Why I hate the Dilithium crafting

System

Alright. Alright. their has been enough ranting and raving and I am sure the Devs know. This is the Reasons WHY I hate the Dilithium crafting.

When I invited a new friend to STO. I Did not simple bring them to the Game, and say, Here's STO, have fun learning everything yourself.

Who does that to a friend they just invited to a game, Even one that is Free to play? WHO would actually DO this, or has this Done to them?

No I do not do that.

When they got through the Tutorial, I met them at ESD, I would even MAKE a NEW Character to help walk them through the turtoral and offer advice, And show them how to do it. When they Got to ESD. I showed them around. I showed them every thing, where the Venders were. The Bank, the Mail. How it worked. The Exchange, Ship requisitions, The Bridge officer trainer, Where Quinn was. EVERYTHING.

But I did not Stop there.
I would Give them some of my On standing Bridge officers. Green or Blue quality. Enough to fill each station on their ship and an extra one to have a five man away team. I would take their commissioned officers. I would take them to the Officer trainer. And train them, in powers I though would be useful to start out with, and with Powers I knew would serve them well down the road.

I would normally give them 2 sci officers, One engineer and one tactical officer, and then I would use my main character's Merits which numbered in the 250k region and excess Bridge officer skills which are like.... 450k. I have so many I can spare it to train freely their officers.

For Science officers.
Ground
Medical tricorder 1. Medical tricorder 2, Stasis field 2, Nanite health monitor 1.
Space
Science team 1, hazard emitters 2.

For Engineers
ground
Shield recharge 1, shield recharge 2, phaser turret 2, support drone fabrication 1
Space
Emergency power to Shields 1, Engineering team 2, Emergency power to shields 3 (Because my main is an engineer), Directed Energy modulation 3.

For tactical officers
Ground
Photon grenade 1, Battle strategies 2, Target optics 2, fire on my mark 2.
Space
Beam over load 1

I do not stop training their officers after the first round after maxing out their BO ensign skills. When they level up to LT Commander. I personally Promote, and train up their officers. I even adjust BO powers to reflect what ship they fly, be it Escort, Cruiser, or Science ship.

And I keep doing this up to When they reach Captain. Helping them refine what works for them. What they enjoy. And I do not Stop there.

I Also Give them 50,000 - 75,000 energy credits. And help them learn the fastest easiest way to handle equipping their officers, and ships.

I even give them supplies to help.
A white Quantum torpedo launcher MK 2
A Green Resilient Shield array DIS
A White MK 2 Bio function monitor.
one or two WHITE RCS Accelerator consoles MK 2 depending on if they that the TOS connie
A Phaser Relay White MK 2

If they do not have the TOS Connie and the Blue phasers. I will get them MK 2 green phaser arrays Acc or Dmg from The exchange.

I'll have them buy personal shields, armor, and ground weapons. Granted these are white items, but still potent with the right lay out.

Finally as they travel into STO. I will constantly give them advice. Tips on crafting, how to face enemies, which enemies are the more dangerous.

Finally when they Reach LT Commander.
I don't abandon them. I help them again, This is their FIRST character on Star Trek Online. So I take my Samples which I stock piled. And I go to Memory Alpha. And there... I don't settle for pathetic green gear. No, I craft them A full load out of BLUE MK IV gear.I don't craft for them Purple items, Because I tell them they are not going to be at this level long enough for it to matter.

This includes
5 personal armors
5 personal shields
6 ground weapons.
A Kit (or bought from the exchange or given to them from my own supples

Ship weapons
Beams
Torpedos
Deflector
Impulse engies
Ship shields.

And the MK IV white consoles for their new ship pointing out the following.
A Green MK III console has the same stats of a MK IV White console, a Blue MK III console has the same stats of a Green MK IV, A purple MK III console has the stats on an MK IV Blue console. And that until you get to the Higher levels Rear Admiral Upper Half.

when they Hit commander.
I repeat the Same process.

When they hit Captain. I sometimes depending on how much trouble they have had will craft for them MK VIII Blue, or Even PURPLE gear. For their ground officers and Ships gear.

