It's a case of dangling the carrot in front of us then yanking it back. Whether they meant to show us the carrot makes no difference.
Not saying I am agreeing with how they managed the change, but as I think about all the discussions, specifically the one where Heretic was commenting on how long it would take and that there were Drawbacks, and Benefits to small vs large fleets.
Large Fleets could fill projects quickly, thereby leveling quickly, but would face problems with provisioning the supplies for a large fleet. (Many more projects that would time gate their development of the base (provision projects produce less Branch specific XP) (Notice that the Dil only projects don't produce Branch XP).
Small Fleets would have a resource issue, but not a provisioning issue (take longer to level, but more supplies to member ratio).
But, being something not working as intended... should have been fixed. Sucks, because it was nice... but makes sense...
I am glad that my fleet last night did do a hard grind at Nukara for both Fed and KDF bases.
I did a grind too before logging. Had two characters with Exterior and Interior Easy and Medium missions all completed, ready for turn-in at the start of the next Fleet Mark event. I log in, patch, and see that they "un-completed" ALL of my missions, taking all progress to 0, claiming all were "out-of-date" except for one Medium Interior mission (the technology report one). All that work for NOTHING!
It's not like there was any consistency in which got reset. The one that didn't had actual drops in my inventory that I'd collected, but so did one that did, and those drops disappeared from my inventory. Even the Easy ones got reset.
What a load of dev-TRIBBLE! That's my new Word of the Day.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm also curious as to why there's new FleetMarks currency at all?
Why not STFs give marks? Why not pvp give marks? Why not content mission give marks? I'm sure roleplaying ppl have their own way of playing the game, why couldn't they have marks for their own team activities?
Why do we have to be forced into STFs for dil, into nukara for marks, and into space vendor for the silly commodities?
I don't even understand it from monetisation perspective: rl money -> zen -> dil or zen -> ec. You can buy anything with ec.
But the fleet marks? What are they there for? Really?
I can understand "we want ppl to play new content", but the new content is not really playable at the moment.
I can understand "we want ppl to play new content", but the new content is not really playable at the moment.
And putting cooldowns on the fancy new content makes it even less attractive to play.
It's completely backwards. They put a lot of effort into this stuff, but then make sure it won't be played most of the day. And when it is played, there are cooldowns to make sure people don't play it too much.
Small Fleets would have a resource issue, but not a provisioning issue (take longer to level, but more supplies to member ratio).
The flaw in that design is that you don't get provisions until you start getting the starbase upgraded. So a small fleet can't get the starbase upgraded to provide any provisions without Fleet Marks, which requires either a larger population (hence a larger fleet and worse provision-to-member ratio) or an easier way to acquire Fleet Marks.
The devs DID NOT think this one through, not to the benefit of all players, especially not to the benefit of the small fleets they claimed wouldn't be hurt by this. It is biased toward large fleets...and my gut and common sense tell me that this was known all along and the podcast (I heard it too) explaining the starbases was all TRIBBLE.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I notice nowhere in the release notes does it say they added a cooldown.
That was the only reason to even do the Tholain ground missions, IMOHPO.
I really am not a fan of the ground combat in STO.
This is just another thing to make us grindgrindgrind because that's all they can come up with...
Cost them too much money to have a Dev actually work on new mission content.
But, they've got plenty of Dev time to burn on adjusting graphics and coming up with stuff to milk players out of more money.
Lord Krueg
KBF CO We are the Dead
join date Aug 2008
And putting cooldowns on the fancy new content makes it even less attractive to play.
It's completely backwards. They put a lot of effort into this stuff, but then make sure it won't be played most of the day. And when it is played, there are cooldowns to make sure people don't play it too much.
Hmm...
I wouldn't call it fancy. Most of it is ground, and ground using the old ground engine which is absolutely horrendous and all ppl I know hate it with a passion.
