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Official Mine Trap Feedback Thread
salamiinferno
Member Posts: 159 Cryptic Developer
Official Mine Trap Feedback Thread
Please leave your comments, feedback, concerns, and BUGS here.
Please leave your comments, feedback, concerns, and BUGS here.
Post edited by salamiinferno on
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It was not obvious that we needed to stay at the Evac points after escorting the civilians, so my team was caught rushing to another point to help it when the "Defend the evac site" prompt came up.
EDIT: It seems that killing subterranean Exits does nothing. They just respawn. Seems pointless to have them as destructible if targeting them doesn't help you any.
Feedback: There is no map to play. Please provide 14 AI substitutes until Tribble activity reaches acceptable levels.
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
first bit about warning them was simple enough.
the fixing of the house was cool and made a change of pace from shooting stuff.
next we had to defend the houses and it can be quite tricky to save everyone and we probably ended up covering 2 districts instead of 4, so we lost all of the buildings in the residential area and 3 in the mine area.
the escape was a nice touch and the rescue was excellent seeing the shuttles land.
im not sure if the drop kick animation fitted the salt vampire? seemed a weird attack for such a creature but a minor grumble. also was hoping for a big boss at the centre of the map. the source of the problem so to speak. would have been nice to see 20 people ganging up on a huge boss, as it just made it slightly anticlimactic at the end.
might be helpful if the queue pops at 15 people instead of 20 as finding 20 can be tricky.
all in all great fun. well done.
Telling people to seek shelter is quite boring! The same for fortifying homes, it's not really that engaging. The occasional salt vampire popping up in this phase is rather irritating and feels a bit off.
When the invasion begins the message "Industrial Building 3 is under attack" should highlight the building on the map as well, otherwise it's quite useless.
Good is that different map sensors are color coded.
Bottom line, should be more focused around the defense of citizens than clicking them or fortifying buildings.
Experienced no bugs, but the new queue system apparently caused a rather longish wait till I could finally join the Fleet Action.
There was one bug. Right near the industrial evacuation site, one of the Romulans got stuck in the ground.
Daizen - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
Selia - Lvl 60 Tactical - Eclipse
I disagree, those sections build tension nicely. It is a zombie apocalypse scenario, after all.
I have one complaint: Each time we finished one of the phases, any remaining salt vampires went untargetable and sat down on the ground. I think a better way to clear the board between phases is needed. For that matter, why clear it at all?
1.) The reward scale is kinda screwed up. I usually get around 50 Fleet Marks and 95 Romulan Marks from the Azula Nebula mission but only 14 fleet marks and 11 romulan marks from the Mine Trap Fleet Action. Something just seems off about it.
2.) There really should be accolades and titles for the M-113 vampires. Two suggestion would be "Salt Vampire Slayer" or "Salt Vampire Hunter".
evacuating: it's hard to determinate when exactly the citizens are 'saved' or if they need another gentle push in the right direction.
salt vampire hold: no immunty when using a hypo to get out of it. (surprise)
rewards: while I cannot judge what the romulan marks will be worth in the end is the amount of fleet marks rather MEH. getting 10 marks out of a 20 minute effort (during fleet mark hours as well) just doesn't cut it. large events (i.e. greater than 5) require some kind of dummy bonus.
edit: I wasn't able to use my operational assets as well! ,c
Step two (fortifying) isn't easy to figure out but after a first run we know what to do.
Step 3 (defending homes) takes a lot of DPS. The mobs don't dps a lot but they are pretty resilient. Fortunately i was with my tac in full KHG Mk XII set and it wasn't too much! I needed evry single bit of dps i could get and my grenades made a difference here. I'm not sure what my sci could do in this part. People running anywhere. Didn't notice any teamwork attempt during our tribble testing event in that part, even if the map is obviously designed to make it easier.
