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Adding dilithium to crafting. Everyone else is ranting about it, but I have a few points to make I haven't seen anywhere else, and really, Cryptic needs to be made aware of how infuriated everyone is over this. I sure am.
First off, to quote another forum post (located here), in the new system it will take a total of 220,000 dilithium to make a full set of top-end gear. And that's only the top-end stuff; what about Rear Admiral gear? Captain gear? And every rank below that? Sure, you don't need full sets of purples at below Vice Admiral, but you still need at least some good gear, which is apparently either going to cost dilithium to craft, or dilithium to buy.
But even looking purely at a top-end gear set, 220,000 dilithium is an insanely large amount. There is a limit of refining 8,000 raw dilithium every day; let's be very generous and assume a player is willing to spend a few hours a day to actually get that much raw dilithium every day; being more generous, let's assume they can somehow obtain the same amount of dilithium every day for 16,000 every day (this definitely taking several hours to obtain). Even at that rate it takes 14 days to gather the required amount of dilithium, or two weeks. That's two weeks of spending several hours, every day, to finally get the dilithium for your top-end items.
And then you ALSO have to farm up all of the particles and particle traces.
So even if you cram in most of your time every single day into farming it's two weeks of rigorous work to get your items. More like a month if you put in a more reasonable amount of playtime per day; maybe longer. And that's only for the VA items. And oh, it doesn't even stop there, does it? Because as it is, the VA ships are C-Store only. Meaning you need to farm up even MORE dilithium to trade for C-store points, just to get your ship and THEN you do weeks of farming to equip it well.
Now, I grant you that you can use lower-level stuff (the odd-numbered Marks) much more easily. But let's face it, eventually, every single player will want that set of Mark XI purples. So every player is going to need to put in this much work eventually.
Besides this being a stupidly huge amount of work, I refer whoever's reading this (hopefully including some Cryptic employees) to this F2P dev blog post. As it says:
"The Dilithium currency is something that we think many starship captains will never need in quantity. If you enjoy playing the episode story line, getting your crew decked out with moderate gear, and so on, you may not need a single unit of Dilithium. The only exception might be the expense of Captain and Rear Admiral ship upgrades for Silver players, which may require a few hours of Dilithium mission play."
So, apparently 'never need in quantity' means 'need several hundred thousand of it.' And apparently 'a few hours" is "several dozen hours over many days or weeks.'
But the latest F2P blog (as of this post) does state Cryptic's reasons for adding dilithium to crafting:
"The introduction of Dilithium as a cost on these schematics reduces the ability to mass produce high-end gear, which is being done intentionally to increase the difficulty of acquiring such gear."
So in their own words, Cryptic is deliberately trying to make it harder to get the best available items at any level, and the best items period.
To which I have to ask, why?
I'm trying to be as civil as I can, but this is utterly infuriating to me. I am part of a five-person fleet. We're all real-life friends, so we trust each other to share resources and items nicely. Three of us are Vice Admirals so far, and we all have been for over a week now, and we still only have half-full sets of top-quality items; even with our fleet all farming particle traces together we haven't found enough of them (both raw tier 5 traces and particularly Anyon traces) to give everyone the weapons and armor they want yet, and we're gong to have a fourth vice admiral soon who will need even more equipment. Equipping a fleet with the best available gear already takes a lot of time and effort; we've put in at least two hours of work each for over a week and we're still working on our top-end gear, and adding dilithium would tack on even more work for us, as explained above.
I am frankly amazed that Cryptic thinks it would be a good idea to deliberately make having a maxed out-character (the most satisfying achievement you can really get in this game) so much harder, and I would honestly like to know why they're doing this.
And the worst part of all of this is that it's going to hit newbies the hardest. Me and my fleet are relatively new to the admiral ranks, but we at least have half sets of top-end gear. A lot of VAs out there probably have maxed-out or close to maxed-out gear, so this dilithium cost won't mean anything to people at the top. But it will make a huge difference to any new players who come to the game. At best, it will mean they have to go through huge amounts of extra work to get the same kind of awesome VA characters everyone else as. And that's assuming this isn't Cryptic making some money-making move of trying to get people to buy C-store points to get their dilithium. So, for newbies (or for that matter, for people starting alt characters; you do get more than one character slot, after all), either you have to put in far, far more work than people have had to previously to get the same things they had, or you'll have to spend cash to get what other people were able to get without buying it.
Whew... sorry this post has been so long. Let me try to provide a bit of a summary then:
The move to add dilithium to crafting is a deliberate attempt to make reaching the pinnacle of the game harder and more time-consuming, and thus inherently makes top-level content like STFs (where good gear is a must) either harder or take longer to actually get to. Instead of hitting Vice Admiral being the high point of the game, it will now be a major let-down when you not only need to farm (or spend cash) just to get your top-end ship, but also to get gear above Mark IX for it (unless you have an incredibly large amount of energy credits, but with crafting getting more expensive the prices of items on the exchange are going to skyrocket).