Plus I would dismiss the "silly mistake" argument, cause the game itself shows particular attention to grind or pay money strategy.
I wouldn't call it fancy. Most of it is ground, and ground using the old ground engine which is absolutely horrendous and all ppl I know hate it with a passion.
Maybe that's the plan. Get fewer people to play the ground missions so the glaring issues (the auto targeting drives me insane) aren't noticed quite as much.
This is ludicrous, you just crushed the one place smaller fleets could keep up with larger fleets.
And it isn't like my fleet is super small, it has many active members, but the kind of lifesucking unrewarding method of fleet mark gathering you are pushing on smaller fleets is absolutely beyond unacceptable. I'd just have to have like what? 50 members regularly farming marks ? To keep up with the daily projects?
Now at this rate it would take small/medium fleets years YEARS, is that what you intended? Dominant control of one or two fleets? That and the player cap is 500, FIVE HUNDRED, which means every active player will join the highest tier fleet they can find... derp DERP balance be damned.
Stop giving the mega fleets all of the advantage, we smaller fleets already have enough to worry about. Did you forget? ALL OF YOUR PROJECTS ARE TIMED ANYWAY, The Tholian Fleet Mark Farming is TIMED for 2 hours only! The other fleet mark methods are UNREALISTIC and take too long and give next to NOTHING for the time spent.
Large Fleets could fill projects quickly, thereby leveling quickly, but would face problems with provisioning the supplies for a large fleet. (Many more projects that would time gate their development of the base (provision projects produce less Branch specific XP) (Notice that the Dil only projects don't produce Branch XP).
Small Fleets would have a resource issue, but not a provisioning issue (take longer to level, but more supplies to member ratio).
But, being something not working as intended... should have been fixed. Sucks, because it was nice... but makes sense...
That is poor reasoning skills right there. "We should make the smaller fleets struggle as much as possible, but oh look they can still buy the same tier 1 ships over and over again." *slaps my forehead*
Maybe that's the plan. Get fewer people to play the ground missions so the glaring issues (the auto targeting drives me insane) aren't noticed quite as much.
I'm not sure... but what's really pisses me off is that branflakes is cleaning up all rant posts into one tread, but there's no response from dev/designers.
That is really annoying. Because it means "we took your money, we will not give it back and we gonna treat you like **** now".
I'm not sure... but what's really pisses me off is that branflakes is cleaning up all rant posts into one tread, but there's no response from dev/designers.
My hopeful guess is that the cleanup is being done while branflakes waits on a response.
But my cynical guess is that the response will probably be a non-reply that boils down to "deal with it" with vague promises of improvements in the future.
My hopeful guess is that the cleanup is being done while branflakes waits on a response.
But my cynical guess is that the response will probably be a non-reply that boils down to "deal with it" with vague promises of improvements in the future.
Something tells me that a similar conversation took place:
"Look at our stats, people are playing nukara mission and getting large amount of marks off it.
We surely did not intend them to get marks that fast. We need to tune it down. Timegating seems perfect.
Yes. Let's do it on Friday. Tribbles will rant till the evening, we'll go on weekends with no response, and by monday tribbles will get on with grinding.
Yeah, we may loose few thousand customers, but we never cared about them anyway. Our loyal grdinding playerbase will stay and we'll feed them more lockboxes for cash. Let's get on with this. "
If they just added a way to get FMs into every other mission/stf/contact in the game, even if it was a small amount, I bet people wouldn't be nearly as pissed off. Oh there's an idea for you PWE, give people a reward for using their FLEET to do FLEET things with your ALL of your content! DERP!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
All fleets, small and large, have to upgrade their starbases to get any real benefit from them, provisions and so on. The blah blah about provision-to-member ratio being better for smaller fleets and therefore is the "balance" is all BS, because small fleets won't GET provisions without UPGRADES. So upgrading comes first. This requires a LOT of contributions, including a LOT of Fleet Marks, to even get these projects underway. Every project of any significance requires you to wait 20 hours before it will unlock anything, if it does unlock anything. You can't do more than 2 projects of the same branch (at least at tier 0) at a time, so that's 20 hours times 5 equals 100 hours to even reach the first branch upgrade, then another 20 hours before you can reach the first starbase upgrade.