Step 4 (escorting civilians) . This part requires a lot of organization, pugs won't do it efficiently that's a fact. Since most of them expect it to work like a solo mission where they can do their own stuff the way they want without caring about other players, it will be the hardest part of the game. There will always be 10 player heading to one spot while the rest of the group will struggle on the three last spots. Excellent DPS and heavy healing abilities will be required, but I guess that a good and experienced player in each team could do it.
Step 5 (waiting for the shuttle). A lot of very resilient mobs, I don't like being held while the two other players can't handle the protection of the area. This is quite frustrating in this part.
Overall: good job, I do like the fact that this mission requires a brain and cooperation, even if it also requires a lot of dps in some parts. It's not hard to predict that pugs will have very poor results in this instance though.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
But sometimes, it's hard to find the full box, maybe should be always full of tools for barricading.
Indeed, that was my exact thought. It's clearly easier though but cooperation is required. I'm not sure about good strategies, all I know is that there are 128 civilans to rescue according to farktoid5000, thus the score could be based on the number of rescued civilans with no further concern.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
First bit about warning them was simple enough, but it seems odd that I have to tell 3 individual standing together 3 seperate time to get inside. Perhaps the "get inside" 'command' should be a short ranged AoE interact?
The fixing of the houses, did you know that those tall supply boxes don't like short characters? i had to jump around them to get the interact to pop up. And shouldn't the doors that need barricaded have an interact glow? It was hard to tell which needed fixed and which didn't.
The escape, the same suggestion with the initial warning. they would stop running and stand next to each other, why can't I "yell" at the group of them?
This^^ Why not just let us keep shooting them down while people escape? They don't have to attack the civilians, just keep coming after us. This would add a little bit of action to those acting as rear guard if some Saltys would follow after. "Salty the Vampire Slayer"
or just "Salty" to get a Naval reference.
Registered: Oct/2009 , LTS : Feb/2011
Fleets: Warriors of the Phoenix, Kirian Industries[/SIGPIC]
Three years and still no Captain Klaa hair...
At first I thought you had to run across the map endgame, but it turned out another team just... well they sucked.
I also noticed quite a few of the creatures falling though the floor when fighting at the shuttle evacuation point on the east side of the map. Other than that I was impressed by the level of detail and difficulty, my first run though my team saved 3 civs, second run we saved 7 or 8.
So right off the bat it's not clear that your team has a zone it should stick to, and that's whichever zone you landed in.
First phase: (Informing civilians). Run around, mash the talk to button, kill anything that spawns. The spawn effect seems a bit slow given that you're under time pressure, so on all occasions I found myself already moved on before I started getting shot at.
Second phase: race to fortify. Not much depth but no problems really
Third evacuation route: A few of our civilians were getting stuck under the ground. We managed to I think move the civilians ahead before a group of vampires spawned, so they just kinda stood there.
4th: Defend shuttles. Nothing to it really. Stand around, kill stuff.
My basic grief here is that the enemy seems uninspired, there's no real tension because it seems like a couple of people with a pulsewave and a splitbeam (or a minigun) can just mow down everything, and they just plod along like zombies waiting to be mowed down. They might just be underpowered (or we're overpowered for the tuning) but it seemed pretty trivial to just shot and win.
Ideally with game design you want some choices*, some risks that can pay off etc. The scenario doesn't really have much that seems to make a difference. When I'm fortifying a building there should be a choice here, I shouldn't be able to defend everywhere all the time in the next phase so the group should have to deliberately choose to armour some structures and defend others, and hope they hold out long enough to be killed.
The 'defend civilians' phases didn't seem to present much of anything. The civilians should try and move in say 3 groups which then bunch up when the whole thing narrows, but they should be spread out just enough you have to feel some tension and a need to rush to save one group or another.
*choices are overcome by execution and gear. If you 'normally' only have enough dps for 2/3 choices a really good team should be able to do 3/3 for example. On my first attempt with no idea what was happening our group easily managed 80% of objectives and none of that was an intentional tradeoff, it was just kinda random guessing and overpowering the enemies.
