie will look at the unscalable wall that crafting will become and just go 'isn't this just ridiculous? meh, I'll pass'.
And for god's sake, make it so people will be able to level the damn thing without spending a single dilithium ore.
Been trying to point this out since Day 1 of F2P being released on Tribble. The agenda behind DL and the economy revamp is finally being understood and rejected by the player base.
No longer can people say you're jumping to conclusions or doom-saying or looking at only half the facts. All the evidence was there in plain sight from the very beginning if you had your eyes open.
I don't mind STO going F2P, but the way it's being implemented isn't good for subscribers at all. Now that people are finally starting to wake up, I hope PW and Cryptic wake up as well and decide to implement a F2P plan that respects the game their existing subscribers have supported and loved for nearly 2 years.
I'm just going to say it.
F2P on Tribble has two prime purposes. ... To see just how much they can safely get out of us and getting us use to the idea of grinding or paying before it goes live so we aren't arguing as much by then.
Toss in that by releasing in stages, it hopefully buries that last hot argument. In this case, VA ship tokens.
When they released the ship purchasing tiers, they started at what we would give them the most money and then backed it down until we accepted a less painful solution but in the end ... they are still getting the money out of us.
Dilithium is about real world cash ... the Perfect World for them.
Ship tiers are now done to steer us to outright buy those new shiney / better ships to make them more money.
Crafting is being done he same. Why?
Because coming up is the dilithium exchange where they hope people like crafters will buy tons of C-Store points to buy dilithium that others are grinding away for.
Ups the STO profit margin.
And by making it such a grind to gt dilithium in game, it raises how much people will have to pay in c-store points to get just a small amount of dilithium.
I think my post here will sum up how everyone feels about the person who thought of this.
I think the person who thought of this Let's add Dilithium to Crafting should be drug out into the middle of the street and Shot with a Paintball Gatling Gun.
Like everyones said previously, this is a terrible idea, and just an excuse to add a real money element into crafting.
Don't try to fool us by making out these changes are game improvements, pretty much all except the long promised Doff system are not, they're just excuses to add 'buy me now' parts to the game.
You seem to forget whilst hacking apart this game that if it's not fun no ones going to play it, and when no one plays it you don't get money!!!
It should be giving you warning bells that the majority of your current die hard player base have either left, threatening to leave, and are telling you that your killing the game.
Personally as it stands with these changes, i will also be leaving to play a game that's fun (most likely star wars). Currently i've one VA and am levelling up another toon and i'm enjoying the existing game. DO yourself a favour and rethink the hatchet job that you're doing.
Comments
Two problems:
A) In answer B (the poor / not lazy) player, you get pwned, hard, once you try PvP, because everybody else who takes the P2W shortcut through the C-Store has extra consoles and Boffs compaired to your free ships attained through normal play, it's like you're playing with a T4 ship in a T5 arena (which you kind of are).
It took me four months to get my first toon to RA, which was the cap at the time. Then another three weeks to go from RA to VA once the cap was raised.
I've gotten 4 other characters to the cap since then. None of them in less than two months. I'm hurrying my last KDF toon to LG now precisely to avoid having to buy a LG ship for that toon. And I'm not bored with any of them yet. Not by a long shot.
Not everybody is a power-gaming min/maxer. Not every F2P player will be a power-gaming min/maxer.
Arguing from the presumption of everybody being power-gaming min/maxers fails to realize how diverse the player-base is.
Therefore they need players... people who believe that this game is fun. What's happening on Tribble is NOT fun for me, and if it is also not fun for others, that is 50 million dollars of fail.
Option 1: I'm harvesting data samples in exploration clusters to get enough high level samples and rare particle traces for crafting. This might not be difficult, but it takes time. The rare particle traces are random, so it can take hours or days to get the right ones. Also I have exactly 1 Daily I can do while harvesting (Explore Strange New Worlds) which grants me 1440 Ore. Doing this and maybe getting supported by others I will soon have enough samples to craft for me, my alts and the fleet. What I won't have is enough Dilithium to do that, since I was busy hunting samples.