All fleets still have to wait that time. It doesn't matter if you have 500 members with 5 Fleet Marks each or 5 members with 500 Fleet Marks each, the timeframe is the same. Equalizer #1.
All fleets only have certain sources for Fleet Marks. The PvE missions are TRIBBLE for Fleet Mark production, simple, but are available 24/7. The "Officer of the Watch (Daily)" mission is a trivial 5 Fleet Mark income, but every little bit helps. The Tholian missions were available to do at any time, but only awarded Fleet Marks during the Fleet Mark event, which occurs maybe 3 times a day for 2 hours at a time. So 6 hours out of 24...1/4 of the day spent farming Fleet Marks AND DOING NOTHING ELSE, just so a small fleet can keep up with the Joneses. The only effective way any small fleet with people that actually wanted to play the game and do something OTHER than just grind Fleet Marks was to blast away at the missions during those events. Equalizer #2.
The equalizers were the starbase construction timeframes and the Fleet Mark event schedule. Small fleets had a chance pre-patch. The devs screwed the small fleets, pure and simple.
But here's your reality check. THERE ARE MORE SMALL FLEETS THAN LARGE ONES. Which means the majority of your players are either small fleet members or solo players (who have no concern about Fleet Marks at all).
Devs...YOU SCREWED THE MAJORITY OF YOUR (FLEET) GAME PLAYER POPULATION! There's the math.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Cryptic, how about to get people enjoying your content you give them reasons to play it?
Nukara is a fun set of missions for me.
However, because my fleet needs Fleet Marks, I can only really play in Fleet Mark missions now. (And I was going to go for a MACO ground set in STFs. Not now. Fleet Mark gathering has killed STF runs for me. )
So I was going to start considering running Nukara missions during the Fleet Marks event as I can have fun and be productive at the same time. That's a win-win for players and gets them to play your new content more!
Now they're on cooldowns? What was the problem?
Take off the "time gate" on when Nukara awards Fleet Marks (AKA allow them to make Fleet Marks 24/7) and maybe I can stand a cooldown (the PvEs for Fleet Marks have cooldowns, which I have relatively no problem with).
But if you keep Nukara as awarding only during Fleet Mark events, then please remove the cooldowns or I'll have lost any interest in running Nukara at all.
So sad to see such great new content get destroyed inside of 3 weeks.
You know I was looking at a Year maybe slightly above that for Tier 5 for my friendly little fleet. Now I am looking at
2 Years, Minimum. All because of this.
You devs already had the fleet marks increased what? each tier? You had the exp lowered on the cheaper projects, you had the Provisions/Doffs/etc DOUBLED for equal exp gains of the previous tier...
So what the hell are you guys doing to us -.-
TimeGating and Cooldowns are NOT a solution, they are an excuse.
The way to balance fleet credits is simple. You could have even asked the community for solutions instead you abandon Season 6 content in a single patch.
Nukara missions could have had the fleet mark reward decreased to either 20 to 40% of the current payout. There's no need to time restrict the missions as everyone will be forced to take a break from the content and do something else.
The fleet events set in space are considerably more time consuming. The payout for the time spent is too low. The space events should really be doubled in payout.
It is possible to be clever and adjust the payout instead of telling people to never use the content.
Note that the space event payout is so low that I question whether it's worth focusing on starbases now. Are you sure that you want people to get bored with playing by restricting content?
This is ludicrous, you just crushed the one place smaller fleets could keep up with larger fleets.
And it isn't like my fleet is super small, it has many active members, but the kind of lifesucking unrewarding method of fleet mark gathering you are pushing on smaller fleets is absolutely beyond unacceptable. I'd just have to have like what? 50 members regularly farming marks ? To keep up with the daily projects?
Now at this rate it would take small/medium fleets years YEARS, is that what you intended? Dominant control of one or two fleets? That and the player cap is 500, FIVE HUNDRED, which means every active player will join the highest tier fleet they can find... derp DERP balance be damned.
Stop giving the mega fleets all of the advantage, we smaller fleets already have enough to worry about. Did you forget? ALL OF YOUR PROJECTS ARE TIMED ANYWAY, The Tholian Fleet Mark Farming is TIMED for 2 hours only! The other fleet mark methods are UNREALISTIC and take too long and give next to NOTHING for the time spent.
That is poor reasoning skills right there. "We should make the smaller fleets struggle as much as possible, but oh look they can still buy the same tier 1 ships over and over again." *slaps my forehead*
All I was saying is that I believe that Nukara missions were designed to produce the same level of Fleet Marks as the other missions... not that I liked it... but with the cooldowns, that is what they do.
The Nukara event's marks are time-gated though, and not available 24/7. It's simple really, loose the time-gating on the fleet marks of Nukara, or remove the cooldowns. Don't double-penalize people on it.
I'd rather they revert it, it was a way to make a decent amount of marks without wasting the entire day grinding, just a couple frenzied hours. Considering how much lengthy grinding there is already; STFs for Borg tech, Dailies for Dilithium, there aren't enough hours in the day to fully play STO the way it is going, and to have a life. Alternatively, if they don't want people making 1000 marks a day from constant effort, then hard-cap it like dilith refinement. You can only can earn X marks in each 24 hour frame, or something like that.
I personally would rather do fun actives than menial repetitions while playing a game. You know, fun things, done, for fun. Higher-powers forbid we have fun playing a game.
Not even going to try and defend Cryptic/PWE on this one....
1. Should have given us a heads up in the patch notes, sure we would have been griping earlier, but we would have know. What was coming.
2. Cool down AND Time gating an event is unacceptable. This makes the fleetmark burden on small fleets too high. Pick one, either time gate it or have a cool down, not both.
Looks like Tier I is as high as my fleet is going to strive on the star bases now.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
99 bugs found in the code!
99 bugs found in the code!
Fix one bug!
Compile it again!
101 bugs found in the code!
I'm posting again even though my posts got nerfed also.
I will NOT be doing Nukara, Ever Again. It was the only thing that made me enjoy ground ANYTHING in this game. There will be no EVA suit purchase, No anything purchased for ground based while this is in effect.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
It's good they nerfed the Nukara missions. Having one single method of generating fleet marks be 5 times more efficient than the others isn't balanced at all. It was so bad that during the bonus mark event, I couldn't find people to run any of the other missions. If I asked, the response was, "Why would we run anything else when farming Nukara is so much better?" That right there is a clear indication of a broken system.
That said, I think the devs should come up with some way to scale fleet mark generation. Members of large fleets end up sitting on piles of fleet marks without chances to contribute them because the projects are filled within seconds of becoming available. Small fleets always have projects sitting for days with every input filled except fleet marks because their ability to generate them is so low. Perhaps the devs should implement scaling requirements for fleet marks, or come up with some way for members of very large fleets to donate their surplus marks to very small fleets for some kind of compensation.
It's good they nerfed the Nukara missions. Having one single method of generating fleet marks be 5 times more efficient than the others isn't balanced at all. It was so bad that during the bonus mark event, I couldn't find people to run any of the other missions. If I asked, the response was, "Why would we run anything else when farming Nukara is so much better?" That right there is a clear indication of a broken system.
That said, I think the devs should come up with some way to scale fleet mark generation. Members of large fleets end up sitting on piles of fleet marks without chances to contribute them because the projects are filled within seconds of becoming available. Small fleets always have projects sitting for days with every input filled except fleet marks because their ability to generate them is so low. Perhaps the devs should implement scaling requirements for fleet marks, or come up with some way for members of very large fleets to donate their surplus marks to very small fleets for some kind of compensation.