This move hurts all players. It hurts existing players who aren't maxed-out yet. It hurts anyone who starts an alt character, which will discourage playing Klingon characters (which is already not a terribly exciting prospect with their limited content) or trying out a new race or class. And it hurts newbies who will now have to trudge through more grinding than any existing maxed-out VAs did.
And what's more, this is probably going to hurt Cryptic. Many people have posted on these forums that this F2P change is enough to make them want to stop playing and/or warn their friends away from this game instead of encouraging them to play it, and you can count me among them. And if people don't want to start new characters because it takes such a large amount of time and effort to max them out, then they're not going to buy that many of the C-Store races, costumes or other purchases that they might buy to use for a new character.
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, and I hope this little essay doesn't come across that way. I'm just trying to make everyone better off.
First off, to quote another forum post (located here), in the new system it will take a total of 220,000 dilithium to make a full set of top-end gear. And that's only the top-end stuff; what about Rear Admiral gear? Captain gear? And every rank below that? Sure, you don't need full sets of purples at below Vice Admiral, but you still need at least some good gear, which is apparently either going to cost dilithium to craft, or dilithium to buy.
But even looking purely at a top-end gear set, 220,000 dilithium is an insanely large amount. There is a limit of refining 8,000 raw dilithium every day; let's be very generous and assume a player is willing to spend a few hours a day to actually get that much raw dilithium every day; being more generous, let's assume they can somehow obtain the same amount of dilithium every day for 16,000 every day (this definitely taking several hours to obtain). Even at that rate it takes 14 days to gather the required amount of dilithium, or two weeks. That's two weeks of spending several hours, every day, to finally get the dilithium for your top-end items.
And then you ALSO have to farm up all of the particles and particle traces.
So even if you cram in most of your time every single day into farming it's two weeks of rigorous work to get your items. More like a month if you put in a more reasonable amount of playtime per day; maybe longer. And that's only for the VA items. And oh, it doesn't even stop there, does it? Because as it is, the VA ships are C-Store only. Meaning you need to farm up even MORE dilithium to trade for C-store points, just to get your ship and THEN you do weeks of farming to equip it well.
Now, I grant you that you can use lower-level stuff (the odd-numbered Marks) much more easily. But let's face it, eventually, every single player will want that set of Mark XI purples. So every player is going to need to put in this much work eventually.
Besides this being a stupidly huge amount of work, I refer whoever's reading this (hopefully including some Cryptic employees) to this F2P dev blog post. As it says:
"The Dilithium currency is something that we think many starship captains will never need in quantity. If you enjoy playing the episode story line, getting your crew decked out with moderate gear, and so on, you may not need a single unit of Dilithium. The only exception might be the expense of Captain and Rear Admiral ship upgrades for Silver players, which may require a few hours of Dilithium mission play."
So, apparently 'never need in quantity' means 'need several hundred thousand of it.' And apparently 'a few hours" is "several dozen hours over many days or weeks.'
But the latest F2P blog (as of this post) does state Cryptic's reasons for adding dilithium to crafting:
"The introduction of Dilithium as a cost on these schematics reduces the ability to mass produce high-end gear, which is being done intentionally to increase the difficulty of acquiring such gear."
So in their own words, Cryptic is deliberately trying to make it harder to get the best available items at any level, and the best items period.
To which I have to ask, why?
I'm trying to be as civil as I can, but this is utterly infuriating to me. I am part of a five-person fleet. We're all real-life friends, so we trust each other to share resources and items nicely. Three of us are Vice Admirals so far, and we all have been for over a week now, and we still only have half-full sets of top-quality items; even with our fleet all farming particle traces together we haven't found enough of them (both raw tier 5 traces and particularly Anyon traces) to give everyone the weapons and armor they want yet, and we're gong to have a fourth vice admiral soon who will need even more equipment. Equipping a fleet with the best available gear already takes a lot of time and effort; we've put in at least two hours of work each for over a week and we're still working on our top-end gear, and adding dilithium would tack on even more work for us, as explained above.
I am frankly amazed that Cryptic thinks it would be a good idea to deliberately make having a maxed out-character (the most satisfying achievement you can really get in this game) so much harder, and I would honestly like to know why they're doing this.
And the worst part of all of this is that it's going to hit newbies the hardest. Me and my fleet are relatively new to the admiral ranks, but we at least have half sets of top-end gear. A lot of VAs out there probably have maxed-out or close to maxed-out gear, so this dilithium cost won't mean anything to people at the top. But it will make a huge difference to any new players who come to the game. At best, it will mean they have to go through huge amounts of extra work to get the same kind of awesome VA characters everyone else as. And that's assuming this isn't Cryptic making some money-making move of trying to get people to buy C-store points to get their dilithium. So, for newbies (or for that matter, for people starting alt characters; you do get more than one character slot, after all), either you have to put in far, far more work than people have had to previously to get the same things they had, or you'll have to spend cash to get what other people were able to get without buying it.