Option 2: I'm doing events, dailies, STFs and what not to get enough Ore to be able to craft for me, my alts and the fleet. This is alot more grindy than harvesting samples, we are talking about almost 11 dailies for 1 single Beam Array or 15 STF runs. I have to do this all on my own for the whole fleet, all the time I have to play my crafter to grind Dilithium. This way I don't have time to harvest data samples (or enjoy the game). Granted, they could be provided by other fleeties, but is this the future of fleet crafters? Becoming nothing else than Dilithium harvesting machines that need additional sample grinders? There is also the refinement cap, so I need 2 days of refinement to craft 1 damn MK XI Beam Array for a fleety, no matter how good or bad they supply me with material.
So I have to ask again. Is this really the awesome future we can hope for with F2P? The awesome possibilities the Devs were talking about?
Edit: Don't get me wrong, if this were Eve or a Sim where you have a fraction or character class that is responsible for providing others with resources and people choose to play them, it would be fine (or maybe working as inteded). This is Star Trek, we are supposed to explore strange new worlds and obviously going to war with everybody else in the quadrant. We are not a Federation (or Klingon Empire) Mining Corp.
I agree with you completely its not really fun the only nice halfway impressing thing they did was give carriers command abilities to command the pets. Other than it seems like 6+ months of time wasted on garbage of things that do not even look, feel, or taste like star trek. Sad thing is they give you enough test points to possibly test 2 out of the how many different ones they have available so its gimmick for you to have to pay money to get more test points as well they are trying to milk this cow dry before it even goes live. On top of that this crafting mess is nothing more than a nightmare to think about. I'm just hoping some game comes along interesting enough to get out of this pit they are trying to dig us into. Heck I might even go to aion they are not as bad as these PW people are.
Free to play but pay to win.
Another mean change to rip us off.
:mad::mad::mad::mad:
As player and crafter I would like to offer you feedback to the recent changes introduced to the crafting- and Duty officer systems on the Tribble test server.
The only change to crafting is that you have added an additional cost, this is always bad from a consumer point of view and I think you are not surprised that no one likes it.
Also the price increase is so enormous that I'm still a bit shell-shocked. :eek:
Dilithium is earned by doing certain missions and the amount is hard capped at 8000 per day and it is not tradable.
However crafter usually sell their goods or craft for fleet members or friends.
Charging them dilithium will only discourage them from crafting since there is no way to get the dilithium back they but into the process.
If you want to add an extra cost to crafting then do not use dilithium but EC since those can be traded and keep crafting as a real alternative to the dilithium (Borg salvage / emblem) vendors.
And if you add an additional cost to crafting give the players something in return. (For weapons and armor this could be the ability to determine the modifiers based on the type and number of rare particles used.)
Also you could allow crafting everywhere for an additional fee, but keep it free at Memory Alpha and Qu'onos.
The duty officer system is a great addition to the game.:)
Adding the progress tracker, risk indicators and the visible countdown for assignment refresh makes the system more transparent.
I really am looking forward to assign a first officer and department heads on the ships of my Holodeck characters.:cool:
The recommendations are very helpful but it would be nice if the active slot would automatically go to the next unassigned slot after assigning a Doff, thus automatically show the recommendation for the next slot.
Also a button to "replicate all necessary commodities" would be nice, it is sometimes a little bothersome to do by hand especially if you are at SFA and have to beam up replicate and beam down again.
Thank you,
Nelya
/edit for spelling errors
next on the list: Tribble Breeding! now Tribbles are addicted to dilithium and only eat if you have refinded food with dilthium powder :rolleyes:
i understand why you did it... (crafting was getting to easy, especially with anomalies thrown at you in the DOff system) but there has to be a better way!
my first suggestion would be to put an Energy Credit cost to crafting instead of dilithium.
or better yet: remove the schematics that you can buy and craft completely, and only give schematics out as loot drops and per DOff assignments
or ADD a whole new minigame to earn schematics...
how about adding crafting XP to the DOff assignments, so people who did not craft at lower levels still have a way to level up crafting, without crafting low level TRIBBLE they don't want.
this would also be a way to slow down *mass producing*, but still be keeping the "Fleet Crafter" and "Account Crafter" options viable because you can trade those items back and forth.