Well the members of large fleets could temporarily leave the large fleet, join the small fleet, donate, and get the Fleet Credits. The fleet credits are character bound, not fleet bound.. so they could then leave, and go back to their fleet with the credits.
It's good they nerfed the Nukara missions. Having one single method of generating fleet marks be 5 times more efficient than the others isn't balanced at all.
In the end, we had access to a bug that allowed people to generate insane amounts of fleet credits. Like the bug that allowed you to take a starship into the vault, or the initial Experience bug that rewarded 20x the fleet credits it was intended (triblle testing of fleetbases).
The difference here is that most people liked this bug... but it was a bug. There is no other "currency" mission that was this far unbalanced. (I.e there is no STF that drops 10 EDC... on double coupon days you get 4 (maybe 6 on if your luck with in-mission edc drops and a good roll)... and thats a timed event (specific day of the week, for 2 specific missions) and has a cooldown (1 hour on each).
Edit; That being said, I agree the Nukara missions should produce fleet marks 24/7 (half the value that is given during the events now). So 5 Fleet Marks, and keep the cooldowns (same basic pattern as STFs)
Do I wish there was a way to earn 300 Fleet Marks an hour, sure... because it made it easier... Do I understand the small fleets issue... somewhat. Yes, it will take you longer (potentially much longer) to level a starbase... but that was never a secret. No where did a developer write that it would, or should, take a 3 man fleet the same amount of time to tier a base as it would 30, or 300. In fact, they were clear that it would take longer (and yes I remember seeing somewhere that 18 months would not be uncommon for small or casual fleets).
Exactly...
In the end, we had access to a bug that allowed people to generate insane amounts of fleet credits. Like the bug that allowed you to take a starship into the vault, or the initial Experience bug that rewarded 20x the fleet credits it was intended (triblle testing of fleetbases).
The difference here is that most people liked this bug... but it was a bug. There is no other "currency" mission that was this far unbalanced. (I.e there is no STF that drops 10 EDC... on double coupon days you get 4 (maybe 6 on if your luck with in-mission edc drops and a good roll)... and thats a timed event (specific day of the week, for 2 specific missions) and has a cooldown (1 hour on each).
Edit; That being said, I agree the Nukara missions should produce fleet marks 24/7 (half the value that is given during the events now). So 5 Fleet Marks, and keep the cooldowns (same basic pattern as STFs)
Do I wish there was a way to earn 300 Fleet Marks an hour, sure... because it made it easier... Do I understand the small fleets issue... somewhat. Yes, it will take you longer (potentially much longer) to level a starbase... but that was never a secret. No where did a developer write that it would, or should, take a 3 man fleet the same amount of time to tier a base as it would 30, or 300. In fact, they were clear that it would take longer (and yes I remember seeing somewhere that 18 months would not be uncommon for small or casual fleets).
The difference here is that it doesn't cost 600 EDCs to get something. Each of the projects costs hundreds of FMs. They effectively just doubled the amount of time (And in some cases, quadrupoled) it will take for fleets to level up their starbases/everything else.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
Comments
Not saying I am agreeing with how they managed the change, but as I think about all the discussions, specifically the one where Heretic was commenting on how long it would take and that there were Drawbacks, and Benefits to small vs large fleets.
Large Fleets could fill projects quickly, thereby leveling quickly, but would face problems with provisioning the supplies for a large fleet. (Many more projects that would time gate their development of the base (provision projects produce less Branch specific XP) (Notice that the Dil only projects don't produce Branch XP).
Small Fleets would have a resource issue, but not a provisioning issue (take longer to level, but more supplies to member ratio).
But, being something not working as intended... should have been fixed. Sucks, because it was nice... but makes sense...