2nd part: Forifying buildings. After playing 3 times, It seems to me that some parts of the map are easier to fortify than others due to the distance between the buildings and the materials. Also, you can choose to fortify doors, windows or walls. Tbh, I'm not sure if it is better to fortify one thing or the other. Also, it seemed to me that no matter how many times you fortify something (the door, for instance) you can always keep choosing to fortify that. Not sure if that is intended.
3rd part: Evacuation to the shuttle landing zone. It is ok, but the romulans like to stop to rest a bit too much. I would reduce the "resting chance" on the romulan NPCs a bit.
4th part: Shuttles. Mostly works ok. As someone else said, some times I have seen other players leave the shuttle area thinking that they are finished and can go help other groups when they should wait for the incoming vampires.
In general, it was a fun experience.
Formerly redleader - Real join date is July 2008
Found a minor bug. At the LZ in the South West there was a Civilian left over at the end of the match:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/213/screenshot2012101715535.jpg
I liked the mission for the most part. Not too happy that its basically a zombie fight, but the evac stuff was fantastic. I loved the smoke at the LZs; I was half expecting to see some Hueys come flying over the hills.
However, there were two things that REALLY bothered me - the delusion effects and the hold effects. The delusion effects seemed to keep coming up over and over, and that was very frustrating. The hold effects also came up too often. This was on top of having 8 ranks in Willpower. It makes me feel like my skill points were a waste - which is made even WORSE because the Mental Discipline trait's effects are so poorly documented, as is Willpower, in terms of how they really work (how much does +30 Confuse resistance give you? It's not a regular damage type, so there's no way to know). Frankly these type of moves are rather frustrating to deal with, both as mind control and in general, so enemies should be using them very rarely, if at all.
What's worse is just how long the effect lasted - my char with Peak Health was darn near drained completely dry. Adding frustration on top of another frustration. (Additionally with Star Trek canon likely allowing us to be briefed on these guys, you would think we'd at least know enough not to fall for delusions the salt vampires tried on us so easily - plus, being the Main Character I'd like to think most of us are pretty hardened against mind control)
Additionally, I think that better instruction is needed for new players. It took a bit to figure out what was going on the first time around, although it didn't help that it queued me into a mission that was already about a minute into the gameplay so I had to play catch-up.
Underground respawn points also need to be reconsidered - they seem like they're respawning too quickly. It might be better for them to stay gone but be considerably tougher.
As a note it's been a bit since I played this, so some of these may have changed, but please, devs, look into this and think about it. This is definitely a mission with a lot of promise, though at least the mind control effects might be frustrating enough to make me want to skip it.
My character Tsin'xing
http://imgur.com/a/6XOgn#0
2 screen shots one before I used /stuck and one after I used /stuck. There were also a couple of times when the game wouldn't allow me to use /stuck and it recommended beaming up/aborting the mission, as well as requesting GM assistance 'as a last resort'...
The request assistance function was almost as much help as /stuck was to begin with, but it never got me to where I could actually REQUEST help. It just told me to use /stuck, gave a helpful little button to push that had the same effect as if I had typed it in the chat window...and gave the same results. It also recommended beaming up/aborting the mission.
I'm sorry but why am I going to abort from something that takes as long as Mine Trap does to queue for.
For that matter, if I'm in the mission there should be a better solution to getting stuck in a friggin building...How hard is it to adjust the spawn in locations so that they DON'T overlap any of the buildings? Or make it so /stuck actually moves you to a location where you wouldn't be STUCK. If there's anything that can be done it would be greatly appreciated, and I'm sorry if this post is in the wrong thread, I found the only one that seemed to on the topic that I was talking about. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Yeah yeah Mine trap is bugged, but did you know this thread was made when it was being tested before release in 2012? Did you know the Tribble server is testing season 8 and Mine trap is not new to S8?
Anyway, good details on the bug report and sad to see you were stuck inside the building and the team suffered a leech ontop. I am glad they were understanding and didnt report you as well.
"I'm drunk, whats your excuse for being an idiot?" - Unknown drunk man. :eek: