How the reputation system could be improved

diogene0

Now that i've reached T5 on my two main characters, i've seen the benefits and the flaws of the reputation system. Since the benefits are well known, i won't mention them again and will focus on the small but very annoying elements i've encountered:

The first one is that it takes time! I'm not complaining at all about the cooldowns, but getting all the requried stuff to fill your project is tedious and tiresome, especially if you want to cut the EC costs. To get my commodities, i had to take my char with the freighter (3-4 min to change ship), beam out to sirious (another 3 minutes), find the cargo in space, buy my commodoties (2 more minutes), and then send them via mail or via the account bank to my other chars (another 5 minutes).

Of course since inventory space is really limited, even forpaying customers who extended their bank space several times, it takes time since you can't stock many commodities. Thus the reputation system increased my daily wasted time doing mandatory but uninteresting stuff on STO. Because, let's admit it, no one really enjoys spending time travelling and changing instances, sending mails and so on.

The second issue is that each tier required different types of commodities. Thanks for the 1k weather control systems i've stockpiled with no use at all. If you think it brings more "variety" to the game, it only brings frustration since we're unable to anticipate. And of course we are always running out of a specific cheap so storage consuming commodity, and as such are forced to waste more time or to pay the full price.

The third issue is that all these huge stocks of commodiites are taking bank slots for nothing. I can't store as many weapons, gear, vanity stuff, as i would like to. If you think i would buy more bank space to store that TRIBBLE you're wrong, i won't pay for the additional hard disk space your database takes now. Your mess, your problem, if i may. :P


You understand that my main concern is the mess the commodities bring to the game. It's just frustrating, it takes time i won't spend in instances, chatting with people, playing a long foundry mission, or testing a new build. And i'm pretty sure your bank slot sales didn't increase that much.

Of course the easiest solution would be to give us a lot more bank space, with the current purchases being tabs instead of a handful of miserable slots. The most player-friendly one would be to remove the commodity cost to add a plain and simple EC cost, since the EC storage is far more simple than the commodities system. ECs doesn't take time to transfer, you can't run out of ECs unless you didn't play in ages, you don't get frustrated because you need another type of EC, and so on.

haravikk

I think my preferred solution to commodity requirements would be to simply ditch them for the experience projects, and limit them to just reputation projects and store unlocks (though I'd like to see store unlocks become automatic but let's skip that for now).

Basically, while adding items individually to projects might make sense for fleets where you're unlikely to cover a whole cost yourself, it's just a pain for reputation projects as the interface is clunky and just wastes my time, and there's more than enough daily stuff I'd rather be doing instead.

I'd propose that instead of breaking down the experience projects in separate bits, each of which must be contributed to, that they instead just give me a list of how many marks, expertise and energy credits I need, and just give me a big "Begin" button that takes those things from my account and starts the project. If I'm short one of the requirements then highlight it in red so I can go away and get more marks/expertise/energy credits as appropriate.

I mean it doesn't even make sense to contribute marks and expertise individually; it's not like they're burning a hole in your inventory that you just have to deal with by dumping some (but not all) the required marks and/or expertise into the project ahead of time.