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
It's not like there was any consistency in which got reset. The one that didn't had actual drops in my inventory that I'd collected, but so did one that did, and those drops disappeared from my inventory. Even the Easy ones got reset.
What a load of dev-TRIBBLE! That's my new Word of the Day.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
Why not STFs give marks? Why not pvp give marks? Why not content mission give marks? I'm sure roleplaying ppl have their own way of playing the game, why couldn't they have marks for their own team activities?
Why do we have to be forced into STFs for dil, into nukara for marks, and into space vendor for the silly commodities?
I don't even understand it from monetisation perspective: rl money -> zen -> dil or zen -> ec. You can buy anything with ec.
But the fleet marks? What are they there for? Really?
I can understand "we want ppl to play new content", but the new content is not really playable at the moment.
And putting cooldowns on the fancy new content makes it even less attractive to play.
It's completely backwards. They put a lot of effort into this stuff, but then make sure it won't be played most of the day. And when it is played, there are cooldowns to make sure people don't play it too much.
The devs DID NOT think this one through, not to the benefit of all players, especially not to the benefit of the small fleets they claimed wouldn't be hurt by this. It is biased toward large fleets...and my gut and common sense tell me that this was known all along and the podcast (I heard it too) explaining the starbases was all TRIBBLE.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
That was the only reason to even do the Tholain ground missions, IMOHPO.
I really am not a fan of the ground combat in STO.
This is just another thing to make us grindgrindgrind because that's all they can come up with...
Cost them too much money to have a Dev actually work on new mission content.
But, they've got plenty of Dev time to burn on adjusting graphics and coming up with stuff to milk players out of more money.
KBF CO
We are the Dead
join date Aug 2008
Hmm...
I wouldn't call it fancy. Most of it is ground, and ground using the old ground engine which is absolutely horrendous and all ppl I know hate it with a passion.
Plus I would dismiss the "silly mistake" argument, cause the game itself shows particular attention to grind or pay money strategy.
Maybe that's the plan. Get fewer people to play the ground missions so the glaring issues (the auto targeting drives me insane) aren't noticed quite as much.
And it isn't like my fleet is super small, it has many active members, but the kind of lifesucking unrewarding method of fleet mark gathering you are pushing on smaller fleets is absolutely beyond unacceptable. I'd just have to have like what? 50 members regularly farming marks ? To keep up with the daily projects?
Now at this rate it would take small/medium fleets years YEARS, is that what you intended? Dominant control of one or two fleets? That and the player cap is 500, FIVE HUNDRED, which means every active player will join the highest tier fleet they can find... derp DERP balance be damned.
Stop giving the mega fleets all of the advantage, we smaller fleets already have enough to worry about. Did you forget? ALL OF YOUR PROJECTS ARE TIMED ANYWAY, The Tholian Fleet Mark Farming is TIMED for 2 hours only! The other fleet mark methods are UNREALISTIC and take too long and give next to NOTHING for the time spent.
That is poor reasoning skills right there. "We should make the smaller fleets struggle as much as possible, but oh look they can still buy the same tier 1 ships over and over again." *slaps my forehead*
| Join Date: January 2009 | Computer | Fleet: Broken Wings |
I'm not sure... but what's really pisses me off is that branflakes is cleaning up all rant posts into one tread, but there's no response from dev/designers.
That is really annoying. Because it means "we took your money, we will not give it back and we gonna treat you like **** now".
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
My hopeful guess is that the cleanup is being done while branflakes waits on a response.
But my cynical guess is that the response will probably be a non-reply that boils down to "deal with it" with vague promises of improvements in the future.
Something tells me that a similar conversation took place:
"Look at our stats, people are playing nukara mission and getting large amount of marks off it.
We surely did not intend them to get marks that fast. We need to tune it down. Timegating seems perfect.