I tell them not to worry about MK IX, or MK X gear when they hit REAR ADMIRAL LOWER HALF. They won't be at that level for very long.

So Next what I do, is I craft for them More often then not.... Full MK XI Purple gear. A full aegis System. Weapons, MK XI BLUE Consoles. Why Do I do this?

Because they are my friend, I invited them to the game, I feel it is partly my duty to help them on their First character. By assisting them in this way. I Show them... I care for them, I WANT you to have a good time here. I want your first character to be fully equipped, I want you to succeed and have FUN.

By adding Dilithium to the crafting system. You are Stopping us from helping our friends as we wish. I Don't want my friend equipped with MK III, MK V, MK VII, gear. I want them to have the best, or Nearly the BEST for their LEVEL. With the crafting system as stands. I can't even quip them with MK IX with out spending RL money.

If This Dilithium crafting system goes live. You are basically charging us RL money. You may not see it as much. BUT it is RL money regardless to equip, people WE Invite to try out Star Trek FREE 2 PLAY. It's NOT FREE to those who are trying to help people they Invite. If they Run out of Dilithium. They have to Grind more. Which might take weeks for them or days depending on how much time they can devote to this game.

They have to PAY REAL MONEY to Buy C-store points, to BUY the Dilithium.... on the Dilithium exchange to equip their Friends. And the prices for Dilithium will be astronomically HIGH, for 85,000 dilithium... I want... 10,000 cryptic points, 20,000, 30,000.

The SAD thing is. This will happen. There will be people who will Pay 30,000 C-store points for A few thousand Dilithium. And Sadly... I am one who could take advantage of this particular system. I do not have a JOB IRL, I would not even be on STO if I did not have a LTS account.

There are a lot of thing sin the C-store I want. And I might try to take advantage of this Dilithium exchange from time to time to get a ship I want. A costume pack, Duty officer packs.

When you Added Dilithium to Crafting. You have basically proposed to turn Star Trek Online into a Scalper's Festival. The Prices for chunks of Dilithium will be so high, very few will be able to afford them.

If this Dilithium crafting goes live. EVEN for 1 Dilithium for crafting. I will not invite any more people to STO, even to try Free to Play. Because I can not out fit them as I want to help them enjoy the game. I will not Buy any more cryptic points because I won't waste money on that which I can't use.

I have a LT officer I want to level. I was the Connie + 1 The EXETER for when he hits LTCommander.
I won't touch this character. I won't buy the Exeter Because I have no use for the ship. Because I can not OUTFIT it with out spending Dilithium Real Life Money on crafting on the GEAR I WANT to put on it. and I will not care

If You want to make a DILITHIUM SINK. He's how.
Give us the ability to Spend Dilithium on bound items. To UNBIND them. 50 dilithium for a MK 1, 100, for am mk 2, 150, for a mk 3, up to 650 to unbind a MK XII item. It would be modestly Expensive to unbind a full set of purple MK VIII gear. And would allow a large group of people to get something they want. The ability to reuse OLD Crafted gear on a new character. Try it, you might be surprised how well this concept actually works.

as I said, and I repeat.
If this Dilithium crafting goes live. EVEN for 1 Dilithium for crafting. I will not invite any more people to STO, even to try Free to Play. Because I can not out fit them as I want to help them enjoy the game. I will not Buy any more cryptic points because I won't waste money on that which I can't use.

For those who reply to this. Keep your comments Civil, and Polite. Explain in your own words why you hate the Dilithium to crafting, and if you desire, offer the Devs an idea or two on how to /control/ the Dilithium with out angering the entire forums.

Archived Post

My highest level characters are LC1-3.

Can I be your friend, too?

Archived Post

FUNDAMENTALLY speaking, I understand this change.

With the direction they are going with F2P, the 'good' gear can be obtained one of two ways (which have 'sub' methods within them)

1) Time - You do missions and get drops, at low levels, or at high levels you run STFs and you get random loot. There's a minor luck factor involved. To a certain extent, the Dilithium system also counts part-way as 'time', because you are gated on how much you can get.

