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Star Trek Online - Future Lookouts regarding PVE/PVP
kanecabal
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
Hello community,
I do want to fire this thread up to have a discussion towards the future of Star Trek Online disregarding Season 8 & 9 in the upcoming year. I do want to use the current state-of-the-game as a matter of example in order to fulfill my view points I am going to be explaining in just a second. As a matter of fact I am talking more as a player inside the game, ex-developer of previous games in other game areas such as RTS and as a financial observer in the current state of the economy based on the current seat of Cryptic Studios which is in the United States of America.
Point 1:
Cryptic Studios is a sole provider and developer of computer video games such as Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and the upcoming Neverwinter. Based on fact information is Cryptic owned by Perfect World Entertainment in the United States which makes most of its profits based on the PVE system in any of these games. As a developer stated "PVE is a feature that has been abandoned".
Point 2:
Based on point 1 we can assume that Cryptic has a team of about 40 people which develops and maintenance all of the three games above. The work though, from a developer view, is that working on these three games can be quite challenging to keep them different from each other in matter of balancing.
Why is PVE more interesting than PVP?
Most of the community inside a regular Free-2-Play system are solely interested in the PVE portion of the game. In a matter of fact PVP can be either challenging a player to become the best or simply give up cause it is useless to grind every little money to enhance towards PVP. This results in a turn-down for PVP. We take Star Trek Online for example as a reference here as we have multiple systems that make PVP unbalanced: DOFF System, Reputation system, different kinds of weapons, modifiers that out-balance each other from a statistical data, and simply exploits exist to advance or simply "cheat" the system. In fact a simply change in balance can destroy someone's PVP build which is a grief inside the community to constantly use respect tokens to adapt to the new balance of the game. In a less frequently game this would be alright in matter of spending money towards respec tokens.
Would be an entire Season be enough to recover PVP and make it more profitable for Cryptic?
Player Opinion: Yes
Developer Opinion: Semi no-yes.
Marketing Purposes: No
Explanation Why:
The regular player opinion looks optimistically towards the future in hope towards changes and a complete revamp of the PVP System.
In a developer opinion, in my point of view, it would mean to completely re-balance every component of the game such as weapons, consoles, systems (DOFF and Repuation), ships main information regarding Tiers 1 through 5 and create consistent PVP tests by the community on a PVP-TEST-ONLY Server disregarding PVE altogether. This would be !all! possible, but only if two separate PVE-PVP servers are created and are not colliding with each other on any basis.
In a marketing point of view it would be impossible to do so as the game heavily sits on PVE content and continues to do so. Not keeping up with PVE content can be a big loss of money for a studio if it does not develop enough continuation of existing systems. With a team of about 40!!! this is may not be possible while the work is of three games is spread out on everyone.
I do wish to hear other players opinion and also would like to invite the developers to this conversation as how to approach the upcoming seasons towards PVE and PVP. I took Business Administration as a college major and I am heavily involved with ongoing decisions regarding money and business management. Please do not use this thread to troll or anything similar as it should be a !productive! possibility of rescuing PVP, enjoy PVE in future, and prevent balance problems in future seasons.
Thank you.
PS: If you find any misspelled words, you can keep them
.
I do want to fire this thread up to have a discussion towards the future of Star Trek Online disregarding Season 8 & 9 in the upcoming year. I do want to use the current state-of-the-game as a matter of example in order to fulfill my view points I am going to be explaining in just a second. As a matter of fact I am talking more as a player inside the game, ex-developer of previous games in other game areas such as RTS and as a financial observer in the current state of the economy based on the current seat of Cryptic Studios which is in the United States of America.
Point 1:
Cryptic Studios is a sole provider and developer of computer video games such as Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and the upcoming Neverwinter. Based on fact information is Cryptic owned by Perfect World Entertainment in the United States which makes most of its profits based on the PVE system in any of these games. As a developer stated "PVE is a feature that has been abandoned".
Point 2:
Based on point 1 we can assume that Cryptic has a team of about 40 people which develops and maintenance all of the three games above. The work though, from a developer view, is that working on these three games can be quite challenging to keep them different from each other in matter of balancing.
Why is PVE more interesting than PVP?
Most of the community inside a regular Free-2-Play system are solely interested in the PVE portion of the game. In a matter of fact PVP can be either challenging a player to become the best or simply give up cause it is useless to grind every little money to enhance towards PVP. This results in a turn-down for PVP. We take Star Trek Online for example as a reference here as we have multiple systems that make PVP unbalanced: DOFF System, Reputation system, different kinds of weapons, modifiers that out-balance each other from a statistical data, and simply exploits exist to advance or simply "cheat" the system. In fact a simply change in balance can destroy someone's PVP build which is a grief inside the community to constantly use respect tokens to adapt to the new balance of the game. In a less frequently game this would be alright in matter of spending money towards respec tokens.
