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Why S7 really hurts: No more synergies
arcademaster
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Up to yesterday I was still thinking S7 would turn out great and that there was a plan behind it all. But now that I've played it and had time to read through the forum for feedback and pondered things myself I'm far less enthusiastic. My big problem with the new things is the complete lack of content synergy. Bear with me for a second and let me explain.
There are now 6 major currencies: Dilithium, Energy Credits, Omega Marks, Romulan Marks, Fleet Marks. And Doffs, which aren't a real currency but you'll want to obtain a lot for various reasons.
Now in Season 6, there was no problem. Endgame players could just play STFs and cover all of their currency needs. You'd get your STF gear, dilithium and 100-200k EC's worth of vendor trash for one hour of playing. That left you enough time to go doffing or do fleet events for another hour to help out your fleet. With two hours playtime a day you would be all around happy and would make good progress every day.
Now in S7, there is absolutely no more synergy at all. All activities we do only help us out with a single currency!
STFs don't earn us anything but Omega Marks. If we grind enough weeks to get to Tier 5 we can earn about 500 dil per run as bonus, if we play during an Reputiation bonus event. No more EC value.
The Romulan Reputation missions also don't reward anything but marks, at least as far as I have seen. If there is a mission that awards dil or substantial amounts of loot to sell for EC I haven't seen it.
Fleet Actions award Dil now, but only award loot to sell if you place in the top 3. Out of 20 people.
The only way to earn EC now is by doing Tour the Universe which takes one hour and is extremely boring and mostly consists of watching loading screens, or by selling Doffs.
I'm not yet sure what will happen with the Doff market. No one will buy green or blue doffs anymore for upgrinding, maybe for degrinding to turn them into whites, but I don't know.
And yes we also still need fleet marks, and now we actually have to do fleet events again since we cut off from our free daily FMs from the console clickers.
Do you see where the problem is? There is so much stuff we need to do, and absolutely nothing of it benefits us in more than one aspect. Cryptic says they want us to play for 4 hours a day to obtain 8000 dilithium. And how many hours to they expect us to play to obtain a basic EC income (even the T0 personal reputation projects cost ~50k EC each)? 4 hours dil grinding + 1 hour tour the universe? + half an hour doing STFs for Omega marks + an hour doffing + half an hour fleet events for fleet marks.
So in total 7 hours a day just to progress at the same pace as we did before?
Ok, no one is forced to participate in all of those activities. One can decide simply not to bother with STFs or a fleet. One can also decide to be happy with 1000 dil a day. But considering how content starved this game was and to some degree still is, do you really want to make players chose between which content they want to play to this degree?
There are now 6 major currencies: Dilithium, Energy Credits, Omega Marks, Romulan Marks, Fleet Marks. And Doffs, which aren't a real currency but you'll want to obtain a lot for various reasons.
Now in Season 6, there was no problem. Endgame players could just play STFs and cover all of their currency needs. You'd get your STF gear, dilithium and 100-200k EC's worth of vendor trash for one hour of playing. That left you enough time to go doffing or do fleet events for another hour to help out your fleet. With two hours playtime a day you would be all around happy and would make good progress every day.
Now in S7, there is absolutely no more synergy at all. All activities we do only help us out with a single currency!
STFs don't earn us anything but Omega Marks. If we grind enough weeks to get to Tier 5 we can earn about 500 dil per run as bonus, if we play during an Reputiation bonus event. No more EC value.
The Romulan Reputation missions also don't reward anything but marks, at least as far as I have seen. If there is a mission that awards dil or substantial amounts of loot to sell for EC I haven't seen it.
Fleet Actions award Dil now, but only award loot to sell if you place in the top 3. Out of 20 people.
The only way to earn EC now is by doing Tour the Universe which takes one hour and is extremely boring and mostly consists of watching loading screens, or by selling Doffs.
I'm not yet sure what will happen with the Doff market. No one will buy green or blue doffs anymore for upgrinding, maybe for degrinding to turn them into whites, but I don't know.
And yes we also still need fleet marks, and now we actually have to do fleet events again since we cut off from our free daily FMs from the console clickers.
Do you see where the problem is? There is so much stuff we need to do, and absolutely nothing of it benefits us in more than one aspect. Cryptic says they want us to play for 4 hours a day to obtain 8000 dilithium. And how many hours to they expect us to play to obtain a basic EC income (even the T0 personal reputation projects cost ~50k EC each)? 4 hours dil grinding + 1 hour tour the universe? + half an hour doing STFs for Omega marks + an hour doffing + half an hour fleet events for fleet marks.
So in total 7 hours a day just to progress at the same pace as we did before?
Ok, no one is forced to participate in all of those activities. One can decide simply not to bother with STFs or a fleet. One can also decide to be happy with 1000 dil a day. But considering how content starved this game was and to some degree still is, do you really want to make players chose between which content they want to play to this degree?
Post edited by arcademaster on
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STF's are pretty much useless now, why run STF's on a constant grind if there isn't any other benefits besides Omega Marks? same with the Romulan Marks, only thing I have use for New Romulus is to climb.
