Overall some very nice changes. Personally, I think you should have put this post in another S7 Blog on the main site. It shows that you are listening and responding to player feedback (which is a good thing.)
Branflakes has to leave before I was able to get the post finished - he said he is going to get it up as a blog as soon as he can - either tonight or tomorrow.
That should be in the patch notes, but forgot to mention that we are changing the Fleet Action daily to reward 50 Fleet Marks instead of Dilithium now that we're added Dilithium for completing every Reputation Project.
We will continue to add ways to earn Fleet Marks where needed as we continue to monitor the overall economy.
Bad move in my opinion.
I wouldn't mind a reduced Dilithium reward from the Daily, but i'd also like to see Fleet Marks given as an OPTION when accepting the Daily reward. Instead of removing the Dilithium completely from the Daily, let us choose whether we want "50 Fleet Marks" OR "xxxx Dilithium". Obviously, the possibility that players would choose Dilithium (and get Dilithium for Fleet Action Completion) would exist. But it would also allow us as players to choose which reward we desire most at the time.
Is there any chance you can have the UI team make a pass on the Foundry search to be paged instead of showing all the missions at once. It can sometime bring the game client to a snails crawl.
The Mailbox has the exact same problem. My game client sometimes lags out from all the mail wanting to show up at once. 20-50 messages per a page would be nice. At least then the mail lag won't be so much a pain in the neck.
I've been able to increase my staff and for the first time in Season 8 - tackle something awesome and on my long standing engineering report to do list.
If things keep going this way - the team will be able to start knocking off all of the features and content goals we've had since day one. It really is a good time for STO and we hope that with your support - it continues!
That sounds awesome. I can remember some of the lofty goals you had in your engineering reports. Hope we can see them come to fruition.
I am happy to see the adjustments being made. However I was sad to see nothing was done to address the growing issue in Doffing concerning the rather negative changes brought by season 7. The officer exchange missions, due to the radical cost increase, have become completely uneconomical and unused considering the limiited capability to refine dilithium resulting in a significant reduction in doff costs on the exchange. Added to this is the elimination of uncommon doffs for starbase missions and the there is now a rather odd looking hourglass shaped pricing structure in doffs. Some commons are costing the same as uncommons or even reaching lower grade rares while very rares continue to be expensive (as they should be). I don't know anyone who has used the general recruitment anymore now that it costs 1/8th the average players dilithium output.
I understand the desire to curb the lottery style doff exchange that was occuring. However it did serve a necessary function by increasing the demand for uncommon and rare doffs resulting in some price normalcy with the grandual increasing in pricing. To restore the demand of midgrade doffs, there are some changes that could be made. First, would be to allow the use of uncommon or rare doffs in shipyard projects would be an effective outlet for the supply. Say 1 uncommon is equal to the provisioning of 3 common doffs and 1 rare is equal to provisioning of 5 commons or something of that nature. Second would be to scale back the price increase on the officer exchange so that it becomes more economical to utilize. Somthing along the lines of common to uncommon being 100 dil, uncommon to rare being 500 dil, and rare to very rare being 1000 dil. I think these changes or something similar is necessary to allow for the value and use of the middle grade doffs.
Branflakes has to leave before I was able to get the post finished - he said he is going to get it up as a blog as soon as he can - either tonight or tomorrow.
Great job! The full playerbase that visits the website needs to see this. I would say 'I eat my hat, Cryptic is listening to the players!' but I'm saving that so I can say 'I eat my hat, my game is working!'.
To be fair to Jack - he has been the most vocal champion of the changes that you see in this list. He plays STO a lot and always has really good feedback. I just like to blame him for things because he's fun to tease.
If there is anyone that deserves the shame, it is me because ultimately the buck stops here and if something goes live, I approved it.
Luckily, I can also change it
Fortunately, Season 6 (and now Season 7) have been such positive improvements to the game (and the health of the business), I've been able to increase my staff and for the first time in Season 8 - tackle something awesome and on my long standing engineering report to do list.
If things keep going this way - the team will be able to start knocking off all of the features and content goals we've had since day one. It really is a good time for STO and we hope that with your support - it continues!
Regarding future updates, are we going to see Tactical, Science and Engineering Reputation Systems, based off our chosen professions, at some point? It might be a good use of those Sol system maps that have been gathering dust on the shelf.
I'd always wanted to see the following institutions involved more in our characters progression:
But one I was hoping to see is a cancel option for rep missions.