Whew... sorry this post has been so long. Let me try to provide a bit of a summary then:
The move to add dilithium to crafting is a deliberate attempt to make reaching the pinnacle of the game harder and more time-consuming, and thus inherently makes top-level content like STFs (where good gear is a must) either harder or take longer to actually get to. Instead of hitting Vice Admiral being the high point of the game, it will now be a major let-down when you not only need to farm (or spend cash) just to get your top-end ship, but also to get gear above Mark IX for it (unless you have an incredibly large amount of energy credits, but with crafting getting more expensive the prices of items on the exchange are going to skyrocket).
This move hurts all players. It hurts existing players who aren't maxed-out yet. It hurts anyone who starts an alt character, which will discourage playing Klingon characters (which is already not a terribly exciting prospect with their limited content) or trying out a new race or class. And it hurts newbies who will now have to trudge through more grinding than any existing maxed-out VAs did.
And what's more, this is probably going to hurt Cryptic. Many people have posted on these forums that this F2P change is enough to make them want to stop playing and/or warn their friends away from this game instead of encouraging them to play it, and you can count me among them. And if people don't want to start new characters because it takes such a large amount of time and effort to max them out, then they're not going to buy that many of the C-Store races, costumes or other purchases that they might buy to use for a new character.
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited, and I hope this little essay doesn't come across that way. I'm just trying to make everyone better off.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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But.. 2 weeks is NOTHING in the world of MMO's to get top gear.
In WoW I had worked for MONTHS to get my DK geared up with all top gear. That was tons of 7+ hour raids several times a week, dailies, arenas,...
Man... 2 weeks of casual gaming is NOTHING to complain about.
Do a 40 man run with a bunch of people lagging and just not knowing what they are doing..and be dependent on them winning to get your gear.. IF you win the roll.
NOT FUN.
This is really no big deal
Frankly, I feel we have been spoiled in how easy it is to get gear in this game.
Now, the gear will mean something.
Let me start with my belief that requiring dilithium for crafting is idiotic and will only discourage new players from attempting it. Now let's get into the why of that.
Assuming you are a good little drone and do all the story missions (another bad idea, taking away the freedom of choice in how we level, but that's another rant) you will unlock the breen missions not long before/ after you hit VA. Now these missions provide you with the cluster torpedo, shields, deflector, and engine. All free of dilithium. But so what? You still need ship weapons, personal shields, and ground weapons. That is correct. Now enter the devidian series with its purple personal shields and blue ship and ground weapons.
Armed with these less than stellar but good enough weapons and equipment you can now start grinding the STFs for the Borg gear, which is also free of dilithium last I checked. So please, explain to me why I would ever spend my dilithium to craft?
Logic dictates that the dilithium cost be removed from crafting and, if necessary, a different gating mechanic put in place.
If that's how WoW works, good for them, but this isn't WoW. This is all a matter of relative time. Maybe adding two weeks to the WoW process of getting gear isn't significant, but if STO is faster-paced in general, then that time is a lot more significant here. This is only my opinion, but I think MMOs like WoW where things do take that much work are bad for just that reason. STO is the first MMO I have played and really stuck with, precisely because it doesn't demand such an incredible investment of time and/or money that WoW or the like does. This is probably a difference of opinion between different crowds of MMO players, so we probably won't agree over this point.
However, time aside, there is another more important point here. Even if this grinding is easy compared to WoW, it is still getting harder. If you're going to make something in a video game harder, you should have some sort of good reason to do it, otherwise all you're going to do is annoy or anger your players.
Also, I don't think the amount of time per day it takes to gather 8,000+ dilithium is "casual." I usually play Tribble 3-4 hours per day and I usually get no more than 3,000-4,000 dilithium in that time.
I've played WoW for 5 years, there is a huge difference between getting gear from crafting or getting gear from raiding. If you ask me people have the full right to be ****ed off about this. You need crafted gear in WoW as a start set to enter raids, it's no different here in STO. Before you can really get started on the harder STF's (hard/ elite difficulty settings) you're gonna want to have good gear already if you want to be successful at them.
Comparing aquiring WoW raid items with STO craft items is comparing apples with oranges.
Cryptic says most players have not hit captain yet. So most silver accounts are never going to need dilithium to buy a ship, or high end gear. Dilithium has been added to crafting for one reason, to help create a demand for dilithium. I just don't see it working out that way.
The best solution I can see for this is to add a store at Memory Alpha that carries the rare particle traces and sells them for dilithium. In this setup there will still be a higher demand for dilithium and fleet crafters don't have to be screwed because the people they are crafting for can supply them with the needed particle traces. For solo crafters you can gather your dilithium while you are grinding anomalies in exploration clusters.
HaloPi, you have a lot of good points, and while the grind is still going to be less than some other games, it's going to be a lot harder than others. I think you raise a lot of valid points about who discouraged people will be seeing what they could have had vs. what they're stuck with.
And the kinds of people who dig Star Trek are not the same kinds that dig WoW, etc. The main new player base for this game will be all the hardcore Trekkies who either could not afford to subscribe before or were not gamers willing to shell out money for a game they weren't even sure they'd enjoy. So basically nerds who are either poor or frugal. These people are not going to spend an excessive amount of C-Store purchases or upgrading to Gold. What Cryptic/Perfect World needs to understand is that many of these people will not have time to spend grinding either. This game is a perfect conceptual fit for casual gamers, but many of these moves are turning it into a game for hardcore gamers. Champions (their model for F2P success) can be all things to all people. A game based on Star Trek will never simultaneously have the same broad appeal to both casual older Trekkies with kid & job as well as 19 year old upper-middle-class kids with hours a day on hand.