Yes. Let's do it on Friday. Tribbles will rant till the evening, we'll go on weekends with no response, and by monday tribbles will get on with grinding.
Yeah, we may loose few thousand customers, but we never cared about them anyway. Our loyal grdinding playerbase will stay and we'll feed them more lockboxes for cash. Let's get on with this. "
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
All fleets, small and large, have to upgrade their starbases to get any real benefit from them, provisions and so on. The blah blah about provision-to-member ratio being better for smaller fleets and therefore is the "balance" is all BS, because small fleets won't GET provisions without UPGRADES. So upgrading comes first. This requires a LOT of contributions, including a LOT of Fleet Marks, to even get these projects underway. Every project of any significance requires you to wait 20 hours before it will unlock anything, if it does unlock anything. You can't do more than 2 projects of the same branch (at least at tier 0) at a time, so that's 20 hours times 5 equals 100 hours to even reach the first branch upgrade, then another 20 hours before you can reach the first starbase upgrade.
All fleets still have to wait that time. It doesn't matter if you have 500 members with 5 Fleet Marks each or 5 members with 500 Fleet Marks each, the timeframe is the same. Equalizer #1.
All fleets only have certain sources for Fleet Marks. The PvE missions are TRIBBLE for Fleet Mark production, simple, but are available 24/7. The "Officer of the Watch (Daily)" mission is a trivial 5 Fleet Mark income, but every little bit helps. The Tholian missions were available to do at any time, but only awarded Fleet Marks during the Fleet Mark event, which occurs maybe 3 times a day for 2 hours at a time. So 6 hours out of 24...1/4 of the day spent farming Fleet Marks AND DOING NOTHING ELSE, just so a small fleet can keep up with the Joneses. The only effective way any small fleet with people that actually wanted to play the game and do something OTHER than just grind Fleet Marks was to blast away at the missions during those events. Equalizer #2.
The equalizers were the starbase construction timeframes and the Fleet Mark event schedule. Small fleets had a chance pre-patch. The devs screwed the small fleets, pure and simple.
But here's your reality check. THERE ARE MORE SMALL FLEETS THAN LARGE ONES. Which means the majority of your players are either small fleet members or solo players (who have no concern about Fleet Marks at all).
Devs...YOU SCREWED THE MAJORITY OF YOUR (FLEET) GAME PLAYER POPULATION! There's the math.
DEV-TRIBBLE!
Sincerely,
-A saddened fleet officer
Nukara is a fun set of missions for me.
However, because my fleet needs Fleet Marks, I can only really play in Fleet Mark missions now. (And I was going to go for a MACO ground set in STFs. Not now. Fleet Mark gathering has killed STF runs for me.
So I was going to start considering running Nukara missions during the Fleet Marks event as I can have fun and be productive at the same time. That's a win-win for players and gets them to play your new content more!
Now they're on cooldowns? What was the problem?
Take off the "time gate" on when Nukara awards Fleet Marks (AKA allow them to make Fleet Marks 24/7) and maybe I can stand a cooldown (the PvEs for Fleet Marks have cooldowns, which I have relatively no problem with).
But if you keep Nukara as awarding only during Fleet Mark events, then please remove the cooldowns or I'll have lost any interest in running Nukara at all.
So sad to see such great new content get destroyed inside of 3 weeks.
2 Years, Minimum. All because of this.
You devs already had the fleet marks increased what? each tier? You had the exp lowered on the cheaper projects, you had the Provisions/Doffs/etc DOUBLED for equal exp gains of the previous tier...
So what the hell are you guys doing to us -.-
TimeGating and Cooldowns are NOT a solution, they are an excuse.
| Join Date: January 2009 | Computer | Fleet: Broken Wings |
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
Nukara missions could have had the fleet mark reward decreased to either 20 to 40% of the current payout. There's no need to time restrict the missions as everyone will be forced to take a break from the content and do something else.
The fleet events set in space are considerably more time consuming. The payout for the time spent is too low. The space events should really be doubled in payout.