Would be an entire Season be enough to recover PVP and make it more profitable for Cryptic?
Player Opinion: Yes
Developer Opinion: Semi no-yes.
Marketing Purposes: No
Explanation Why:
The regular player opinion looks optimistically towards the future in hope towards changes and a complete revamp of the PVP System.
In a developer opinion, in my point of view, it would mean to completely re-balance every component of the game such as weapons, consoles, systems (DOFF and Repuation), ships main information regarding Tiers 1 through 5 and create consistent PVP tests by the community on a PVP-TEST-ONLY Server disregarding PVE altogether. This would be !all! possible, but only if two separate PVE-PVP servers are created and are not colliding with each other on any basis.
In a marketing point of view it would be impossible to do so as the game heavily sits on PVE content and continues to do so. Not keeping up with PVE content can be a big loss of money for a studio if it does not develop enough continuation of existing systems. With a team of about 40!!! this is may not be possible while the work is of three games is spread out on everyone.
I do wish to hear other players opinion and also would like to invite the developers to this conversation as how to approach the upcoming seasons towards PVE and PVP. I took Business Administration as a college major and I am heavily involved with ongoing decisions regarding money and business management. Please do not use this thread to troll or anything similar as it should be a !productive! possibility of rescuing PVP, enjoy PVE in future, and prevent balance problems in future seasons.
Thank you.
PS: If you find any misspelled words, you can keep them
. Lifetime - Joined 2008 - U.S.S. Kilimanjaro - Inner Circle
Post edited by kanecabal on
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Comments
- New PvP Maps (Not 1 or 2 simple maps, but many new maps).
- PvP Balance
- Purpose (some people like a reason to fight, like with Territorial PvP)
- And of course the most intimidating reason why people don't like PvP is simply Veterans vs PuGs, in which PuG groups have no chance and eventually people give up, because they are tired of losing or feeling like they are target practice.
It's these things that have erroded the PvP Population significantly. If Cryptic is sincere with their wishes to restore PvP, they really have to do a complete overhaul and do it on a level where a regular PvErs with bad builds have a halfway decent chance to survive against a seasoned veteran, than being blown up in under three seconds.And to add purpose like Territorial PvP (not a reputation system) with Open PvP where a PvEr can choose to enter a fight and participate in PvP, doing a a PvEvP mission (to contribute to the war effort), or do a PvE mission and support in their own way.
So unless Cryptic is willing to go to such lengths in the upcoming Season, their efforts in fixing the current PvP is near impossible and their time would be better spent on future PvE content and increase interest in the game.
Option #1: Get rid of all modifiers for every weapon and create a stand alone weapon where as the different rarities make more damage, but where as the other person compared to the one who carries higher damage weapons still have the both the same chance that the shot misses the target.
Option #2: Create a exchange based on a + and - table where as weapons of higher rarities cannot be sold in tremendous amount of money making it unable for someone to reach it. This also goes for every other console including ships to create a non-inflation system.
Option #3: Separate PVE and PVP systems altogether and create two different balance sheets for both systems where as every balance sheet can be adjusted separately according to the Season update.
Option #4: Revoke every universal console as it is proven that universal consoles can be a game changing effect on both systems and/or include specific abilities within the ship without consoles.
Option #5: Revamp the entire system as it was mentioned before by a ex-moderator on the forum in order to make !all! ships accountable in every fight no matter how old or what kind of tier they are.
We can keep adding to it, but I think this is more of a foundation I would assume. Opinions?
And thank you azurianstar for participating.
Your assumption would be incorrect as there are around 50 devs (and growing!), ranging from production to QA, on STO team alone, and each game has their own dedicated team.
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
That was based on older information that I currently had. I apologize for that, but that does still not solve the current state of the game.
Option 1, 2 and 5, sounds like it would require a major overhaul of the game in order to incorporate. And don't think Cryptic can afford such a gamble at this time. Not to mention it might not be very popular with the playerbase.
Option 4, also might not be popular since players due to them already invested currency into them. But could see a new PvP system that would turn them off or limit them in PvP (using Option 3).