So the most likely new player influx is going to be the group most likely to be turned off by grinding and repetition. They want the stories, the magic, the TREK of it all.
Also, consider this: Many of the C-Store items (especially the lower-tier ships, costume variants and playable races) are purchases that require Alt characters! How many people are going to buy an Oberth, Thunderchild or Excelsior ship from the C-Store when they only have one other character slot, and gearing up that first character was such a pain!? The more they make things "difficult" to get, the more they're actually discouraging sales of their items!
Anyway, very thoughtful and thought-provoking post, HaloPi. Let's hope the message gets across.
I disagree.
WoW and dozens of other MMO's have MANY MANY recipes that require special hard-to-get materials to make items. These items are also an investment in time. This is just an attempt to move the crafting of this game into something a bit more difficult, in the sense of time put in.
I think it is funny how nothing can be right, when it comes to this.
Let's be real here.
Crafting,.. you can max it out in 20 minutes, once you get the mats. Those are not that hard to get either. Just grab them as you do missions.
Rare particles. Well, those are also on the AH, if you really want them. But even if not, you probably have most of what you need just from doing the collecting of the materials you used to grind.
It really is not hard to raise this up.
To say that people need "fleet crafters" is just saying "my people in my fleet are so lazy that they can't grind the most simple crafting system ever devised in an MMO"
Cryptic is attempting to do something they should have done from the beginning...
They are attempting to make a system where time has value. Where if you put more time into your character than somebody else, you will have better stuff.
That is not uncommon in any MMO.
It is like when I read how easy PvE is (and it is) and then the first time they raise the difficulty to the point where it is a challenge, people complain it is too darn hard.
There is no way for them to win this. I can't see any.
Frankly, this is a step that will reward long term players and encourage people to stay longer, if they want the better gear.
I think there is nothing abnormal about that, in the world of MMO's
Aww, well, thanks. (And everyone here has been making some other excellent points too!) And let's hope the message does get across indeed.
I'm fairly hopeful Cryptic will eventually either reduce or eliminate these new deuterium costs. They did give in on the free ship issue earlier, after all, as opposed to just discount tokens; people spoke out, and Cryptic listened, so hopefully that continues.
Also, I do think the changes being tested in Tribble are mostly for the better. For example, the latest F2P blog (since the crafting one) seems like it's bringing very positive changes to the STF missions. Dividing them into more manageable time chunks and adding the STFs to the PvE system will both remove a lot of obstacles to people getting these missions done. Making STFs more accessible is a good move; and they're not just making it all easier, either, because the Elite mode is there for those who have mastered the game and want to truly challenge themselves, and also provide extra reward.
As a note, if Cryptic wants top-end items to be more significant, this is a far better way to do so than the dilithium idea in my opinion, by adding a new tier of equipment that takes real dedication and skill to obtain, but provides benefits to make it truly worth it, much as the Borg set is. As a real-world friend of mine said: you don't mess with someone who has a borg set casually. It not only means they have good gear, it means they know how to play well enough to earn it too. Adding this new tier of difficulty and rewards provides exactly this kind of benefit, so I hope Cryptic embraces this idea over the dilithium in crafting idea.
EDIT, because of post while I was making this posting:
If you feel this game is too easy, I would like to point out one key factor in many video games: difficulty levels. Not the levels themselves, but rather what it implies: different people like different levels of difficulty. Some people (like yourself, I'd venture to guess based on your statements) want video games that take large amounts of time/effort/skill to succeed at because you enjoy the satisfaction of such hard accomplishments. Others (myself included) prefer the casual-type difficulties. We're just here to have fun.
If you feel STO should have content that requires such major effort, then by all means I think such content should be added; perhaps whole new sets of uber-expensive and hard to get items and missions against truly hard and dangerous foes to use the gear in, in line with the WoW raids you keep mentioning. Add all of that you want, but I think it is vital to add: you shouldn't do so by making it harder for everyone. STO is inviting to me and all my friends precisely because it can be played fairly casually; STO is the only MMO any of us play for this reason.
I don't intend any offense to you or any other player or MMO, but to be frank: if you want content more like WoW's, by all means, suggest/ask that Cryptic add such content to the game. But if you instead ask Cryptic to change all of their current content and make it harder, you would be ruining it for the casual players.
And if STO can't satisfy what you think MMOs need to be without making the game harder for everyone, I would like to remind you that WoW and any number of other MMOs are out there for you to play.
But I don't like WOW because it is what it is.
So I don't play WOW anymore, I want have fun while playing
not feeling Forced 2 Pay (F2P) and irritated.
So if STO irritates me I will not play it and not buy anything in C store.