Since they are very similar to doff mechanic I would think that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to introduce one to the interface.
While we're on the topic of dilithium changes, could we get some kind of dilithium reward for Mission content? Or, if not, maybe some enhanced rewards for EC (hard to get these days) or maybe even marks? There is some really good content in the missions but little incentive to play them beyond 50. Just to throw out some ideas.
1. Dilithium container as optional reward instead of standard loot.
2. Wrap around for 3 or so missions, maybe excluding a couple like Spin the Wheel.
3. Wrap around for completion of all missions in feature episodes.
Thanks for the update dastahl, I see there is a lot to look forward to in the coming two months. Especially featured replay for all of December and the notice in advance. The changes coming this next week will certainly make the reputation system more beneficial. Marks to dilithium conversion will be very nice, I have hundreds of the Omega Marks collecting dust. Also thanks for the well thought out effort for dilithium balance. Breaking the Planet and the other ground fleet actions are no longer dormant like they were before season seven.
Branflakes has to leave before I was able to get the post finished - he said he is going to get it up as a blog as soon as he can - either tonight or tomorrow.
I think we're fine as a community if Branflakes has to work a few extra hours once in a while (every other day perhaps?)
Heard and understood. It is still tough for fleets under 25 players to achieve Starbase goals in a reasonable time. We will look more into this and see if there are other things we can do to help. We've already adjusted the top tier projects down a few times and we may do so even more in the future.
Might I suggest, moving the 200k Dilithium "cosmetic projects" to something alittle more manageable? Say for example, slashing the cost by as much as 50-75%, and possibly adding an EC sink? 200k Dilithium for floating Tribbles, or a Fish Tank is rather steep, especially in light of all the other current Dilithium sinks in the game. Yes, these projects are mostly cosmetic, and while I personally don't like -all- of them, it's undeniable that many players would want to have all of the cosmetic projects "unlocked" at some point.
OK - I understand your point now. I'll bring this up with the appropriate designer and we'll see if we can bring these in line so that they are balanced.
What if you had an item crate AND Dilithium and not just one or the other?
seeing a big picture like this is good, changes by them selves in a vacume, with nothing added at the same time to pick up the slack is alarming to say the least. im glad you outlined all that.
whatever ship is added this holiday, please, dont make it as overpowered as the bug ship.
the andorian ship, i dont think this side weapons thing is a good idea, unless side weapons were added to all ships as a major change to ships across the board.
finally, the ambassador. in an odyssey like give away huh? well i hope there will be an alternate way to get it after the event, i may make a character later and realy want that ship on it.
Dan Stahl, its time. its time to add fleet marks to pvp. please properly incentives pvp in game so more people will want to play it so you can then justify its development. it wont be farmable like the foundry daily was for geting marks, matches take a wile.
finally, the ambassador. in an odyssey like give away huh? well i hope there will be an alternate way to get it after the event, i may make a character later and realy want that ship on it.
Guess where the free Odyssey went after the event? T5 fleet shipyards of course. Guess where the Ambassador might go if it's given away free for a limited time?
It is still tough for fleets under 25 players to achieve Starbase goals in a reasonable time. We will look more into this and see if there are other things we can do to help. We've already adjusted the top tier projects down a few times and we may do so even more in the future.
Dan,
That just made my day/night/holiday weekend. Running a small fleet with about 4 active human players (and way too many alts) the strain of trying to get to Tier 3 is great but we are nibbling on it.
The biggest help for us was allowing the Fleet DOffs to be used in the missions. 1.5 million Fleet credits (my main alone) will allowed us to start running the 1000 department XP projects. We are running at about 42,000 in each of the Department Tiers and hope to be able to start T3 upgrades around Christmas.
Two of my active fleetmates would love to be able to get us to T5 shipyard and we will get there (slowly) but any assistance for some of the 5 man fleets would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for listening to the community.
Matt Miracle
Fleet Commander in Chief [Rank 7] for Covenant of Honor; a FED T5 Starbase
House Leader [Rank 7] for Honorable House of Mor'gue; a KDF T3 Starbase Find us at CovenantofHonor.com. My Twitter handle; @jmattmiracle
Thanks for these changes. I'm not nearly as hardcore as some of my fellow captains, but I've been here a while and seen most of the slings and arrows tossed in your direction. I wanted to post only to echo a previous post regarding small fleets. After 'real' life caught up with my fleet mates, I'm basically trying to build a starbase by myself. I know it's going to take a long time, but like the other poster said: I can't just walk away from what I've built - I've got too many doffs in the mortar, too much dilithium, too many ECs sunk to just take my fleet credits and beg into a bigger fleet (not to mention the RP customization that goes in to making the fleet). The problem I'm running into is in recruitment: no one wants to get into a nanofleet now that the big fleets have access to much better equipment.
I don't have the answer to this, but there's got to be a way to help nanofleets keep progressing. The fleet mark bonus pool was nice, but I've got nearly a million fleet credits that are not likely to be spent. Maybe we could have a bonus pool that upped the multiplier - make it more expensive, so that nano fleet players (who have fleet credits to burn) can choose to spend some of those credits to gain more marks. (Same thing goes for dilithium - an expensive multiplier that could be purchased for fleet credits would be awesome.) Alternatively, the ability to convert fleet credits back to some other usable currency would be helpful. I'm not sure if I'm going to be interested in buying a top tier fleet ship when (if) I get my starbase up to the higher tiers, so if I had some way to reinvest my credits now... (maybe a cross-fleet credit exchange, or an easy way to let some of the largess in the larger fleets spill over into the smaller ones)
Just some thoughts. But to reiterate the other poster: Dil (and fleet mark) nerfs really kill the progression of nanofleets... almost to the point of making them impossible.
Heard and understood. It is still tough for fleets under 25 players to achieve Starbase goals in a reasonable time. We will look more into this and see if there are other things we can do to help. We've already adjusted the top tier projects down a few times and we may do so even more in the future.
Well I have a fleet with over 100 (maybe 200) members. Problem is most of them have no clue how to contribute or anything. Any chance you can make a tutorial (in game one) as to how to contribute? Oh and one more thing; it seems like my members are contributing more to the Embassy than the Starbase. I gonna blame it on how they are both in the holdings tab. Can you guys give them two separate tabs?
Well I have a fleet with over 100 (maybe 200) members. Problem is most of them have no clue how to contribute or anything. Any chance you can make a tutorial (in game one) as to how to contribute? Oh and one more thing; it seems like my members are contributing more to the Embassy than the Starbase. I gonna blame it on how they are both in the holdings tab. Can you guys give them two separate tabs?
Um. Are you serious? You could send a fleet wide mail with 4 simple instructions:
1) click the fleet button below the mini-map
2) click fleet holdings
3) click the starbase
4) click on the project you want to donate to
Anyone who cant follow those steps wouldnt be able to follow a tutorial either.
Um. Are you serious? You could send a fleet wide mail with 4 simple instructions:
1) click the fleet button below the mini-map
2) click fleet holdings
3) click the starbase
4) click on the project you want to donate to
Anyone who cant follow those steps wouldnt be able to follow a tutorial either.
You'd be surprised how often more subtle aspects of the game slip people's attention
In fact, there was a player who didn't know that the Fleet Action Daily rewarded Dil until it was pointed out in the Tribble patch notes (the one giving out Fleet Marks instead).
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
You'd be surprised how often more subtle aspects of the game slip people's attention
In fact, there was a player who didn't know that the Fleet Action Daily rewarded Dil until it was pointed out in the Tribble patch notes (the one giving out Fleet Marks instead).
I understand what your saying, but I'm saying if someone couldnt follow those 4 steps when they were given to them, I'm not sure if anything else would help them either.
I understand what your saying, but I'm saying if someone couldnt follow those 4 steps when they were given to them, I'm not sure if anything else would help them either.
As I understand it, those steps simply aren't obvious to those players. To some, yes, but not everyone.
A tutorial would probably help.
Was named Trek17.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
I first thought PWE only wanted money, however the changes brought above proves that you guys actually do make effort to make it balanced and it also shows how closely you monitor the TTS chat and people's concerns.
I'm impressed with your efforts, and they way you've lowered the dil exchange to ~140 with these efforts.
Good one mates, good one.
Join www.UFPlanets.com
5 FED Fleets | 3 KDF Fleets - T5 Colony on both factions
....still waiting for you to play my 3-hour Foundry mission!
Back on topic. I like the idea of "career" reputation tiers for the future.