I didn't say it did
As for PvP, there's been talk about a PvP reputation system (no ETA on release, but it's on the radar as a possibility), Fleet Marks being added as rewards, balance passes, and changes/ updates based on player feedback. This is evident by just a few of the very recent updates/ discussions (Trico changes, testing vendor, etc.) and the support that is being shown for PvP Boot Camp. While Boot Camp was a player initiated movement, it is overseen by me, supported by everyone at PWE and Cryptic (including creating a reward to give out to participants upon graduation) and will help drive up interest for PvP. This means more players in the queues, which means more players wanting to see PvP content, which means the greater possibility of us spending developer resources on it. I've been chatting with some of the content and systems devs about their ideas they have for PvP and they sound incredibly awesome. Drumming up interest in PvP will hopefully bring those ideas, as well as those we read in these forums, to fruition.
Earlier this year, the Foundry community and I worked on resurrecting the Spotlight on the Foundry. It was such a success that there is now a dedicated spot for spotlights in the in-game mission journal, as well as special rewards for them being added (these were in testing on Tribble but were not released to Holodeck due to a couple bugs that were found; we hope to have them on Holodeck very soon). Using this as a precedent, I'm very hopeful that the same will occur with PvP due to the increased interest that we'll see in PvP after the first class of Boot Camp participants graduate.
As a final word, it is without a doubt that we would like to see STO's PvP to be as epic as it's PvE content. The above will help us get there, and once we do, I can't imagine another game that could have as epic PvP as STO would have.
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
The requirements in terms of essentially a 'new build':
The realities speak for themselves. PvP clearly isn't a driver for revenue, otherwise this discussion would not even occur.
The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few (or PvE'rs).
While I have issues with quality of support, I really enjoy the game. I enjoy it to the tune of 'hundreds of dollars' in the past year alone. I want to keep enjoying it. If my vote has weight, then money does talk.
[Edited out - not a fan of PvP, don't want to be seen as Trolling]
A Different Approach:
I would propose a different approach to the issues of PVP: points-based ship builds. Using the existing DOFF, BOFF, consoles, weapons, hulls, engines, deflectors and shields create a test generator. Allow everything. Allow players access to ALL ships in the Z-store.
Only the Captain would be unique to the player.
Players could create a 'build', and save it to thier account. These ships would only be available in the generator. PvP would be separate from the existing game. Players would choose between 1000, 2500, and 5000 point builds. Then they could fight.
No new consoles would need to be created. And as for balance, everyone would be equal. it would become a game of skill - and not who has the biggest bankroll.
Heck - you could even run contests, award trophies, create fleet events.
The marketing team would love it.
- I could test ANY ship I wanted before buying. I guarantee you'd see more purchases of ships after a 'try it' chance in the generator.
- New players to STO could get a feel for the game before committing - try the big guns for fun, etc. This is your best attribute, other than the IP itself
Admiral Thrax
Why? Because we seen in the past that PvErs didn't want to PvP at all, were in it for the marks / emblems and caused people who did want to PvP, to lose diliberately. So this would cause unwanted frustration in the community.
And for a PvP Reputation system that did boost PvP prowless would only cause a greater gap between hardcore and casual (or new) PvPers. Right now, a properly geared ship / character in a veteran's hands already cause a wide enough gap between Hardcore and causal PvPers, so adding more of a gap would only serve to be a negative.
So then what purpose could a PvP reputation then serve if it cannot be used for PvE or PvP? Which makes me hope that Cryptic carefully considers such angles when planning a PvP Reputation system.
so are you going to make us grind pvp marks then do yet another 20 hour grind / 35 day grind ?
or
can we level that up by simply doing pvp ?
I play for the items and rewards in sto and so it's natural to pve so people's purple consoles work for me and I get max profit for my time.
In addition to that, having inferior stats is a game I will always lose, not least because I messed up on all my character creations and have no way to respec them...
Yeah you could force us into a repuation system for pvp marks to earn new gear but it won't solve the lack of intrinsic interest for pvp.
How will you prevent one team from queueing up in shuttles or remove their shields to just get over and done with and what happens to pvp when people are through the repuation system, you have to come out with a new one to keep people grinding?
Also is there even a playerbase for it regardlessly of how great you might possibly make it?
I can't wait for Season 8
But will the bugs be as big as the storycontent? :-P
With the involvement of the devs in the PvP forum and the patch notes PvP gets more attention than ever. The PvP camp even had a spot on the STO front page !!!
I think we will see next year more updates and bugfixes for PvP than ever before.
But I'm not sure if a reputation system with more passives will be a good thing.
If they affect PVE too than you will have a lot of players who will whine that they want the new passives without doing PVP in order to be able to overcome the OP borg :P
Not to mention that you have another power creep and source of bugs in the game.