WoW was released in November of 2004. It only had two true raids. (And some semi-raid dungeons; but that's an odd mechanic to really put your finger on, because it depends on if you define "Raid" in early WoW life as the level 40-man compositions, or any instance requiring you to make a "Raid" group of more than 5 players)
It's third raid was released in July of 2005, 8 months later.
Anyway, Raid is probably not the best comparison. STFs sit somewhere in the middle between a modern conventional MMO's 'instance/dungeon/heroic mode' and a 'raid', given STO's slower/more-casual paced gameplay.
Right now, the STFs are ridiculously easy, that I've seen people that don't even really seem to know which way is up clear them, so the current "Normal" mode STFs (Infected and CUre) are like your intro level dungeons. With the promise of the "Elite" modes being something much more intellectually and tactically challenging.
With the, hopeful, end result, of the subsequent STFs getting appropriately harder till they eventually work their way up into 'heroic mode' and proper 'raid coordination' level modes.
That depends on when you were asking that question, compared to the life cycle on this game.
To say that this game has a difficulty level at all would be false. How many videos do I have to watch where people completely un-equip their entire bridge officer staff and circle strafe down everybody. The "Difficulty" slider only increases how long it takes to kill these yellow bus AI captains. There is really no difficulty in STO. Heck, even dying means little to nothing. Just respawn and run right back into battle. No fuss, no muss.
We have been completely spoiled in this game. How is difficulty associated with something that just takes a time investment? They are not asking you to fight some mega boss or something. They are simply saying that these good quality pieces of gear are going to take longer to get. It is not hard to get them. Not at all. What I am hearing here is "I want it now." Many aspects of this game have been exactly that. It is time to change that. I could not think of a better time to do it.
Once again, this is not a situation that defines difficulty. It is a situation that defines a time investment. That is still a very very easy thing to do. If you play STO, then eventually you will have all the purple stuff you can stand and have so much dilithium you can instantly equip all your alts when they hit max level. There is no difficulty raise here... only a time investment raise. This does not effect the "casual" player, because they are not being forced into raids or anything. It is just time. Something a "casual" player would have no real problem finding.
Please post where I am not satisfied (other than the PvP issues). Also, I am a lifetime member. ALSO I play Perfect World, Aion, Champions Online, Guild Wars and a variety of other games. I have my "other MMO's are out there for you to play."
There is no increase in difficulty curve here. The AI is just as dumb. The missions are the same. What people are complaining about is the lack of "drive thru window" purples. You know.. I just hit VA and in 3 minutes I have completely crafted everything I need to max.
OH NO, now you have to spend a few weeks to get the same result.
Big deal.
It is not like this makes the game harder. It really doesn't. Maybe now people will have more incentive to do the STF's, because they want to save some time in crafting, by getting a set. If they don't .. then they can just wait.
But it makes 0.. ZERO difference in the game difficulty. It just makes people upset that they can't have it NOW.
That is really what it comes down to.
That doesn't mean STO "doesn't have a difficulty." It means it has a difficulty of "easy."
Okay... why? Why do you think this game needs to be harder for everyone?
1. What is wrong with having an easy content part (what we have now) and adding more harder content, as I've proposed?
2. Again, what I also already proposed: Don't make this game harder for the rest of us who like it how it is. You think this game is too easy, fine. The key word is you. Me (and others who have spoken in this and other threads) like the difficulty (or lack thereof, whatever you want to call it) of this game as is. Unless a majority of people feel like you do that this game is too easy, you're going to be ruining/decreasing the enjoyment of the game for the majority to suit a minority, which is not a good move.
Yes, casual players have the time to add weeks to their maxing-out grinding. The point is we don't want to take that much extra time. And again, unless a majority of people agree with you that this game is way too easy, see the above point about not making it harder for all of us who like it how it is.
The fact that you think this game is too easy is what I see as you being not satisfied.
And if you have all those other MMOs, then I encourage you to play them if you don't like STO and its lack of difficulty.
I never said I wanted it all now. As I said in my first post, my fleet has been working on full purple sets for a while now and we still don't have them. I don't think you should have a full set of purples one hour or one day after hitting VA. But I think the amount of time it takes as is is long enough, and there is no need to add more to it.
Really, this all seems to come down to one point, which you never directly responded to:
You think STO has no difficulty in it and you think the best gear is too easy to obtain. That's fine. The proper answer to that, however, is to go play an MMO that doesn't have those problems for you, WoW or whatever other game(s) you have. The proper answer is not to make the entire game harder when (going based on what forum posts I've seen and what players I've talked to) the majority of people seem to like the game's difficulty (or lack thereof) as-is; again, please don't ask Cryptic to make all of our gameplay experiences less fun when there are other MMOs you can go play that do these things right for you.
And again, I will ask this: is there anything wrong with leaving the current gameplay as easy as it is and adding a new level of harder, challenging, time-consuming play for high-level players, like what the new Elite STFs (at least in theory) will be? As far as I can tell, that would make both of us happy.
Easy would be an upgrade. Their difficulty level is "falls asleep at desk and wins"
1) Nothing
2) It does not make it harder. It makes it take more time. Nothing about this changes the game difficulty level. Frankly, this is not uncommon in MMO's to have to EARN the best gear. Even this "grind" is nothing compared to every game I have played in the MMO world.... EVER.