...and personally the very rare particles are already in place only to slow down crafting of high end gear, and it slowed my crafter down pretty good (i can't craft shields for my BOffs because those rare anomalies are always empty somehow...). adding dilithium on top of that will bring him to a full stop because i do not grind with that char anymore... with no way to trade dilithium he will not be able to trade the crafted items.
Selling them on the exchange will not be viable because that would only turn dilithium into EC, which is not a good trade.
And to craft for my other chars it will force me to grind on that char EVERY DAY because dilithium is time gated.
The fun thing for me about crafting was that i could have one char as a crafter, but send him the materials per mail everytime i spend time playing with any of my chars....
and that isn't a problem, because it is still ME playing the game. Just not on that one char.
another thought:
if now every single one of my Chars needs to be maxed in crafting, at least give me an account bank so that i can put all my collected anomalies and schematics to work without emailing them around every time.
Also @Dev Blog, if Mark 8 items are the highest mark you can get without dilithium...
well that gear is not worth it at endgame.
at the very least make Mk IX items free of a dilithium charge... not that those would be viable endgame items but at least it wouldn't be as crappy as 8... or 7 or whatever...
You know that this is effectivly already in?
Buy C-Points and get ingame to the whatever-they-call-it to trade them in for another persons Dilithium...
And this Change to Crafting is nothing more then another futile attempt to get money from us for more Dilithium...
"Hey you don't want to buy a Ship with appropriate gear in the C-Store? I hear you want to craft it yourself without paying us? FORGET IT! *Slap Dilithium on anything worth for crafting* There you go... grind or pay!"
The idea of including a Dilithium tax of ANY kind as many have said is a TERRIBLE idea. I have 3 toons that are LTs. I will not touch them again until I get word the Dilithium TAX is revoked. I had always intended to keep buying C-store points even though the stipend comes.
If this Dilithium TAX goes to Holodeck. I will never Buy another C-store point. Nor will I level the LT till this Dilithium tax is totally revoked. I have 12 level 51 characters and no desire to level them anymore due to the prospect of paying Dilithium to craft.
If the Devs are intent on actually limited the items and item farmers. Then do the simple thing. Make all items from White to purple Bind on Pick Up. Just abolish the exchange entirely, and make all items no matter what Bind on Pick up. And banish the energy credits.
I am very upset that this concept was even thought of, much less implemented as what was thought of as a good idea.
Do I want the Exeter the Connie +1?
Yes I want it. Will I buy it?
No.
I will not buy it because I will never use it, because I won't spend my limited stipend on something I can't use for just a single console. Why buy something you never use.
But until this idea of a dilithium tax is removed 100% I won't bother putting any more of my money into the game to buy C-store points. and I want to, I want to so badly. there are a number of things I will buy with the Stipend... just not anything I can't get use at VA. like the Exeter.
I feel like this entire dilithium on crafting is like a slap in the face to EVERYONE in the game. I hope the Devs will for one listen to the community, and actually follow our suggestions. and remove the dilithium tax.
What's next? Buy 500 dilithium ore for 1000 cstore points? I will keep playing the game, as I am a life time subscriber. And most of my toons are all at level 51. Minus three at LT. This is of course very sad. I won't be making any more toons, or leveling them up. Because a MK 3, purple has the same attack/console stats of a MK 4 blue item of the same type. and since I rarely use Purples at low levels. This is just my form of protest to this idea and system of a dilithium crafting tax.
The reason is I have 4 crafters. and no way to trade Dilithium between characters or toons like samples, traces. and I will be forced to level their crafting up to get good ideas at VA.
If you have to charge something for crafting, make it EC which is at least transferable. Spending the extra time flying off mission to gather anomalies, plus having to spend a chunk of time based currency makes crafting a little redundant.
Unless you plan on adding a mining mini-game and a host of new industry ships, crafting should really stay as it is.
I agree entirely.
Guys, I'm NOT happy with the new crafting system at all. I don't like the push towards a total grind fest.
I have no problems grinding for premo items, but I've spent a considerable amount of time and effort getting my character to be able to craft anything, this changes my gameplay and not for the better. I understand the change to the economy, but I don't think I should have to grind to get the samples for crafting, grind myself to the top crafting tier, then grind for dilithium too.