If you add more rewards for doing pvp you risk that even more AFK'loosers in teh queues.
Tricky situation xD
True, but when it comes to such things, PvErs would also want as well.
And having a system that you only gain by winning would be a major negative, because if you are in a PuG vs a Hardcore group, well you ain't going to win. Which would cause complaints and quitting.
Also, lets not forget how PvErs are using Private queues right now for Dilithium Farming, just to avoid PvP. So a PvP reputation system will not serve as incentive to increase the actual PvP population.
The game can track damage and healing numbers, number of deaths and kills, accolades and number of played matches and so on, right?
So shouldn't it be possible to average those numbers out and compare the resulting PvP index of each player entering a queue and match them up as best as possible, so you likely end up eye to eye with your opponents without seperate queues.
If matching up similar skill levels use a handicap system.
Debuff the Veteran and buff the newbie. This won't generate magical skills for the newbie and he will still have a hard time winning, but at least he should not die AS fast anymore and have the opportunity to learn during a fight.
Blowing up repeatedly in 3 seconds has no educational value, every information on WHY you lost flies by too fast, hence frustration...
The steeper the skill index difference, the higher the handicap for the veteran.
And the difference can be very significant, I remember dueling a high level captain with a low commander and won by a landslight. And I am not a hardcore PvPer, I consider myself just above average...
Make this index account wide so it can't be abused by veterans making new toons with neutral indexes.
Edit: The skill index could also influence the reward, so killing helpless newbs won't generate as much fleetmarks as seasoned veterans.
That's exactly why I am doing pve to begin with, the profit is simply bigger...
However the other side of that is of course people abusing it and playing to lose to get it over with as I said. And just doing a reputation system will not fix pvp in itself, only temporaily inflate it while people grind through it.
If you think the afk'ing on stf is bad wait till you see whole fleets show up with no shields and all power to engines in a connie.
I might not earn any pvp marks if I don't play it but you know what neither will pvp'ers if I don't show up.
Thinking I'd be interested in showing up for a fight where I lose time and stf rewards in exchange for helping another person go through his pvp repuation is laughable, not even once.
Either scenario doesn't fix the lack of fun in playing pvp in itself though and even having to talk about paying people to go play pvp goes to show the magnitude of the problems.
/edit
Even if you decided to do generic ships, say iconic ships premade, you'd still face the problem of invalidating people's effort to build their own.
this
we just need "killwalls"
reward enough in the new PVP reputation would be
- costumes
- titles
- ship costumes/materials
- effects and/or emotes
- accolades
plus, i'm all in for a Foundry driven PVP. Let us do our own maps!
and you also promised Star Base PVP!!! we didn't forget!
Worst approach EVER!
What happened to "build it and they will come"?
So you expect me to waist my time playing your crappy PVP to tell you to make more of it which you will see via Dataming and Statistics? ...
how about i tell you right now, i would love to PVP in STO, but yours is TRIBBLE, make it better, invest some time, you have done nothing for it in 3 YEARS. Just like you have done nothing for exploration, unless something gamebreaking happens you don't touch that stuff.
Sorry, no 10 horses will get me to play your 2 Map PvP game any longer unless something actually interesting happens there.
There are plenty of other games out there and if you don't give me the player vs player experience that scratches that itch sufficiently, then i will just click on Battlefield 3 instead (and i have done so for 200+ hours so far (if you love statistics so much, here are some!). Granted my STO playtime is 3000+ hrs now, but very few of those are PvP hours).
If you can up your PvP queue numbers by financially cheap PR stunts like that boot camp one, good for you, but you won't see me participating, i don't need a boot camp i need fun gameplay.
A PvP Reputation System better comes with some uber epic PvP improvements, not just one new map or whatever and a requirement to play it 5000 times.
The best definition for your PvP i can think of would be: "Your PvP is what i would call a Demo Version, for a Game, that i get on Xbox Live for $10, and is fun for half an hour but you stick around for 5 hours and ask yourself WHY?!"
What you need/should/would be nice of you to do is build a PvP Game that is FUN, and then People will come on their own.
Try Planetside 2, it's free to download, and you're playing with thousands of players on the battlefield instead of Battlefields 64.
Someone mentioned earlier that new players come into pvp against old players who are decked out in the best gear, and they get destroyed. This happens in most mmos, like WoW, Guild Wars 2, etc. People who have been playing longer have the better gear. Guild Wars 2 has structured pvp, where everyone is using preset gear, so everyone basically has the same stats, but they can choose what kind of armor or weapons they want to use. Like one person may want to use a two handed sword with precision and vitality while someone else may want vitality and healing power.