Nothing is harder. Only longer. You will still get it. Nothing in this game currently represents a time investment. Frankly it is time that there is such.
And I do play them. I will and do play this as well. Once again, I never said I did not like STO. Those are YOUR worlds. I will play what I want, when I want, how I want, thank you very much.
Difficulty.. none of that is changed by this. Only a time investment. Please get that into your head. Nothing in this game is made harder by these changes. Not----one
thing."
Nope, you never said you wanted to have it now. What you have complained about is difficulty changes which don't exist and how it will now take much longer to get your gear. But the truth of the matter is this. The heart of the matter is that people want it NOW. They want to hit VA, max gear and go. This prevents it from happening in 3 minutes. Maybe YOU don't want stuff instantly,..but it would be a good guess that the vast majority of those complaining do.
The proper answer is to make the game have some value for the time you spend in it. Once again, from the cheap seats. THIS HAS NO EFFECT ON THE DIFFICULTY OF THE GAME IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER, AS THE AI IS AS DUMB AS A BOX OF CHEERIOS AND IF YOU CANNOT BEAT THEM YOU SHOULD JUST LOG OUT AND STOP PLAYING VIDEO GAMES FOREVER.
This does not effect a "gameplay experience" in a negative way. This is a common thing in most MMO and RPG's. It is that the best items take time to acquire. The only way this vastly changes anything for the majority of the game, is that it takes them longer to get stuff. And this mostly effects new players as the older players will have more than enough dilithium and whatnot to fully gear a new VA character in minutes. This whole complaint is fallacious.
There is plenty wrong with leaving it as it is. There is no reward for long term play and nothing to work towards. That is death to an MMO. If you want player retention .. LONG TERM.. then there has to be something to work towards. That means that if crafting takes longer or raids take longer or it takes time to save up money for the AH purchases you need,... fine
And once again... there is no challenge level in this game. Even the highest "difficulty" is just the AI doing more damage and having more HP. They don't get any smarter. The same tactics apply. They are dumb dumb dumb.
And this will not effect raids or anything. Again... this is a marker that finally represents a time investment and the rewards for spending that time in game
And frankly it is something STO has needed for a while.
I have to agree here, based off my SWG Jedi unlock time...I didnt need to unlock Jedi, I choose to and spent 154 days of my time achieving something players ended up getting for free after 11-15-05...I didnt mind that grind at all and on the day of my unlock and looking at even more grinding to hit 2 full profession temps, I was still happy as could be because I spent my time for something I wanted in game that other ppl thought was too hard...
So yeah, 2 weeks in STO for gear is def not bad at all...either you put in some time or not...but it is totally up to the player...
Okay, I do apparently need to clarify one thing I was saying. I didn't mean "make getting max gear harder" as in the enemies get smarter or tougher. What I meant was, the process of obtaining the maximum set of items itself will get harder, specifically, by taking longer. Look at it this way: walking to your fridge to get an apple takes, say, two minutes. Going outside and picking one from a tree in a park takes, say, 20 minutes. So the second process is "harder" to me because it takes more effort.
But to be clear, I'm referring not to the gameplay being hard, but to getting items requiring more work.
First: Yes, this DOES affect a gameplay experience, at least for me. For me, doing the exact same ten missions or so (the procedurally-generated missions of the Explore blah blah Cluster to get particles) is fun for a day. Or two or three or five, maybe a week. But eventually it becomes boring and tedious. Eventually it stops being "I'm blowing up pirates to take their stuff!" and "I'm hitting space and using buffs repeatedly until these pirates blow up so I can take their stuff." Maybe you enjoy grinding the exact same quests and dailies over and over, but for me and others I know it gets old after a while.
And as you say, this will mostly effect new players. I did mention that in my first post here.
To briefly return to what I said just above: player retention is important, but I think drawing in new players is too. And I know of many players who were drawn to STO precisely because it does not take months to build up your character to do the top-end STFs and whatnot. For us, this is a strength of the game, not a weakness.
You're right, this game does need to worry about giving players things to do for months on end. Obviously, it's unrealistic to expect new story missions every day so some kind of repetitive play does have to be included here. That's what the STFs, the PvE and the PvP should all be for. I'm all for adding new and challenging STFs or whatever with smarter AIs, and the whole reason I'm working on a full top-end item set is to make sure I'm fully prepared to do the elite STFs.
Simply put: Giving players a handful of missions you can repeat over and over, have fun doing, and try out some new and interesting tactics at is a great way to let them/encourage them to play over a long period of time. And speaking of trying new and interesting tactics, that is a great reason to try multiple characters as well; maybe you finally have explored all the options of a Tactical officer, so you decide to level up and equip and Engineer and see what you can do there.
On the other hand, making players play a long time by requiring them to do massive amounts of grinding (that sooner or later is going to get repetitive and boring to most people) to reach the exciting content is bad, especially when it also means that it takes a ton of work to get that Engineer leveled up to try it out in the high-end stuff; it means someone probably won't want to put all that work into getting their alt up to snuff, which means once their Tactical (or substitute whatever classes you want, these are just examples) gets boring, the game will get boring, and they may well leave.