2) Money - You purchase items, that are specifically what you want, using either the exchange, or buying it for dilithium via the vendors. (Neither of these options really viably include getting it from a friend, because your friend got it from either time or money)

Again, speaking purely conceptually, I understand their desire to want to weight the crafting system to properly reflect this kind of time/money philosophy. Obviously, there's a couple of flaws, here - first of which is the fact that crafting of the 'good' items is a hybrid of time AND money. You need time and or money to get the bits, and you need time and or money to get dilithium. As a result, the at-face impact of this is that the cost-investment for crafting is drastically over-inflated.

This is compounded by the fact that the exchange rate for dilithium-to-badges/emblems would create the appearance that the crafting items are overly expensive, especially when you factor in the anomaly bits.

In fairness, part of the cost of the anomaly bit has been slightly lessened by the new multiphasic event; it has added the ability to generate a significantly increased quantity of anomaly bits more quickly for short periods of time - although admittedly not of set types, so you are getting a bit of a mixed bag. To a certain extent, this has 'lessened' the cost of the anomaly bit as part of the time-or-formula value (though not by much).

The exchange rate for dilithium-to-emblems is being made as a comparison as dailies; we know how many emblems we get out of dailies now, and we know how much dilithium we get. We can compare this data to the cost of items we can buy in the store, and then compare this against the material costs for dilithium crafting - obviously, we're coming up 'short changed' and it creates the image that we are being over charged. Yes, we are, if you compare it in that sense, but I should also point out that the number of sources we can get dilithium has drastically increased over the amount of sources we have of getting emblems.

BUT, there comes a catch at this. We are drastically limited on the amount of dilithium that we can get per day, because of the refining gate. If we were not, the dilithium cost now stops becoming a source of primarily money, and becomes an issue of time. Take, for example, STFs. Right now, it's pretty easy to do the normal STFs in about 15 minutes. Now, it's been said that this is 'too eas' - okay, that's fine. Lets assume that the 'normal' STF would actually take more like 20-30 minutes; they each reward ~1000 Dilithium at the end. You can technically run these back to back, with your friends, all day one day if you really wanted, and make a killing on Dilithium. Obviously, we can't have that, because that does drastically de-value Dilithium, and causes inflation. However, the current gate of 8,000 Dilithium Refinement is hugely limiting - and as a result, is counter-balancing the impact of the increased availability of anomaly bits, and the 'increased availability' of the 'emblem equivalent currency'. This basically gets us back to square one; the cost of the crafted items is still drastically over-budget from what would be 'expected' in a time-or-money formula of purchasing items.

There's a couple of solutions we can have here;

1) Increase the amount of dilithium we can obtain per day. This could be done in one of two ways;
1a) Increase the amount of dilithium we can process. This is actually a good idea, over all, with an increase to maybe 10-15k per day, due to the ease at which you can grind missions. This is a value that a casual player likely won't hit, anyway, but a 'grinder' player would still very easily surpass within their regular play cycle. The problem with this method is that it does 'devalue' dilithium slightly, if the idea is that time = money in equal proportions.
Or
1b) Change the way certain activities pay you out. For example; dailies are giving you dilithium ore, which you have to process. You can already do them once per day, and you're already gated, so this seems kind of silly, because it's double-gating. When you consider that the DOff missions ALSO give you ore, you're getting some weird balance. So here's an interesting idea; make it so that things that take an extraordinary amount of time simply give you straight up refined dilithium. Dailies, which can only be done once every 20-hours, anyway, and in short supply, may as well just give you straight up refined ore. You can't repeat them more than once per day, anyway, and the quantity you'd get is only about an additional surplus of 2,000 dilithium. For that matter, make any doff assignment that takes more than, say, 12 hours, give you straight Refined Dilithium instead of ore. It's taking 12 hours, so you can't grind them, and they're only giving you 5 at a normal success, anyway - it's literally a drop in the bucket. This small amount of straight dilithium into your wallet can be done very easily by every player, and rewards casual players just for the sake of playing, and doesn't benefit the grinder much more, because in theory, they were already getting much much more, in the first place.

