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TRIBBLE Maintenance and Release Notes - February 2, 2012
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We will be bringing the Tribble server down for maintenance to apply a new update.
ST.17.20120129b.9
General:
ST.17.20120129b.9
General:
- Slipstream can again only be used in sector space.
- Reverted Console - Science - Field Generator, Shield HP Consoles, to modify shield HP instead of granting Starship Shield System skill points.
- Values will now be identical to the original console.
- This console still goes into Science console slot.
- This is a temporary fix and the console will eventually go back to using Starship Shield System skill points.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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That would be too simple. Gotta mess with the formula so they can nerf it down like all the other consoles. Anyone remember when the power consoles gave +7 power or the beam and cannon consoles did just as much as the specific energy type tac consoles?
Everything must be nerfed in order for them to raise the level cap.
A player goes through the entire game without the console until Vice Admiral why is it even really needed? I realize that manipulating all the shields can be a pain, versus 1 item, but the console effectively removes 1 slot for every VA ship.
If we have to have this overpowered shield booster, why not simply make it a special slot in the VA ship? I know the Cryptic team has the talent. In the future if the team decided to make more unique "must have" items then the ground work would be done.
For example:
Add a slot called "Warp Core" then rename the Current Field Generator to "Shield Modulation Warp Core System Mk XI"
Then say a few months down the line another bunch of set items come out, the team could use that basis for more interesting items with pros and cons.
M.A.C.O. Warp Reactor Mk XI anyone?
Anyway prudent to slap a band aid until the math is fixed, but there is an opportunity to grow the ship systems in a "more trek way".
Oh and before I forget, I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work that you, Gozer, Heretic, and the rest have done on the two year anniversary. It is highly appreciated by me, and many others I'm sure.
Two things:
1) Since the goal that was specifically stated was to NOT change the end value of the console, WHY is this a temporary fix considering it achieves the goal. Consistency? There isn't a lot of consistency in Engineering consoles and I don't see anyone complaining about that. Beyond that, the "consistency" of Science consoles is one of the main complaints (read: reasons they suck). We WANT them to do more than just buff science skills, which apparently is the goal of changing this again. This is the problem with Science consoles. This is why we don't like them. If someone bothered to actually read the feedback this should have been readily apparent, and doing this is the exact opposite of what pretty much all the feedback indicated.
If it's working as intended and giving the proper bonus (which from what we're told, is what reverting it should lead to).... LEAVE IT ALONE. Stop trying to fix what works and work on what doesn't. This is becoming an incredibly bad habit of the STO team. You keep making needless changes to stuff that works and then breaking it as opposed to fixing what doesn't work. Stop that. Seriously. Stop it.
2) These are STILL going to be Science Consoles? So that means that everyone who had them Overflowed (read: everyone) won't be able to reinsert them into the Engineering slots which we were specifically told they would not be moved from. How is THAT going to be fixed? And if you CAN'T fix it, should I be expecting a lump sum of Dilithium equivalent to my Blue Mk.XI Engineering and Science consoles? Because the last Science console rework already caused me to have to trash pretty much every Sci console I had, since they were made utterly worthless to all of the characters who owned them. This will essentially be the second time in about a month that I will have to replace my consoles with DIlithium out of my pocket?
Am I actually supposed to want to put time and effort into this game playing it when the developers keep doing stuff that screws over my characters and makes the time I spend a total waste?
You want to fix something? Leave the Field Generator giving a percent bonus like it's supposed to and has always worked, and instead fix the double blunder of borking our consoles twice by giving us a refund on DIlithium spent, or a method to exchange Rare Mk.XI consoles on a 1-for-1 basis so our time getting all these nifty new paperweights wasn't entirely wasted.
...
...
... ... *sigh* who am I kidding, this is going to be ignored too.
The specific energy type consoles should be better than the generics. You gain by being selective, or get a lesser bonus that lets you mix and match, but the optional use of multiple energy types/effects. The numeric changes don't bug me because as I understand it, the math ended up the same. This change was very different and I'm thinking it will take a while to figure out how to get the complete change to give the same result the old method did. I don't think it can.
That being said, if you return the console's to exactly their old value, for the love of God make sure that they no longer stack.
The force-able removal of the console from it's engineering slot was also quite the rude surprise to a lot of people, especially science vessel captains who would prefer to keep it there. The worst thing that can happen now is a stealth fix to the console removal bug, so that people who log in after a later patch can keep the console in an engineering slot. This would effectively make some science vessels gimped, and give others a permanent advantage. Please don't do that Cryptic.
The console should have never been moved, but now that it has it is not going to be moved back. I also can't see Cryptic going around and offering to put the +35 console back into it's engineering slot for everyone that wanted theirs to be grandfathered as was promised. Best solution I can think of is to just make it so you can equip the console in either an engineering or a science slot. This would effectively let Cryptic keep the promise they screwed up, make science consoles more valuable like the original intent, and not create two tiers between people who were able to keep their console in an engineering slot and those who couldn't. Win/win/win, and a simple change.
Credit were credit is due though, good work buffing the other science consoles back to parity with the bonuses other consoles give you. This was probably the only change that was ever necessary.