As for Foundry mission length vs. reward given for the dailies...I am in agreement with another poster that suggested that the reward should scale with the difficulty and average completion time of the mission. As stated above, my mission can take around three hours to complete, if the player takes the time to read all of the dialog and explore. Although I could easily have broken the mission up into several different missions, I opted to keep it a feature-length one...this was mainly due to my fear of having a limited amount of mission slots to play with. I'm sure if the reward was more substantial for playing it, I'd see more traffic.
It is refreshing to see new captain skills becoming available! Are we going to see new bridge officer skills in the future as well?
I would definitely like to hear more of your ideas on helping smaller fleets progress their starbases easier. I am dying for those ultra-rare weapons...but unfortunately, with a 10-man fleet, that will be a long time coming.
Comments
Branflakes has to leave before I was able to get the post finished - he said he is going to get it up as a blog as soon as he can - either tonight or tomorrow.
Bad move in my opinion.
I wouldn't mind a reduced Dilithium reward from the Daily, but i'd also like to see Fleet Marks given as an OPTION when accepting the Daily reward. Instead of removing the Dilithium completely from the Daily, let us choose whether we want "50 Fleet Marks" OR "xxxx Dilithium". Obviously, the possibility that players would choose Dilithium (and get Dilithium for Fleet Action Completion) would exist. But it would also allow us as players to choose which reward we desire most at the time.
Is there any chance you can have the UI team make a pass on the Foundry search to be paged instead of showing all the missions at once. It can sometime bring the game client to a snails crawl.
The Mailbox has the exact same problem. My game client sometimes lags out from all the mail wanting to show up at once. 20-50 messages per a page would be nice. At least then the mail lag won't be so much a pain in the neck.
Sweet, how about also undoing the last Excelsior nerf (pre-season 6 stats) or finally releasing a Fleet version
LTS, here since...when did this game launch again?
I understand the desire to curb the lottery style doff exchange that was occuring. However it did serve a necessary function by increasing the demand for uncommon and rare doffs resulting in some price normalcy with the grandual increasing in pricing. To restore the demand of midgrade doffs, there are some changes that could be made. First, would be to allow the use of uncommon or rare doffs in shipyard projects would be an effective outlet for the supply. Say 1 uncommon is equal to the provisioning of 3 common doffs and 1 rare is equal to provisioning of 5 commons or something of that nature. Second would be to scale back the price increase on the officer exchange so that it becomes more economical to utilize. Somthing along the lines of common to uncommon being 100 dil, uncommon to rare being 500 dil, and rare to very rare being 1000 dil. I think these changes or something similar is necessary to allow for the value and use of the middle grade doffs.
Great job! The full playerbase that visits the website needs to see this. I would say 'I eat my hat, Cryptic is listening to the players!' but I'm saving that so I can say 'I eat my hat, my game is working!'.
Regarding future updates, are we going to see Tactical, Science and Engineering Reputation Systems, based off our chosen professions, at some point? It might be a good use of those Sol system maps that have been gathering dust on the shelf.
I'd always wanted to see the following institutions involved more in our characters progression:
Starfleet Security & Starfleet Tactical
Starfleet Corps of Engineers & United Earth Space Probe Agency
Federation Science Council & Starfleet Medical
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
But one I was hoping to see is a cancel option for rep missions.
Since they are very similar to doff mechanic I would think that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to introduce one to the interface.
Do you have any plans to add one at some point?
Jorm
1. Dilithium container as optional reward instead of standard loot.
2. Wrap around for 3 or so missions, maybe excluding a couple like Spin the Wheel.
3. Wrap around for completion of all missions in feature episodes.
You just made my night.
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
I think we're fine as a community if Branflakes has to work a few extra hours once in a while
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Or do like they seem to do other PWE/Cryptic CMs: Give him a cot under his desk to sleep on in the office
ROLL TIDE ROLL
Might I suggest, moving the 200k Dilithium "cosmetic projects" to something alittle more manageable? Say for example, slashing the cost by as much as 50-75%, and possibly adding an EC sink? 200k Dilithium for floating Tribbles, or a Fish Tank is rather steep, especially in light of all the other current Dilithium sinks in the game. Yes, these projects are mostly cosmetic, and while I personally don't like -all- of them, it's undeniable that many players would want to have all of the cosmetic projects "unlocked" at some point.
What if you had an item crate AND Dilithium and not just one or the other?
whatever ship is added this holiday, please, dont make it as overpowered as the bug ship.
the andorian ship, i dont think this side weapons thing is a good idea, unless side weapons were added to all ships as a major change to ships across the board.
finally, the ambassador. in an odyssey like give away huh? well i hope there will be an alternate way to get it after the event, i may make a character later and realy want that ship on it.