Or, more simply, if we don't want to touch the Dilithium gaining mechanics;

2) Simply re-evaluate the cost of the crafting items. If you MUST add dilithium to crafting to make it 'economically comparable' to the shops, then
2a) Cut the cost of dilithium. Bring it down to about maybe 40-60% of what its current costs are; this will make crafting seem much more attractive, and cause most items to be crafted to easily fit into the 'daily refinement' budget. At low levels, you can still craft a couple of pieces of gear from a day of work, and it doesn't feel like you are hurting yourself too much by doing so.
2b) Re-evaluate the weight of the 'time' component of the anomaly bits. You could either drastically cut the cost of the dilithium (make them about 10% of the total dilithium requirements right now), and then up the number of bits you need. Or even bring back the concept of 'upgrading' a base white-level item, so that you are breaking the cost up between dilithium and energy credits (if you really must apply dilithium to it). Or you can simply drastically increase the amount of bits you need to craft an item, for a no-dilithium cost. You could even make some sort of compromise between solution 2a and 2b, and drop the cost to about 30-40%, and increase the number of rare bits/add a base white item requirement.

For a lot of people, I know the cost of dilithium on the crafting AT ALL is a sore point; but it would appear that finding a situation that compromises might be a more amiable and likely solution.

Archived Post

Or a means of transferring Refined DC only for the purposes of crafting? A crafting Writ, a bond, or DC ingot or something like that. We don't want to see fleets closing their crafting sections for something like this.

Archived Post

To say I was displeased when I saw this change in the patch notes the last week would be a gross understatement, I was angry, let me explain why.

I enjoy helping people wherever I can.

One of the reasons I play STO is to help fellow players and the community. It's why;

• I have max level characters across all classes/factions
• I'm a member of Several Fleets/Houses
• I have characters with max level crafting on Fed and KDF
• I'm a Federation Ambassador on multiple characters
• I play on the RedShirt test server
• I play on the Tribble test server
• I read and post on the STO forums
• I contribute to STOwiki
• I'm subscribed to STOKED, RedShirtArmy, Podcast UGC, Priority One

I get a lot of enjoyment from helping people both in and out of game, but Cryptics’ planned change to crafting will essentially remove one of the ways a lot of people (myself included) try to help the STO community by offering crafting as a service to individuals and fleets.

Crafting in STO hasn't had the best track record, it's had its problems and still does (KDF Hargh'Pengs being Bind on Pickup for example ), but on holodeck it’s usable and worthwhile. It’s taken Cryptic a long time to get crafting to a stage where most of the community are happy with it.

However if this change makes it to holodeck, it will completely undermine all of their previous efforts. It will kill off crafting, not just as a service for non-crafters and fleets, but kill it entirely! The time spent collecting samples and traces, combined with the dilithium costs (especially given that they increases with level and rarity) for fabricating items will not be justifiable for the slight bonus variations crafted items offer compared to their store bought counterparts.

Cryptic surely must realise this?:confused

I don’t mind going the extra light-year to help someone in need, but expecting me to earn the hundreds of thousands of dilithium this new system would require (not to mention refining it), just to craft items for other people is taking it too far!:mad:

I know and understand that with F2P coming, Cryptic is going to be more reliant on C-Store turnover than Subscriptions, that they are moving to a time/money based way of acquiring gear, and that the dilithium economy ties into that. But must everything involve dilithium?!

Under the proposed system, if I were to continue offering my services as a crafter, I would have to earn hundreds of thousands more dilithium than I currently do, and combined with the daily refining limit, it would take days/weeks to craft items.

The C-Point/Dilithium exchange could allow me to get more refined dilithium, but at the expense of Cryptic Points. Requiring me to either sell my own dilithium, or spend real-world money. Because from what Cryptic have announced thus far, there will be no direct way to transfer dilithium/c-points to other players (the exception being gifting c-points, which can only be done using real-world money at present), for dilithium to pass from one player to another it will have to pass through the currency exchange with no fixed rates.

Even if the player wanting an item crafted put their dilithium up on the currency exchange for an absurdly low amount of C-Points, it’s likely the exchange will be a blind auction, just like the current in game exchange. Meaning it will get snapped up in seconds by a third party. The current exchange has players constantly sniping it, just waiting for a player to put something up at an unbelievably low price, just imagine it when C-Points are involved.

The dilithium for crafting model is fundamentally flawed, because it not only makes the items on the menu not worth the effort, it makes the time and resources, ‘cause let’s not forget, it costs a lot of time and resources to level through crafting, completely redundant.

This change in crafting is virtual kick in the groin to every max level crafter in the game. Your time and effort you spent levelling through crafting has been devalued to nothingness, and your possible contributions to the community written off.:mad:

IF, and I do mean if, any crafter continues to operate (or someone has the insanity to start) on this new system, expect their wares to be on the exchange for at least ten-fold what they currently cost. That’s right, twelve million energy credits for a single Aegis piece.

Now I’m not normally one to complain, I’ve given Cryptic a lot of slack in the past. But helping the STO community is something I feel passionately about, because we very nearly didn’t have a STO at all, and I would be doing them (and Cryptic) a disservice if I did not point out something which is no doubt going to be a major TRIBBLE-up.

That being said my parents always taught me “if you’re going to criticise something, be ready with a better idea”. I think these are better ideas than what’s currently on Tribble, but I’ll let the community be the judge.


1) Remove Dilithium requirement entirely.
Collecting the samples and particles to craft high-end gear can be a grind unto itself. Players who buy the ingredients for crafting from the exchange to bypass this can end up spending millions of EC, often more than the crafted item is selling for on the exchange.

If you want to make crafted items harder to acquire, lower the drop rates on data samples and particle traces. You could use a correlation similar to your dilithium surcharge, so the samples/traces needed for higher-end gear drop less.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of drop rates. If you wanted to make crafting items harder, then why in god’s name did you introduce the Multiphasic Events? The ones that make samples and particles drop more often?


2) Make Schematics cost Dilithium.
If you must insist on having dilithium in the crafting system, assign it to the schematics.

That way, the person wanting the items crafted can buy the schematics with their own dilithium, and give them to a crafter via mail/trade.

Current schematics wouldn’t need to change for this to work, just item recipes. The existing schematics would still exist, still be craftable themselves, and still buyable on exchange or for high EC from MA.

You would simply need to add three new schematics;

• Uncommon Item Schematic (Suggested price 80 Refined dilithium)
• Rare Item Schematic (Suggested price 160 Refined dilithium)
• Very Rare Item Schematic (Suggested price 480 Refined dilithium)

These would only be purchasable via dilithium, and cannot be sold on the exchange.
They could also possibly be very low rate drops from mini-game wins (same rate as XP boost dops).

To get your rising dilithium costs with Mk levels you simply require more of that quality level schematic. For example;

• Mk II Uncommon Phaser Array would cost: 1x[Item Type Schematic] [Current Samples/Traces] 2x[Uncommon Schematics].
• Mk VI Rare Quantum Torpedo Laucher would cost: 1x[Item Type Schematic] [Current Samples/Traces] 6x[Rare Schematics].
• Mk XI Very Rare Dual Phaser Cannons would cost: 1x[Item Schematic] [Current Samples/Traces] 11x[Very Rare Schematics].

So there you have it, two ideas, one which will likely appeal most to the community, one which is a middle ground compromise.

Let me know what you think, and if you have ant better ideas, don’t keep them to yourself!

Archived Post

The idea with the schematics is also a good one. Alternativly (and probably a smaller change to teh system) one could replace the current dilithium amounts with "delithium cores". This way the devs would only need to create new craftable items available at lower crafting levels to allow players to craft these delithium cores and mail trade them to the actual crafter for the item they want. Pretty much the same as above.