It is possible to be clever and adjust the payout instead of telling people to never use the content.
Note that the space event payout is so low that I question whether it's worth focusing on starbases now. Are you sure that you want people to get bored with playing by restricting content?
All I was saying is that I believe that Nukara missions were designed to produce the same level of Fleet Marks as the other missions... not that I liked it... but with the cooldowns, that is what they do.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
I'd rather they revert it, it was a way to make a decent amount of marks without wasting the entire day grinding, just a couple frenzied hours. Considering how much lengthy grinding there is already; STFs for Borg tech, Dailies for Dilithium, there aren't enough hours in the day to fully play STO the way it is going, and to have a life. Alternatively, if they don't want people making 1000 marks a day from constant effort, then hard-cap it like dilith refinement. You can only can earn X marks in each 24 hour frame, or something like that.
I personally would rather do fun actives than menial repetitions while playing a game. You know, fun things, done, for fun. Higher-powers forbid we have fun playing a game.
1. Should have given us a heads up in the patch notes, sure we would have been griping earlier, but we would have know. What was coming.
2. Cool down AND Time gating an event is unacceptable. This makes the fleetmark burden on small fleets too high. Pick one, either time gate it or have a cool down, not both.
Looks like Tier I is as high as my fleet is going to strive on the star bases now.
I will NOT be doing Nukara, Ever Again. It was the only thing that made me enjoy ground ANYTHING in this game. There will be no EVA suit purchase, No anything purchased for ground based while this is in effect.
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.
That said, I think the devs should come up with some way to scale fleet mark generation. Members of large fleets end up sitting on piles of fleet marks without chances to contribute them because the projects are filled within seconds of becoming available. Small fleets always have projects sitting for days with every input filled except fleet marks because their ability to generate them is so low. Perhaps the devs should implement scaling requirements for fleet marks, or come up with some way for members of very large fleets to donate their surplus marks to very small fleets for some kind of compensation.
Well the members of large fleets could temporarily leave the large fleet, join the small fleet, donate, and get the Fleet Credits. The fleet credits are character bound, not fleet bound.. so they could then leave, and go back to their fleet with the credits.
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
In the end, we had access to a bug that allowed people to generate insane amounts of fleet credits. Like the bug that allowed you to take a starship into the vault, or the initial Experience bug that rewarded 20x the fleet credits it was intended (triblle testing of fleetbases).
The difference here is that most people liked this bug... but it was a bug. There is no other "currency" mission that was this far unbalanced. (I.e there is no STF that drops 10 EDC... on double coupon days you get 4 (maybe 6 on if your luck with in-mission edc drops and a good roll)... and thats a timed event (specific day of the week, for 2 specific missions) and has a cooldown (1 hour on each).
Edit; That being said, I agree the Nukara missions should produce fleet marks 24/7 (half the value that is given during the events now). So 5 Fleet Marks, and keep the cooldowns (same basic pattern as STFs)
Do I wish there was a way to earn 300 Fleet Marks an hour, sure... because it made it easier... Do I understand the small fleets issue... somewhat. Yes, it will take you longer (potentially much longer) to level a starbase... but that was never a secret. No where did a developer write that it would, or should, take a 3 man fleet the same amount of time to tier a base as it would 30, or 300. In fact, they were clear that it would take longer (and yes I remember seeing somewhere that 18 months would not be uncommon for small or casual fleets).
Star Trek Online, Now with out the Trek....
The difference here is that it doesn't cost 600 EDCs to get something. Each of the projects costs hundreds of FMs. They effectively just doubled the amount of time (And in some cases, quadrupoled) it will take for fleets to level up their starbases/everything else.
[Unrepentant] Lapo@overlapo: the problem with space STF
is that you can't properly teabag your defeated opponent
Unrepentant: Home of the Rainbow Warrior and the Rainbow Brigade.