Dan Stahl, its time. its time to add fleet marks to pvp. please properly incentives pvp in game so more people will want to play it so you can then justify its development. it wont be farmable like the foundry daily was for geting marks, matches take a wile.
Guess where the free Odyssey went after the event? T5 fleet shipyards of course. Guess where the Ambassador might go if it's given away free for a limited time?
Dan,
That just made my day/night/holiday weekend. Running a small fleet with about 4 active human players (and way too many alts) the strain of trying to get to Tier 3 is great but we are nibbling on it.
The biggest help for us was allowing the Fleet DOffs to be used in the missions. 1.5 million Fleet credits (my main alone) will allowed us to start running the 1000 department XP projects. We are running at about 42,000 in each of the Department Tiers and hope to be able to start T3 upgrades around Christmas.
Two of my active fleetmates would love to be able to get us to T5 shipyard and we will get there (slowly) but any assistance for some of the 5 man fleets would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for listening to the community.
Find us at CovenantofHonor.com. My Twitter handle; @jmattmiracle
I don't have the answer to this, but there's got to be a way to help nanofleets keep progressing. The fleet mark bonus pool was nice, but I've got nearly a million fleet credits that are not likely to be spent. Maybe we could have a bonus pool that upped the multiplier - make it more expensive, so that nano fleet players (who have fleet credits to burn) can choose to spend some of those credits to gain more marks. (Same thing goes for dilithium - an expensive multiplier that could be purchased for fleet credits would be awesome.) Alternatively, the ability to convert fleet credits back to some other usable currency would be helpful. I'm not sure if I'm going to be interested in buying a top tier fleet ship when (if) I get my starbase up to the higher tiers, so if I had some way to reinvest my credits now... (maybe a cross-fleet credit exchange, or an easy way to let some of the largess in the larger fleets spill over into the smaller ones)
Just some thoughts. But to reiterate the other poster: Dil (and fleet mark) nerfs really kill the progression of nanofleets... almost to the point of making them impossible.
Sadly, the "item" is all but useless to a max level player. So it still wouldnt be worth the 45 minutes(minimum).
Well I have a fleet with over 100 (maybe 200) members. Problem is most of them have no clue how to contribute or anything. Any chance you can make a tutorial (in game one) as to how to contribute? Oh and one more thing; it seems like my members are contributing more to the Embassy than the Starbase. I gonna blame it on how they are both in the holdings tab. Can you guys give them two separate tabs?
Um. Are you serious? You could send a fleet wide mail with 4 simple instructions:
1) click the fleet button below the mini-map
2) click fleet holdings
3) click the starbase
4) click on the project you want to donate to
Anyone who cant follow those steps wouldnt be able to follow a tutorial either.
In fact, there was a player who didn't know that the Fleet Action Daily rewarded Dil until it was pointed out in the Tribble patch notes (the one giving out Fleet Marks instead).
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
I understand what your saying, but I'm saying if someone couldnt follow those 4 steps when they were given to them, I'm not sure if anything else would help them either.
A tutorial would probably help.
Been playing STO since Open Beta, and have never regarded anything as worse than 'meh', if only due to personal standards.
I'm impressed with your efforts, and they way you've lowered the dil exchange to ~140 with these efforts.
Good one mates, good one.
5 FED Fleets | 3 KDF Fleets - T5 Colony on both factions
...but come on....
....still waiting for you to play my 3-hour Foundry mission!
Back on topic. I like the idea of "career" reputation tiers for the future.
As for Foundry mission length vs. reward given for the dailies...I am in agreement with another poster that suggested that the reward should scale with the difficulty and average completion time of the mission. As stated above, my mission can take around three hours to complete, if the player takes the time to read all of the dialog and explore. Although I could easily have broken the mission up into several different missions, I opted to keep it a feature-length one...this was mainly due to my fear of having a limited amount of mission slots to play with. I'm sure if the reward was more substantial for playing it, I'd see more traffic.
It is refreshing to see new captain skills becoming available! Are we going to see new bridge officer skills in the future as well?
I would definitely like to hear more of your ideas on helping smaller fleets progress their starbases easier. I am dying for those ultra-rare weapons...but unfortunately, with a 10-man fleet, that will be a long time coming.