EDIT: Forgot to put this in, but my final point, one I try to keep making:
If you want to have grindy content that requires massive time investment and gives you the pride of having spent however many months to get your shiny gear and whatnot, then I still don't see why that can't be added to the game instead of replacing the game.
I don't, and have never played WOW, but from what I understand though there is one key difference. You can go farm herbs in WOW for as long as you want. And farming herbs does not impinge on your ability to complete some other kind of farming/grinding to gather the resources required to create some other item/gear. Basically the only limit on what you can get out of WOW is the time you put in.
In STO, it's different in that while you can farm for 2 weeks to craft a set of gear, you cannot do anything else in that time period, since your total dilithium allotment is limited by the 8k/day ceiling. Spending dilithium resources to craft directly impinges on your ability to do other things in the game that also require dilithium.
If they truly wanted to make crafting items harder, they could have simply raised the number of mats required to craft an item, or reduced the drop/farm rate for said materials. Adding in the dilithium requirement is one of the worst ways to implement such a change, and is also probably the most transparent in terms of furthering their goals of monetizing the entire game. Furthermore, they have done so in a laughably imbalanced manner. The time required to collect the mats AND the dilithium far outweigh the "discount" in dilithium cost. There would be a point if they balanced it such that the time investment for grinding the dilithium to get item X at a vendor and the time investment for farming mats+dilithium to craft item X's crafting equivalent, but right now it's way out of whack.
It's frustrating and stupid that they put all these ridiculous checks in the game to slow down progression, when the source of the problem is LACK OF PLAYABLE CONTENT. If there were a lot more new missions to play, and more being regularly released, people probably wouldn't mind grinding more/longer to get those mats, because the gameplay would then be fun again. If you're having fun, then you WANT to play more. By making things more expensive, you HAVE to play more, which just makes it a chore. If you could craft unique items with meaningful, unique properties not available anywhere else (beyond just another [Dmg][KBKB] type iteration of a purple) then maybe crafting would be worthwhile, and people would be willing to undergo the grind. Longer grinds in WOW "work better" (working is always a relative term) because you can play thousands of hours and not repeat any content. In STO you're done after a month of dedicated play... probably a week or two of hardcore play. You can play the ENTIRE GAME in the time it takes you to craft ONE SET of high end gear, due to the artificial limiting.
Cryptic makes these utopian arguments about people with more time than money trading with people with more money than time (or should it be brains) but they're forgetting the third key element: FUN. If the game isn't FUN then NOBODY will want to invest EITHER time OR money.
For building MOST goods and reagents in World of Warcraft, that is indeed a fair comparison. But those potions are largely similar to stims/boosters/batteries in STO. They are consumed, and some of them had some novel effect.
Conversely, EQUIPMENT in WoW is a different issue; you could craft basic starter dungeon gear, with grinding for skill points/leveling up, that were *mostly* "cost free". However, the majority of them required some sort of crafted component, usually on a cooldown, from yourself or another player. Effectively creating a gate on how often you could get parts for equipment.
As the time for any given WoW Expansion increased, people would raid and they would start getting drops from raiding which could be used to craft later recipes. These new craftable items were comparable, and sometimes better than, loot that you were getting out of the raids. You would only be able to get a set number of these a week, because they would drop from bosses.
Of course, with a player base like WoW, you still had a fair number of these items that might crop up on the market, but there's still the fact you had a gated supply of this craftable item available. There's also the fact that you needed to get the recipe in the first place, which was often a drop out of a raid or part of a grind.
In that sense, Dilithium works *exactly the same* as a gating method in comparison. Whether or not this is entirely fair is an entirely different point, of course, as the majority of the focus on gameplay in STO has been on casual gameplay.
I don't entirely agree that it should always stay this way, though. I am not saing tha tthe current budget on Dilithium off the craftbles is where it needs to be, but it is also not as outrageous when you compare it to other games.
No, this is not WoW. Yes, this game is more casual. No, you don't have to like it. But that also doesn't invalidate that as a good point of reference, a system in another game *that has significantly more subscribers than STO does right now* works with limited complaints. It is *perfectly valid* to consider it as a comparison point.
Thank you for saying this.
Yes, this is a "gated" crafting system. The idea here is not to flood the market with fast money and fast purples. These items will have more actual value now to the community. Now, as far as a "gated" crafting system goes, this is still pretty casual. It is not like they have to go, once a week, into the Molten Core and kill some boss, hope it drops, roll against 40 guys, win it and THEN craft the item.
NOW THAT IS HARD.
Let me get this straight:
Do daily quests for dilithium and also daily quests/farming for mats is not hard, it just time-consuming.
Do weeklies for a small chance of getting mats is hard.
What is the difference here? These both sound like they're just time-consuming to me.
The difference is MASSIVE.
1) One involves you fighting AI that is as dumb as it can be, doing missions to get dilithium you KNOW you are going to get, unless your internet goes out.