I think STO could do something like this. Add a new form of pvp where you are only allowed to use preset ships with preset stats and abilities, then true skill would come into play; maybe this could be an arena type thing.
The rest of this thread has all been said before, and I think there are some good ideas in there, and while I don't PvP in STO, some of these ideas might make it more interesting to me. However, the above section just makes me laugh, I'm sorry, but it does. STO's PvE can be pretty good, some of it might even be epic, some of the 2800 series I think got pretty close. But STO's PvP in anything like its current form will never be epic, IMHO. Part of that is the current system is basically jousting at a fair, with limited numbers and no real injury possible in a match. The other part is I used to play EvE Online, and honestly once you've run through systems throwing rocks at the hunting dogs until finally you're trapped and you swarm those chasing you and manage to blow a ship that is worth more than all of your loses combined, and you sit back, fitting your next ship and waiting for the next time you can fly it like that, well, nothing much else comes close.
But still, maybe come back when you can have two ships hunting each other in a nebula, each questing for the other, battle damage slowly mounting until one gets the drop on the other. Or have two massive fleets colide with each other, destruction all around until one sides surrenders or is totally destroyed. Make it feel like I'm in one of the fleet battles from DS9, or in one of the duels from the movies, and make it count, so if I lose that ship, that at least is it for the match. Then maybe I'll call it epic.
Nouveau riche LTS member
There more PVE content Cryptic releases there harder it will get to rescue the PVP system as in PVE affects the balance sheet "again".
Yes, I saw your post. But this has been brought up many times in the past.
It has been argued by hardcore PvP teams / fleets that doing such a thing would hurt their play, for it would reduce their queues from poping.
Second, it's really not going to stop newb vs hardcore player domination, unless the PvP queues are tiered as to give newbs a chance to aclimate.
Third, even with this PvP Bootcamp, the majority of people still won't know how to PvP, because it's vastly different from PvE. They are use to clicking Emergency Shields, but not knowing how to tank to survive. That's how great the difference is with PvP in STO. So Cryptic needs to balance the field so a newb in a cruiser poping just emergency shields has a chance against a hardcore player in an escort that blows up people in a few seconds.
Very little all-encompassing advantage from gear
The ideal is something like Team Fortress 2 -- gear changes what you can do, but, more or less, everyone is on equal ground.
At least one area with large-scale, persistant, shifting goals and territory
Guild Wars 2 WvWvW is a great example of many of the past lessons of MMOs being applied. Taking and controlling territory on a large scale gives pvp a feeling of immersion, context, and consequent that, say, Capture STO pvp maps lack.
More than 2 factions (generally 3)
Two sided pvp battles, on a large scale, generally become more imbalanced over time. Once one side is seen as consistently winning, people generally stop joining on the losing side (because it's less and less enjoyable to just get rolled)
Ideally (and it takes some planning/good design), 3 factions allows an underdog to take the corners and survive while two other factions fight, and for shifting alliances and advantages.
PuG/newbie protection
That is, PuG vs. premade veteran groups... sucks. Organization makes a HUGE difference. A ladder system might help, but it requires a LOT of people to be pvping. You can't solve the problem with a ladder system, because you need some way to get people playing, first.
I don't know how to fix this, other than maybe giving PuGs a way to only match up against other PuGs.
Warhammer Online is a great example of ignoring many of these elements and f'ing up the game completely. It should have 3 factions, but they decided to go with 2. It generally locks gears to tiers, which works great until the end, at which point the last tier covers way too much power variation and newcomers are roflstomped for a long time.
I honestly don't know if STO can really fix these issues. I wish them the best, but with the inability to even manage to flesh out two factions, I have very little hope.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
balance and sets, consoles? if u don't know how ans when 2 use them, they are worth nothing..
btw . in space, the maps are not the problem. the problem is the lack of purpose and no ladder/team effort..
build it, they will come.
give FED'S the incentive to team up and LEARN. to try harder. reward players for that with extra shinies (costumes, titles, ship materials, unlocks).. as of now, i would not queue into a FED PUG, because even if my ship is set up propoerly, the "team" are 99,99% probability a bunch of PVE noobs which will just give me 3 horrible minutes of humiliation.
This is FAR better on KDF side.
my perfect pvp map...
must have...
* Crashed Starship
* Water/Ocean
* Pve Hazards
That's pretty much the core of what Territorial PvP supposed to be about.
Open World PvP with PvE objectives that players have to battle other players to accomplish.
They can't because PVE content drives in revenue so the main focus is PVE and not PVP.