I'll probably start doing ALOT more Fleet actions...
I definately want dilithium back to STF's and the loot drops returned "forget EDC's and the others" I just want random weapons, consoles. Mk X - XI for Normal, Mk XI - XII For Elite.
RachelJ88
"edit" - its pay 2 win, even the Exchange is pay 2 win, no decent loot from any of the end game "grind-fest" missions this equals the less than fortunate playerbase who can't whip out their wallet/purse every day to buy lock box keys to get things to sell on the exchange so they can buy things off the exchange to get better equipment.
It's either A or B. specific missions to get specific rewards.
Exactly this.
I, as a casual player, now pretty much have to choose what parts of the game I want to progress in.
I can go for contributing to my small fleet's starbase.
I can try to get somewhere contributing to our fleet's embassy.
I can go for dilithium, to trade in for zen and buy c-store stuff.
I can go do stf's to progress in omega rep.
I can go do Romulan stuff for that rep.
Or I can try and get some ec's, which are needed for 4 out of 5 of these.
As it was, one could easily get by on 1-2 hours every day or even every other day, and feel like accomplishing something. Now, not so much. There is no way for me to do all of that and still make any sort of progress towards reaching the goals in a reasonable amount of time.
I've already decided not to be bothered with embassy stuff, or further starbase development. The rewards, while nice, such as the new science consoles, are just not worth it.
I guess I'll try to get my Romulan and Omega rep to t2 or 3, depending on how the demands scale, and settle for mk x gear from their pricey stores and about half of the new captain skills/skill bonuses.
I'm glad I got some decent gear pre-change, or I would've been pretty much excluded from any dabbling in competitive play I might like to do every once in a while.
Edit: also, this pretty much bombs simultaneously progressing on 2 alts for me. I can not manage to do all of these things on 3 characters, within the time I have. I simply can't.
I played S7 Yesterday for a bit and I can already see, that I can either push one or two of my toons and ignore the other 2 for a bit or ignore the new rep system and continue to max out my Dil on all toons.
... or i could simply stop playing. I intended to buy the new ship bundle. I already had put aside the cash needed for that, but didn't convert it into zen points yet. So now I will take a wait and see aproach. If it gets better I will probably stay in the game. If it does not get better I am just glad that I did not convert that money to Zen points yet.
I just played an elite ground mission, without the op it gives like 90 marks.
If 2 days = 26 marks then 90 marks is a week's worth of marks for the reputation system in like 30 minutes.
1 mission = nothing to do for a full week.
And obviously they want you to have something to do outside 30 minutes worth of time per week...
They openly said that should be fleet action hence the dil was moved there.
The extra positive about that is it gives you plenty of times to keep up on marks with your alts.
And in the huge gap of lost time you can also go out and earn.
Albeit personally I am not a fan of fleet missions mainly because I end up with marks I can't use for anything since the projects are always filled in my fleet.
This is for Tier 0, for each new tier the required marks will go higher and higher. Starbase T0 projects required like 180 marks, T3 projects already require 800 marks. Do you see the pattern?
On tribble the projects were exactly the same on tier 2...
26 marks per 2 days. 90 marks = 1 week. The only thing that changes is the amount of weeks to the next tier, not the weekly requirements.
/edit
ps. but sure, if you want every item on 8 characters right away you better sell your house
I for one am done with STF's until they fix it, nor will I bend and do those godawful FA's.
you have to do this OR that OR something else.
and worse i am now unable to choose the content i ENJOY to play and get my daily dilithium, no Cryptic chooses what content i should play, even if i HATE that other content and am bored out by it.
Instead i now have to choose what types of marks in my grind UI of choice i will want to fill next and do whatever mission CRYPTIC put those marks on... if they are fun to me or not does not matter now.
So i just played a Romulan Mark Mission, a Borg Cube spawned and i got no Omega Marks for it (obviously), so i'm fighting Borg here and get Romulan Marks.
Why does this feel wrong?
Yeah, kind of kills the fun, for me.
I want to play the content I enjoy, and progress towards a goal I want to reach. Not either/or. Also, if I'd want to manage projects all the time I'd become a project manager for a living. I'd get better rewards, and a raise every once in a while.
Come to think of it, maybe they are aiming to put some of the bureaucratic stuff into admiralship, which would make sense, from a canon perspective.
Anyway. I'm off to play a game for awhile. Like, running story content that I like, and is rewarding. Plenty of possibilities out there, after all.
And after that, I'm going to do some work. Stuff that I do not particularly like doing, but earns me good money, that I can spend on whatever I like.
I was going to roll a Klingon to help my fleetmates with the Klingon Starbase which is lagging behind our Fed one, but I work fulltime and it would be too much hassle to put a 3rd character on my roster.
I lose playing a Klingon. My fleetmates lose another potential source of materials for the Starbase, and Cryptic loses the Zen I would have payed for things like a T5 B'rel.