In terms of under-powered consoles though, what happened to power boost consoles? +7 power was never really overpowered, and +3.5 is more or less not worth wasting a slot on. These really need to be restored to the original value, and aren't even worth looking at if they don't give at least +5.
Also, good work on returning the Maco shields to the point where they are not completely unbalanced. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the KHG shields. Like the Maco's, they also have an extra cap modifier that should be removed. They also have a very nice proc, but the probability is far too high. 25% is going to proc almost immediately given the amount of hits each ship can dish out a second. Somewhere between 5-10% would quite a bit better.
I hope Cryptic has learned some much needed lessons in terms of QA between this and the maco shield disasters. It also seems that the devs knew about the problem with grandfathering the consoles before the patch went live, but couldn't stop it because the patch was attached to the 2 year anniversary event. There's another lesson: In the future, don't couple systems or balance changes with content changes that have a tight schedule. Keep them separate so you aren't forced to put stuff you know is broken onto live.
This.
I would also like to suggest making the console a science and an engineering console so you can slot it in either type of console slot. This is the only reasonable way I can think of to amicably resolve this blunder.
Why stop at Science and Engineering? We know they have the tech to make universal consoles. They're trying to sell us enough of them to make that readily apparent. They should just do that. Make the Field Generator console a Universal since it functions more on a par with the other universal consoles than it does with the standard ones.
Simple fix for all the people who had theirs overflowed, and all the people who want to have it as a Science console too. It also means they don't have to worry about how that console stacks against other options, since it would be a universal one and they've never been particularly balanced anyway.
A fix that actually solves problems.
Then, perhaps, it would be time to find a way to deal with what is actually wrong with Science consoles as opposed to what was recently done to them which ultimately ignores the actual problem which was clearly expressed in pages and pages of feedback.
That would work even better and would probably actually be simpler (the code already exists as you stated). Good point as usual.
Dude that's not even the half of it. They have reworked sector space, ground combat, crafting at least twice, the entire economy, and the handfull (3) of end game missions All inside of 2 years of STO being launched. More time is spent reworking existing game mechanics than anything else. This company has serious time management issues.
Zero, could you go back and ask Geko one simple question:
If I say, "Hey, this dohicky adds +35% to your shield capacity!" then everyone knows what that means. They can see the benefit just looking at the tooltip. The capacity of your shields go up 35%. It's simple. It is, in fact, plain English (and yes, I know you folks Cryptic have an aversion to that, explaining the vast majority of your tooltips and stat screens over the years, but the rest of us mostly like it.... just FYI).
The thing is, +X skill points... means nothing. If I say to someone it gives +40 skill points in Shield Systems that tells them literally nothing. They need to know what that skill does, beyond that they need to know where that skill currently lies, and what kind of bonus 40 points at that level will equal out to. Essentially it's contextual gibberish. It is spectacularly less clear and if you see it in a vendor window you almost certainly don't really know what specific numerical advantage you're buying. It is what we in these parts (which I like to call "The Real World") like to refer to as "Mind ****ingly Counter-Intuitive."
If the goal is to make this more transparent (which, to be frank, should ALWAYS be the goal) then the entire idea behind making this a skill modifier is... just... a massive ****ing failure at the conceptual level.
Oh, and as long as I'm discussing the last patch, could someone please do something about the UI guy? It really doesn't need to be reworked once every two weeks with various buttons added and subtracted seemingly with the sole purpose of fighting off this individual's boredom. If this person is doing nothing but pointless changes because there is nothing else for them to do then they should either be fired to moved to a project where they are actually needed. Apparently this game can get by with a part-time UI person, a full-time one is proving itself to be massive overkill and frequently detrimental (as the changes are often not for the better).
Also, the first thing you could have the new part-time guy can do is fix something the current full-time guy borked (apparently because he couldn't find anything else to do so he had to resort to breaking something): shrink the buy inventory space button by about 50%. It's more than twice the size of the other buttons in the inventory window and causes it to scroll sideways with a blank space at the side when set to the smallest width. It is ridiculously annoying, and didn't used to do that. The window now takes up more of the screen than it used to, and does so with useless blank space. I don't need dead space in my UI obscuring the actual game.
As far as Maco goes, the resistance was bugged, giving 90% instead of 10%. PvPers first noticed this and pointed it out, and it was rightly changed. Sorry if you were using it as a crutch.
They should do like in other MMOs where you can immediately see changes when you add or remove an item. So if you add / remove a console, off to the left you will see various ship stats and their new values. And along with those values the increase of the function.
But in STO as it is now, you have to go to all sorts of windows to even see those changes.
About the science cunsole for shield HP or shield system ... what's the difference?! Sorry, I'm missing sumfin.
Big Loud whiny "AAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!"
Please learn to play without god-mode like shields....
This can't possibly be said enough.
Actually fixing Sci consoles for real is a much bigger undertaking.
Here's an idea, instead of mucking up a console that is working perfectly fine, do as suggested and invest that time in improving and creating new science consoles that have more value for a wider range of playing styles.
And for the future, please use your test server for big changes like this and you won't be balled out if its broken or not what your community wants to see in the actual game. All of yesterday could have been avoided if that was done in the first place.
I miss Dstahl.