2) The other is a massive raid that requires 40 people coordinating to take down bosses that can wipe out the entire party if they don't know what they are doing and / or are not equipped enough to take said boss down and then maybe having a 1 in 40 chance on getting the item you want, IF it drops which is like a 1 in 5 chance and only being able to do that once a week at most, because of raid timers.
If you think the first paragraph even compares to the second one,.. nothing will ever make sense about this to you.
People are spoiled in this game. Pretty much cut and dry.
^^^ This
You'd think that unless the player has all high end purple gear, they couldn't do anything. The nice part about STO is that the purple gear is *optional* and not required to play the game. Nor is it required to be successful on the STF's. It's gravy. And therefore it should have some extra work involved in obtaining it.
The only content were i see having the best as requirement is PvP here and there i saw equipping a new toon with all the highest stuff in 5 hours flat (3stfs+crafting) as one of its greatest features.. in fact i'd say it was ahead of other big titles there, as that allowed to get quickly away from the boring and repetitive PvE to be quickly ready for the more fun and player skill (rather then equipment) based PvP.
Its also worth noting that this crafted or emblem gear isn't even the best gear.. as the bonuses on that stuff is just average compared to i.e. guns with [acc]x3.
So you're telling me you think it is a good thing for it to take up to 200 weeks (1/5 chance of drop, 1/40 chance of you getting it) to get an item of gear in an MMO?
I think at this point we may just have to agree to disagree, because I can't see that as anything but asinine amounts of work, frankly.
But let me reiterate what I keep saying that you still haven't seemed to have acknowledged:
You are of the opinion that players of this game are spoiled. Okay, fine. I am of the opinion that the amount of time investment WoW-like MMOs require is absurdly huge. We each have differing opinions, but in the end what should matter is what the player base thinks, and as far as I can tell the majority of STOs player base is in line with the latter opinion. And again: even if you want to add a tier of quests, raids, gear or whatever that is as time-consuming as that, I still see no need for it to replace existing content when you can just throw it on the end of the level cap and make it there for those who want it.
And if you like games like WoW so much, why do you feel the need to insist every single MMO in the universe be exactly like it rather than just going and playing the MMOs already like that? Not every single MMO in the universe can, nor should they, be identical, because guess what, different players like different kinds of games. Some of us like STO, some of us like WoW; so why don't we just let the former group play their game and the latter play theirs instead of trying to turn one game into a clone of the other?
I know I keep saying those things over and over, but frankly I don't think I've gotten any direct answer to them.
Causal player are going to spend weeks grinding for equipment that is only a few percent better than white (common) equipment? This game isn't catering to hardcore MMORPG players. It's (trying) catering to Star Trek fans. What's nothing for you make be enough to turn off other players to stop playing STO. And that would be bad for everyone.
Those are the same people that have been paying the bills the last two years, the people that have gotten the game this far. So they kinda want their game, the game they paid money for, to stay the same, not suddenly become the same grindfest for them as the people who pay nothing at all.
I'll say that if STO went f2p tomorrow I'd probably log in to play with doffs and RP, that's about it. Grind stuff? Forget it. PVP? Against pay to win ships? Not my idea of fun. Buy Cstore points? Why bother? Level up another character and gear it out? Nah, don't need to.
Of what we have seen thus far, the game is not changing in ways favorable to old players. The game isn't changing in ways that make subscribers want to stay subscribed. That is frustrating because we are the ones that got it this far, and now the game we paid for and loved is being turned upside down. Yes a lot can change before f2p launch, but the changes I see are not indicative of good changes that make me want to spend more money on the game.
So maybe I'm spoiled, but you know what, that's what I paid for.
Quoted for the Truth
Nope, you are telling yourself this. I was showing you what a REAL grind is. You are not getting what I am saying, hence, as my previous post, you are just not going to get it... at all.
I am going to agree that you are dead wrong. That is what I agree to. Sorry, but you don't know what a grind is,..and if you think that this even comes close to one that is worth mentioning across the industry, I don't know what to tell you any more.
When did I ever say I wanted the grind to be exactly the same as other games? I am simply stating this "grind" is so tiny and so unmentionable compared to the industry as a whole, I have to LOL every single time somebody complains about it. Frankly the only people who I can imagine really complaining are those who have never played another MMO ... EVER... and have no idea still how easy this is.
Frankly, I don't care if they don't like that it takes a bit longer. This will help keep the economy in check... a thing that has grown WILDLY out of control.
You keep missing the point so far, you are throwing at the wall opposite of the dartboard. How many times do I have to say that I in FACT DO play other MMO's. The fact that you think that this "grind" is even comparable to ANY of these games is so massively HILARIOUS that this whole post should be saved for an internet comedy routine.
You jump so far outside the realms of reason in this last paragraph that I don't even know where to start. You assume I want this game to be a clone of some other game. No...I never said that. I never inferred that and I never implied that. You are whining about a step to keep the game's economy solid and can't grasp how minor... EPICALLY minor this "grind is" compared to every MMO pretty much ever made.
You just don't get it.
I don't think you ever will.