We all lose.
just forget STF's. There is Dill and Omega marks earned in the Fleet Actions. The Omega Marks requirements are so lol low you can do 2 fleet actions taking no longer than an STF and you are done.
EC?
Just try and do the Tau Dewi (or how is it called) patrol mission. From the loot i have trashed to replicator I've got 300k.
My problem is with the Fleet Marks. Nobody seems to be queueing up for these in the KDF.
Right before Dilithium came out the devs removed the different types/tiers of marks because they wanted to simplify the currency system. The number of currencies for different types of items were too varied to know which one to obtain.
So the devs consolidated them all into dilithium and energy credits. It seems like that entire consolidation was for nothing as our currency count is back up to the following:
1)Energy Credits
2) Dilithium
3)Fleet credits
4)Fleet Emblems
5)Omega Marks
6) Romulan Marks
7)Latinum
So will we be getting a new currency with each patch now? What happened to the simplification of currency design that was intended for the STO economy?
Now it will be like:
1. Run a couple STF's, get the Omega marks, start the research, log off and go play a real MMO.
2. Come back in a couple months, run a few Elite, get MK XII gear I always wanted, then log off and go play a real MMO.
This must be exactly what Cryptic wants from their players because it is surely what they deisgned.
Thanks for everything!
The point of removing the old marks was to get rid of the obsolete currency in the game, not to simplify anything. Those old marks were level gated, so they had absolutely no use at level 40/50. All of the new currencies are valuable for a level 50 player. It also gives the designers the ability to distribute different currency types to specific types of missions to encourage the usage of content that has not seen much use (Big Dig, SB24, Gorn Minefield, etc). I'm not saying that it is perfect, but there is rational reasoning behind the design.
Don't forget the lobi crystals and (arguably) borg neural things.
Just be glad they simplified before they added these... Oh my, what a mess that would've been. It's plenty messy as is.
Iguess they have succeeded in accomplishing their goals of having people take longer or pay more money, while dissuading people from having multiple characters or alts they use so there is less chance the player has too much in-game money and thereby does not buy more Zen fror Dil. Their main goal all along since rthe PWE acquisition.
*Sigh*, accomplishing your financials goals by hurting your player base in all areas is not the way to succeed Crytpic! If we dont talk up the game and bring new people in, then you will eventually see a diminishing playerbase as those of us who remain burn out.
or seek other MMO options
I agree that they can now, and ARE, use the new currency typoes to force our player behavior to do things we would not regularly do otherwise.
If they pull that off, my hat is off to Cryptic for being only game company to pull off a trifecta of pissing off pklaywers three times and STILL getting them to keep playing.
Corporate middle management D-bag alert!
That's the point. they want to mostly break up where the currency/rewards are so players have to play all the content to get what they want. i found myself doing it already.
i needed romulan marks - off to new romulus, then i needed some omega marks, off to do the stf's, then i wanted some dilithium, off to do pvp, and fleet actions.
for better or for worse, depending on your point of view, to get all the rewards you need to spend a much greater amount of time in game and over a greater variety of activities than before.
now this all has benefits and disadvantages. if you are restricted in time then you want to progress as quickly as you can and now it will feel slower. also progressing down one course does nothing for the others.
if you spend a lot of time in game because you want to be here, you might actually enjoy being pushed to play a variety of content rather than just grinding stf's over and over. having a solid reason to pvp, and do fleet actions again was a nice break from my usually gameplay.
That depends on the person I suppose.
I for one do not appreciate being forced away from getting what I need in STF's.
Season 6: Run a few elite STF missions in a day and get my dilithium and credits and then move on to things like doffing or helping my fleet mates with getting set items.
Season 7: I start my reputation projects cooking, then I go play the absolutely terrible missions that still give dilithium, then I go watch loadings screens for an hour to earn some credits... and by the time that's done, I won't have any time left for my alt characters or my fleet mates (who may not even be trying to get the same "currency" I currently am).
Extremely disappointed in season 7. I tried to be optimistic. I said "wait and see" to the doomsayers. That was back when we were told that STF and fleet actions were both giving dilithium.
But now reality has hit. Cryptic has basically killed my alt characters and badly crippled my ability to participate with friends by making everything take five times longer, forcing me to be selfish with my time. I'm having a serious crisis of motivation to even play STO at all.
I know what you mean.
Isn't it...ironic that they added the feature to switch between alts without logging out/in and eliminated the need to switch between alts with the very same release?
The dil changes and the singleplayer progress time-gating, this is just not motivating in any form anymore. Guess I'm out until Cryptic realizes they made a mistake and fixed it.
They'd be better off actually listening to player feedback and making that content into something that people would actually WANT to play, instead of leaving it in the un-fun state it is and just tacking some "currency" reward onto it that forces you to trudge through something you don't even enjoy.
But I'm sure some suit will look at their precious numbers and say "Wow, we knocked it out of the park with this one, look at how many people are playing FAs now!" and use the same "strategy" in future updates.
Lol so true!