I enjoy new content, not an endless grind.....
Charge the silver players dilithium for crafting, please don't change this aspect of my gameplay please.
However much I LOVE THE DOFF SYSTEM it is the only thing about the way STO is going F2P on the Tribble Server that is good. I can't say much about the STFs as the rest of the enforced mission progression made me tired of it all. I'm sure Gozer did his best though. I have heard complaints about the missing Borg space set. Not to mention the idiocy of putting the Breen missions at the end of your enforced mission arc.
Instead I rolled a KDF toon and lo and behold, things have gotten worse. Not only the annoying run in circles tutorial is still the same (as if running is a skill in need of training). But Getting to the Klingon Academy can't be done from the warp in spawn point like it is possible to do from Sol's warp in point.
No Orion ships are available from the Ship Requisition, not for promotion tokens, not for EC, not for Dilithium, not for C-points not even for Gold Pressed Latinum. Way to go.
Not only is it cheaper to buy a ship then to equip your away-team with purple gear, it is so cheap that you can get more then one ship for the same amount of dilithium. Sorry but that doesn't make any sense at all.
*edit*
I turned Captain on my KDF toon on Tribble. I got a Capt. token to get a new ship. I got these to pick between:
Pach Raptor & Vor'Cha Cruiser. Then I notice that there are two different kinds of Cpat. tokens and that one ship, the Ki'Tank Bird-Of-Prey requires the other token, the one I didn't get.
There are also 3 C-Store ships:
Vor'Kang Battle Cruiser, Ch'Tang Bird-Of-Prey & Draguas Support Vessel.
Am I going to spend C-Points to get a ship? No.
Are there and Nausicaan, Gorn, Orion or Leethan ships available. No. Only one Gorn one that has to be bought.
Way to go to make me loose interest in playing on the KDF side even more.
*edit*
I know you want to stifle the economy because a handful of players got loads of EC. Well I've asked many many players and almost none have more then 7 digit amounts. Most only 6 digits. Why punish everyone if it is only a fraction or percent you're after?
Again, I would like to and with how much I LOVE THE DOFF SYSTEM. Even though it has some flaws that I hope can be fixed before it goes live. Like a bigger cap on DOffs then 100. Some way to sort the missions on how much time remains without having them divided in to departments. Love the new Department Head suggestions. I think that somewhere the info on what bonuses/rewards we get for each DOff tier in each department should be available. If it is there already, then maybe it could be made more easily found. I've looked but cannot find it.
I've lost count on how many friends have vanished due to boredom from lack of content. I agree that F2P should be put on hold. All these concerns addressed and changed, In the meantime, release some content to Holodeck. Preferable the DOff system as it will being a lot of things to do for everyone.
I couldn't wait for this game to come out. I paid a monthly membership fee to a website I can't even remember anymore just to get an early beta invite. I then per-ordered 3 CE copies of the game (1 for myself, 1 each for my boys). I played the hell outta this game in beta, loved every minute of it. Met a great Klingon player during the end-of-beta event who was so incredible, we had to invite him to our fleet.
Any Klingon should remember how lopsided that EOB event was, he kept returning, he baited some to follow him far enough away from the pack that he got some fed blood that day, and he NEVER complained about the obvious one-sidedness and spawn-camping. I KNEW this was going to be a great game with an AMAZING community! I bought three lifetime memberships before launch.
There were issues with the game, but i didn't mind. The lack of content combined with my lifetime membership meant I could take my time leveling and step away from the game to give Cryptic time to add more. My first character hit VA right after Cryptic announced they were eliminating the free ship tokens. I've been leaving and returning for a while now. Content has trickled in here and there - NO I don't count the foundry, can't keep up with demand so have the player base create your content?! - but it has been a long road with little to show. Don't get me wrong, there HAVE been great advances and EVERYTHING that is in the game makes me happy I'M in the game.
I feel like I've been married to this above average girl that I found captivating. I've been faithful, provided for her, never neglected her, I thought she loved me back. Now, some pimp (PWI) walks in, tells her she could be doing so much better, that I was holding her back, that she can be a star desired by men who will throw money at her feet. I still love her, so I try to tell her she's just going to end up a strung out junkie, thrown away by her pimp as soon as he uses her up, I guess I'll know sometime this year if she listens to me.
I don't buy the 'its just test server' deal. This is just an excuse to see what they can get away with.
There is no way they couldn't possibly see the downsides to this before implementing it on the test server, and well, if they can't...I wouldn't even know what to say with that. I wouldn't know what's worse, the intentional pushing to see how far they can get, or just the utter lack of basic understanding of their own game.
MUAHHAHAHAHA Yeah the pretty soon the term Dev will be replaced with The Dealer. Yo you got the stuff I got the dough. Here's some high quality uncut C Points my man. Then you play and grind up a kilo of dilithium and see how much yer kilo is worth to the dealer. Then you find out some automated kid just born yesterday that does not need to get paid, eat, or sleep has just grinded 10,000 times more dilithium in an hour than you did in a week and has out bid you for your time you actually spent with your *girl* lol to get screwed by Cryptic and some fool using a bot. Yeah they put a lot of thought into this system which involved the 10 seconds before they ordered their beverages at their local steakhouse. Oh yeah the creativity is so flowing with these dev blogs that it's making me burst into tears.
Also nice job TRIBBLE over every fleet crafter in the game.
Cryptic you fail -_-
No more fleet crafters and probably a lot less profit from crafting overall.
This is the free ship token all over again!
I think you should keep crafting as it is on Holodeck, but perhaps
add a Dilithum cost for silver players. You should also focus more
on adding more stuff to actually craft - because that is what crafting really needs.
Yeap ... Agreed.
When it comes to crafting, you already have to grind and grind some more just to collect those data samples and make sure you have all you need to get the item built.
And now they are asking us to grind even more to have dilithium to do it.
There is such a thing as a money sink, but we are talking about a black hole here in this game.
And you know black holes. ... The suck in everything and it doesn't end well for anyone caught in them.
I hate politics in game, but that is exactly what this all feels like ... corporate politics where I feel like they are trying to lead me blindfolded to the edge of the cliff, telling me its not there but yet I know it is.
Cryptic: you're overestimating profit. We want to do things for people not to gain advantages over people.
Look more at a League of Legends inspired model and less at the Zynga model.
If you want to monetize crafting?
Let people buy eachother crafting skill upgrades.Or sell anomalies for C-Points to fleetmasters as an alternative way to acquire the ingredients.
But it should be rooted in us helping eachother, NOT theperson with the most money/C-points/dilithium being more special.
There are ways to monetize things while doing that.
I have multiple alts on both factions, with one alt on each as a crafter. Under this plan I would have to max out crafting on every alt, increasing the amount of time that I need to grind samples, rather than enjoying and playing the game.
Also I would need to spend Dil on crafting even gear, gear that I have already spent a considerable amount of time trying to collect in game, and now I have to spend 15k Dil, plus 30 samples, plus 2 rare traces to craft a single item, when I can just buy the same item for only 22k Dil. This does destroy crafting.
Odd gear is gear we make do with, both in PVE and PVP, it is what we use if we have no option at our current rank. It's the ugly sister of gear. With this plan you are increasing the grind by a factor of nastiness and turning time that I could spend playing and enjoying the game into 'work'. EVE seemed to work like that, that is why I left it.
This change removes crafting from alts, fleet crafting, social crafting, actually just crafting full stop from the game. Remove the Dil requirement, use EC, or a broader range of samples, etc if you want to make even mark gear a bit more of a challenge to craft. Using Dil just seems to indicate that you want to add $ to the crafting equation, rather than make it a better system.
It sucks, its pure greed, its uncalled for and its going to kill crafting, remove the dilithium cost...
Now i cant wait till the next moronic announcement comes from cryptic.... i wonder what they are going to mess up next..... Im going to guess that the death penality will be enforced on normal and you will have to pay dilithium to remove the negative effects ohh and at the same time all enemys will double their dps !!!!!
No doubt the same person who thought x.5/+1s to the C-Store (and ONLY the C-Store) was a good idea. And the same person who thought that removing ship tokens (thus driving more people to the C-Store) was a good idea. Or that introducing quad-cannons (which should have been in the game free at launch) as a C-Store bonus to the captain level 4.5/+1 Defiant was a good idea. And that the dilithium/CPoint exchange system was an excellent substitute for a real in-game method to attain C-Store products, and that due to it ripping out any and all in-game methods already available was perfectly warranted. And probably the same guy who thought that gathering all the missions into an unbreakable chain so that a single showstopper bug can derail your game entirely was such a hot idea.
To be frank, since the Rhode Island Cryptic (more accurately the STO Team, since CO seems to be doing fine) hasn't seemed to have been able to make a decision that isn't (and forgive me if this doesn't doesn't sound diplomatic, as I'm going for an assessment that's accurate as opposed to whitewashed) fall-down-and-drool-on-themselves stupid. I have no idea what exactly caused this, I have trouble believing it was PWI since many of these decisions seem to predate the finalization of their deal, but the fact remains: since the RI it's just been bad decision after bad decision.
At this point they should just rename the Path to Free to Play Dev Blogs as "Bombshells" as it would seem to be an accurate title. I keep waiting for the next one to drop to see what hilariously horrible stuff will crop up and worsen the game next.
I've said it before: they should do it like a Band-aid; just tell us all the new ideas they have NOW instead of dropping them piece by piece over a course of weeks. Seriously, just save us all the time and tell us all ideas they have in store, then tells us why they think we shouldn't uninstall the game and see how many of us agree with their presentation.
As it stands, this bit-by-bit thing... it just seems like they're wasting everyone's time.
We are the Tribbles.... think about it.
It should be EITHER dilithium OR samples+particles, not both! Give people that buy tons of dilithium with their CP a way to powerlever crafting, if you like, but keep a way to craft our own gear just through exploration and particle hunting.
If you feel like dilithium needs to be a part of everything in-game, then add a token cost to crafting (something like 1-2k / recipe, about 1 or 2 days worth of exploration in B'Tran) and maybe drop the cost from 30 samples to 25.
Paying 70% of the dilithium vendor cost for something that I made myself, with even more mats, is plain nuts. People would rather stop crafting altogether. And bear in mind that this does not affect most veterans, who already have everything they want - and after this update I'm sure they will craft everything they need for 10 alts yet to come. Instead, a newbie will look at the unscalable wall that crafting will become and just go 'isn't this just ridiculous? meh, I'll pass'.
And for god's sake, make it so people will be able to level the damn thing without spending a single dilithium ore.
I'm just going to say it.
F2P on Tribble has two prime purposes. ... To see just how much they can safely get out of us and getting us use to the idea of grinding or paying before it goes live so we aren't arguing as much by then.
Toss in that by releasing in stages, it hopefully buries that last hot argument. In this case, VA ship tokens.
When they released the ship purchasing tiers, they started at what we would give them the most money and then backed it down until we accepted a less painful solution but in the end ... they are still getting the money out of us.
Dilithium is about real world cash ... the Perfect World for them.
Ship tiers are now done to steer us to outright buy those new shiney / better ships to make them more money.
Crafting is being done he same. Why?
Because coming up is the dilithium exchange where they hope people like crafters will buy tons of C-Store points to buy dilithium that others are grinding away for.
Ups the STO profit margin.
And by making it such a grind to gt dilithium in game, it raises how much people will have to pay in c-store points to get just a small amount of dilithium.
More real world money for them.
That is what it's all about, my friends.
I think the person who thought of this Let's add Dilithium to Crafting should be drug out into the middle of the street and Shot with a Paintball Gatling Gun.
By every single person who hates this idea.
Don't try to fool us by making out these changes are game improvements, pretty much all except the long promised Doff system are not, they're just excuses to add 'buy me now' parts to the game.
You seem to forget whilst hacking apart this game that if it's not fun no ones going to play it, and when no one plays it you don't get money!!!
It should be giving you warning bells that the majority of your current die hard player base have either left, threatening to leave, and are telling you that your killing the game.
Personally as it stands with these changes, i will also be leaving to play a game that's fun (most likely star wars). Currently i've one VA and am levelling up another toon and i'm enjoying the existing game. DO yourself a favour and rethink the hatchet job that you're doing.